Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Food security and insecurity in medieval Irish towns

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 49; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03044181.2023.2250951

1873-1279

James A. Galloway, Margaret Murphy,

Historical Studies of British Isles

ABSTRACTThe degree to which the townspeople of medieval Ireland enjoyed food security or experienced food insecurity forms the subject of this paper. Having outlined the context within which Irish medieval towns started to experience food insecurity, the paper then proceeds to examine responses to this situation. These include protection of the urban area, strategies for improved storage and transport of foodstuffs, the production of food within and immediately adjacent to urban space, the regulation of the food trades, the operation of food markets, inter-regional and international trade, and the engagement with sometimes hostile rural hinterlands.KEYWORDS: FoodurbanIrelandgrainscarcitystoragetower housetrade Notes1 http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/faoitaly/documents/pdf/pdf_Food_Security_Cocept_Note.pdf2 Caroline Delgado, Vongai Muragani and Kristina Tschunkert. Food Systems in Conflict and Peacebuilding Settings. Pathways and Interconnections. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/food-systems-conflict-and-peacebuilding-settings-pathways-and-interconnections3 See Giuliano Pinto and Charles Hindley, ‘Food Security’, in A Cultural History of Food in the Medieval Age, ed. Massimo Montanari (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 57–71; John Walter, ‘Famine and Food Security in Early Modern England: Popular Agency and the Politics of Dearth’, in A Cultural History of Famine: Food Security and the Environment in India and Britain, ed. Ayesha Mukherjee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 21–36.4 George Dameron, ‘Feeding the Medieval Italian City-State: Grain, War and Political Legitimacy in Tuscany, c.1150–c.1350’, Speculum 92 (2017): 976–1019; Stef Espeel and Sam Geens, ‘Feeding Inequalities: The Role of Economic Inequalities and the Urban Market in Late Medieval Food Security. The Case of Fourteenth-Century Ghent’, Datini Studies in Economic History 1 (2020), at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/56032; Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher, ‘Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona’, Speculum 97 (2022): 40–76.5 See, for example, James A. Galloway, Margaret Murphy and Michael Potterton, ‘Town and Country in Ireland in the Later Middle Ages, c.1170–c.1600’, in Town and Country: Perspectives from the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, eds. S. Gearty and M. Potterton (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2023), 139–76; Margaret Murphy and Michael Potterton, The Dublin Region in the Middle Ages: Settlement, Land-Use and Economy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 465–86.6 Gearóid MacNiocaill, ‘Socio-Economic Problems of the Late Medieval Town’, in The Town in Ireland, eds. D. Harkness and M. O’Dowd (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1981), 7–21; H.B. Clarke, ‘Decolonization and the Dynamics of Urban Decline in Ireland, 1300–1550’, in Towns in Decline, AD 100–1600, ed. T. Slater (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 157–92; M.C. Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague in Ireland, 900–1500’, in Famine: The Irish Experience, 900–1900: Subsistence Crises and Famines in Ireland, ed. E. Margaret Crawford (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989), 31–74; Bruce M.S. Campbell and Francis Ludlow, ‘Climate, Disease and Society in Late-Medieval Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 120C (2020): 159–252.7 Jacinta Prunty and H.B. Clarke, ‘The so-called “Monastic Town” and “The Viking Town”’, in Reading the Maps: A Guide to the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, eds. Jacinta Prunty and H.B. Clarke (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2011), 162–9, 170–9.8 M. Murphy, ‘The Economy’, in The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 1: Ireland, 600–1550, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 385–414 (400–1).9 There are no definite population figures for a single Irish town in this period, but Campbell has proposed an urban population of 94,000 for Ireland c.1290, suggesting that 14% of the population of the lordship (estimated at 0.7 million) lived in towns. B.M.S. Campbell, ‘Benchmarking Medieval Economic Development: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, c.1290’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 61 (2008): 896–945 (931), Table 16.10 John Bradley, Kilkenny: IHTA 10 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2000), 2, 4; Campbell, ‘Benchmarking’, 911–13.11 Avril Thomas, The Walled Towns of Ireland. 