On the other hand there is a medieval proverbial saying which places England in a light strangely at variance with this native boast of fertility, plenty, and abundance overflowing to the famished peoples abroad: “Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra”—three afflictions proper to three countries, famine to England, St Anthony’s fire to France, leprosy to Normandy[31]. Whatever the “lepra Normannorum” may refer to, there is no doubt that St Anthony’s fire, or ergotism from the use of bread containing the grains of spurred rye, was a frequent scourge of some parts of France; and, in common repute abroad, famine seems to have been equally characteristic of England. Perhaps the explanation of England’s evil name for famines is that there were three great English famines in the medieval history, before the Black Death, separated by generations, no doubt, but yet of such magnitude and attended by so disgraceful circumstances that the rumour of them must have spread to foreign countries and made England a by-word among the nations. These were the famines of 1194-96, 1257-59, and 1315-16. Of the first we have a tolerably full account by William of Newburgh, who saw it in Yorkshire; of the second we have many particulars and generalities by Matthew Paris of St Albans, who died towards the end of it; and of the third we have an account by one of his successors as historiographer at St Albans, John Trokelowe. All other references to famine in England are meagre beside the narratives of these competent observers, although there were probably two or three famines in the Norman period equally worthy of the historian’s pen. For the comprehension of English famine-pestilences in general, we ought to take the best recorded first; but it will be on the whole more convenient to observe the chronological order, and to introduce, as occasion offers, some generalities on the types of disease which famine induced, the extent of the mortalities, and the conditions of English agriculture and food-supply which made possible occasional famines of such magnitude.
From the great plague “of Cadwallader’s time,” which corresponds in history to the foreign invasion of pestilence in 664, until nearly the end of the Anglo-Saxon rule, there is little recorded of famines and consequent epidemic sickness. It does not follow that the period was one of plenty and prosperity for the people at large. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is at no period detailed or circumstantial on the subject of famines and pestilences; and although the entries become more numerous in the last hundred years before the Chronicle came to an end in 1137, their paucity in the earlier period probably means no more than the imperfection of the record. Some of the generalities of Malthus might be applied to help the imagination over a period of history which we might otherwise be disposed to view as the Golden Age. One of these, originally written for the South Sea Islands, is applicable to all romantic pictures of “rude plenty,” such as the picture of the Anglo-Saxon household in Ivanhoe. It has been remarked of Scott as a novelist that he always feeds everyone well; but the picture, grateful to the imagination though it be, is probably an illusion. “In a state of society,” says Malthus, “where the lives of the inferior order of the people seem to be considered by their superiors as of little or no value, it is evident that we are very liable to be deceived with regard to the appearances of abundance”; and again: “We may safely pronounce that among the shepherds of the North of Europe, war and famine were the principal checks that kept the population down to the level of their scanty means of subsistence.” The history of English agriculture is known with some degree of accuracy from the thirteenth century, and it is a history of prices becoming steadier and crops more certain. It is not to be supposed that tillage was more advanced before the Conquest than after it. On the other hand the probabilities are that England had steadily emerged from a pastoral state. It would be unfair to judge of the state of rural England at any time by the state of Wales in the twelfth century, as it is described by Giraldus Cambrensis, or by the condition of Ireland as described from the same traveller’s observations. But in the absence of any concrete view of primitive England itself, the picture of the two neighbouring provinces may be introduced here.
Ireland, says Giraldus, closely following Beda, is a fertile land neglected; it had no agriculture, industries or arts; its inhabitants were rude and inhospitable, leading a purely pastoral life, and living more upon milk than upon meat. At the same time there was little sickness; the island had little need of physicians; you will hardly ever find people ill unless they be at the extremity of death; between continuous good health and final dissolution there was no middle term. The excessive number of children born blind, or deaf, or deformed, he ascribes to incestuous unions and other sexual laxities[32].
The picture of Wales is that of a not less primitive society[33]. The Welsh do not congregate in towns, or in villages, or in fortified places, but live solitary in the woods; they build no sumptuous houses of stone and lime, but only ozier booths, sufficient for the year, which they run up with little labour or cost. They have neither orchards nor gardens, and little else than pasture land. They partake of a sober meal in the evening, and if there should be little or nothing to eat at the close of day, they wait patiently until the next evening. They do not use table-cloths nor towels; they are more natural than neat (naturae magis student quam nitori). They lie down to sleep in their day clothes, all in one room, with a coarse covering drawn over them, their feet to the fire, lying close to keep each other warm, and when they are sore on one side from lying on the hard floor, they turn over to the other. There are no beggars among this nation. It is of interest, from the point of view of the “positive checks” of Malthus, to note that Giraldus more than hints at the practice of a grosser form of immorality than he had charged the Irish with. Spinning and weaving were of course not unknown, for the hard and rough blanket mentioned above was a native product. By the time that Higden wrote (about 1340), he has to record a considerable advance in the civilization of Wales. Having used the description of Giraldus, he adds: “They now acquire property, apply themselves to agriculture, and live in towns[34].” But in the reign of Henry II., it was found easy to bring the rebellious Welsh to terms by stopping the supplies of corn from England, upon which they were largely dependent[35].
Of the condition of Scotland in the twelfth century we have no such sketch as Giraldus has left for Wales and Ireland. Uncivilized compared with England, the northern part of the island must certainly have been, if we may trust the indignant references by Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon to the savage practices of the Scots who swarmed over the border, with or without their king to lead them, or the remark by William of Malmesbury concerning the Scots who went on the Crusade leaving behind them the insects of their native country.
