[87] Wendover, III. 381.
[88] William of Newburgh, sub anno 1196.
[89] On the other hand John Stow seems to have acquired, from some unstated source, an extraordinary prejudice against him.
[90] Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj. ed. Luard, V. 663, 675.
[91] Annals of Tewkesbury in Annales Monastici, Rolls series, No. 36.
[92] Chronica Majora, IV. 647; Stow, Survey of London.
[93] Chron. Maj. IV. 654.
[94] Chr. Maj. V. 660. Other details occur here and there to the end of the chronicle.
[95] This is the number given by Matthew Paris. It suggests a larger population in the capital than we might have been disposed to credit. The same writer says that London was so full of people when the parliament was sitting the year before (1257) that the city could hardly hold them all in her ample bosom. The Annals of Tewkesbury put the whole mortality from famine and fever in London in 1258 at 20,000. But the whole population did not probably exceed 40,000.
[96] The year 1274 was the beginning of so exceptional a murrain of sheep that it deserves mention here, although murrains do not come within the scope of the work. It is recorded by more than one contemporary. Rishanger (p. 84) says: “In that year a disastrous plague of sheep seized upon England, so that the sheep-folds were everywhere emptied through the spreading of it. It lasted for twenty-eight years following, so that no farm of the whole kingdom was without the infliction of that misery. Many attributed the cause of this disease, which the inhabitants had not been acquainted with before, to a certain rich man of the Frankish nation, who settled in Northumberland, having brought with him a certain sheep of Spanish breed, the size of a small two year old ox, which was ailing and contaminated all the flocks of England by handing on its disease to them.” Under the year following, 1275, he enters it again, using the term “scabies.” Thorold Rogers (Hist. of Agric. and Prices, I. 31) has found “scab” of sheep often mentioned in the bailiffs’ accounts from about 1288; it is assumed to have become permanent from the item of tar occurring regularly in the accounts; but tar was used ordinarily for marking. It may have been sheep-pox, which Fitzherbert, in his Book of Husbandry (edition of 1598), describes under the name of “the Poxe,” giving a clear account of the way to deal with it by isolation. For murrains in general, the reader may consult Fleming’s Animal Plagues, 2 vols. 1871—1884, a work which is mostly compiled (with meagre acknowledgment for “bibliography” only) from the truly learned work of Heusinger, Recherches de Pathologie Comparée, Cassel, 1844. Fleming has used only the “pièces justificatives,” and has not carried the history beyond the point where Heusinger left it.