We have only to recall the minute subdivisions of the common field, or fields, of the parish into half-acre strips separated by balks of turf, and the fact that no two half-acres of the same cultivator lay together, to realize how nice must have been the discrimination[84].

But the moral of the story is obvious. It is an appeal to the teaching and the sanction of the Gospels, against the rooted belief of the natural man that he owes what he has to his own industry and thrift, and that it is no business of his to part with his goods for the sustenance of a helpless and improvident class.

The spirit of avarice, according to Wendover, permeated all classes at this period, from high ecclesiastics downwards. Walter, archbishop of York, had his granaries full of corn during the scarcity, some of it five years old. When the peasants on his manors asked to be supplied from these stores in the summer of 1234, the archbishop instructed his bailiffs to give out the old corn on condition of getting new for it when the harvest was over. It need not be told at length how the archbishop’s barns at Ripon were found on examination to be infested with vermin, how the corn had turned mouldy and rotten, and how the whole of it had to be destroyed by fire[85]. Of the same import are the raids upon the barns of the alien or Italian clergy in 1228, in the diocese of Winchester and elsewhere, and the ostentatious distribution by the raiders of doles to the poor[86].

The somewhat parallel course of public morality in the centres of trade, or, as Wendover would call it, the prevalence of avarice, demands a brief notice for our purpose.

In every state of society, there will of course be rich and poor. But a class of pauperes seems to emerge more distinctly in the life of England from about the beginning of the thirteenth century. The period corresponds to the appearance on the scene of St Francis and his friars. Doubtless St Francis was inspired by a true sense of what the time needed, even if it be open to contend that his ministrations of charity brought out, consolidated, and kept alive a helpless class who would have been less heard of if they had been left to the tender mercies of economic principles. The mission of the friars was not merely to the poor; it was also to the rich, whether of the church or of the world, “to soften the hardness of their hearts by the oil of preaching[87].” It was one of these interpositions, ever needed and never wanting, to reduce the inequalities of the human lot, not by preaching down-right theoretical communism, but, more by force of rhetoric than of logic, to extort from the strong some concessions to the weak, to mitigate the severity of the struggle for existence, and to bring the respectable vices of greed and sharp practice to the bar of conscience.

As early as 1196 there is the significant incident, in the city of London, of the rising of the poorer class and the middling class, headed by Fitzosbert Longbeard, himself one of the privileged citizens, against an assessment in which the class represented by the mayor and aldermen were alleged to have been very tender of their own interests[88]. Longbeard was hailed as “the friend of the poor,” and, having lost his life in their cause (whether in the street before Bow Church, or on a gallows at Tyburn, or at the Smithfield elms, the narratives are not agreed), he is celebrated by the sympathetic Matthew Paris as “the martyr of the poor[89].” That historian continues, after the manner of his predecessor Wendover, to speak of Londoners as on the one hand the “mediocres, populares et plebei,” and on the other hand the “divites.” In 1258 the latter class overreached themselves: they were caught in actual vulgar peculation of money raised by assessment for repairing the city walls; some of them were thrown into prison and only escaped death through the royal clemency at the instance of the notorious pluralist John Mansel, and on making restitution of their plunder; but one of them, the mayor, never recovered the blow to his respectability, and died soon after of grief[90]. Whether it meant a wide-spread spirit of petty fraud, or some unadjusted change in value, the young king in 1228, during a journey from York to London, took occasion along his route to destroy the “false measures” of corn, ale and wine, to substitute more ample measures, and to increase the weight of the loaf.

The scarcity or famine of 1234, to which the Abbotsley incident belongs, was accompanied, says the St Albans annalist, by a mortality which raged cruelly everywhere. On the other hand the annalist of Tewkesbury may be credited when he says that, although the year was one of scarcity, corn being at eight shillings, yet “by the grace of God the poor were better sustained than in other years[91].”

