Philip Slavin

The 1310s Event

In the 1310s, northwestern Europe experienced two environmental crises, each on a catastrophic scale. First, anomalous weather from the summer of 1314 to the summer of 1316, including torrential rains and frosts, brought widespread harvest failures. This was a tipping point into the single harshest subsistence crisis in Europe of the last two millennia. Second, between c.1314 and 1321, northwestern Europe was devastated by a cattle pestilence, most likely caused by rinderpest, which based on contemporary English evidence, killed over 60% of bovine stocks and brought about a long-term depression within the dairy industry. The disasters had serious implications for human health and paved the way for the Black Death. This chapter explains the environmental and biological foundations of the two disasters and places them in their wider ecological and climatic contexts.

Epizootic Landscapes: Sheep Scab and Regional Environment in England in 1279–1280

ABSTRACT This essay looks at late-medieval rural landscapes of animal disease through the prism of sheep epizootics in England, caused by sheep scab, a highly acute and transmissive disease, whose first wave broke out in 1279–1280. The essay focuses on three regions in England: East Anglia, the Wiltshire-Hampshire Chalklands and Kent, each possessing distinct topographic and environmental features and exhibiting different rates of mortality. The study sets a theoretical model, based on the concept of ‘complexity theory’ and consisting of ten different principles, determining regional variances in dissemination of scab and in mortality patterns. A close analysis of the available statistical sources suggests that there was no ‘universal’ explanatory factor accounting for the correlation between regional geography and mortality rates, and that the situation varied not only from region to region, but from farm to farm, depending on a combination of several possible factors. It is only through a meticulous analysis of local, rather than regional, conditions that the complexity of the situation can begin to be appreciated

Money in the Medieval English Economy: 973–1489. By Jim Bolton. Manchester University Press. 2012. xv + 317pp. £19.99.

Money in the Medieval English Economy: 973–1489 is an insightful and wide-ranging book on money and its place in the medieval English economy, covering the period that began in 973 with the decree that there should be a single coinage in England, and which ended in 1489 with the institution of the pound coin. Not since Professor Peter Spufford’s book on Money and its Uses in Medieval Europe (1), has there been a book on this topic which ranges so broadly in its chronological coverage. A wide range of numismatic evidence is considered in the light of economic modelling and related to a diverse range of historical sources and key historiographical debates. Bolton’s work follows the observation of Nicholas Oresme (d. 1382): ‘it is clear without further proof that coin is very useful to the civil community, and convenient, or rather necessary, to the business of the state’.(2)