episode of the seventh century, to which he devotes thirty-eight lines of

his romance. In Cadwaladre’s time the corn fails and there is great hunger. A man may go for three days before he can buy any food in burgh, or in city, or in upland; he may indeed catch wild creatures, or fishes, or gather leaves and roots. Worse still, a plague comes, from rotten air and wicked winds, so that hale men fall down suddenly and die; gentle and bondmen all go, hardly any are left to till the land, the living cannot bury the dead, those who try fall dead in the grave. Men leave house and land, and few are left in the country. Eleven years does Britain lie waste with but few folk to till the land[100]. After the famine of 1315-16, the third and last of the great and, one may say, disgraceful famines which gave rise to the by-word “Anglorum fames,” prices continued at their ordinary level for several years. But from 1320 to 1323 they again came to a height. To that period probably belongs a mortality which is entered, in a chronicle of the next century[101], under the year 1325. On the contemporary authority of Higden we know that, in 1322, the king went to Scotland about the feast of St Peter ad Vincula, “and though he met not with resistance, lost many of his own by famine and disease.” After that period of scarcity comes a long succession of cheap years, covering the interval to the next great event in the annals of pestilence that concerns us, the arrival of the Black Death in the autumn of 1348. With that great event the history of English epidemics enters upon a new chapter. There were, of course, years of dearth and scarcity in the centuries following, but there were no great famine-pestilences like those of 1196, 1258 and 1315. The period of the great famines ought not to be left without another reference to the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, and the keenness of traders which led them sometimes to incur the restraints of government and the punishments of justice. On 26 March, 1269, was issued one of those ordinances against forestalling, of which many more followed for several centuries: no citizen to go outside the city of London, either by road or river, to meet victuals coming to market. In the 7th year of Edward I., clipping or debasing the coinage was carried on so systematically that nearly three hundred persons, mostly of the Hebrew race, were drawn and hanged for it. In the 11th year of Edward I. (1283) a statute had been directed against cheating by bakers and millers. Meanwhile the nobility retaliated by plundering the traders and merchants at Boston fair, and the king settled the account with these marauding nobles by hanging them. A statute of 1316, the second year of the famine, to fix the price of ale, has an interest on account of its motive--“ne frumentum ulterius per potum consumeretur.” The proportion of the corn of the country turned into malt, or the amount diverted from bread to beer, may be guessed from the fact that in London, for which the beer ordinance was first made, there were in 1309, brewhouses to the number of 1334, and taverns to the number of 354[102]. In the very year of great famine, 1316, an ordinance was issued (in French, dated from King’s Langley) against extravagant housekeeping[103]. In the year of great scarcity and mortality, 1322, there was such a crowd for a funeral dole at Blackfriars (for the soul of Henry Fingret) that fifty-five persons, children and adults, were crushed to death in the scramble[104]. At the same time the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, was sitting down to dinners of seventeen dishes, the cellarer had thirty-eight servants under him, the chamberlain and sacrist had large numbers of people employed as tailors, furriers, launderers and the like, and the servants and equipages of the one hundred and forty brethren were numerous and splendid[105]. The monasteries, on which the relief of the poor mostly depended, have been thus characterized: “From the end of the twelfth century until the Reformation,” says Bishop Stubbs, “from the days of Hubert Walter to those of Wolsey, the monasteries remained magnificent hostelries: their churches were splendid chapels for noble patrons; their inhabitants were bachelor country gentlemen, more polished and charitable, but little more learned or more pure in life than their lay neighbours; their estates were well managed, and enjoyed great advantages and exemptions; they were, in fact, an element of peace in a nation that delighted in war. But, with a few noble exceptions, there was nothing in the system that did spiritual service[106].” There is little to be said, at this period, of the profession most directly concerned with sickness, epidemic or other, namely the medical. We become aware of its existence on rare occasions: as in the account of the death of William the Conqueror at Rouen on 9 September, 1087, of the illness and death of Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, on 13 July, 1205, at one of his manors on a journey to Rochester[107], or in the reference by William of Newburgh, to the noted Jewish physician of King’s Lynn, whose honourable repute among the citizens for skill and modesty did not save him from the murderous fanaticism against his race in 1190[108], or in occasional letters of the time[109]. There were doubtless benevolent men among the practitioners of medicine, then as now; but