As in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, subsistence crises were common in medieval Europe, but famines, defined as food shortages that occasioned large increases in mortality caused by hunger and disease, were relatively rare. Famines usually arose from harvest failures in a succession of years, in most cases the outcome of abnormal weather and sometimes exacerbated by warfare or political breakdown. Contemporary descriptions did not always make such a precise distinction, but in the commercialised conditions which prevailed from the early eleventh century onwards it was common to characterise the severity of a crisis or famine by reference to the price of wheat. This was the premier and most widely marketed grain and of special significance for the supply of cities such as London, where grain probably contributed about seventy per cent of the calorific requirement of the average inhabitant. Using a new series of wheat prices for London, this essay explores the relative significance of three fairly well-recorded episodes of famine in the later-medieval city — those of 1257–60, 1315–17 and 1438–40 — and the nature of responses to them. Those reactions highlight aspects of the political and moral economy of urban famine and of civic developments over the period.

Several earlier famines recorded both in England and in other parts of Europe are likely to have had a serious effect in London. These were in 793, 975–6, 1005–6, the mid 1040s, 1124–6 and the years 1193–8.