There was an epidemic in 1247, but it is not clear whether it was due to famine. Although Higden, quoting from some unknown record, says that there was dearth in England in that year, wheat being at twelve shillings the quarter, yet he does not mention sickness at all; and Matthew Paris, who was then living, is explicit that the harvest of 1247 was an abundant one, and that the mortality did not begin until September of that year. There does appear, however, to have been a sharp famine in Wales; and it is recorded that the bishop of Norwich, “about the year 1245,” in a time of great dearth, sold all his plate and distributed it to the poor[92]. All that we know of this epidemic is the statement of Matthew Paris, that it began in September and lasted for three months; and that as many as nine or ten bodies were buried in one day in the single churchyard of St Peter’s at Saint Albans[93].

Matthew Paris notes the quality of the harvest and the prices of grain every year, and his successor Rishanger continues the practice. The prices noted appear, from comparison with those tabulated by Thorold Rogers from actual accounts, to have been the lowest market rates of the year. The harvest of 1248 was plentiful, and wheat sold at two shillings and sixpence a quarter. In 1249 and 1250 it was at two shillings, oats being at one shilling. But those years of exceptional abundance were followed at no long interval by a series of years of scarcity or famine, which brought pestilential sickness of the severest kind.

The scarcity or famine in the years 1256-59 was all the more acutely felt owing to the dearth of money in the country. The burden of the history of Matthew Paris before he comes to the famine is that England had been emptied of treasure by the exactions of king and pope. Henry III. was under some not quite intelligible obligation of money to his brother, the earl of Cornwall. The English earl was a candidate for the Imperial crown, and had got so far towards the dignity of emperor as to have been made king of the Germans. It was English money that went to pay his German troops, and to further his cause with the electoral princes; but the circulating coin of England does not appear to have sufficed for these and domestic purposes also. The harvest of 1256 had been spoiled by wet, and the weather of the spring of 1257 was wretched in the extreme. All England was in a state of marsh and mud, and the roads were impassable. Many sowed their fields over again; but the autumn proved as wet as the rest of the year. “Whatever had been sown in winter, whatever had germinated in spring, whatever the summer had brought forward—all was drowned in the floods of autumn.” The want of coins in circulation caused unheard-of poverty. At the end of the year the fields lay untilled, and a multitude of people were dead of famine. At Christmas wheat rose to ten shillings a quarter. But the year 1257 appears to have had “lethal fevers” before the loss of the harvest of that year could be felt. Not to mention other places, says the St Albans historian, there was at St Edmundsbury in the dog-days so great a mortality that more than two thousand bodies were buried in its spacious cemetery[94].

The full effects of the famine were not felt until the spring of 1258. So great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want of money that fifteen thousand[95] are said to have died of famine, and of a grievous and wide-spread pestilence that broke out about the feast of the Trinity (19 May).

The earl of Cornwall (and king of Germany) who had relieved the country of a great part of its circulating coin, took the opportunity to buy up corn in Germany and Holland for the supply of the London market. Fifty great ships, says Matthew Paris, arrived in the Thames laden with wheat, barley, and other grain. Not three English counties had produced as much as was imported. The corn was for such as could buy it; but the king interposed with an edict that, whereas greed was to be discouraged, no one was to buy the foreign corn in order to store it up and trade in it. Those who had no money, we are expressly told, died of hunger, even after the arrival of the ships; and even men of good position went about with faces pinched by hunger, and passed sleepless nights sighing for bread. No one had seen such famine and misery, although many would have remembered corn at higher prices. The price quoted about this stage of the narrative, although not with special reference to the foreign wheat, is nine shillings the quarter. Elsewhere the price is said to have mounted up to fifteen shillings, which may have been the rate before the foreign supply came in. But such was the scarceness of money, we are told, that if the price of the quarter of wheat had been less, there would hardly have been found anyone to buy it. Even those who were wont to succour the miserable were now reduced to perish along with them. It is difficult to believe that the historian has not given way to the temptations of rhetoric, and it is pleasing to be able to give the following complement to his picture. After some 15,000 had died in London, mostly of the poorer sort, one might hear a crier making proclamation to the starving multitude to go to a distribution of bread by this or that nobleman, at such and such a place, mentioning the name of the benefactor and the place of dole.

