“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.
CHAPTER II.
LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN.