“Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens
Infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo:
Quos dulcis vitae exsortes, et ab ubere raptos,
Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo.”
We come, then, to the chronology of famine-pestilences, and first in the Anglo-Saxon period. The years from 664 to 685 are occupied, as we have seen, by a great plague, probably the bubo-plague, which returned in 1348 as the Black Death, affecting, like the latter, the whole of England and Ireland on its first appearance, and afterwards particular monasteries, such as Barking and Jarrow. But it is clear that famine-sickness was also an incident of the same years. The metrical romancist of the fourteenth century, Robert of Brunne, was probably mistaken in tracing the great plague of “Cadwaladre’s time” to famine in the first instance; there is no such suggestion in the authentic history of Beda. But that historian does make a clear reference to famine in Sussex about the year 679[39]. Describing the conversion of Sussex to Christianity by Wilfrid, he says that the province had been afflicted with famine owing to three seasons of drought, that the people were dying of hunger, and that often forty or fifty together, “inedia macerati,” would proceed to the edge of the Sussex cliffs, and, joining hands, throw themselves into the sea. But on the very day when the people accepted the Christian baptism, there fell a plenteous rain, the earth flourished anew, and a glad and fruitful season ensued[40].
The anarchy in Northumbria which followed the death of Beda (in 735), with the decline of piety and learning in the northern monasteries, is said to have led to famine and plague[41]. It is not until the year 793 that an entry of famine and mortality occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is in keeping with the disappointing nature of all these early records that Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden, the two compilers who had access to lost records, are more particular in enumerating the portents that preceded the calamity than in describing its actual circumstances. Then a whole century elapses (but for a vague entry under the year 822) until we come to the three calamitous years, with 897 as the centre, which followed Alfred’s famous resistance to the Danes. In that mortality, many of the chief thanes died, and there was a murrain of cattle, with a scarcity of food in Ireland. Two generations pass before the chronicle contains another entry of the kind: in 962 there was a great mortality, and the “great fever” was in London. At no long intervals there are two more famines, in 976 and 986. That of 986 (or 987) would appear to have been severe; the church plate at Winchester was melted for the benefit of the starving[42], and there was “a fever of men and a murrain of cattle[43].” After the expulsion of the Danes in 1005, says Henry of Huntingdon, there was such desolation of famine as no one remembered. Then in 1010 or 1011 comes the incident of St Elphege, already given. From 1036 to 1049 we find mention of four, or perhaps five, famines, those of the years 1046 and 1049 being marked by a great mortality of men and murrain of cattle.
Except in Yorkshire, the Norman Conquest had no immediate effects upon the people of England in the way of famine and pestilence. From the last great mortality of 1049, a period of nearly forty years elapses until we come to the great pestilence and sharp famine in the last year of the Conqueror’s reign (1086-7). The harrying of Yorkshire, however, is too important a local incident to be passed over in this history. Of these ruthless horrors in the autumn of 1069 we have some particulars from the pen of Simeon of Durham, who has contemporary authority. There was such hunger, he says, that men ate the flesh of their own kind, of horses, of dogs, and of cats. Others sold themselves into perpetual slavery in order that they might be able to sustain their miserable lives on any terms (like the Chinese in later times). Others setting out in exile from their country perished before their journey was ended. It was horrible to look into the houses and farmyards, or by the wayside, and see the human corpses dissolved in corruption and crawling with worms. There was no one to bury them, for all were gone, either in flight or dead by the sword and famine. The country was one wide solitude, and remained so for nine years. Between York and Durham no one dwelt, and travellers went in great fear of wild beasts and of robbers[44]. William of Malmesbury says that the city of York was so wasted by fire that an old inhabitant would not have recognized it; and that the country was still waste for sixty miles at the time of his writing (1125)[45]. In the Domesday survey we find that there were 540 houses so waste that they paid nothing, 400 houses “not inhabited,” of which the better sort pay one penny and others less, and only 50 inhabited houses paying full dues.
The same local chronicler who has left particulars of the devastation of 1069-70, has given also a picture of the siege of Durham by Malcolm Canmore in 1091, which may serve to realize for us what a medieval siege was, and what the Scots marches had to endure for intervals during several centuries:—
Malcolm advancing drives the Northumbrians before him, some into the woods and hills, others into the city of Durham; for there have they always a sure refuge. Thither they drive their whole flocks and herds and carry their furniture, so that there is hardly room within the town for so great a crowd. Malcolm arrives and invests the city. It was not easy for one to go outside, and the sheep and cattle could not be driven to pasture: the churchyard was filled with them, and the church itself was scarcely kept clear of them. Mixed with the cattle, a crowd of women and children surrounded the church, so that the voices of the choristers were drowned by the clamour. The heat of summer adds to the miseries of famine. Every-where throughout the town were the sounds of grief, ‘et plurima mortis imago,’ as in the sack of Troy. The siege is raised by the miraculous intervention of St Cuthbert[46].
