In 1608, an anonymous author in London—whom some have presumed to be the poet and playwright Thomas Dekker—recorded the astonishing sights of a frozen Great Britain in a dialogue called The Great Frost: Cold doings in London (published in 1608). In this “familiar talke between a Country-man and a Citizen” of London, the two interlocutors discuss many aspects of what is characterized on the title page of the dialogue as a “terrible frost,” which hit Britain in the winter of 1607-08.[1] At one point in this dialogue, the man from country asks the London citizen, “[Y]our desire, Sir, is to know how we spend the days of this our frozen age in the country.”[2] Coincidentally, Arthur Standish, in “The Epistle Dedicatorie” of The Commons Complaint, an agrarian reform pamphlet published in 1611, claims that, with his work, he hopes to “maintaine the blessings of God…in this our destroying age.”[3] In this particular context, Standish calls it a “destroying age” because he sees people merely exploiting the land, but written in response to the violence of the Midland Revolt, the term “destroying” also implies the potential political upheavals of the period.[4] In these texts, one can identify a central issue faced by the subjects of Great Britain during the early Jacobean period: employing agrarian practices that were thought to be able to prevent political rebellion in a time of great climatic stress.
In the Jacobean period, a significant reduction in temperature led to major stress on crops and led to greater demands for other items, particularly wood for fuel. Emerging out of a time when dearth was associated with political instability, the dialogue The Great Frost and The Commons Complaint voice the anxieties associated with the declining weather of the period as well as the means of improving preparation for problematic weather and increasing food production in general. During the Great Frost of 1607-08, the citizens of London, essentially isolated from the rest of the country, voice their concerns regard the weather’s disruptions to commerce. Though the weather was seen as a central factor behind the dearth, these texts, though speaking ill of rebellion, allude to the frustration with the English nobility’s greed. Thus, in the dialogue we see the limitations of agrarian production in the early Jacobean period and the move toward increased production of food and timber in The Commons Complaint to accommodate the British population and their lifestyle.
The Great Frost: Cold Doings in London was written and published in the year of a terrible frost. In this work, two characters, a citizen of London and a country gentleman, discuss the events surrounding the first frost fair in 1607-08. As the temperature decreased in 1607, the Thames froze over for the first time since the ‘seventh year of the reign of Elizabeth I,” which would have been 1564.[5] In an effort to profit from this rare phenomenon, London merchants took to the ice, selling a variety of items: beer, ale, fruit, and shoes.[6] The ice also became a host to a number of other diverting activities, including archery, football, and shooting.[7] The novelty was indeed intriguing, as it is estimated by the author of The Great Frost that as many as three quarters of the city walked the ice and attended this event that came to be known as London’s first frost fair.[8]
The country resident’s epithet of “the frozen age” came to be a prophetic one as periods of extreme cold became a rather common occurrence in London in the seventeenth century. H.H. Lamb calculated that “the river in London does not seem to have frozen over more than once or twice a century until the 1500s: during that century it froze 4 times, in the 1600s 8 times.”[9] The period spanning from 1550 to 1800 according to H.H. Lamb—or more broadly by Gabriel Egan from 1300-1850—has been characterized as the Little Ice Age.
As H.H. Lamb argues, during this climatic period in history, “the glaciers of Europe reached their most advanced positions since the Ice Age.”[10] He also records that “the polar ice pack on the North Atlantic probably became more extensive than” any period from 4000 B.C.E. to today.[11] Also, through the analysis of “ice-caps in Greenland and Antarctica” and “radiocarbon dated pollen analyses of the deposits in peat-bogs and lake beds,” scientists have been able to offer an accurate picture of climatic conditions of the early modern world and England in particular.[12]
Indeed, from these various methods of observation, climatologists have been able to determine global temperatures during this period. Lamb asserts in Climate, History, and the Modern World that “the mean winter temperature from 1560 to 1599 in central Europe was about 1.3 °C lower than in 1880-1930 or the first half of the sixteenth century.”[13] Lamb indicates in the same work that “the summer temperatures derived for England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries averaged 0.6 to 0.8 °C below those of 1900-50 or the earlier sixteenth century, and it is likely that the difference would be a little greater on the continent.”[14] Thus, the North Atlantic was seeing significant reductions during this period in history.
