Agricultural History Review, Volume 74 Part 1 (2026), pp. 1–26

This article examines the provisioning of staple foods – particularly grain – at Norwich Cathedral Priory and St Giles’s Hospital during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a period of low grain prices. Following the end of demesne farming in the early fifteenth century, food was neither simply purchased at the marketplace nor did farm fees in kind (‘food farms’) replace the former deliveries from the demesne. Instead the priory appealed to a whole range of alternative food networks, combining both market and non-market mechanisms. Bread grain was purchased from a network of trusted sellers, frequently overlapping with farmer and tenant families. At the priory, the non-market supply was made up mainly of barley (malt) farms used for brewing. Since malt is not a bread grain, and barley was often in oversupply, these farms were not intended for food security. Instead, they stabilized the income of both landlords and tenant farmers during a long-lasting agricultural depression. As this article argues, the reliance on such alternative food networks, in particular for grain, did not signal a retreat from commercialization, but rather a willingness to maintain social networks via food, as well as shielding both landlords and tenant farmers from the unpredictability of the grain market.