the profession has never been one in which individuals could rise conspicuously above the level of their age, and the moral standard of those centuries was a poor one. It is not surprising, then, that John of Salisbury, indulging a taste for epigram, should have characterized the profession of medicine in the twelfth century as follows: “They have only two maxims which they never violate, ‘Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich’[110].” The one English physician whose writings have come down to us from the period that we are still engaged with, is John of Gaddesden. There is every reason to think that he was practising at the time of the famine and pestilence of 1315-16; but it is not from his bulky treatise on medicine that we learn the nosological types of the epidemic maladies of those years. Some account of his _Rosa Anglica_ will be found in the chapter on Smallpox; it must suffice to say here that he was a verbalist compiler from other books, themselves not altogether original, and that, according to Dr Freind, he displays no great knowledge of his profession. It is nothing strange, therefore, that Gaddesden throws no light upon the famine-pestilences of England, such as those of 1315-16, which he lived through. Dysentery and lientery, he treats of almost in the very words of Gilbertus Anglicus; but those maladies might have been among the dwellers in another planet, so far as native experience comes in. He reproduces whole chapters from his predecessors, on _synochus_ and _synocha_, without a hint that England ever witnessed such scenes of hunger-typhus as the St Albans chroniclers have recorded for us from their own observation. The reference by Trokelowe to the prevalence of _pestis gutturuosa_ in 1316, is one that a medical writer of the time might well have amplified; but Gaddesden missed the opportunity of perhaps anticipating Fothergill’s description of putrid sore-throat by more than four hundred years. Epidemics of St Anthony’s Fire, or Ergotism. One form of epidemic malady, intimately connected with bad harvests and a poor state of agriculture, namely Ergotism, from the mixture of poisoned grains in the rye or other corn, is conspicuously missed from English records of the medieval period, although it plays a great part in the history of French epidemics of the Middle Ages, under such names as _ignis sacer_, _ignis S. Antonii_, or _ignis infernalis_. According to the proverbial saying already quoted, France was as notorious for _ignis_ as England for famine, and Normandy for lepra: “Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra[111].” The malady was of a nature to attract notice and excite pity; it is entered by chroniclers, and is a frequent topic in French legends of the Saints. Its occurrence in epidemic form can be traced in France, with a degree of probability, as far back as 857 (perhaps to 590); six great outbreaks are recorded in the tenth century, seven in the eleventh, ten in the twelfth, and three in the thirteenth, the medieval series ending with one in the year 1373. The estimates of mortality in the several epidemics of ergotism over a larger or smaller area of France, range as high as 40,000, and 14,000, which numbers may be taken to be the roughest of guesses; but in later times upwards of 500 deaths from ergotism have been accurately counted in a single outbreak within a limited district. The epidemics have been observed in particular seasons, sometimes twenty years or more elapsing without the disease being seen; they have occurred also in particular provinces--in the basin of the Loire, in Lorraine, and, since the close of the medieval period, especially in the Sologne. The disease has usually been traced to a spoiled rye crop; but there is undoubted evidence from the more recent period that a poison with corresponding effects can be produced in some other cereals, even in wheat itself. In a field of rye, especially after a wet sowing or a wet season of growth, a certain proportion of the heads bear long brown or purple corns, one or more upon a head, projecting in the shape of a cock’s spur, whence the French name of ergot. The spur appears to be, and probably is, an overgrown grain of rye; it is grooved like a rye-corn, occupies the place of the corn between the two chaff-coverings, and contains an abundant whitish meal. Microscopic research has detected in or upon the spurred rye the filaments of a minute parasitic mould; so that it is to the invasion by a parasite that we may trace the enormous overgrowth of one or more grains on an ear, and it is probably to the ferment-action of the fungus that we should ascribe the poisonous properties of the meal. The proportion of all the stalks in a field so affected will vary considerably, as well as the proportion of grains on each affected head of corn[112]. Rye affected with ergot is apt to be a poor crop at any rate; one or more spurred corns on a head tend to keep the rest of the grains small or unfilled; and if there be many stalks in the field so affected, the spurred grain will bulk considerably in the whole yield. When the diseased grains are ground to meal along with the healthy grains, the meal and the bread will contain an appreciable quantity of the poison of ergot; and if rye-bread were the staple food, there would be a great risk, after an unusually bad harvest, of an outbreak of the remarkable constitutional effects of