Despite exploring the joys of the frost fair, most of the dialogue concerns the problems associated with the freezing weather. In The Great Frost, the author observes the way that the weather significantly harmed commerce in that city in 1608. The citizen of London states, “Strangers may guess at our harms: yet none can give the full number of them but we that are the inhabitants. For the City by this means is cut off from all commerce.”[15] The Thames, of course, was relied upon for commercial navigation, and as this text indicates, the freezing of the water restricted London’s capacity as a major international commercial port. Indeed, the speaker goes on to note that this most impacted merchants who were forced into a work stoppage that had apparently acquired several different descriptions, including “The dead vacation,” “The frozen vacation,” and “The cold vacation.”[16] Thus, the author illustrates that, with no capacity to ship goods, London’s merchants were unable to engage in commercial activities.
The text illustrates that the hindrance to commerce was a significant source of anxiety, and along with restricting trade, the freezing temperatures, as The Great Frost notes, hindered food transportation and crop production. When the citizen discusses London, he states, “For you of the country being not able to travel to the City with victuals, the price of victail must of necessity be enhanced; and victail itself brought into a scarcity.”[17] He notes the rapid increase in price that the resident of the country must have experienced, and he seems to allude to the idea that the rise in prices is wholly a problem of transportation: the city of London is merely unable to retrieve the bounty of the countryside.
The problematic assumption here helps display the sense of isolation of the city of London. The subtitle of the dialogue is “With News out of the Country,” and the form of a dialogue between a citizen of London and a resident of the country displays the text’s function as, among other things, a means of letting the citizens of London learn the news of the countryside.”[18] Also, as is the case with the citizen’s assumption that there is food that merely cannot be transported into London, there is room in the dialogue to correct assumptions that citizens may be making about the conditions of the English countryside.
However, the limited capacity for the delivery of goods from the country, according to the dialogue, was not the only thing impeding food consumption in the city. Food production was being significantly diminished by both the raising of livestock and the diminished capacity of farmers to produce crops in such cold weather. At one point the text alludes to the problems associated with the sustaining of livestock in periods of cold weather. The farmer asserts that whereas the city dwellers need only worry about their “wives, children, and servants,” the farmer must also worry about his livestock.[19] He notes the way that frozen “earth seems barren and bears nothing” and is “not worth a poor handful of grass.”[20] Yet he remarks that the farmer, when the earth will not produce grass, needs to “feast [his animals] with fodder out of his barns.”[21] Thus, with a limited supply of grass, the farmers, as the text alludes, are forced to reach into an already limited grain supply in order to feed them.
At one point, the speaker states that the “charge of feeding so many beastly mouths, is able to eat up a countryman’s estate.”[22] The rhetorical flourish of this argument—that animals are able to consume people and estates—alludes to an argument presented by Thomas More in the first book of Utopia. When discussing the devastation of enclosure for the purpose of sheep pasturage, More states,“[The sheep] are becoming so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves as I hear. They devastate and pillage fields, houses, and towns.”[23] The argument in The Great Frost, of course, is not about enclosure but the difficulty of sustaining livestock in a dearth. In a column for the New York Times written in 2008, Mark Bittman asserts that
about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.[24]
As this statistic from 2008 illustrates, even in the contemporary world of innovation and advances in agrarian technology, meat production is calorically inefficient. In this sense, the livestock consume the estate by consuming more than the people themselves thereby diminishing their food supply. By alluding to Thomas More, the author of the dialogue is trying to note the way in which animals are taking a priority over human beings themselves. In doing so, the author attempts to expose a practice that places a self-imposed strain on England’s resources, and the argument exposes the potential problems with meat consumption especially when food becomes scarce.
However, this maintaining of livestock, as the man from the country asserts, is important as the livestock “are our nurses that give us milk, they are our guides in our journeys, they are our partners and help to enrich our state; yea, they are the very upholders of a poor farmer’s lands and living.”[25] His last two statements attempt to explain animals as contributing not only to the wealth of farmers and the wealth of the English state as a whole. The country man’s rhetorical appeals—describing his animals as “nurses” and “guides”—attempts to anthropomorphize the animals in order to display their importance and, given the portrayal of the caloric waste of the animals, potentially defend the very cause of livestock maintenance, which deprives the poor of grain. Though the farmer sees the potential downside in maintaining cattle, he enters into such a venture in the hope, of course, of making a profit.
Along with his description of the livestock consumption of grain as diminishing the food supply, the country resident also notes the ways that vegetation is also suffering because of the weather. When discussing children in the country, the gentleman farmer tells the citizen, “hunger pinches their cheeks, as deep into the flesh as it doth into yours here.”[26] The farmer, responding to the citizen’s suspicion that the only reason behind the dearth in London is because of the difficulty in moving food into the city from the country, contends, as though to defend himself against the potential accusation of hoarding, that hunger is manifest not only in the city but in the country as well.