The wasting of Yorkshire by William and the five incursions of the Scots into Northumberland and Durham in the reign of Malcolm Canmore had the effect of reducing a large part of the soil of England to a comparatively unproductive state. The effacement of farms (and churches) in Hampshire, for the planting of the New Forest, had the same effect in a minor degree. The rigorous enforcement of the forest laws in the interests of the Norman nobles must have served also to remove one considerable source of the means of subsistence from the people. Whether these things, together with the general oppression of the poor, contributed much or little to what followed, it is the fact that the long period from the last two years of William to the welcomed advent of Henry II. to the throne in 1154, is filled with a record of famines, pestilences, and other national misfortunes such as no other period of English history shows.
The first general famine and pestilence under Norman rule was in the years 1086 and 1087, the last of the Conqueror’s reign. It is probable from the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the aggravation (for which we must always look in order to explain a historical famine and pestilence) was due to two bad harvests in succession. The year 1086 was “heavy, toilsome and sorrowful,” through failure of the corn and fruit crops owing to an inclement season, and through murrain of cattle[47]. Some form of sickness appears to have been prevalent between that harvest and the next. Almost every other man, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was stricken with fever, and that so sharply that many died of it. “Alas! how miserable and how rueful a time was then! when the wretched men lay driven almost to death, and afterwards came the sharp famine and destroyed them quite.” It is probably a careless gloss upon that, by a historian of the next generation[48], when he says that “a promiscuous fever destroyed more than half the people,” and that famine, coming after, destroyed those whom the fever had spared[49]. But there can be no question that this was one of those great periodic conjunctions of famine and fever (λιμὸν ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν), of which we shall find fuller details in the chronicles of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is easy to understand that England, with all her wealth of fruits and corn in a good season, had no reserve for the poor at least, and sometimes not even for the rich, to get through two or more bad seasons with. How much the corn crop in those days depended on the season is clear from the entry in the chronicle two years after (1089), that reaping was still in progress at Martinmas (11 November) and even later. Fields cultivated to yield an average of only four or six times the seed were, of course, more at the mercy of the seasons than the highly cultivated corn-land of our own time.
The next famine with pestilence in England, seven years later, or in the seventh year of William Rufus, introduces us to a new set of considerations. It was the time when the exactions of tribute for the king’s wars in Normandy, or for the satisfaction of his greed and that of his court, were severely felt both by the church and the people. England, says one[50], was suffocated and unable to breathe. Both clergy and laity, says another[51], were in such misery that they were weary of life. But the most remarkable phraseology is that of William of Malmesbury, the chief historian of the period, who seldom descends from the region of high political and ecclesiastical affairs to take notice of such things as famine and pestilence. In the 7th year of Rufus, he says, “agriculture failed” on account of the tributes which the king had decreed from his position in Normandy. The fields running to waste, a famine followed, and that in turn was succeeded by a mortality so general that the dying were left untended and the dead unburied[52]. The phrase about the lack of cultivation is a significant and not incredible statement, which places the England of Rufus in the same light as certain belated feudal parts of India within recent memory.
In the villages of Gujerat, when the festival comes round early in May, the chief of a village collects the cultivators and tells them that it is time for them to commence work. They say: “No! the assessment was too heavy last year, you lay too many taxes upon us.” However, after much higgling, and presents made to the more important men, a day is fixed for cultivation to begin, and the clearing and manuring of the fields proceeds as before[53]. But while Gujerat was still possessed by hundreds of petty feudal chiefs under the Mahratta rule, previous to the establishment of the British Agency in 1821, the exactions of tribute by the Baroda government were so extreme, and enforced by so violent means[54], that cultivation was almost neglected; the towns and villages swarmed with idlers, who subsisted upon milk and ghee from their cows, while indolence and inactivity affected the whole community[55]. A dreadful famine had “raged with destructive fury” over Gujerat and Kattiwar for more than one year about 1812-13-14, which was followed, not by a contagious fever, but by the true bubo-plague.