In other passages, which may be taken as picturing the state of matters in the country, the historian says that the bodies of the starved were found swollen and livid, lying five or six together in pig-sties, or on dungheaps, or in the mud of farmyards. The dying were refused shelter and succour for fear of contagion, and scarcely anyone would go near the dead to bury them. Where many corpses were found together, they were buried in capacious trenches in the churchyards.

We come now to the harvest of 1258. After a bleak and late spring the crops had come forward well under excessive heat in summer, and the harvest was an unusually abundant, although a late one. Rains set in before the corn could be cut, and at the feast of All Saints (1 November) the heavy crops had rotted until the fields were like so many dungheaps. Only in some places was any attempt made to carry the harvest home, and then it was so spoiled as to be hardly worth the trouble. Even the mouldy grain sold as high as sixteen shillings a quarter. The famishing people resorted to various shifts, selling their cattle and reducing their households. How the country got through the winter, we are not told. Matthew Paris himself died early in 1259, and the annalist who added a few pages to the Chronica Majora after his death, merely mentions that the corn, the oil and the wine turned corrupt, and that as the sun entered Cancer a pestilence and mortality of men began unexpectedly, in which many died. Among others Fulk, the bishop of London, died of pestilence in the spring of 1259; and, to say nothing of many other places, at Paris —— thousand (the number is left blank) were buried.

The vagueness of the last statement reminds us that we are now deprived of the comparatively safe guidance of Matthew Paris. His successor in the office of annalist at St Albans, Rishanger, is much less trustworthy. He sums up the year 1259 in a paragraph which repeats exactly the facts of the notorious year 1258, and probably applies to that alone; for the year 1260 his summary is that it was more severe, more cruel and more terrible to all living things than the year before, the pestilence and famine being intolerable. There is, however, no confirmation of that in the authentic prices of the year collected by Thorold Rogers. Parcels of wheat of the harvest of 1259 were sold at about five and six shillings, and of the harvest of 1260 at from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings. For a number of years, corresponding to the Barons’ war and the war in Wales, the price is moderate or low, the figures of extant bailiffs’ accounts agreeing on the whole with Rishanger’s summary statements about the respective harvests[96]. The years from 1271 to 1273 were dear years, and for the first of the series we find a doubtful record by the Yorkshire continuator of William of Newburgh that there was “a great famine and pestilence in England and Ireland[97].” The harvest of 1288 was so abundant that the price of wheat in the bailiffs’ accounts is mostly about two shillings, ranging from sixteen pence to four and eightpence. Rishanger’s prices for the year are sufficiently near the mark: in some places wheat sold at twenty pence the quarter, in others at sixteen pence, and in others at twelve pence. From that extremely low point, a rise begins which culminates in 1294. The chronicler’s statement for 1289, that in London the bushel of wheat rose from threepence to two shillings, is not borne out by the bailiffs’ accounts, which show a range of from two shillings and eightpence to six shillings the quarter. But these accounts confirm the statement that the years following were dear years, and that 1294 was a year of famine prices, wheat having touched fourteen shillings at Cambridge, in July. Rishanger’s two notes are that the poor perished of hunger, and that the poor died of hunger on all sides, afflicted with a looseness (lienteria)[98]. The two years following are also given as hard for the poor, but not as years of famine or sickness; the country was at the same time heavily taxed for the expenses of the war which Edward I. was waging against the Scots. Ordinary prosperity attends the cultivators of the soil until the end of Rishanger’s chronicle in 1305; and from the beginning of Trokelowe’s in 1307, the year of Edward II.’s accession, there is nothing for our purpose until we come to the great famine of 1315[99].

