national distress probably arose as much from good government as from the
clemency of the seasons. The country was growing rich by foreign trade. In
1190 the two leading Jews of York, Joyce and Benedict, were occupying
residences in the heart of the town like royal palaces in size and in the
sumptuousness of their furniture. The same historian, William of
Newburgh, who records the king’s protection of these envied capitalists,
mentions also his protection of “the poor, the widows and the orphans,”
and his liberal charities. That the king’s protection of his poorer
subjects was not unneeded, would be obvious if we could trust the
extraordinary account of the keen traders of London which is put by
Richard of Devizes into the mouth of a hostile witness[67]. The peoples of
all nations, it appears, flocked to London, each nationality contributing
to the morals of the capital its proper vices and manners. There was no
righteous person in London, no, not one; there were more thieves in London
than in all France[68]. In the entirely different account, of the same
date, by an enthusiastic Londoner, the monk Fitz-Stephen, the only
“plagues” of London are said to be “the immoderate drinking of fools and
the frequency of fires.” The city and suburbs had one hundred and
twenty-six small parish churches, besides thirteen greater conventual
churches; and it was a model to all the world for religious observances.
“Nearly all the bishops, abbots, and magnates of England are, as it were,
citizens and freemen of London; having there their own splendid houses, to
which they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to great
councils by the king or by their metropolitan, or drawn thither by their
own private affairs[69].” The archdeacon of London, of the same date,
Peter of Blois, in a letter to the pope, Innocent III., concerning the
extent of his duties and the smallness of his stipend, gives the parish
churches in the city at one hundred and twenty, and the population at
forty thousand[70]. The Germans who came in the train of Richard I. on
his return to England in 1194, after his release from the hands of the
emperor, were amazed at the display of wealth and finery which the
Londoners made to welcome back the king; if the emperor had known the
riches of England, they said, he would have demanded a heavier ransom[71].
The ransom, all the same, required a second, or even a third levy before
it was raised, owing, it was said, to peculation; and the ecclesiastics,
who held a large part of the soil, appear to have had so little in hand to
pay their share that they had to pledge the gold and silver vessels of the
altar[72].
The year of Richard’s accession, 1189, is given by the annalist of the
Welsh monastery of Margan, as a year of severe famine and of a mortality
of men. Probably it was a local famine, and it may well have been the same
in which Giraldus Cambrensis says that he himself saw crowds of poor
people coming day after day to the gates of the monastery of Margan, so
that the brethren took counsel and sent a ship to Bristol for corn[73].
The great and general famine with pestilence in Richard’s time was in the
years 1193, 1194, 1195, 1196 and 1197, and it appears to have been felt in
France, in the basin of the Danube, and over all Europe, as well as in
England. Of the pestilence which came with it in England we have an
exceptionally full account from the pen of William of Newburgh. The
monastery in which William wrote his history was situated among woods by
the side of a stream under the Hambledon hills in Yorkshire, on the road
between York and the mouth of the Tees; so that when he says of this
famine and pestilence, “we speak what we do know, and testify what we have
seen,” he may be taken as recording the experience of a sufficiently
typical region of rural England.
His narrative of the pestilence[74] is given under the year 1196, which
was the fourth year of the scarcity or famine: After the crowds of poor
had been dying on all sides of want, a most savage plague ensued, as if
from air corrupted by dead bodies of the poor. This pestilence showed but
little respect even for those who had abundance of food; and as to those
who were in want, it put an end to their long agony of hunger. The disease
crept about everywhere, always of one type, namely that of an acute fever.
Day after day it seized so many, and finished so many more, so that there
were scarcely to be found any to give heed to the sick or to bury the
dead. The usual rites of burial were omitted, except in the case of some
nobler or richer person; at whatever hour anyone died the body was
forthwith committed to the earth, and in many places great trenches were
made if the number of corpses was too great to afford time for burying
them one by one. And as so many were dying every day, even those who were
in health fell into low spirits, and went about with pale faces,
themselves the living picture of death. In the monasteries alone was this
pestilence comparatively unfelt. After it had raged on all sides for five
or six months, it subsided when the winter cold came.