Giraldus intended to have written an itinerary or topography of England also, but his purpose does not appear to have been fulfilled. Higden, his immediate successor in that kind of writing a century and a half later, is content, in his section on England, to reproduce the generalities of earlier authors from Pliny downwards. Of these, we have already quoted the ‘Prerogatives of England’ by Henry of Huntingdon, from which one might infer that the British Isles, under the Norman yoke, were the Islands of the Blest. On the other hand, the impression made by the details of the Domesday survey upon a historian of the soundest judgment, Hallam, is an impression of poor cultivation and scanty sustenance. “There cannot be a more striking proof,” he says, “of the low condition of English agriculture in the eleventh century than is exhibited in Domesday book. Though almost all England had been partially cultivated, and we find nearly the same manors, except in the north, which exist at present, yet the value and extent of cultivated ground are inconceivably small. With every allowance for the inaccuracies and partialities of those by whom that famous survey was completed, we are lost in amazement at the constant recurrence of two or three carucates in demesne, with folkland occupied by ten or a dozen villeins, valued all together at forty shillings, as the return of a manor which now would yield a competent income to a gentleman[36].”
Whether, the population at the Domesday survey were nearer two millions than one, the people were almost wholly on the land. Of the size of the chief towns, as the Normans found them, we may form a not incorrect estimate from the Domesday enumeration of houses held of the king or of other superiors[37]. London, Winchester and Bristol do not come at all into the survey. Besides these, the towns of the first rank are Norwich, York, Lincoln, Thetford, Colchester, Ipswich, Gloucester, Oxford, Cambridge, and Exeter.
Norwich had 1320 burgesses in the time of Edward the Confessor; in the borough were 665 English burgesses rendering custom, and 480 bordarii rendering none on account of their poverty; there were also more than one hundred French households. Lincoln had 970 inhabited houses in King Edward’s time, of which 200 were waste at the survey. Thetford had 943 burgesses before the Conquest, and at the survey 720, with 224 houses vacant. York was so desolated just before the survey that it is not easy to estimate its ordinary population; but it may be put at about 1200 houses. Gloucester had 612 burgesses. Oxford seems to have had about 800 houses; and for Cambridge we find an enumeration of the houses in nine of the ten wards of the town in King Edward’s time, the total being about 400. Colchester appears to have had some 700 houses, Ipswich 538 burgesses, with 328 houses “waste” so far as tax was concerned. Exeter had 300 king’s houses, and an uncertain number more. Next in importance come such places as Southampton, Wallingford, Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Coventry, Derby, Canterbury, Yarmouth, Rochester, Dover, Sandwich (about 400 houses), and Sudbury. In a third class may be placed towns like Dorchester, Ilchester, Bridport, Wareham, Shaftesbury, Bath, Chichester, Lewes, Guildford, Hythe, Romney, Pevensey, Windsor, Bath, Chester, Worcester, Hereford, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham, Hertford, St Albans, Torchesey, Maldon, each with from 100 to 200 burgesses. Dover and Sandwich each supplied twenty ships, with crews of twenty-four men, for King Edward’s service during fifteen days of the year. In Hereford there were six smiths, each rendering one penny a year for his forge, and making 120 nails of the king’s iron. Many of these houses were exceedingly small, with a frontage of seven feet; the poorest class were mere sheds, built in the ditch against the town wall, as at York and Canterbury.
It would be within the mark to say that less than one-tenth of the population of England was urban in any distinctive sense of the term. After London, Norwich, York, and Lincoln, there were probably no towns with five thousand inhabitants. There were, of course, the simpler forms of industries, and there was a certain amount of commerce from the Thames, the East Coast, and the Channel ports. The fertile soil of England doubtless sustained abundance of fruit trees and produced corn to the measure of perhaps four or six times the seed. There were flocks of sheep, yielding more wool than the country used, herds of swine and of cattle. The exports of wool, hides, iron, lead, and white metal gave occasion to the importation of commodities and luxuries from Flanders, Normandy, and Gascony. If there was “rude plenty” in England, it was for a sparse population, and it was dependent upon the clemency of the skies. A bad season brought scarcity and murrain, and two bad seasons in succession brought famine and pestilence.
Of the general state of health we may form some idea from the Anglo-Saxon leechdoms, or collections of remedies, charms and divinations, supposed to date from the eleventh century[38]. The maladies to which the English people were liable in these early times correspond on the whole to the everyday diseases of our own age. There were then, as now, cancers and consumptions, scrofula or “kernels,” the gout and the stone, the falling sickness and St Vitus’ dance, apoplexies and palsies, jaundice, dropsies and fluxes, quinsies and anginas, sore eyes and putrid mouth, carbuncles, boils and wildfire, agues, rheums and coughs. Maladies peculiar to women occupy a chief place, and there is evidence that hysteria, the outcome of hardships, entered largely into the forms of sickness, as it did in the time of Sydenham. Among the curiosities of the nosology may be mentioned wrist-drop, doubtless from working in lead. One great chapter in disease, the sickness and mortality of infants and children, is almost a complete blank. It ought doubtless to have been the greatest chapter of all. The population remained small, for one reason among others, that the children would be difficult to rear. There is no direct evidence; but we may infer from analogous circumstances, that the inexpansive population meant an enormous infant mortality. The sounds which fell on the ear of Æneas as he crossed the threshold of the nether world may be taken as prophetic, like so much else in Virgil, of the experience of the Middle Ages: