Grain stays cheap across Europe for one hundred and thirty years

Cereal prices across Europe stayed low from about 1620 until about 1750. The fall was one of the marks of the long seventeenth century stagnation, and it reached its sharpest point at the very end of the period, in England, which was then the largest grain exporter of them all. Low bread prices sound like relief and were nothing of the kind for the people who grew the grain. A small farmer sold whatever was left after seed, tithe and rent had been taken out, and when prices were low that remainder bought very little. Landlords in England responded in the 1730s and 1740s by accepting lower rents and more arrears. The same cheap grain fed the towns and the ports, including the ports fitting out ships for the Atlantic trade, and the recovery of prices after 1750 turned the terms of that bargain around again.

On 30 October 1665 the army of the Kongo met the Portuguese forces of Loanda at Ambuila and was destroyed. The king, Antonio I, died there, along with his son, the dukes of Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi and Gorimba, the marquess of Mpemba, and ninety five title holders altogether, as well as a Capuchin who had come against his prefect's orders. Antonio had brought his crown, his sceptre and the royal archives with him. Everything was lost. Angola's expansion had made a strong independent kingdom to its north unacceptable, and Angola's economy was the traffic in slaves feeding Brazil. The kingdom that had existed since Afonso I, and the Christian ruling class that had formed inside it, never recovered. Succession disputes multiplied between rival clans, and in 1678 one of the contending armies sacked Mbanza Kongo itself. The churches and palace were left in ruins and nobody lived in the city for twenty five years.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.

On 23 January 1745 a court in Orange County, Virginia convicted a woman named Eve of mixing poison into the milk of her owner, Peter Montague, who had languished four months before dying. The record calls the act feloniously and traitorously done, and she was burned at the stake. Virginia treated the killing of a master by a slave as a species of treason, on the model of the English rule under which a wife who killed her husband committed petit treason. Trial records from Virginia counties usually run to a few lines listing the accused, the charge and the outcome, so cases with this much detail are rare. Where a method is named it is almost always something put into food or drink, which is what European ideas about poisoning expected. In four trials between 1763 and 1798 the accused were said to have poisoned their owners while pretending to give them medicine.