Abstract
In 1647 the price of wheat in England rose to an unprecedented level, and the yearly average did not fall significantly until 1650. The price of a secondary staple like oats had reflected previous dearths in 1630 and 1637 but only over relatively short periods; now it remained at one-and-a-half times its normal level for much longer. In the grain market in Les Halles in Paris, the price of best wheat averaged over an August–July agricultural year was more than 50 per cent above its normal harvest level for two seasons running in the periods 1625–7, 1630–1 and 1642–4; but this was mild by comparison with a run of six years from 1648 to 1654, when prices were higher than ever before, and when the annual average twice reached a level three times the norm for settled years.1 Here again oats followed suit, if on a marginally less dramatic scale. As already indicated (ch. 3), the years 1648–51 were times of widespread food shortages over much of Europe, including not only the north-west and parts of the Mediterranean but also — because of the scale of the shortages — pushing up prices on the markets of east-central Europe. It is no coincidence that one of the major sequences of urban and rural unrest occurred precisely then.
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Notes
J. Thirsk (ed.). The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 815–21. For continental prices, see index.
For excellent short surveys see especially T. K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1975), chs 1–6;
T. Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe 1560–1660 (London, 1965);
G. Parker and L. M. Smith (eds), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1978);
H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Die Krise des 17. Jahrhunderts’, ZfHF, 9 (1982), 143–65; and ‘The crisis of the 17th century: a farewell?’, in his Politicians and Virtuosi (London, 1986), pp. 149–68.
A. Lossky, ‘The general crisis of the 1680s’, EurStR, 10 (1980), 177–97;
P. Clark (ed.), The European Crisis of the 1590s (London, 1985), including the stimulating evaluation there by J. H. Elliott, pp. 301–12.
Rabb, Struggle for Stability, pp. 29–34; J. H. Shennan, The Origins of the Modern European State 1450–1725 (London, 1974), pp. 103–11. For a discussion of the ‘crisis’ in intellectual life, see ch. 9.
Ivo Schöffer in ibid., ch. 4; J. L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic during the Seventeenth Century (London, 1974), chs 2, 5–7.
W. S. Unger, ‘Trade through the Sound in the 17th and 18th centuries’, EcHR, 12 (1959–60), 206–21;
P. Jeannin, ‘Les comptes du Sund comme source pour la construction d’indices généraux de l’activité économique en Europe’, RH, 231 (1964), 55–102, 307–40; R. Romano in Parker and Smith, General Crisis, ch. 7.
A. Wyczanski, ‘The system of power in Poland, 1370–1648’, in East Central Europe in Transition, ed. A. Maczak et al. (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 140–52;
A. Maczak, ‘The structure of power in the Commonwealth of the 16th and 17th centuries’, in A Republic of Nobles, ed. J.K. Fedorowicz (1982), esp. pp. 130–2.
R. I. Frost, ‘“Initium calamitatis Regni”? John Casimir and monarchical power in Poland-Lithuania, 1648–68’, EurHQ, 16 (1986), 181–207.
H. G. Koenigsberger, Estates and Revolutions (London, 1971), pp. 253–77;
P. Burke, ‘The Virgin of the Carmine and the revolt of Masaniello’, PP, 99 (1983), 3–21;
P. Villari, ‘Masaniello: contemporary and recent interpretations’, PP, 108 (1985), 117–32.
J. H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans (Cambridge, 1963), esp. ch. 16;
R. A. Stradling, ‘Seventeenth-century Spain: decline or survival?’, EurStR, 9 (1979), 157–94;
Stradling, Europe and the Decline of Spain (London, 1981), esp. pp. 115–42.
Amongst recent work on the Fronde, see notably R. Bonney, ‘La Fronde des officiers’, xviie siècle, 145 (1984), 323–40; F. Bayard, ‘Les financiers et la Fronde’, ibid., 355–62, and other articles in the same issue.