The country resident goes into detail about the way that crops, even those that usually can withstand problematic weather, have proven difficult to produce in this period. When discussing the frozen age, the man from the countryside claims that “all the fruits that had wont to spring out of her fertile womb are now nipped in their birth, and likely never to prosper.”[27] He further asserts that the ground “hath not lively sap enough in her veins left as yet to quicken her, and raise her up to strength.”[28] He particularly emphasizes the leek, a crop that “could never be compelled to shrink for hail, snow, frost or showers; is now by violence and cruelty of this weather beaten into the earth, being rotted, dead, disgraced, and trod upon.”[29] Current scientific analyses have determined that “plant growth increases approximately linearly in temperature up to a point where additional heat quickly becomes harmful.”[30] Thus, the yield of crops will on the whole decrease as temperatures lower from optimum temperatures, and this information is affirmed by Lamb’s claim that a decline in temperatures will lead to an increase in crop prices.[31] Also, Brian Fagan claims rightly that “fluctuating grain prices are…[a] barometer of changing temperatures” as they reveal “wet or dry weather that brought poor harvest[s].”[32] Thus, as The Great Frost attests—and Lamb and Egan affirm in their retrospective analysis—the significant reductions in temperature are a central cause behind the crop failures being experienced during this period.
Indeed, this reduction in the availability of grain has been seen as an important contributing factor in the rebellions and uprisings during the period. During the Little Ice Age, there were major fluctuations between terrible and good harvests, and with decreases in temperature came dearth and, in many instances, rebellion. For example, directly prior to James’ reign, a period of freezing weather resulted in a run of bad harvests. Brian Fagan has argued that the period of the 1590s were a part of one of the “coldest decades of the Little Ice Age.”[33] In fact, scientific analysis of climate data notices a 2 degree centigrade cooler mean temperature between 1586 and 1595 in central Europe and though it was most likely colder on the continent, this data is undoubtedly a helpful way to understand the conditions in England during this time.[34] As agrarian historian Joan Thirsk indicates, though there were regular food scarcities throughout the Renaissance, these were particularly problematic in the period between 1594 to 1597.[35]
And from this food scarcity erupted violence and political insurrection. As economic historian Craig Muldrew argues, “the decade of the 1590s was not only one of war and political instability, but also witnessed one of the most severe economic depressions in English history.”[36] Crop failures were rampant in the 1590s in England, and given the fact that England was largely comprised of subsistence farmers, the impact was particularly troubling, and writers linked these crop failures directly to the fact that “food riots erupted in many counties.”[37]
However, when James I came to the throne, England saw a resurrection of its crop production. According to Muldrew, “When James I arrived in England from Scotland in the late spring of 1603 it would not yet have been apparent that the following summer would produce the best harvest since 1592.”[38] Muldrew further notes that bread prices decreased, and this introduction “marked a fortunate beginning to a new reign,” making it possible for James to assume the throne in relative peace. Muldrew rightly ventures to guess that “had Elizabeth died a few years earlier…the transition might have been more difficult.”[39] However, this period of relative stability proved to be short-lived.
Certainly, the perceived connection between crop production and political stability came to the fore during the Midland Revolt. Between the depression and severe dearth of the 1590s and the freezing temperatures of 1607, the harvests have been characterized by John Martin as anywhere from “average to good.”[40] However, in 1607, England suffered a major cold spike in weather, and the severity of the winter “gave rise to a bad harvest in 1607.”[41] The weather was apparently so cold that, as Brian Fagan has noted, “Savage frosts split the trunks of many great trees in England.”[42] The temperature decreased at this point to a level that apparently caused a regional dearth in Leicestershire, Warwickshire, and Northamptonshire.
This regional dearth had significant implications for the socio-political landscape of early modern England. In The Commons Complaint, Arthur Standish notes the way in which this regional dearth was a contributing cause of the Midland Revolts. Writing in 1611, nearly four years after the revolts were put down, he states,
Not onely Corne, but especially other victuals is brought and doth continue at too deere a rate, for the poore Artificer and Labouring man; by which dearth, too oft ariseth discontents, and mutinies among the common sort, as appeared of late by agrievance taken onely of the dearth of Corne, in Warwickshire, Northamp-tonshire and other places.[43]
As Standish argues, the high price of grain was a contributing cause of the Midland Revolt. Thus, we see a significant anxiety lurks behind The Great Frost and The Commons Complaint, namely political rebellion.