2 vols. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1992), 1: 153–6.12 A.J. Otway Ruthven, ‘The Medieval Irish Town’, in Medieval Dublin X, ed. Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 299–311.13 Pinto and Hindley, ‘Food Security’, 58.14 Helmut Jäger, ‘Land Use in Medieval Ireland: A Review of the Documentary Evidence’, Irish Economic and Social History 10 (1983): 51–65; Kevin Down, ‘Colonial Society and Economy’, in A New History of Ireland, vol. 2: Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534, ed. Art Cosgrove (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 439–91; Murphy, ‘Economy’, 391–2.15 Using Campbell's estimated urban population of 94,000, Murphy has proposed that the output of some 564,000 acres was needed to supply the grain needs of towns: ‘Economy’, 395.16 Murphy, ‘Economy’, 405–7.17 For an overview of urban legislation relating to the marketing of foodstuffs in Irish towns, see Anna Maleszka and Julia Mozdzen, ‘Urban Legislation as an Instrument for the Formation and Regulation of Socio-Economic Life in 14th-Century Prussian and Irish Towns’, in Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europe: The Social and Political Order of Peripheral Urban Communities from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries, eds. Matthew F. Stevens and Roman Czaja (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 93–119.18 J.T. Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, vol. 1 (Dublin: Joseph Dollard, 1889), 134.19 A. Ballard and J. Tait, eds., British Borough Charters 1216–1307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 293.20 See, for example, William Marshal the Younger’s charter to Moone (Co. Kildare), c.1223, which fixes the rate of amercements for breaches of the assize of bread and ale. This follows closely the earlier charter granted to Kilkenny by the elder William Marshal. Gearóid Mac Niocaill, ed., Na buirgéisí XII–XV aois, vol. 1 (Dublin: Clú Morainn, 1964), 135–49, 247.21 James Davis, ‘Baking for the Common Good: A Reassessment of the Assize of Bread in Medieval England’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 57 (2004): 465–502; S.P. Kernan, ‘From the Bakehouse to the Courthouse: Bakers, Baking, and the Assize of Bread in Late Medieval England’, Food and History 12 (2014): 139–78.22 H.S. Sweetman and G.F. Handcock, eds., Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London. 5 vols. (London: Longman, 1875–86), 1: 172.23 Sweetman and Handcock, eds. Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, 2: 262.24 H.F. Berry ed., Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland First to the Twelfth Years of the Reign of King Edward the Fourth. (Dublin: H.M.S.O., 1939), 508–9; Peter Crooks, ed., A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509. CIRCLE Patent Roll 8 Edward III, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/8-edward-iii/5.25 In 1307 the town authorities of Kilmallock (Co. Limerick) offered the clerk of the market 40s. ‘that he not aggrieve the town in his examination’: James Mills, ed., Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls, or Proceedings in the Court of the Justiciar of Ireland, vol. 2: 1305–7 (Dublin: Alex. Thom and Co, 1914), 289, 438–9. See also James Mills, ed., Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls, or Proceedings in the Court of the Justiciar of Ireland, vol. 1: 1295–1303 (Dublin: HMSO, 1905), 316.26 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, vol. 1: 132–5.27 M. Murphy, ‘Feeding Another City. Dublin and Its Region in the Later Middle Ages’, in London and Beyond. Essays in Honour of Derek Keene, eds. Matthew Davis and James A. Galloway (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2012), 3–24.28 James A. Galloway, ‘The Economic Hinterland of Drogheda in