ergotism. Rye-bread with much ergot in it may be rather blacker than usual; but it is said to have no peculiar taste. It is almost exclusively among the peasantry that symptoms of ergotism have been seen, and among children particularly. The attack usually began with intense pains in the legs or feet, causing the victims to writhe and scream. A fire seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, and, at a later stage, even in the bowels, the surface of the body being all the while cold as ice. Sometimes the skin of affected limbs became livid or black; now and then large blebs or blisters arose upon it, as in bad kinds of erysipelas. Gangrene or sloughing of the extremities followed; a foot or a hand fell off, or the flesh of a whole limb was destroyed down to the bones, by a process which began in the deeper textures. The spontaneous separation of a gangrenous hand or foot was on the whole a good sign for the recovery of the patient. Such was the _ignis sacer_, or _ignis S. Antonii_ which figures prominently, I am told, in the French legends of the Saints, and of which epidemics are recorded in the French medieval chronicles. Corresponding effects of ergotism may or may not have occurred during the medieval period in other countries of Europe where rye was grown. The remarkable thing is, that when we do begin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to obtain evidence of agrarian epidemics in Germany, Sweden and Russia, which have eventually come to be identified, in the light of more recent knowledge, with ergotism, the type of the disease is different, not perhaps fundamentally or in the ultimate pathological analysis, but at all events different as being a functional disorder of the nervous system, instead of a disorder, on nervous lines, affecting the nutrition of parts and their structural integrity. This newer form, distinctive of Germany and north-eastern Europe, was known by the name of Kriebelkrankheit, from the creeping or itching sensations in the limbs at the beginning of it; these heightened sensibilities often amounted to acute pain, as in the beginning of the gangrenous form also; but the affection of the sensory nerves, instead of leading to a breakdown in the nutrition of the parts and to gangrene, was followed by disorder of the motor nerves,--by spasms of the hands and arms, feet and legs, very often passing into contractures of the joints which no force could unbend, and in some cases passing into periodic convulsive fits of the whole body like epilepsy, whence the name of convulsive ergotism[113]. Side by side with these German, Swedish and Russian outbreaks of convulsive ergotism, or Kriebelkrankheit (called by Linnaeus in Sweden by the Latin name _raphania_), there had been a renewal or continuance of the medieval epidemics in France, notably in the Sologne; but the French ergotism has retained its old type of _ignis_ or gangrene. It was not until the eighteenth century that the learned world became clear as to the connexion between either of those forms of disease among the peasantry and a damaged rye-crop, although the country people themselves, and the observant medical practitioners of the affected districts, had put this and that together long before. Thus, as late as 1672-75, there were communications made to the Paris Academy of Medicine[114] by observers in the Sologne and especially around Montargis, in which ergot of rye is clearly described, as well as the associated symptoms of gangrenous disease in the peasantry; but the connexion between the two was still regarded as open to doubt, and as a question that could only be settled by experiment; while there is not a hint given that these modern outbreaks were of the same nature as the notorious medieval _ignis sacer_. According to Häser, it was not until the French essay of Read (Strasbourg, 1771) that the identity of the old _ignis_ with the modern gangrenous ergotism was pointed out. The result of the modern study of outbreaks of ergotism, including the minute record of individual cases, has been to show that there is no hard and fast line between the gangrenous and convulsive forms, that the French epidemics, although on the whole marked by the phenomena of gangrene, have not been wanting in functional nervous symptoms, and that the German or northern outbreaks have often been of a mixed type. Thus, in the French accounts of 1676, “malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” are mentioned along with “the gangrene in the arms but mostly in the legs, which ordinarily are corrupted first.” Again, the observations of Th. O. Heusinger[115] on an outbreak near Marburg in 1855-56, led him decidedly to conclude for the essential sameness of _ignis_ and Kriebelkrankheit, and for the existence of a middle type, although undoubtedly the sensory and motor disorders, including hyperaesthesia, pain and anaesthesia on the one hand, and contractures of the joints, choreic movements and convulsions on the other, were more distinctive of the epidemics of ergotism on German or northern European soil. Thus far the foreign experience of ergotism, both medieval and modern, and of its several types. We shall now be in a position to examine the English records for indications of the same effects of damaged grain. In the English medieval chronicles an occasional reference may be found to _ignis_ or wild fire. The reference to wild fire in Derbyshire