As we can assume that the mills had a monopoly of grinding grain in the town, we can use the mill accounts to estimate the volume of grain passing through the town’s markets and being consumed in the town and so we can generate indirect figures of the scale of the harvest shortfall in these years.

... including the identity of their customers and their profitability to the earl. But it will be shown how the data can be used to generate figures for weekly, monthly and yearly volumes of grain passing through the mills. This gives us a new way of looking at the crisis of 1585-7 in the North....

... obscure.

The discovery of a decade’s worth of continuous mill accounts from the earl of Shrewsbury’s corn mills at Sheffield therefore opens up the subject. These yield just short of 17,000 individual transactions. The paper will describe a number of aspects of the mills, ...

Grain mills are something of a mystery in early modern England. A great deal is known about medieval mills, manorial accounts having formed a rich source for medieval economic historians such as Holt and Langdon. But there are no equivalents in early modern England and mills are correspondingly ...

especially on their treatments of the fall of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, in 1599-1601, an event that exercises them not only in itself but as a symptom of a wider crisis of politics and society.

Abstract: Because the historian William Camden is studied by historians, and the poet and dramatist Samuel Daniel by literary critics, the intimate literary partnership between them has been missed. A grasp of it gives us fresh perspectives on the writings of both men, ...

8 December Jacob Deacon & Rob Runacres, panel on ‘The Politics of Martial Education in Tudor and Stuart Britain’.

All welcome!

10 November Clare Egan, ‘Libel Performance and Legal Literacies in the Early Seventeenth-Century English Provinces'

24 November Richard Hoyle, ‘Harvest variability in the 1580s: volume and prices at the mills of the earl of Shrewsbury in Sheffield (Yorkshire), 1578-1588’

The rest of the term looks like this (all sessions now bookable at the link below):

13 October Blair Worden, ‘History, the Playhouse, and the Fall of the Earl of Essex: The Literary Partnership of William Camden and Samuel Daniel’

27 October Sean Bottomley, ‘Wardship in England, 1513-1642’