Medieval Famine-pestilences.
The foregoing are all the instances of pestilence in early English history, unconnected with famine, that have been collected in a search through the most likely sources. The history of English epidemics, previous to the Black Death, is almost wholly a history of famine sicknesses; and the list of such famines with attendant sickness, without mentioning the years of mere scarcity, is a considerable one.
TABLE OF FAMINE-PESTILENCES IN ENGLAND.
The period covered by this long list is itself a long one; and the intervals between successive famine-pestilences are sometimes more than a generation. A history of epidemics is necessarily a morbid history. In this chapter of it, we search out the lean years, saying nothing of the fat years; and by exclusively dwelling upon the dark side we may form an entirely wrong opinion of the comforts or hardships, prosperity or adversity, of these remote times. English writers of the earliest period, when they use generalities, are loud in praise of the advantages of their own island; until we come to the fourteenth century poem of ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman’ we should hardly suspect, from their usual strain, that England was other than an earthly paradise, and every village an Auburn, “where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain.” There is a poem preserved in Higden’s Polychronicon by one Henricus, who is almost certainly Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon in the time of Henry I., although the poem is not included among the archdeacon’s extant verse. The subject is ‘De Praerogativis Angliae,’ and the period, be it remarked, is one of the early Norman reigns, when the heel of the conquering race is supposed to have been upon the neck of the English. Yet this poem contains the famous boast of ‘Merry England,’ and much else that is the reverse of unhappy:—
“Anglia terra ferax et fertilis angulus orbis.
Anglia plena jocis, gens libera, digna jocari;
Libera gens, cui libera mens et libera lingua;
Sed lingua melior liberiorque manus.
Anglia terrarum decus et flos finitimarum,
Est contenta sui fertilitate boni.
Externas gentes consumptis rebus egentes,
Quando fames laedit, recreat et reficit.
Commoda terra satis mirandae fertilitatis
Prosperitate viget, cum bona pacis habet[29].”
Or, to take another distich, apparently by Alfred of Beverley,
“Insula praedives, quae toto non eget orbe,
Et cujus totus indiget orbis ope.”
Or, in Higden’s own fourteenth century words, after quoting these earlier estimates: “Prae ceteris gulae dedita, in victu et vestitu multum sumptuosa[30].”