This article examines the impact upon English towns of shortages of grain during periods of harvest failure in the later Middle Ages. It explores the reactions of civic and central governments at times of shortage, looking in detail at the census of people, grain, bakers and brewers drawn up in Coventry during the dearth of 1520. This census seems to have formed more than simply a headcount, and it is argued here that its purpose was to ensure that resident traders did not retain surpluses of grain beyond their immediate production needs, and to provide a means by which the city government could demonstrate to its citizens that immoral behaviour was being curtailed. As this census formed one of the key pieces of evidence which Charles Phythian-Adams used to identify a ‘crisis’ period in Coventry between 1518 and 1525, which ‘decisively sounded the knell of the medieval city’, this study also questions whether grain shortages contributed in any way to the significant challenges faced by many towns in this period, which have been collectively labelled as ‘urban decline’. The marketing patterns, regulation and economic development of late medieval towns, and the social and economic policies of urban and central governments, are all areas which have been illuminated by Richard Britnell's wide-ranging and detailed research.