ABSTRACT
Let us start with some figures pregnant with implication. In 1524-5, the popu -lation of England was in the range of 2.2-2.4 million people. By the accession of Queen Elizabeth, it had reached about 3 million, and by the time of her death in 1603, around 4 million. It continued to rise until the late 1630s, when it plateaued at about 5 million people. Over this century, the population more than doubled, and over the Queen’s reign it increased by a third. And yet we do not see this producing food shortages, malnutrition or distress. It is true that there were years of famine in north-western England in 1586-7, 1595-7 and later in 1622-3, the ripples of which were felt throughout England. These years arose not from yearon-year pressure on food supplies but from years of catastrophically poor weather in which the crops failed. Generally speaking, farmers seem to have met the demands of the enlarged population more than adequately. Indeed, the problem they faced may well have been one of overproduction of grain. In 1593, after a succession of good years and confident of future food supplies, parliament repealed the legislation forbidding depopulating enclosures (where arable was converted into pasture). The legislation was reimposed in 1597-8, a year of high prices, national distress and localised famine, but the parliamentary debates of both 1597-8 and 1601 show that overproduction had emerged as a problem.
