As population growth exploded over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how well did England’s food producers meet the challenge of feeding the people? From the mid eighteenth century, notes of concern sounded from numerous sources that food availability would not match the nutritional needs of a rapidly growing population. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), mathematician, parson and political economist, lived through this critical period and was understandably concerned at a seeming mismatch between the (geometric) rate of population growth compared with that of agricultural output, which he considered to increase only arithmetically. Left unchecked, these diverging trends could end in only one outcome: famine. And yet the Malthusian ceiling was reached and breached. Earlier there seemed to be a limit of 5.5 million people who could be satisfactorily supported within England’s boundaries, but this constraint was now exceeded in the eighteenth century and famine did not ensue.1 In the tragic case of mid nineteenth-century Ireland the nation succumbed to potato blight, starvation, death and mass emigration. Most of England, Wales and Scotland, however, did not enter famine after the mid eighteenth century, though regularly teetering on the brink.2 Just how close England came to this peril is up for debate.
