Bad harvests in the 1590s drove the price of grain up to inflationary levels. In his Abridgement of the English Chronicle, John Stow wrote of the year 1595: This year by means of the late transportation of grain into foreign Countries, the same was here grown to an excessive price, as in some parts of this Realm, from fourteen shillings to four marks the quarter. On the 29 of June being Sunday in the afternoon, a number of unruly youths on the Tower hill, being blamed by the Warders of Towerstreet-ward to sever themselves and depart from thence, threw stones at them, and drave them back unto Tower street, and were heartened thereunto by a late Soldier, sounding of a trumpet, but the trumpeter and many other of them being taken by the sherifs of London, and committed to prison. . . . five of those unruly youths that were on the Tower hill apprehended, they were condemned, and had judgment to be drawn, hanged, and quartered. To prevent illegal hoarding, the Privy Council ordered local officials to record the names of those who possessed large quantities. Called the "noate of corne and malte," the survey of almost every householder in Stratford, taken in 1598, listed Shakespeare as one of the illegal holders of ten quarters (80 bushels) of grain.
The shortage in Stratford was apparently dire. "Our neighbors are grown with the want they feel through the dearness of corn, which here is beyond all other countries," wrote one of Shakespeare's townmen in a letter to another. " They have assembled together in a great number and travelled to Sir Thomas Lucy on Friday last to complain of our masters. . . . 'I hope," saith Thomas Grannams, 'shortly to see [the masters] hanged on gibgets at their own doors.'"
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