The Regional Provisioning of Grain
The Regional Provisioning of Grain
Unlike the constant struggle to regulate the meat market on the southern Upper Rhine, the provisioning of grain rarely presented the authorities with a serious challenge until the last third of the sixteenth century, when a series of harvest failures, possibly exacerbated by demographic pressure, led to repeated bouts of dearth and famine. The authorities' only concern was to prevent Fürkauf, understood in this context not as a general hostility to commerce or towards foreigners, but in the exact sense of forestalling, pre-empting the workings of a free market by buying corn on the ear directly from the peasantry or at unlicensed markets in the countryside. The desire to conserve dwindling stocks of grain within a given territory prompted bans on exports, although these were subject to innumerable exceptions. Whereas with meat the Rappen league had depended on supplies brought into its area either from its fringes or from abroad, with grain its members traded freely throughout the Upper Rhine.
Keywords: Upper Rhine, grain, provisioning, forestalling, exports, bans, Rappen league, free market
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