the Later Middle Ages’, in Space and Settlement in Medieval Ireland, eds. Vicky McAlister and Terry Barry (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2015), 167–85 (171).29 Margaret Murphy, Anne Connon and Jim Galloway, ‘Waterford and Its Hinterland: An Historical Overview’, in Cois tSiuire: Nine Thousand Years of Human Activity in the Lower Suir Valley, eds. James Eogan and Elizabeth Shee Twohig (Dublin: NRA Monograph Series, 2011), 217–44 (240).30 Galloway, Murphy and Potterton, ‘Town and Country’, 165–6.31 H.F. Berry, ‘The Water Supply of Medieval Dublin’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1, no. 7 (1891): 557–73 (560).32 Howard Clarke, Sarah Dent and Ruth Johnson, Dublinia. The Story of Medieval Dublin (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2002), 97.33 James Lydon, ‘The Years of Crisis, 1254–1315’ and ‘A Land of War’, in New History of Ireland, ed. Cosgrove, 2: 179–204, 240–74.34 Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague’, 61.35 Emmet O’Byrne, War, Politics and the Irish of Leinster, 1156–1605 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 58; J.F. Lydon, ‘Medieval Wicklow: A Land of War’, in Wicklow: History and Society, eds. K. Hannigan and W. Nolan (Dublin: Irish Geography Publications, 1994), 151–89 (158).36 Sweetman and Handcock, eds. Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, 4: 83; J.T. Gilbert, ed., Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, … and Annals of Ireland. Rolls Series 80. 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1884–6), 2: 324.37 Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague’, 60. The Irish crannock of wheat, containing eight pecks, was frequently equated with the English quarter containing eight bushels. In the period 1280–1300 the average price for a crannock of wheat in Ireland was 5s. 4d., about 10d. less than consumers in England were paying in the same period. Murphy and Potterton, Dublin Region, 475, 478.38 Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, Disease and Society’, 236.39 Colm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces. Scotland, England and Ireland 1306–1328 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), 167–9.40 Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague’, 63.41 Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague’, 63–4.42 J.F. Lydon, ‘Ireland’s Participation in the Military Activities of the English Kings in the Thirteenth and Early-Fourteenth Century’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1955), 192–7, 226–9, Appendix 7; Murphy and Potterton, Dublin Region, 478–9.43 Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, Disease and Society’, 358.44 Sweetman and Handcock, eds. Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, 4: 159.45 Mills, ed., Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls, vol. 2: 1305–7, 289.46 J.T. Gilbert, ed., Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, 1172–1320 (London: Longmans Green, 1870), 505.47 Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague’, 65–6.48 Gilbert, ed., Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey, 2: 375.49 Maria Kelly, A History of the Black Death in Ireland (Stroud: Tempus, 2004).50 Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, Disease and Society’, 333, 354.51 Katherine Simms, ‘The Political Recovery of Gaelic Ireland’, in Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 1, ed. Smith, 272–99 (272–3).52 Katherine Simms, ‘Gaelic Culture and Society’, in Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 1, ed. Smith, 415–40 (416).53 Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III, vol. 16: 1374–1377 (London: H.M.S.O., 1916), 145.54 CIRCLE. Close Roll 4 Richard II. https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/close/4-richard-ii/89.55 H.F. Berry, ed., Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland: Reign of King Henry the Sixth (Dublin: H.M.S.O., 1910), 171, 237; A.F. O’Brien, ‘Politics, Economy and Society: The Development of Cork and the Irish South-Coast Region c.1170 to c.1583’, in Cork: History and Society, eds. Cornelius G. Buttimer and Patrick O’Flanagan (Cork: Geography Publications, 1993), 82–155 (104–5).56 Hugh Shields, ed., ‘The Walling of New Ross – A Thirteenth-Century Poem in French’, Long Room, 12–13 (1975–6): 24–33.57 Thomas, Walled Towns, 