The connection between the Midland Revolt and the dearth of 1607 is borne out by the economic documents of the period which identified the fact that “[t]he general price index of arable crops did rise in that year [1607] from 442 to 584.”[44] The nearly one-third jump in prices impacted the farmers in Leicestershire, Warwickshire, and Northamptonshire very directly and as Martin notes, though crops had not been harvested by the spring in which the Midland Revolts began, “the peasantry,” already poor and suffering prior to the rise of crop prices, “would have been aware that even harder times were on the way.”[45] Though the revolt took the form of a rebellion against enclosure, Joan Thirsk rightly asserts that “enclosures were the scapegoat for more immediate ills,” namely concern over the skyrocketing price of grain.[46]
Writers of the period felt the connection between declining crop production and political upheaval. Many argue that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus displays the anxieties regarding dearth and political rebellion in the wake of the Midland Revolt.[47] The play begins, according to the stage directions, with the entrance of “a company of mutinous Citizens, with staves, clubs, and other weapons.”[48] They are up in arms because they would like the grain stores from the Roman state to open “while it were wholesome.”[49] The citizen who leads the rebellion in the first scene states, “Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.”[50] However, they argue that they should “proceed especially against Caius Marcius,” who they perceive as “a very dog to the commonality.”[51] The only reason that is given for their hatred of Caius Marcius is the fact that he is “proud,” which ends up being the fault that contributes to his downfall.[52] Though they claim to decry the desire for vengeance, their anger at Caius Marcius displays that they, to some extent seek retribution for some fault of his. Thus, we see political rebellion arising from the dearth, and I would argue that John Martin rightly suggests that the conflict arises because the peasantry ascribe the dearth faced to “social factors,” particularly mismanagement by the nobles, like Caius Marcius.[53] This, I would argue, is their central motivation for rebellion.
However, the rational voice of Menenius Agrippa manages to successfully dispute the claims of the mob. Agrippa begins his argument against political uprising by noting the Roman government’s inability to prevent dearth. When discussing where to look for the cause of the dearth, Agrippa, a synthesis of the play’s conceited aristocratic nobility and its pandering politicians, states, “For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians make it.”[54] With this argument, he notes the problematic way in which the rebellion seeks to harm those who are not at fault for the environmental conditions that have led to the dearth in which they are suffering at the beginning of the play.
Standish and the author of The Great Frost were certainly anxious about the possibility of political rebellion. Standish, when discussing the Midland Revolts, asserts that at the “time minds of many were molested.”[55] He asserts that this violence was the central reason behind why he “tooke the first occasion to imploy [his] Studie and travell…to prevent such inconveniences, as too oft doth spring cut of the desperate tree of want.”[56] Along with Standish, The Great Frost voices an anxiety regarding rebellion. When describing the way that several cakes of ice collide together on the ice, the man from the country contends “that violent factions and combinations, albeit of the basest person, in a commonwealth are not easily dissolved.”[57] The uncontested characterization of members of factions as “the basest person” shows a genuine embrace of the state and rejection of political rebellion. Truly, one can see that these texts clearly display a critical perspective of political rebellions during the period.
However, despite the fact that these texts support changes in agricultural and commercial practices rather than violent political upheaval, their arguments maintain the critique of waste that they see exhibited by the nobility in the country and the city in the Jacobean period. In Coriolanus, Agrippa argues against the rebels’ unstated, but probable, contention that the Roman government hoards the grain with his famous body politic analogy. In his “pretty tale,” he relates that “[t]here was a time when all the body’s members / Rebelled against the belly” and asserted that it was “idle and unactive” despite “cupboarding the viand, never bearing / Like labor with the rest.”[58] He ultimately argues that the belly ultimately responded by asserting, “I am the storehouse and the shop / Of the whole body” and that he distributes his wealth to “the court, the heart, to the seat o’th’brain.”[59] Thus, his argument illustrates the idea that all parts of the body get their equal share through the ‘digestion’ of the state. Agrippa’s argument responds to an important issue underlying the mob’s desire for political rebellion: the corruption and waste of the nobility.