Those lean years were doubtless followed by seven fat years; for it is not
until 1203, the fourth year of John, that we again meet with the records
of famine and pestilence. From various monasteries, from Waverley in
Sussex, Tewkesbury in Gloucester and Margan in Glamorgan, we have the same
testimony--“fames magna et mortalitas,” “fames valida, et saeva mortalitas
multitudinem pauperum extinguit,” “maxima fames.” The monks of Waverley
had to leave their own house and disperse themselves through various
monasteries. Two years after, 1205, there came so hard a season that the
winter-sown seed was almost killed by frost. The Thames was crossed on the
ice, and there was no ploughing for many weeks. An Essex annalist says
there was a famine, and quotes the famine prices: a quarter of wheat was
sold for a pound in many parts of England, although in Henry II.’s time it
was often as low as twelve pence; a quarter of beans ten shillings; a
quarter of oats forty pence, which used to be four pence[75]. The annalist
at Margan enters also the year 1210 as a sickly one throughout
England[76].
We are now come to the period when we can read the succession of these
events in the domestic life of the people from the more trustworthy
records of the St Albans school of historians. Of the scarcity and
sickness among the poor in 1234 we have some suggestive particulars by
Roger of Wendover[77], and for the series of famines and epidemics from
1257 to 1259 we have a comparatively full account by his famous successor
in the office of historiographer to the abbey, Matthew Paris[78]. The next
St Albans _scriptorius_, Rishanger[79], notes the kind of harvest every
year from 1259 to 1305, and for only one of those years after the scarcity
of 1259 was past, namely the year 1294, does he speak of the people dying
of hunger. His successor, John Trokelowe[80], carries on the annals to
1323, and gives us some particulars, not without diagnostic value, of the
great famine-sickness of 1315-16, and of the succession of dear years of
which the epidemic was an incident. It is on these contemporary accounts
by the St Albans school, together with the record for the year 1196 by
William of Newburgh, that our knowledge of the famine-pestilences of
England must be based.
With the harvest of 1259 begins the tabulation of agricultural prices from
farm-bailiffs’ accounts, by Professor Thorold Rogers, a work of vast
labour in which the economic history of the English people is written in
indubitable characters, and by means of which we are enabled to check the
more general and often rhetorical statements of the contemporary
historians.
Although the history of the last year or two of John and of the earlier
years of Henry III. is full of turbulence and rapine, yet we hear of no
general distress among the cultivators of the soil. The contemporary
authority, Roger of Wendover, has no entry of the kind until 1234,
excepting a single note under the year 1222, that wheat rose to twelve
shillings the quarter. We hear of king John and his following as
plundering the rich churchmen and laymen all the way from St Albans to
Nottingham, of William Longspée, earl of Salisbury, carrying on the same
practices in the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Hertford, Cambridge and
Huntingdon, of the spoliation of the Isle of Ely, and of the occupation of
towns and villages in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk by Louis, Dauphin of
France, the king-elect, or broken reed, on whom the Barons of Magna Charta
thought for a time to lean[81]. But the whole of that period, and of the
years following until 1234, is absolutely free from any record of
wide-spread distress among the lower class. We are reminded of the
observation by Philip de Comines, with the civil wars of York and
Lancaster in his mind, a saying which is doubtless true of all the
struggles in England for the settlement of the respective claims of king
and aristocracy: “England has this peculiar grace,” says the French
statesman, “that neither the country, nor the people, nor the houses are
wasted or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fall
only upon the soldiers and especially the nobility, of whom they are more
than ordinarily jealous: for nothing is perfect in this world.” That
cannot apply of course to the barbarous incursions of the Scots and the
Welsh; for the northern marches were often reduced to desolation during a
period of three hundred years after the Conquest and were never more
desolate than in the reign of Richard II.; while the marches of Wales were
subject to not less ruthless spoliations until the concessions to the
Welsh by Edward I. Nor is the immunity of the peasantry from the troubles
of civil war to be taken as absolute; for we find under the year 1264,
when Simon de Montfort was in the field against the king, an explicit
statement that the small peasantry were plundered even to the poor
furniture of their cottages. But on the whole we may take it that the
paralysing effect of civil war seldom reached to the English lower classes
in the medieval period, that the tenour of their lives was seldom
disturbed except by famine or plague, and that kings and nobles were left
to fight it out among themselves.
