The notion that the series of alarming events in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century might be connected goes back at least as far as Voltaire. Professional historians of Europe during the past forty years have fixed on this period as the principal case to test the idea that societies can undergo a ‘general crisis’, in which agricultural, demographic, climatic, economic, military and political factors are interrelated (Hobsbawm 1954; Trevor-Roper 1959; Aston 1965; Parker and Smith 1978; Parker 1979). For some this was the crisis of the transition to capitalism, for others that of the absolutist state, while more recent commentators have put more emphasis on climatic and environmental factors. The causal connections between the various factors remain the most puzzling unresolved problem.