in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1049, probably means some meteorological phenomenon, elsewhere called _ignis sylvaticus_: “Eac þ wilde fyr on Deorbyscire micel yfel dyde[116].” Whatever the _ignis sylvaticus_ or _ignis aereus_ was, which destroyed houses as well as crops, there appears to be no warrant for the conclusion of C. F. Heusinger that it was the same as the _ignis sacer_ of the French peasantry[117]. An undoubted reference to _ignis infernalis_ as a human malady occurs in the _Topography of Ireland_ by Giraldus Cambrensis: a certain archer who had ravished a woman at St Fechin’s mill at Fore was overtaken by swift vengeance, “igne infernali in membro percussus, usque in ipsum corpus statim exarsit, et nocte eadem exspiravit.” Taking the incident as legendary, and the diagnosis as valueless, we may still conclude that the name, at least, of _ignis infernalis_ was familiar to English writers. But in all the accounts of English famines and wide-spread sicknesses in the medieval period which have been extracted from the nearest contemporary authorities, I have found no mention of any disease that might correspond to ergotism[118]. The first undoubted instance of ergotism in England belongs to the eighteenth century. On or about the 10th of January, 1762, a peasant’s family (father, mother, and six children) of Wattisham in Suffolk, were attacked almost simultaneously with the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, several of them eventually losing portions of their limbs. The disease began with intense pain in the legs, and contractures of the hands and feet. It was proved that they had not been using rye flour; but their bread for a short time before had been made exclusively from damaged wheat, grown in the neighbourhood and kept apart from the farmer’s good corn so as not to spoil his sample. It had been sent to the mill just before Christmas, and had been used by some others besides the family who developed the symptoms of ergotism[119]. In that authentic instance of ergotism (although not from rye), there was one symptom, the contractures of the hands and feet, which is distinctive of the convulsive form; so that the English type may be said to have been a mixture of the French form and of the form special to the north-eastern countries of Europe. With that instance as a type, let us now inquire whether any epidemics in England at earlier periods may not be brought under the head of ergotism. It is to be kept in mind that none of the medieval outbreaks were called by their present name, or traced to their true source, until centuries after; so that our task is, not to search the records for the name of ergotism, but to scrutinize any anomalous outbreak of disease, or any outbreak distinguished in the chronicles by some unusual mark, with a view to discovering whether it suits the hypothesis of ergotism. I shall have to speak of three such outbreaks in the fourteenth century, and of one in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702[120]. The first of these is given by Knighton for a period and a locality that may have been within his own cognizance. In the summer of 1340 there happened in England generally, but especially in the county of Leicester, a certain deplorable and enormous infirmity. It was marked by paroxysms or fits, attended by intolerable suffering; while the fit lasted, the victims emitted a noise like the barking of dogs. A “great pestilence,” or perhaps a great mortality, is said to have ensued[121]. In that record the salient points are, firstly the wide or epidemic incidence of the malady, at all events in Leicestershire, which was Knighton’s own county; secondly the paroxysmal nature of the attacks, and the strange noises emitted therewith; thirdly the intolerable suffering (_poena_) that attended each fit (_passio_). Except for the clear indication of pain, one might think of the strange hysterical outbreaks, extending, by a kind of psychical contagion, to whole communities, which were observed about the same period in some parts of the continent of Europe. But of these medieval psychopathies, as they are called, there is hardly any trace in England. The Flagellants came over from Zealand to London in 1349, and gave exhibitions at St Paul’s, but that pseudo-religious mania does not appear to have taken hold among the English. The epidemic recorded by Knighton had probably a more material cause. To illustrate the somewhat meagre reference by Knighton to the strange epidemic of 1340, I shall proceed at once to the remarkable outbreak in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702, which was clearly not a psychopathy or hysterical outbreak, and yet had a seemingly hysterical element in it. An account of it was sent to the Royal Society by Dr Charles Leigh “of Lancashire[122].” “We have this year [1702] had an epidemical fever, attended with very surprising symptoms. In the beginning, the patient was frequently attacked with the colica ventriculi; convulsions in various parts, sometimes violent vomitings, and a dysentery; the jaundice, and in many of them, a suppression of urine; and what urine was made was highly saturated with choler. About the state of the distemper, large purple spots appeared, and on each side of ’em two large blisters, which continued three or four days: these blisters were so placed about the spots that they might in some measure be term’d satellites or