It is clear, however, that prices were high in every year from 1309 until that famine, with the single exception of the harvest of 1311. At the meeting of Parliament in London before Easter in 1315, the dearth was a subject of deliberation, and a King’s writ was issued attempting to fix the prices at which fat oxen, cows, sheep, pigs, geese, fowls, capons, chickens, pigeons and eggs should be sold on demand, subject to confiscation if the sale were refused. The statute was ineffective (it was repealed the year after), and provisions became dearer than ever. The quarter of wheat, beans and peas sold for twenty shillings, of oats for ten shillings, and of salt for thirty-five. When the king stopped at St Albans at the feast of St Lawrence, says Trokelowe, it was hardly possible to buy bread for the use of his household. The scarcity was most felt from the month of May until the harvest. With the new crop, ruined as it was by rains and floods, the scarcity lessened somewhat, but not before many had felt the pinch of hunger, and others were seen (as the St Albans annalist says he saw them) lying squalid and dead in the villages and by the road-sides. At Midsummer, 1316, wheat rose to thirty shillings, and after that as high as forty shillings (the highest price found by Thorold Rogers is twenty-six shillings and eightpence at Leatherhead in July). The various forms of famine-sickness are mentioned:—dysentery from corrupt food, affecting nearly everyone, an acute fever which killed many, or a putrid sore throat (pestis gutturuosa). To show the extremities to which England was reduced, Trokelowe specially inserts the following: Ordinary flesh was not to be had, but horse-flesh was eaten, fat dogs were stolen to eat, and it was rumoured abroad that in many places both men and women secretly ate the flesh of their own children, or of the children of others. But the detail which Trokelowe justly thinks posterity will be most horrified to read, is that prisoners in gaols set upon the thieves newly brought in and devoured them alive.

It is probably the same famine and pestilence that we find worked into the metrical romance of Robert of Brunne (1338), under the guise of the plague ‘in Cadwaladre’s time,’ that is, the pestilence recorded by Beda for the year 664. The Lincolnshire romancist must have seen the famine and pestilence of 1315-16, for he was then in the prime of life, and probably he transferred his own experiences of famine and pestilence to the remote episode of the seventh century, to which he devotes thirty-eight lines of his romance. In Cadwaladre’s time the corn fails and there is great hunger. A man may go for three days before he can buy any food in burgh, or in city, or in upland; he may indeed catch wild creatures, or fishes, or gather leaves and roots. Worse still, a plague comes, from rotten air and wicked winds, so that hale men fall down suddenly and die; gentle and bondmen all go, hardly any are left to till the land, the living cannot bury the dead, those who try fall dead in the grave. Men leave house and land, and few are left in the country. Eleven years does Britain lie waste with but few folk to till the land[100].

After the famine of 1315-16, the third and last of the great and, one may say, disgraceful famines which gave rise to the by-word “Anglorum fames,” prices continued at their ordinary level for several years. But from 1320 to 1323 they again came to a height. To that period probably belongs a mortality which is entered, in a chronicle of the next century[101], under the year 1325. On the contemporary authority of Higden we know that, in 1322, the king went to Scotland about the feast of St Peter ad Vincula, “and though he met not with resistance, lost many of his own by famine and disease.” After that period of scarcity comes a long succession of cheap years, covering the interval to the next great event in the annals of pestilence that concerns us, the arrival of the Black Death in the autumn of 1348. With that great event the history of English epidemics enters upon a new chapter. There were, of course, years of dearth and scarcity in the centuries following, but there were no great famine-pestilences like those of 1196, 1258 and 1315.

The period of the great famines ought not to be left without another reference to the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, and the keenness of traders which led them sometimes to incur the restraints of government and the punishments of justice.