We become aware, however, from the time of the Great Charter, and during
the steady growth of the country’s prosperity, of a widening chasm between
the rich and the poor within the ranks of the commons themselves, and that
too, not only in the centres of trade (as we shall see), but also in
country districts. The claims of feudal service did not prevent some among
the villagers from adding house to house, and field to field, thereby
marking in every parish the interval between the thriving and comfortable
and a residuum of _pauperes_ composed of the less capable or the less
fortunate. A curious story, told by Roger of Wendover of the village of
Abbotsley near St Neots, will serve as an illustration of a fact which we
might be otherwise well assured of from first principles[82].
The year 1234 was the third of a succession of lean years. So sharp was
the famine before the harvest of that year, that crowds of the poor went
to the fields in the month of July, and plucked the unripe ears of corn,
rubbing them in their hands and eating the raw grain. The St Albans monk
is full of indignation against the prevailing spirit of avarice which
reduced some of the people to that sad necessity: Alms had everywhere gone
out of fashion; the rich, abounding in all manner of temporal goods, were
so smitten with blind greed that they suffered Christian men, made in the
image of God, to die for want of food. Some, indeed, were so impious as to
say that their wealth was due to their own industry, and not to the gift
of God. Of that mind seem to have been the more prosperous cultivators of
the village of Abbotsley “who looked on the needy with an eye of
suspicion[83].”
The following story is told of them. Seeing the poor making free with
their corn in the ear, they assembled in the parish church on a Sunday
in August, and assailed the parson with their clamours, demanding that
he would forthwith pronounce the ban of the Church upon those who
helped themselves to the ears of corn. The parson, notwithstanding a
well-known precedent in the Gospels, was about to yield to their
insistence, when a man of religion and piety rose in the congregation
and adjured the priest, in the name of God and all His saints, to
refrain from the sentence, adding that those who were in need were
welcome to help themselves to his own corn. The others, however,
insisted, and the parson was just beginning to ban the pilferers, when
a thunderstorm suddenly burst, with hail and torrents of rain. When
the storm had passed, the peasants went out to find their crops
destroyed,--all but that one simple and just man who found his corn
untouched.
We have only to recall the minute subdivisions of the common field, or
fields, of the parish into half-acre strips separated by balks of turf,
and the fact that no two half-acres of the same cultivator lay together,
to realize how nice must have been the discrimination[84].
But the moral of the story is obvious. It is an appeal to the teaching and
the sanction of the Gospels, against the rooted belief of the natural man
that he owes what he has to his own industry and thrift, and that it is no
business of his to part with his goods for the sustenance of a helpless
and improvident class.
The spirit of avarice, according to Wendover, permeated all classes at
this period, from high ecclesiastics downwards. Walter, archbishop of
York, had his granaries full of corn during the scarcity, some of it five
years old. When the peasants on his manors asked to be supplied from these
stores in the summer of 1234, the archbishop instructed his bailiffs to
give out the old corn on condition of getting new for it when the harvest
was over. It need not be told at length how the archbishop’s barns at
Ripon were found on examination to be infested with vermin, how the corn
had turned mouldy and rotten, and how the whole of it had to be destroyed
by fire[85]. Of the same import are the raids upon the barns of the alien
or Italian clergy in 1228, in the diocese of Winchester and elsewhere, and
the ostentatious distribution by the raiders of doles to the poor[86].
The somewhat parallel course of public morality in the centres of trade,
or, as Wendover would call it, the prevalence of avarice, demands a brief
notice for our purpose.
In every state of society, there will of course be rich and poor. But a
class of _pauperes_ seems to emerge more distinctly in the life of England
from about the beginning of the thirteenth century. The period corresponds
to the appearance on the scene of St Francis and his friars. Doubtless St
Francis was inspired by a true sense of what the time needed, even if it
be open to contend that his ministrations of charity brought out,
consolidated, and kept alive a helpless class who would have been less
heard of if they had been left to the tender mercies of economic
principles. The mission of the friars was not merely to the poor; it was
also to the rich, whether of the church or of the world, “to soften the
hardness of their hearts by the oil of preaching[87].” It was one of these
interpositions, ever needed and never wanting, to reduce the inequalities
of the human lot, not by preaching down-right theoretical communism, but,
more by force of rhetoric than of logic, to extort from the strong some
concessions to the weak, to mitigate the severity of the struggle for
existence, and to bring the respectable vices of greed and sharp practice
to the bar of conscience.