160–70.58 Thomas, Walled Towns, 149; J. McKeon, ‘Urban Defences in Anglo-Norman Ireland: Evidence from South Connaught’, Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies 5 (2011): 146–90 (150).59 Avril Thomas, ‘Financing Town Walls in Medieval Ireland’, in Rural Landscapes and Communities: Essays Presented to Desmond McCourt, ed. Colin Thomas (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), 65–91.60 J. Claridge, and J. Langdon, ‘Storage in Medieval England: The Evidence from Purveyance Accounts, 1295–1349’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 64 (2011): 1242–65.61 Kew, UK National Archives, E 101/16/21; E 101/14/40; Lydon, ‘Ireland’s Participation in the Military Activities of English Kings’, 36.62 O’Brien, ‘Politics, Economy and Society’, 104–5.63 V.L. McAlister, The Irish Tower House: Society, Economy and Environment c.1300–1650 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 11.64 Harold O’Sullivan and Raymond Gillespie, Carlingford: IHTA 23 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2011), 3.65 Tom McNeill, Castles in Ireland: Feudal Power in a Gaelic World (London: Routledge, 1997), 223.66 Denis Power, Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, vol. 2 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1996), 221.67 McAlister, Irish Tower House, 188, 204.68 McAlister, Irish Tower House, 227–30.69 CIRCLE. Patent Roll 13 Henry VI, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/13-henry-vi/94.70 Dublin, National Inventory of Architectural Heritage. https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/12000116/kytelers-inn-saint-kierans-street-gardens-st-johns-par-kilkenny-co-kilkenny; https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/21813007/sarsfield-house-sarsfield-street-kilmallock-kilmallock-co-limerick71 T.C. Breen, ‘A Medieval Riverside House and Town Defences at Scotch Hall, Drogheda, Co. Louth’, in The Town in Medieval Ireland in the Light of Recent Archaeological Excavations, eds. Christiaan Corlett and Michael Potterton (Dublin: Wordwell, 2020), 1–9; G. Dawkes, ‘Interim Results of Excavations at 152–5 Church Street, Dublin: St Michan’s Early Enclosure and Late-Medieval Timber-Framed Buildings’, in Medieval Dublin X, ed. Duffy, 198–219.72 Dawkes, ‘Interim Results’, 215–18.73 CIRCLE, Patent Roll 49 Edward III, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/49-edward-iii/207; CIRCLE, Patent Roll 9 Richard III, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/9-richard-ii/218. In Ireland ‘haggards’ were enclosed areas where granaries were located or stacks of grain were stored ahead of threshing. In the late medieval sources, the word is used to denote anywhere that grain is stored and ‘haggardmen’ are those involved in the grain trade.74 N.B. White, ed., Extents of Irish Monastic Possessions, 1540–1541 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1943), 1, 81, 135, 299, 335.75 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 308.76 Nominally Irish money was worth three-quarters of its sterling equivalent at this period, but a de facto exchange rate of 1:2 sterling:Irish prevailed: C.E. Challis, ‘The Tudor Coinage for Ireland’, British Numismatic Journal 40 (1971): 98–9.77 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 454.78 ‘Ad faciend’ larderia pro commune profic’ ville’: Edward Tresham, ed., Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium, Henry II–Henry VII, vol. 1 (Dublin: Record Commission for Ireland, 1828), 172, no. 12.79 Erich Landsteiner and Tim Soens, Farming the City: The Resilience and Decline of Urban Agriculture in European History. Rural History Yearbook, 2019 (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2020).80 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 139, 145, 333.81 James Mills and M.J. McEnery eds., Calendar of the Gormanston Register (Dublin: University Press, 1916), 55.82 H.B. Clarke, Dublin, part I, to 1610: IHTA, no. 11. (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2002), 24–5.83 Paul Walsh, Renaissance Galway: Delineating the Seventeenth-Century City (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2019).84 White, ed., Extents of Irish Monastic Possessions, 303.85 Susan Lyons, ‘Food Plants, Fruit and Foreign Foodstuffs: The Archaeological Evidence from Urban Medieval Ireland’, in Food and Drink in Ireland, eds. Elizabeth