tenders: of these there were in many four different eruptions. But the most remarkable instance I saw in the fever was in a poor boy of Lymm in Cheshire, one John Pownel, about 13 years of age, who was affected with the following symptoms:-- “Upon the crisis or turn of the fever, he was seized with an aphonia, and was speechless six weeks [? days], with the following convulsions: the distemper infested the nerves of both arms and legs which produced the Chorea Sancti Viti, or St Vitus’s dance; and the legs sometimes were both so contracted that no person could reduce them to their natural position. Besides these, he had most terrible symptoms, which began in the following manner: [description of convulsions follows] ... and then he barked in all the usual notes of a dog, sometimes snarling, barking, and at the last howling like an hound. After this the nerves of the mandibles were convulsed, and then the jaws clashed together with that violence that several of his teeth were beaten out, and then at several times there came a great foam from his mouth.... These symptoms were so amazing that several persons about him believed he was possessed. I told them there was no ground for such suppositions, but that the distemper was natural, and a species of an epilepsy, and by the effects I convinced them of the truth of it; for in a week’s time I recovered the boy his speech, his senses returned, his convulsions vanished, and the boy is now very cheerful. There have been other persons in this country much after the same manner.” This epidemic of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire was recorded as something unusual. It had certain intestinal symptoms such as colic, which may well have followed the use of poisoned food and are indeed described among the symptoms of ergotism; there were also convulsions, large purple spots with blisters coming and going on the skin near them, and, in the single case that is given with details, there were contractures of the legs “so that no person could reduce them to their natural position,” and a continuance for several days of painful epileptiform fits attended with noises like the barking of a dog, or the hissing of a goose, “all which different sounds (I take it) proceed from the different contractions of the lungs variously forcing out the air.” The remarkable case of the boy, certified by several witnesses, is expressly given as one belonging to the general epidemic of the locality, others having been affected “much after the same manner.” Whatever suggestion there may be of ergotism in these particulars, nothing is said of gangrene of the limbs, although the livid spots and blisters are part of the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, just as the convulsions and contractures are of convulsive ergotism. In the Suffolk cases of 1762 there were both contractures of the limbs and gangrene. Knighton’s mention of the barking noises emitted by the sufferers of 1340 has suggested to Nichols, the author of the _History of Leicestershire_[123], a comparison of them with the cases investigated by Dr Freind in the year 1700, at the village of Blackthorn in Oxfordshire. Having heard a great rumour in the summer of that year that certain girls at that Oxfordshire village were taken with frequent barkings like dogs, Dr Freind made a journey to the place to investigate the cases[124]. He found that this _pestis_ or plague had invaded two families in the village, on terms of close intimacy with each other. Two or three girls in each family are specially referred to: they were seized at intervals of a few hours with spasms of the neck and mouth, attended by vociferous cries; the spasmodic movements increased to a climax, when the victims sank exhausted. The fits had kept occurring for several weeks, and had appeared in the second family at a considerable interval after the first. The symptoms, said Freind, were those that had been described by Seidelius--distortion of the mouth, indecorous working of the tongue, and noises emitted like barking. He found nothing in the girls’ symptoms that could not be referred to a form of St Vitus’ dance or to hysteria, in which maladies, laughter, howling and beating of the breast are occasionally seen as well as the spasmodic working of the neck and limbs. The question remains whether the cases of 1700 in the Oxfordshire village, assuming Dr Freind’s reading of them to be correct, were as illustrative of the outbreak of 1340 as the cases of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire, which were probably too numerous and too much complicated with symptoms of material toxic disorder to be explained as hysterical. There is, indeed, a larger question raised, whether the so-called psychopathies of the medieval and more recent periods may not have had a beginning, at least, in some toxic property of the staple food. The imagination readily fixes upon such symptoms as foaming at the mouth and barking noises, exalts these phenomena over deeper symptoms that a physician might have detected, and finds a simple explanation of the whole complex seizure as demoniac possession or, in modern phrase, as a psychopathy. Without questioning the subjective or imitative nature of many outbreaks which have been set down to hysteria, it may be well to use some discrimination before we exclude altogether an element of material poisoning such as ergot in the staple food, more