As early as 1196 there is the significant incident, in the city of London,
of the rising of the poorer class and the middling class, headed by
Fitzosbert Longbeard, himself one of the privileged citizens, against an
assessment in which the class represented by the mayor and aldermen were
alleged to have been very tender of their own interests[88]. Longbeard was
hailed as “the friend of the poor,” and, having lost his life in their
cause (whether in the street before Bow Church, or on a gallows at Tyburn,
or at the Smithfield elms, the narratives are not agreed), he is
celebrated by the sympathetic Matthew Paris as “the martyr of the
poor[89].” That historian continues, after the manner of his predecessor
Wendover, to speak of Londoners as on the one hand the “mediocres,
populares et plebei,” and on the other hand the “divites.” In 1258 the
latter class overreached themselves: they were caught in actual vulgar
peculation of money raised by assessment for repairing the city walls;
some of them were thrown into prison and only escaped death through the
royal clemency at the instance of the notorious pluralist John Mansel, and
on making restitution of their plunder; but one of them, the mayor, never
recovered the blow to his respectability, and died soon after of
grief[90]. Whether it meant a wide-spread spirit of petty fraud, or some
unadjusted change in value, the young king in 1228, during a journey from
York to London, took occasion along his route to destroy the “false
measures” of corn, ale and wine, to substitute more ample measures, and to
increase the weight of the loaf.
The scarcity or famine of 1234, to which the Abbotsley incident belongs,
was accompanied, says the St Albans annalist, by a mortality which raged
cruelly everywhere. On the other hand the annalist of Tewkesbury may be
credited when he says that, although the year was one of scarcity, corn
being at eight shillings, yet “by the grace of God the poor were better
sustained than in other years[91].”
There was an epidemic in 1247, but it is not clear whether it was due to
famine. Although Higden, quoting from some unknown record, says that there
was dearth in England in that year, wheat being at twelve shillings the
quarter, yet he does not mention sickness at all; and Matthew Paris, who
was then living, is explicit that the harvest of 1247 was an abundant one,
and that the mortality did not begin until September of that year. There
does appear, however, to have been a sharp famine in Wales; and it is
recorded that the bishop of Norwich, “about the year 1245,” in a time of
great dearth, sold all his plate and distributed it to the poor[92]. All
that we know of this epidemic is the statement of Matthew Paris, that it
began in September and lasted for three months; and that as many as nine
or ten bodies were buried in one day in the single churchyard of St
Peter’s at Saint Albans[93].
Matthew Paris notes the quality of the harvest and the prices of grain
every year, and his successor Rishanger continues the practice. The prices
noted appear, from comparison with those tabulated by Thorold Rogers from
actual accounts, to have been the lowest market rates of the year. The
harvest of 1248 was plentiful, and wheat sold at two shillings and
sixpence a quarter. In 1249 and 1250 it was at two shillings, oats being
at one shilling. But those years of exceptional abundance were followed at
no long interval by a series of years of scarcity or famine, which brought
pestilential sickness of the severest kind.
The scarcity or famine in the years 1256-59 was all the more acutely felt
owing to the dearth of money in the country. The burden of the history of
Matthew Paris before he comes to the famine is that England had been
emptied of treasure by the exactions of king and pope. Henry III. was
under some not quite intelligible obligation of money to his brother, the
earl of Cornwall. The English earl was a candidate for the Imperial crown,
and had got so far towards the dignity of emperor as to have been made
king of the Germans. It was English money that went to pay his German
troops, and to further his cause with the electoral princes; but the
circulating coin of England does not appear to have sufficed for these and
domestic purposes also. The harvest of 1256 had been spoiled by wet, and
the weather of the spring of 1257 was wretched in the extreme. All England
was in a state of marsh and mud, and the roads were impassable. Many sowed
their fields over again; but the autumn proved as wet as the rest of the
year. “Whatever had been sown in winter, whatever had germinated in
spring, whatever the summer had brought forward--all was drowned in the
floods of autumn.” The want of coins in circulation caused unheard-of
poverty. At the end of the year the fields lay untilled, and a multitude
of people were dead of famine. At Christmas wheat rose to ten shillings a
quarter. But the year 1257 appears to have had “lethal fevers” before the
loss of the harvest of that year could be felt. Not to mention other
places, says the St Albans historian, there was at St Edmundsbury in the
dog-days so great a mortality that more than two thousand bodies were
buried in its spacious cemetery[94].
