Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.Rich landowners do not normally sell their grain immediately after the harvest is in, when prices are low; instead they store it until the numerous small-scale producers have sold all theirs and prices go up again. Pig farmers keep their flitches of bacon back in storage until they can get a better price for them later in the winter. Such tactics are made even more profitable by the unhappy fact that harvests can fail, causing local—and sometimes national—food shortages.