especially in the case of the wide-spread hysterical epidemics of Sweden, a country subject to ergotism also[125]. These eighteenth-century instances have been brought in to illustrate Knighton’s account of the epidemic of 1340. The next strange outbreak of the fourteenth century is recorded by the St Albans historian (“Walsingham”) under a year between 1361 and 1365, probably the year 1362. Like so many more of the medieval records of epidemic sickness, it is a meagre and confused statement: “Numbers died of the disease of lethargy, prophesying troubles to many; many women also died by the flux; and there was a general murrain of cattle[126].” Along with that enigmatical entry, we may take the last of the kind that here concerns us. At Cambridge, in 1389, there occurred an epidemic of “phrensy;” it is described as “a great and formidable pestilence, which arose suddenly, and in which men were attacked all at once by the disease of phrensy of the mind, dying without the _viaticum_, and in a state of unconsciousness[127].” The names of phrensy and lethargy occur in the manuscript medical treatises of the time in the chapters upon diseases of the brain and nerves[128]; strictly they are names of symptoms, and not of forms or types of disease, and they may be used loosely of various morbid states which have little in common. A lethargy would in some cases be a name for coma in fever, or for a paralytic stroke; a phrensy might be actual mania, or it might be the delirium of plague or typhus fever. The “lethargy” of 1362 is alleged of a number of people as if in an epidemic, whatever the singular phrase “prophetantes infortunia multis” may mean; and the “phrensy of the mind” of which many died suddenly at Cambridge in 1389, does not look as if it had been a symptom of plague or pestilential fever. The judicious reader will make what he can of these disappointingly meagre details. But for his guidance it may be added that the French accounts of ergotism in 1676 give one of the poisonous effects as being “to cause sometimes malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” which terms might stand for lethargy and phrensy; also that it has not always been easy, in an epidemic among the peasantry after a bad harvest, to distinguish the cases of ergotism from the cases of typhus, the contractures of the limbs, which seem so special to ergotism, having been described also for undoubted cases of typhus[129]. Whether these anomalous epidemics in medieval England were instances of convulsive ergotism or not, the English records are on the whole wanting in the evidence of such wide-spread and frequent disasters from a poisoned harvest as distinguish the French annals of the same period. One reason of our immunity may have been that the grain was better grown; another reason certainly is that rye was a comparatively rare crop in England, wheaten bread being preferred, although bread made from beans and barley was not uncommon. Thorold Rogers says: “Rye was scantily cultivated. An occasional crop on many estates, it is habitually sown in few. It is regularly sown in Cambridgeshire and some other of the eastern counties. As the period before us passes on [1259-1400], it becomes still more rare, and as will be seen below, some of the later years of this enquiry contain no entries of its purchase and sale[130].” But it is clear from the entries in chronicles, more particularly about the very period of the fourteenth century to which the three epidemics suggestive of ergotism belong, that the English peasantry suffered from the poisonous effects of damaged food, even if they suffered little from spurred rye. Thus, under the year 1383, in the history known as Walsingham’s, there is an unmistakeable reference to many fatalities, as well as serious maladies, caused by the eating of damaged fruit[131]. Again, under 1391, it is stated that this was “a hard and difficult year for the poor owing to a dearth of fruits, which had now lasted two years; whence it happened that at the time of the nuts and apples, many of the poor died of dysentery brought on by eating them; and the pestilence would have been worse had it not been for the laudable diligence of the Mayor of London, who caused corn to be brought to London from over sea[132].” Generalities on Medieval Famines in England. Summing up the English famine-pestilences of the medieval period, we find that they included the usual forms of such sickness--spotted fever of the nature of typhus, dysentery, lientery or looseness (such as has often subsequently accompanied typhus or famine-fever in Ireland), and putrid sore-throat. That some of these effects were due to spoiled grain and fruits, as well as to absolute want, we may reasonably conclude; for example the harvest of 1258 rotted on the ground, and yet the mouldy corn was sold at famine prices. With all those records of famines and their attendant sicknesses in England, it is significant that there is little indication of ergotism. The immunity of England from ergotism, with such a record of famines as the annals show, can only have been because little rye was grown and little black bread eaten. The standard of living would appear to have been higher among the English peasantry than among the French. A bad harvest, still more two bad harvests in succession, made them feel the pinch of famine more acutely, perhaps, than if they had accommodated themselves to the more