The full effects of the famine were not felt until the spring of 1258. So
great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want
of money that fifteen thousand[95] are said to have died of famine, and of
a grievous and wide-spread pestilence that broke out about the feast of
the Trinity (19 May).
The earl of Cornwall (and king of Germany) who had relieved the country of
a great part of its circulating coin, took the opportunity to buy up corn
in Germany and Holland for the supply of the London market. Fifty great
ships, says Matthew Paris, arrived in the Thames laden with wheat, barley,
and other grain. Not three English counties had produced as much as was
imported. The corn was for such as could buy it; but the king interposed
with an edict that, whereas greed was to be discouraged, no one was to buy
the foreign corn in order to store it up and trade in it. Those who had no
money, we are expressly told, died of hunger, even after the arrival of
the ships; and even men of good position went about with faces pinched by
hunger, and passed sleepless nights sighing for bread. No one had seen
such famine and misery, although many would have remembered corn at higher
prices. The price quoted about this stage of the narrative, although not
with special reference to the foreign wheat, is nine shillings the
quarter. Elsewhere the price is said to have mounted up to fifteen
shillings, which may have been the rate before the foreign supply came in.
But such was the scarceness of money, we are told, that if the price of
the quarter of wheat had been less, there would hardly have been found
anyone to buy it. Even those who were wont to succour the miserable were
now reduced to perish along with them. It is difficult to believe that the
historian has not given way to the temptations of rhetoric, and it is
pleasing to be able to give the following complement to his picture. After
some 15,000 had died in London, mostly of the poorer sort, one might hear
a crier making proclamation to the starving multitude to go to a
distribution of bread by this or that nobleman, at such and such a place,
mentioning the name of the benefactor and the place of dole.
In other passages, which may be taken as picturing the state of matters in
the country, the historian says that the bodies of the starved were found
swollen and livid, lying five or six together in pig-sties, or on
dungheaps, or in the mud of farmyards. The dying were refused shelter and
succour for fear of contagion, and scarcely anyone would go near the dead
to bury them. Where many corpses were found together, they were buried in
capacious trenches in the churchyards.
We come now to the harvest of 1258. After a bleak and late spring the
crops had come forward well under excessive heat in summer, and the
harvest was an unusually abundant, although a late one. Rains set in
before the corn could be cut, and at the feast of All Saints (1 November)
the heavy crops had rotted until the fields were like so many dungheaps.
Only in some places was any attempt made to carry the harvest home, and
then it was so spoiled as to be hardly worth the trouble. Even the mouldy
grain sold as high as sixteen shillings a quarter. The famishing people
resorted to various shifts, selling their cattle and reducing their
households. How the country got through the winter, we are not told.
Matthew Paris himself died early in 1259, and the annalist who added a few
pages to the _Chronica Majora_ after his death, merely mentions that the
corn, the oil and the wine turned corrupt, and that as the sun entered
Cancer a pestilence and mortality of men began unexpectedly, in which many
died. Among others Fulk, the bishop of London, died of pestilence in the
spring of 1259; and, to say nothing of many other places, at Paris
----thousand (the number is left blank) were buried.