On 26 March, 1269, was issued one of those ordinances against forestalling, of which many more followed for several centuries: no citizen to go outside the city of London, either by road or river, to meet victuals coming to market. In the 7th year of Edward I., clipping or debasing the coinage was carried on so systematically that nearly three hundred persons, mostly of the Hebrew race, were drawn and hanged for it. In the 11th year of Edward I. (1283) a statute had been directed against cheating by bakers and millers. Meanwhile the nobility retaliated by plundering the traders and merchants at Boston fair, and the king settled the account with these marauding nobles by hanging them. A statute of 1316, the second year of the famine, to fix the price of ale, has an interest on account of its motive—“ne frumentum ulterius per potum consumeretur.” The proportion of the corn of the country turned into malt, or the amount diverted from bread to beer, may be guessed from the fact that in London, for which the beer ordinance was first made, there were in 1309, brewhouses to the number of 1334, and taverns to the number of 354[102]. In the very year of great famine, 1316, an ordinance was issued (in French, dated from King’s Langley) against extravagant housekeeping[103]. In the year of great scarcity and mortality, 1322, there was such a crowd for a funeral dole at Blackfriars (for the soul of Henry Fingret) that fifty-five persons, children and adults, were crushed to death in the scramble[104]. At the same time the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, was sitting down to dinners of seventeen dishes, the cellarer had thirty-eight servants under him, the chamberlain and sacrist had large numbers of people employed as tailors, furriers, launderers and the like, and the servants and equipages of the one hundred and forty brethren were numerous and splendid[105]. The monasteries, on which the relief of the poor mostly depended, have been thus characterized:

There is little to be said, at this period, of the profession most directly concerned with sickness, epidemic or other, namely the medical. We become aware of its existence on rare occasions: as in the account of the death of William the Conqueror at Rouen on 9 September, 1087, of the illness and death of Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, on 13 July, 1205, at one of his manors on a journey to Rochester[107], or in the reference by William of Newburgh, to the noted Jewish physician of King’s Lynn, whose honourable repute among the citizens for skill and modesty did not save him from the murderous fanaticism against his race in 1190[108], or in occasional letters of the time[109]. There were doubtless benevolent men among the practitioners of medicine, then as now; but the profession has never been one in which individuals could rise conspicuously above the level of their age, and the moral standard of those centuries was a poor one. It is not surprising, then, that John of Salisbury, indulging a taste for epigram, should have characterized the profession of medicine in the twelfth century as follows: “They have only two maxims which they never violate, ‘Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich’[110].”

The one English physician whose writings have come down to us from the period that we are still engaged with, is John of Gaddesden. There is every reason to think that he was practising at the time of the famine and pestilence of 1315-16; but it is not from his bulky treatise on medicine that we learn the nosological types of the epidemic maladies of those years. Some account of his Rosa Anglica will be found in the chapter on Smallpox; it must suffice to say here that he was a verbalist compiler from other books, themselves not altogether original, and that, according to Dr Freind, he displays no great knowledge of his profession.

It is nothing strange, therefore, that Gaddesden throws no light upon the famine-pestilences of England, such as those of 1315-16, which he lived through. Dysentery and lientery, he treats of almost in the very words of Gilbertus Anglicus; but those maladies might have been among the dwellers in another planet, so far as native experience comes in. He reproduces whole chapters from his predecessors, on synochus and synocha, without a hint that England ever witnessed such scenes of hunger-typhus as the St Albans chroniclers have recorded for us from their own observation. The reference by Trokelowe to the prevalence of pestis gutturuosa in 1316, is one that a medical writer of the time might well have amplified; but Gaddesden missed the opportunity of perhaps anticipating Fothergill’s description of putrid sore-throat by more than four hundred years.

Epidemics of St Anthony’s Fire, or Ergotism.

