If the English historian’s language, “agricultura defecit,” with reference to the tribute exacted by Rufus, have that fitness which we have reason to expect from him,—Higden varies it to “ita ut agricultura cessaret et fames succederet,”—then the famine and mortality about the years 1094-5 were due to no less remarkable a cause than a refusal to cultivate the land. It is not to be supposed that the incubus of excessive tribute passed away with the accession of Henry I. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle repeats the complaint of heavy taxation in connexion with bad harvests and murrains in 1103, 1105 and 1110[56]. Severe winters, or autumn floods, with murrains and scarcity, are recorded also for the years 1111, 1115, 1116, 1117, 1124 and 1125, the famine of 1125 having been attended with a mortality, and having been sufficiently great and general to be mentioned by several chroniclers[57]. In the midst of these years of scarcity and its effects upon the population, there occurs one singular entry of another kind in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1112: “This was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and in field; but it was a very sad and sorrowful one, through a most destructive pestilence[58].” Under the year 1130, the annalist of the Welsh monastery of Margan, who is specially attentive to domestic events, records a murrain of cattle all over England, which lasted several years so that scarcely one township escaped the pest, the pigsties becoming suddenly empty, and whole meadows swept of their cattle. It is to the same murrain that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers under the year 1131: in towns where there had been ten or twelve ploughs going there was not one left, and the man who had 200 or 300 swine had not one left; after that died the domestic fowls.

These things happened from time to time in the comparatively prosperous reign of Henry I. But with the death of Henry in 1135, there began a state of misery and lawlessness lasting almost to the accession of Henry II. in 1154, beside which the former state of England was spoken of as “most flourishing[59].” Besides the barbarities of the Scots and the Welsh on the northern and western marches[60], there were the civil wars of the factions of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and the cruelties and predations of the unruly nobles under the walls of a thousand newly-built strongholds. A graphic account of the condition of England remains to us from the pen of an eyewitness, the observant author of the Gesta Stephani[61]. Under the year 1143 he writes that there was most dire famine in all England; the people ate the flesh of dogs and horses or the raw garbage of herbs and roots. The people in crowds pined and died, or another part entered on a sorrowful exile with their whole families. One might see houses of great name standing nearly empty, the residents of either sex and of every age being dead. As autumn drew near and the fields whitened for the harvest, there was no one to reap them, for the cultivators were cut off by the pestilent hunger which had come between. To these home troubles was added the presence of a multitude of barbarous adventurers, without bowels of pity and compassion, who had flocked to the country for military service. The occasion was one of those which cause the archdeacon of Huntingdon to break out into his elegiac verse:

“Ecce Stygis facies, consimilisque lues[62].”

“And in those days,” says another, “there was no king in Israel[63].” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which comes to an end in this scene of universal gloom, describes how one might go a day’s journey and never find a man sitting in a town, or the land tilled, and how men who once were rich had to go begging their bread, concluding with the words, “And they said openly that Christ and His saints slept.”

Among the penances of Henry II. after the murder of Becket, there is recorded his charity in feeding during a dearth ten thousand persons daily from the first of April, 1171, until the harvest[64]. But, apart from a reference to a flux among the troops in Ireland in 1172, from errors of diet[65], the long reign of Henry II. is marked by only one record of general pestilence. It is recorded by the best contemporary writer, Benedict of Peterborough, and it is the first instance in which the number of burials in a day (perhaps at Peterborough) is given. In the year 1175, he says, there was in England and the adjacent regions a pestilential mortality of men, such that on many days seven or eight corpses were carried out to be buried. And immediately upon that pestilential mortality there followed a dire famine[66]. It is to be observed that the famine is explicitly stated to have come after the pestilence, just as in the great mortality of 1087; and, as in the latter case, it may be that a hard winter, with scarcity of food, brought a general sickness, and that the scarcity had been raised to famine point by a second bad harvest. The entry in the chronicle of Melrose for 1173 may refer to Scotland only: a bad kind of cough, unheard of before, affected almost everyone far and wide, whereof, “or from which pest,” many died. This is perhaps the only special reference to “tussis” as epidemic until the influenzas of the seventeenth century.

The comparative freedom of the long reign of Henry II. from famines and 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.