[126] “Moriebantur etiam plures morbo litargiae, multis infortunia prophetantes; mulieres insuper decessere multae per fluxum, et erat communis pestis bestiarum.” Walsingham, Hist. Angl., sub anno; and in identical terms in the Chronicon Angliae a Monacho Sancti Albani.
[127] “Magna et formidabilis pestilentia extemplo subsecuta est Cantabrigiae, qua homines subito, prout dicebatur, sospites, invasi mentis phrenesi moriebantur, sine viatico sive sensu.” Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 186. Under the same year, 1389, the continuator of Higden’s Polychronicon (IX. 216) says that the king being in the south and “seeing some of his prostrated by sudden death, hastened to Windsor.”
[128] For example in the Sloane MS. 2420 (the treatise by Constantinus Africanus of Salerno), there are chapters “De Litargia,” “De Stupore Mentis,” and “De Phrenesi.”
[129] Th. O. Heusinger, Studien über den Ergotismus, Marburg, 1856, p. 35: “Es werden freilich in den Beschreibungen einiger früheren Epidemieen öfter typhöse Erscheinungen erwähnt; die Beschreiber behaupten aber auch dann meist die Contagiosität der Krankheit, und es liegt die Vermuthung nahe, dass die Krankheit dann eigentlich ein Typhus war, bei dem die Erscheinungen des Ergotismus ebenso constant vorkommen, wie sie sonst in vereinzelteren Fällen dem Typhus sich beigesellen” (cf. ‘Dorf Gossfelden,’ in Appendix).
[130] History of Agriculture and Prices, I. 27.
[131] “Sed in fructibus arborum suspicio multa fuit, eo quod per nebulas foetentes, exhalationes, aerisque varias corruptiones, ipsi fructus, puta poma, pyra, et hujusmodi sunt infecta; quorum esu multi mortales hoc anno [1383] vel pestem letalem vel graves morbos et infirmitates incurrerunt.” Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 109. The continuator of Higden records under the same year, in one place a “great pestilence in Kent which destroyed many, and spared no age or sex” (IX. 27), and on another page (IX. 21) a great epidemic in Norfolk, which attacked only the youth of either sex between the ages of seven and twenty-two!
[132] Walsingham, II. 203; Stow’s Survey of London, p. 133.
[133] The spelling, and a few whole words, have been altered from Skeat’s text, so as to make the meaning clear.
[134] Simpson, Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ. 1842, vol. LVII. p. 136.
[135] Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls ed. p. 156) describes the death of Hubert on 13 July, 1205, but does not mention the name of his physician.