For an important assessment of the role of the nobility in the Fronde, see R. Bonney, ‘The French civil war, 1649–53’, EurStR, 8 (1978), 71–100; cf. C. Jones, ‘The organisation of conspiracy and revolt in the Memoires of the Cardinal de Retz’, ibid., 11 (1981), 125–50;
and W. Beik, ‘Urban factions and the social order during the minority of Louis XIV, FHS, 15 (1987), 36–67.
D. Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (London, 1983), pp. 103–17.
S. A. Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux (Baltimore, 1972);
H. Körting, Die Ormée (1651–1653) (Münster, 1983), argues that the movement involved too broad a social spectrum to make it immune to tactical manipulation and incitation by the political elite. Körting also discusses the contacts between Bordeaux and the English revolutionaries, pp. 122–36, 155–65, 194–244.
But cf. J. Morrill, ‘The religious context of the English civil war’, TRHS, 34 (1984), 155–78, who concludes (p. 178) that religion was so central an issue in terms of 1642 that the civil war ‘was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion’.
As in Germany during the Thirty Years War, damage to local economies and the destructive effect of war impositions varied enormously in different parts of England in the 1640s. I. Roy, ‘England turned Germany: the aftermath of the Civil War in its European context’, TRHS, 28 (1978), 127–44, argues that continental-style practices and exactions were common because of the number of soldiers returning from service abroad; in the west of England, the damage was severe.
See also J. S. Morril and J. D. Walter, ‘Order and disorder in the English Revolution’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 137–65.
For the effects of the civil war on Scottish towns, and their remarkable resilience in the 1650s, see D. Stevenson, ‘The burghs and the Scottish revolution’, in The Early Modern Town in Scotland, ed. M. Lynch (London, 1987), pp. 167–91.
For a recent discussion of local loyalties and the widespread reluctance to take confrontational stands on wider issues, see D. Underdown, ‘The chalk and the cheese: contrasts among the English clubmen’, PP, 85 (1979), 25–48.
See V. Pearl, ‘London’s counter-revolution’, in The Interregnum, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London, 1972), pp. 29–56;
R. Brenner, ‘The civil war politics of London’s merchant community’, PP, 58 (1973), 53–107.
R. Ashton, The English Civil War (London, 1978), pp. 337f;
J. Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–49 (London, 1982), pp. 25–7.
B. Reay, ‘Quakerism and Society’, in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J.F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford, 1984), pp. 141–64 and esp. pp. 161ff;
B. Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London, 1985);
C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1975);
regarding the Ranters, see also G. E. Aylmer, ‘Did the Ranters exist?’, PP, 117 (1987), 208–19.
For discussion of the ubiquitous belief in divine presence, see B. Worden, ‘Providence and politics in Cromwellian England’, PP, 109 (1985), 54–99.
C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. ii, 263–6.
R. Bonney, ‘The English and French Civil Wars’, H, 65 (1980), 365–82, estimates that in the early 1630s the income of the French crown had been at least eleven times that of Charles I, for a population around four times the size; this difference in resources was later diminished, however, because of growing problems in the French fiscal system, the costs of administration itself (compared with the many local office-holders in England who were paid nothing by the state), and the crisis of confidence in the French system of venality of offices.
T. Munck, The Peasantry and the Early Absolute Monarchy in Denmark 1660–1708 (Copenhagen, 1979), pp. 39–53.
M. Roberts, ‘Queen Christina and the general crisis of the 17th century’, in his Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), pp., 111–37.
M. Roberts, Sweden as a Great Power 1611–97 (London, 1968), pp. 44–9, 98–110.
S. Dahlgren, ‘Estates and revolutions’, in Sweden’s Age of Greatness 1632–1718, ed. M. Roberts (London, 1973), pp. 102–31.
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© 1990 Thomas Munck
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Munck, T. (1990). Provincial revolts, civil war and the ‘crisis of the 17th century’. In: Seventeenth Century Europe. History of Europe. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20626-1_7
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