vi Preface. 



lasted through nearly the whole of Edward II.'s 

 reign, when, for twenty years or more, incessant 

 rains were noted to have fallen every summer, with 

 only two or three exceptions ; and as we were then 

 dependent on our home produce, the sufferings of 

 the people from scarcity were unparalleled, and the 

 death of cattle and sheep (no doubt from rot) was a 

 national calamity. Fifty years later corn was dear 

 for some years owing to the wet seasons, but this 

 period seems to have been of a less severe character 

 than the preceding one. Then followed a series of 

 years generally fruitful, although occasionally some 

 wet years intervene, yet we find no long period of 

 dearth till 1542, when we have a continuation of 

 rainy summers and bad crops of corn till the end of 

 the century, with occasionally a more fruitful year 

 than its neighbours ; the consequence of which seems 

 to have been the conversion of arable land into 

 pasture, which is specially noted by Hume. In 1692 

 commenced a series of extraordinarily bad seasons. 

 They have been traditionally referred to as the barren 

 years at the close of the seventeenth century. Again 

 in 1773, Gilbert White remarks : "Such a run of wet 

 seasons as we have had the last ten or eleven years 

 would have produced a famine a century or two ago." 

 Then another cycle of bad seasons commenced in 

 1792, and continued with few intermissions up to 1817, 

 since which the wet and dry years were pretty evenly 

 balanced to 1875, then began the wet period through 

 which we are now passing. Holmshed, who wrote in 