The criticism of the over-consumption/hoarding by the nobility is one that is maintained in The Great Frost. In the dialogue, the citizen, when discussing the way that the merchants of London have been rendered unable to work by the incapacitated state of London nautical navigation, states, “If it be a gentleman’s life to live idly and do nothing, how many poor artificers and tradesman have been made gentleman then by this frost?”[60] This argument about the inactivity of gentleman is undoubtedly the nature of the country resident’s assertion that “Rich men have never more money, and Covetousness had never less pity.”[61] The man from the country asserts further that “[f]armers are now slaves to racking young prodigal landlords,” but he also goes on to note that “these are the common diseases of every kingdom, and therefore are but common news.”[62]
The Londoner and the farmer agree that the rich live idly and are not contributing to society at best and making things awful for the poor at worst. Whereas the frost has made merchants unproductive, according to the Londoner, gentleman have no such excuse. Indeed, by attacking the landlords as “prodigal,” the resident of the country asserts that not only do the rich, particularly the rich in the country, fail to produce anything for the benefit of the people they rule over; they actually contribute to the dearth by consuming resources and wasteful extravagance.
However, despite the fact that he sees the prodigality of landlords as contributing to the poor’s awful experience of the dearth, the resident of the country dismisses these arguments as too common to even address in great depth. Certainly, at the beginning of the reign of James, court culture was perceived as being corrupt, gluttonous, lustful and wasteful. Indeed, this critique of the nobility as a good-for-nothing was also maintained in the play The Revenger’s Tragedy, which was published in 1607 and most likely performed earlier, possibly in 1606.[63] The whole text acts as a critique of the appetites of the nobility of the period. In one of the most memorable descriptions of the play, the character Vindice, attempting to test his mother’s virtue by seeing if she would be willing to essentially sell her daughter to the Duke’s son Lussrioso as a sex slave, asserts
Who’d sit at home in a neglected room,
Dealing short-lived beauty to the pictures
That are as useless as old men, when those
Poorer in face and fortune than herself
Walk with a hundred acres on their backs,
Fair meadows cut into green foreparts—Oh,
It was the greatest blessing ever happened to women
When farmers’ sons agreed, and met again,
To wash their hands and come up gentleman.[64]
Vindice here notes the connection between the country lord with the city gentleman. Given the critique of gentleman in the texts above as failing to contribute to the productivity of society, the argument attempts to associate the country landlords with the gentleman portrayed in the play, and the lords in the play are indeed insufferably awful. In one particular passage, the bastard son of the duke, Spurio asserts, “Faith, if the truth were known, I was begot / After from gluttonous dinner; some stirring dish / Was my first father.”[65] This passage connects the duke with gluttony and lust, and by having this arise in the context of reproduction, the play illustrates the way in which the gluttony and lust of the court is perpetuated.
Vindice asserts that beauty should be used rather than “neglected” and rendered “as useless as old men.” However, the irony of this speech arises in the fact that the kind of “use” is actually far from productive; rather, such a use of her beauty would add to the debauchery of court. Indeed, Vindice shows that her use of her beauty would be similar to the way that landed lords in the country ditched their potentially productive life in the country for a life of self-gratifying opulence and consumption at court.
This would have been particularly relevant in performance given James’s attempts at land reform throughout the early part of his reign. Throughout his reign, James I sought to have the nobility at court move back to their country estates.[66] According to Hugh Jenkins, “James issued eleven proclamations with just such a commandment during his reign: two, in fact, within months of his coronation.”[67] His purpose was to spread order throughout the land and restore an order that was perceived to have been lost with the massive migration of nobles to his court, and James, in the course of one proclamation, laments the way “that Noblemen, Knights, and Gentleman of qualities, doe rather fall to a more private and delicate course of life” by residing away from their home estates.[68] Thus, even James I himself lamented the way in which the nobles are merely living a self-satisfying life of opulence.
Thus, given the portrayals of nobility of the period, The Great Frost takes for granted the idleness and wasteful excess of the nobility. In doing so, the dialogue praises productive action and condemns the unproductive and wasteful. The text ultimately asserts the value of pushing for manageable reforms rather than take on the political establishment. We see this clearly when the man from the country, upon hearing of the way that the winter has hurt the productive capacity of London, states, “This beating may make them wise. The want that this hard season drives them into, may teach them to play ants; and in summer to make provision against the wrath of winter.”[69] Thus, we see that the nature of the text, at least, partially is didactic. It acts as a method of revealing the problematic conditions of the winter of 1607-08 so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.