FitzPatrick and James Kelly (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2016), 111–66 (150–60).86 Noel Ross, ‘The Walled Town of Ardee: Selected Extracts’, Journal of the Co. Louth Archaeological and Historical Society 27 (2011): 339–65 (345, 354).87 Hugh de Lacy granted his burgesses at Drogheda and Kells in Meath three acres each outside the towns in charters of c.1200, while at Fethard (Co. Tipperary), each burgage was supplemented by two and a half acres of agricultural land in the fifteenth century. At Gowran (Co. Kilkenny) the amount of extra-urban land allocated to each burgage seems to have been nearer to five acres: Galloway, Murphy and Potterton, ‘Town and Country’, 140–1; Adrian Empey, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny 1190–1610: Custom and Conflict in a Baronial Town (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015), 33.88 Tadgh O’ Keeffe, Fethard: IHTA, no. 13. (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2003), 2; Galloway, Murphy and Potterton, ‘Town and Country’, 142–3.89 Philip Robinson, Carrickfergus: IHTA, no. 2 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1986), 3.90 Richard Caulfield, ed., The Council Book of the Corporation of Youghal (Guildford: J. Billing & Sons, 1878), 40–2, 100, et seqq.91 Philomena Connolly, ‘“The Head and Comfort of Leinster”: Carlow as the Administrative Capital of Ireland, 1361– 1394’, in Carlow History and Society, ed. Thomas McGrath (Dublin: Irish Geography Publications, 2008), 307–30 (316–17).92 A.E.J. Went, ‘The Galway Fishery’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 49 (1943–4): 187–219.93 Eamon O’Flaherty, Limerick: IHTA 21 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2010), 29; R. Herbert, ‘The Lax Weir and Fishers Stent of Limerick’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal 5 (1946–7): 49–61.94 Murphy and Potterton, Dublin Region, 393–6.95 Sweetman and Handcock, eds. Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, 2: 185.96 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 18–19.97 Lydon, ‘Medieval Wicklow’, 179.98 Howard B. Clarke, ‘From Dyflinnarskiri to the Pale: Defining and Defending a Medieval City-State, 1000–1500’, in The March in the Islands of the Medieval West, eds. Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Emmett O’Byrne (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 35–52 (48–9).99 John Bradley, ‘From Frontier Town to Renaissance City: Kilkenny, 1500–1700’, in Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence, and Divergence, eds. L.J. Proudfoot and Peter Borsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29–51 (29).100 N.J. Byrne, ed., The Great Parchment Book of Waterford (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2007), 17–19.101 J.S. Brewer and W. Bullen eds., Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, 1515–1574 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), 474–5.102 CIRCLE, Patent Roll 3 Henry IV, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/3-henry-iv/154; CIRCLE, Patent Roll 4 Henry IV, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/Patent/4-henry-iv/197.103 CIRCLE Patent Roll 4 Henry IV, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/4-henry-iv/131.104 Clarke, ‘Decolonisation’, 175; Kevin Hoare, ‘The Evolution of Urban Oligarchies in Irish Towns, 1350–1534’, in Frontiers and Identities: Cities in Regions and Nations, eds. l. Klusáková and L. Teulières (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2008), 87–107 (95–6).105 Gilbert ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 14, 134.106 C. McNeill, ed., Liber Primus Kilkenniensis. The Earliest of the Books of the Corporation of Kilkenny Now Extant (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1931), 2–5. CIRCLE, Patent Roll 13 Richard II, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/13-richard-ii/245; CIRCLE, Patent Roll 8 Henry IV, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/8-henry-iv/39; CIRCLE, Patent Roll 9 Henry IV, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/9-henry-iv/7; Byrne, ed., Great Parchment Book, 58–9.107 Philomena Connolly, Irish Exchequer Payments 1270–1446, vol. 2 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1998), 495.108 Gilbert, ed., Historic and Municipal Documents, 233–4.109 Pinto and Hindley, ‘Food Security’, 62.110 