The vagueness of the last statement reminds us that we are now deprived of
the comparatively safe guidance of Matthew Paris. His successor in the
office of annalist at St Albans, Rishanger, is much less trustworthy. He
sums up the year 1259 in a paragraph which repeats exactly the facts of
the notorious year 1258, and probably applies to that alone; for the year
1260 his summary is that it was more severe, more cruel and more terrible
to all living things than the year before, the pestilence and famine being
intolerable. There is, however, no confirmation of that in the authentic
prices of the year collected by Thorold Rogers. Parcels of wheat of the
harvest of 1259 were sold at about five and six shillings, and of the
harvest of 1260 at from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings. For
a number of years, corresponding to the Barons’ war and the war in Wales,
the price is moderate or low, the figures of extant bailiffs’ accounts
agreeing on the whole with Rishanger’s summary statements about the
respective harvests[96]. The years from 1271 to 1273 were dear years, and
for the first of the series we find a doubtful record by the Yorkshire
continuator of William of Newburgh that there was “a great famine and
pestilence in England and Ireland[97].” The harvest of 1288 was so
abundant that the price of wheat in the bailiffs’ accounts is mostly about
two shillings, ranging from sixteen pence to four and eightpence.
Rishanger’s prices for the year are sufficiently near the mark: in some
places wheat sold at twenty pence the quarter, in others at sixteen pence,
and in others at twelve pence. From that extremely low point, a rise
begins which culminates in 1294. The chronicler’s statement for 1289, that
in London the bushel of wheat rose from threepence to two shillings, is
not borne out by the bailiffs’ accounts, which show a range of from two
shillings and eightpence to six shillings the quarter. But these accounts
confirm the statement that the years following were dear years, and that
1294 was a year of famine prices, wheat having touched fourteen shillings
at Cambridge, in July. Rishanger’s two notes are that the poor perished of
hunger, and that the poor died of hunger on all sides, afflicted with a
looseness (_lienteria_)[98]. The two years following are also given as
hard for the poor, but not as years of famine or sickness; the country was
at the same time heavily taxed for the expenses of the war which Edward I.
was waging against the Scots. Ordinary prosperity attends the cultivators
of the soil until the end of Rishanger’s chronicle in 1305; and from the
beginning of Trokelowe’s in 1307, the year of Edward II.’s accession,
there is nothing for our purpose until we come to the great famine of
1315[99].
It is clear, however, that prices were high in every year from 1309 until
that famine, with the single exception of the harvest of 1311. At the
meeting of Parliament in London before Easter in 1315, the dearth was a
subject of deliberation, and a King’s writ was issued attempting to fix
the prices at which fat oxen, cows, sheep, pigs, geese, fowls, capons,
chickens, pigeons and eggs should be sold on demand, subject to
confiscation if the sale were refused. The statute was ineffective (it was
repealed the year after), and provisions became dearer than ever. The
quarter of wheat, beans and peas sold for twenty shillings, of oats for
ten shillings, and of salt for thirty-five. When the king stopped at St
Albans at the feast of St Lawrence, says Trokelowe, it was hardly possible
to buy bread for the use of his household. The scarcity was most felt from
the month of May until the harvest. With the new crop, ruined as it was by
rains and floods, the scarcity lessened somewhat, but not before many had
felt the pinch of hunger, and others were seen (as the St Albans annalist
says he saw them) lying squalid and dead in the villages and by the
road-sides. At Midsummer, 1316, wheat rose to thirty shillings, and after
that as high as forty shillings (the highest price found by Thorold Rogers
is twenty-six shillings and eightpence at Leatherhead in July). The
various forms of famine-sickness are mentioned:--dysentery from corrupt
food, affecting nearly everyone, an acute fever which killed many, or a
putrid sore throat (_pestis gutturuosa_). To show the extremities to which
England was reduced, Trokelowe specially inserts the following: Ordinary
flesh was not to be had, but horse-flesh was eaten, fat dogs were stolen
to eat, and it was rumoured abroad that in many places both men and women
secretly ate the flesh of their own children, or of the children of
others. But the detail which Trokelowe justly thinks posterity will be
most horrified to read, is that prisoners in gaols set upon the thieves
newly brought in and devoured them alive.
It is probably the same famine and pestilence that we find worked into the
metrical romance of Robert of Brunne (1338), under the guise of the plague
‘in Cadwaladre’s time,’ that is, the pestilence recorded by Beda for the
year 664. The Lincolnshire romancist must have seen the famine and
pestilence of 1315-16, for he was then in the prime of life, and probably
he transferred his own experiences of famine and pestilence to the remote
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.