Indeed, we see the kind of information that was produced in the dialogue put to great use in agrarian reform pamphlets like The Commons Complaint. One of the central issues that The Commons Complaint attempts to engage is the question of the lack of availability of timber in the period. When discussing the problems that he assumes are faced by London, the resident of the country in The Great Frost states, “Methinks…that this drying up of the waters should be a devourer up of wood.”[70] In response, the citizen of London notes that the citizens’ “care for fire was as great as for food. Nay, to want it was a worse torment than to be without meat.”[71] With the river frozen, the citizen notes, “[N]either could coal be brought up the river, neither could wood be sent down.”[72] The citizen claims that this offered a major opportunity for price gauging of the poor, when he states “chandlers, woodmongers, &c….lay the poor on the rack.”[73] He states that these people were engaged in the “unconscionable and unmerciful raising of the prices of fuel.”[74]
However, the freezing over of the Thames can only partially explain the lack of wood in the city. As the resident of the country notes, they also faced the incredible difficulties in acquiring the means of warming themselves. The country man states that “the same cold hand of Winter is thrust into our bosoms.”[75] He states that “the poor ploughman’s children sit crying blowing their nails” and asserts that “we complain, we shall die for want of wood.”[76] Thus, we see that the absence of wood impacts both the citizens of London and the members of country in the same way.
What this text illustrates was a central problem with timber production that partially led Arthur Standish to write The Commons Complaint. Though there may have been some considerable price gouging, the more likely reason behind the rise in price was the rampant practice of wood felling at this particular point in history. In The Commons Complaint, Standish laments “the general destruction and waste of wood made within” Great Britain. He begins to notice that in the kingdom there are “to many destroyers, but few or none at all doth plan or preserve: by reason thereof there is no Timber left in this Kingdome at this instant onely to repaire the buildings thereof an other age.”[77] In an interesting rhetorical move, Standish asserts “[N]o wood, no kingdome.”[78] He then suggests a large-scale tree-planting effort to curb the skyrocketing prices of timber needed for, among other things, buildings, farming, naval vessels, and of course warmth.[79] By asserting that without wood there can be no kingdom, Standish presses the way in which the lack of wood can lead to revolt, and if we take the citizen of London’s assertion in The Great Frost seriously—that the need for wood can overpower the desire for food—then this may have been seen as a strong possibility.
Of course, Arthur Standish proposes the way to prevent dearth in Great Britain. The central arguments were how to increase the food supply of Britain through the increase in the production of cattle, the planting of fruit trees, the breeding of “fowle,” and the elimination of crop-destroying vermin.[80] In the case of planting fruit trees, the author asserts that “by want of industrie, they are made strange unto us, by our buying them from foriane Countries at a deare rate, by our slouth and negligence.”[81] Thus, the text not only displays a desire for the production of food but a system of national agrarian self-sufficiency.
At this point in history in which The Commons Complaint and The Great Frost were written, we see the faltering of the system of agrarian production in Great Britain. The stress of the cold necessitated either the necessity of trying to reduce consumption or an increase in the productive capacity of the land. The descriptions of hunger reveal that a reduction in consumption could not come from the general populace during this period. Though the British population tended to see that the reduction should come from the “idle” and “prodigal” rich nobility who were wasting resources, the texts dismiss any attempts at overthrowing the political order. The texts attempt to chide the nobility for its wastefulness, but they do not advocate armed revolt. Thus, The Great Frost sought to learn from the calamities of the frost of 1608, and Standish’s document advocates methods designed increase food and timber production and prevent a future rebellion. Thus, in the dialogue we see the limitations of agrarian production in the early Jacobean period and the move toward increased production of food and timber in The Commons Complaint to accommodate the British population and their lifestyle.
In the Jacobean period, the steep decline in temperature led to stress on crops and, ultimately, political discontent and upheaval. Emerging out of a time when dearth would have been associated with political instability, the dialogue The Great Frost and The Commons Complaint voice the anxieties associated with the declining weather of the period as well as the means of improving food production and preparation for problematic weather. Standish and the author of The Great Frost are writing in the hope that rebellion need not accompany unpredictable weather. Given the agrarian base of the economy of the British countryside and the nautical nature of trade in London, the Great Frost of 1607-08 proved a significant disruption for British commerce. In order to counter to prevent future outbreaks of rebellion, the authors seem to advise methods for coping with the cold weather. We see particularly in the case of The Commons Complaint, a search for practices that will sustain Britain, including its excessive nobles and its meat-eating citizens. Thus, in the The Commons Complaint and The Great Frost we see the hope that, though it may continue to be “frozen,” the age not continue to be a “destroying” one.