sober level of rye bread. Hence the somewhat paradoxical but doubtless true saying of the Middle Ages--“Anglorum fames, Francorum ignis.” The saying really means, not that England was a poor country, which would be an absurd repute for foreigners to have fixed upon her; but that the English were subject to alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, of surfeit and starvation. The earliest English work which deals fully and concretely with the social condition of the country is the fourteenth-century poem of “The Vision of Piers the Ploughman.” A few passages from that poem will be of use as throwing light upon the famines of England, before we finally leave the period of which they are characteristic. Langland’s poem describes the social state of England in peculiar circumstances, namely, after the upheaval and dislocation of the Great Mortality of 1349; and in that respect it has an interest for our subject which comes into a later chapter. But in so far as it illustrates the alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, the vision of medieval England concerns us here before we quit the subject of famine-pestilences. The average industrious ploughman, represented by Piers himself, fares but soberly until Lammas comes round[133]:-- “I have no penny, quod Piers, pullets for to buy, Ne neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, A few cruddes and cream, and an haver-cake, And two loaves of beans and bran ybake for my fauntis. And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon, Nor no cookeney, by Christ, collops for to maken. And I have percil and porettes and many kole-plantes, And eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare To draw afield my dung the while the drought lasteth. And by this lyflode me mot live till lammas time; And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft; And then may I digte thy dinner as me dear liketh.” Some are worse off than the ploughman in the slack time before the harvest: “All the poor people tho pesecoddes fetched, Beans and baken apples they brought in their lappes, Chibolles and chervelles and ripe cherries many, And proferred Piers this present to plead with Hunger. All Hunger ate in haste, and axed after more. Then poor folk for fear fed Hunger eagerlie, With green poret and pesen, to poison Hunger they thought. By that it nighed near harvest, new corn came to chipping. Then was folk fain, and fed Hunger with the best, With good ale, as glutton taught, and gerte Hunger go sleep. And though would waster not work but wandren about, Ne no beggar eat bread that beans in were, But of cocket or clerematyn or else of clean wheat: Ne no halfpenny ale in none wise drink, But of the best and of the brownest that in burgh is to sell. Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands, Deigned nought to dine a-day night-old wortes. May no penny ale them pay ne no piece of bacon, But if it be fresh flesh other fish fried other bake.” The waster being now in his season of plenty falls to abusing the Statute of Labourers: “And then cursed he the king and all his council after, Such laws to loke, labourers to grieve. But whiles Hunger was their master there would none of them chide, Nor strive against _his_ statute, so sternly he looked. And I warn you, workmen, wynneth while ye mowe, For Hunger hitherward hasteth him fast. He shall awake with water wasters to chasten. Ere five year be fulfilled such famine shall arise Through floods and through foul weathers fruits shall fail. And so said Saturn, and sent you to warn ... Then shall death withdraw and dearth be justice, And Daw the dyker die for hunger, But if God of his goodness grant us a truce.” He proposes to feed the lazy wasters on beans: “And gif the groomes grudge, bid them go swynk, And he shall sup the sweeter when he hath deserved.” The ploughman asks Hunger the reason why both himself and his servants are unable to work: “I wot well, quod Hunger, what sickness you aileth. Ye have maunged over much, and that maketh you groan ... Let not sir Surfeit sitten at thy board ... And gif thy diet be thus, I dare lay mine ears That Physic shall his furred hoods for his food sell, And his cloak of calabre with all the knaps of gold, And be fain, by my faith, his physic to let, And learn to labour with land, for lyflode is sweet: For murtherers are many leeches, Lord them amend! They do men kill through their drinks, or destiny it would. By Saint Poul, quod Piers, these aren profitable words.” In another place, Hawkin the minstrel confesses to gluttony: “And more meat ate and drank than nature might digest, And caught sickness some time for my surfeits oft.” A liking for the best of food, and plenty of it, when it was to be had, has clearly been an English trait from the earliest times. Conversely thrift does not appear to have been a virtue or a grace of the labouring class in England. Thus a bad harvest brought wide-spread scarcity, and two bad harvests brought famine and famine-pestilences. The contrasts were sharp because the standard of living was high. And although three, at least, of the English famines were disgraceful to so rich a country, and were probably the occasion of the foreign reproach of “Anglorum fames;” yet the significant fact remains that the disease of the European peasantry, which is the truest index of an inferior diet, namely ergotism, has little or no place in our annals of sickness.