In England, there were multiple famines in the 11th century - the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports famines as having taken place in 1044, 1047, 1069 (as a result of William the Conqueror laying waste to the North following the rebellions there), 1082 and 1086 - 1087. These famines appear to be strongly linked to bad weather associating with the global warming taking place in that period i.e. the Anglo-Saxon chronicle's entry for 1047 says “in this same year [1047] came the severe winter with frost and with snow and with all bad weather, such that there was no man alive who could remember so severe a winter as that was, both through the mortality of men and mortality of cattle; both birds and fish perished through the great cold and hunger" - severe winters in temperate zones are a classic feature of global warming, as we ourselves are experiencing now. However, as the climate stabilised and the cultivated area greatly expanded England was free of famines for the entire 12th and 13th centuries, until, after the limits of agrarian expansion had been reached and global cooling began to set in, it was hit in the 14th century by the Great European Famine of 1315 - 1317 - estimated to have killed 10 - 15% of England's population which really affected everyone i.e. when King Edward II visited St Albans, no one could find anything to feed him and his entourage. Due to a very static birthrate, England experienced relatively no famines in the late 14th and 15th centuries, but when demographic growth began again from the 1520s, the threat of famine rose up again and there was a very serious famine from 1554 to 1557 and the threat of one again in 1596 - 1598, which led to the creation of the Poor Law of 1601, which through taxes at parish level entitled the "deserving poor" to financial assistance.

As for how badly people would be affected by famines, It depended on what kind of famine it was. For example, if it was crop failure then the subsistence of rural and urban dwellers would be badly affected, though more so urban dwellers since peasants would be less willing to sell them. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1044 tells us how the price of wheat skyrocketed up to 60 pence a sester (an archaic English measurement). A famine caused by disease, like the sheep-plagues of the 14th century, might be less threatening to subsistence but might lead to declining revenues for landlords in areas where pastoral farming predominated and where a major source of employment was in textiles i.e. the seep-plagues of the 14th century lead to a terminal decline of many monasteries in North Wales, which depended mainly on sheep-farming, and would have economic repercussions as far as Italy and Flanders, which depended on imports of English wool for their textile industries. Still if the famines affected livestock more generally, rather than just a particular kind, as the famine of 1047 did (as we have seen) then it could lead to many human deaths too.