Berry, ed., Statute Rolls First to Twelfth Edward IV, 629.111 On the frequency with which petitions from Irish towns to the Crown invoke ongoing struggles against the native population, see Anna Maleszka and Matthew Frank Stevens, ‘Maintaining a “Special Relationship”? Petitions to the Crown from Irish and Welsh Towns, 13th–16th Centuries’, in Towns on the Edge, eds. Stevens and Czaja, 208–35 (212, 231–4).112 CIRCLE, Patent Roll 13 Richard II, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/13-richard-ii/217.113 Timothy O’Neill, Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987), 24–7; Galloway, ‘Economic Hinterland of Drogheda’, 178; O’Brien, ‘Politics, Economy and Society’, 125–9.114 CIRCLE, Patent Roll 5 Henry IV, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/5-henry-iv/125; CIRCLE, Patent Roll 5 Henry V, https://chancery.tcd.ie/document/patent/5-henry-v/17. The wey was a variable measure but when used for wheat was commonly the equivalent of six quarters: S. Flavin and E.T. Jones, ‘A Glossary of Commodities, Weights and Measures found in the Sixteenth-Century Bristol Customs Accounts’ (unpublished working paper from ESRC-funded project ‘Ireland-Bristol Trade in the Sixteenth Century’, 2009), 106, available at https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/3015669/glossarycommodities.pdf.115 Wendy Childs and Timothy O’Neill, ‘Overseas Trade’, in New History of Ireland, ed. Cosgrove, 2: 492–524 (505).116 Brendan Smith, ‘Late Medieval Ireland and the English Connection: Waterford and Bristol c.1360–1460’, Journal of British Studies 50 (2011): 546–65 (551).117 Buchanan Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. The Regulation of Grain Marketing 1256–1631 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 110–11.118 Calendar of Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III, vol. 11: 1360–4 (London: H.M.S.O., 1909), 255–6.119 Sharp, Famine and Scarcity, 113.120 Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, Disease and Society’, 223–5.121 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 276, 287.122 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 308, 310–11.123 Berry, ed., Statute Rolls First to Twelfth Edward IV, 5. The medieval Irish peck was equivalent to the English bushel: see note 37 above.124 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 320.125 Gilbert, ed., Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, 1: 336–7, 346–7.126 Berry, ed., Statute Rolls First to Twelfth Edward IV, 753.127 Lyons, ‘Weather, Famine, Pestilence and Plague’, 71.128 Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, Disease and Society’, 223–5, 240.129 Kew, UK National Archives, SC 6/798/7–10, 799/1–10, 800/1–8.130 Jane Laughton, Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester 1275–1520 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008), 37.131 Wendy Childs, ‘Ireland’s Trade with England in the Later Middle Ages’, Irish Economic and Social History 9 (1982): 5–33.132 Peadar Slattery, Social Life in Pre-Reformation Dublin, 1450–1540 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019), 112.133 James Davis, ‘Market Regulation in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages, eds. Ben Dodds and Christian D. Liddy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 104.134 Alan Bliss and Joseph Long, ‘Literature in Norman French and English’, in New History of Ireland, ed. Cosgrove, 2: 709–36 (727–8).135 Sparky Booker, Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland. The English and Irish of the Four Obedient Shires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). It is likely that increasing Gaelic populations in towns led to changes in the late medieval urban diet. Further research on this topic, which falls outside the parameters of the present paper, is needed.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJames A. GallowayJames A. Galloway is an independent researcher based in County Carlow, Ireland. He has published widely on the economic, urban and environmental history of later medieval England and Ireland.Margaret MurphyMargaret Murphy is Assistant Registrar at Carlow College, St Patricks. She has published widely on aspects of the social and economic history of medieval Ireland and Britain. Her research interests focus on agriculture, settlement, urban provisioning and material culture.