One form of epidemic malady, intimately connected with bad harvests and a poor state of agriculture, namely Ergotism, from the mixture of poisoned grains in the rye or other corn, is conspicuously missed from English records of the medieval period, although it plays a great part in the history of French epidemics of the Middle Ages, under such names as ignis sacer, ignis S. Antonii, or ignis infernalis. According to the proverbial saying already quoted, France was as notorious for ignis as England for famine, and Normandy for lepra: “Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra[111].” The malady was of a nature to attract notice and excite pity; it is entered by chroniclers, and is a frequent topic in French legends of the Saints. Its occurrence in epidemic form can be traced in France, with a degree of probability, as far back as 857 (perhaps to 590); six great outbreaks are recorded in the tenth century, seven in the eleventh, ten in the twelfth, and three in the thirteenth, the medieval series ending with one in the year 1373. The estimates of mortality in the several epidemics of ergotism over a larger or smaller area of France, range as high as 40,000, and 14,000, which numbers may be taken to be the roughest of guesses; but in later times upwards of 500 deaths from ergotism have been accurately counted in a single outbreak within a limited district. The epidemics have been observed in particular seasons, sometimes twenty years or more elapsing without the disease being seen; they have occurred also in particular provinces—in the basin of the Loire, in Lorraine, and, since the close of the medieval period, especially in the Sologne. The disease has usually been traced to a spoiled rye crop; but there is undoubted evidence from the more recent period that a poison with corresponding effects can be produced in some other cereals, even in wheat itself.

In a field of rye, especially after a wet sowing or a wet season of growth, a certain proportion of the heads bear long brown or purple corns, one or more upon a head, projecting in the shape of a cock’s spur, whence the French name of ergot. The spur appears to be, and probably is, an overgrown grain of rye; it is grooved like a rye-corn, occupies the place of the corn between the two chaff-coverings, and contains an abundant whitish meal. Microscopic research has detected in or upon the spurred rye the filaments of a minute parasitic mould; so that it is to the invasion by a parasite that we may trace the enormous overgrowth of one or more grains on an ear, and it is probably to the ferment-action of the fungus that we should ascribe the poisonous properties of the meal. The proportion of all the stalks in a field so affected will vary considerably, as well as the proportion of grains on each affected head of corn[112]. Rye affected with ergot is apt to be a poor crop at any rate; one or more spurred corns on a head tend to keep the rest of the grains small or unfilled; and if there be many stalks in the field so affected, the spurred grain will bulk considerably in the whole yield. When the diseased grains are ground to meal along with the healthy grains, the meal and the bread will contain an appreciable quantity of the poison of ergot; and if rye-bread were the staple food, there would be a great risk, after an unusually bad harvest, of an outbreak of the remarkable constitutional effects of ergotism. Rye-bread with much ergot in it may be rather blacker than usual; but it is said to have no peculiar taste.

It is almost exclusively among the peasantry that symptoms of ergotism have been seen, and among children particularly. The attack usually began with intense pains in the legs or feet, causing the victims to writhe and scream. A fire seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, and, at a later stage, even in the bowels, the surface of the body being all the while cold as ice. Sometimes the skin of affected limbs became livid or black; now and then large blebs or blisters arose upon it, as in bad kinds of erysipelas. Gangrene or sloughing of the extremities followed; a foot or a hand fell off, or the flesh of a whole limb was destroyed down to the bones, by a process which began in the deeper textures. The spontaneous separation of a gangrenous hand or foot was on the whole a good sign for the recovery of the patient. Such was the ignis sacer, or ignis S. Antonii which figures prominently, I am told, in the French legends of the Saints, and of which epidemics are recorded in the French medieval chronicles. Corresponding effects of ergotism may or may not have occurred during the medieval period in other countries of Europe where rye was grown.

The remarkable thing is, that when we do begin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to obtain evidence of agrarian epidemics in Germany, Sweden and Russia, which have eventually come to be identified, in the light of more recent knowledge, with ergotism, the type of the disease is different, not perhaps fundamentally or in the ultimate pathological analysis, but at all events different as being a functional disorder of the nervous system, instead of a disorder, on nervous lines, affecting the nutrition of parts and their structural integrity. This newer form, distinctive of Germany and north-eastern Europe, was known by the name of Kriebelkrankheit, from the creeping or itching sensations in the limbs at the beginning of it; these heightened sensibilities often amounted to acute pain, as in the beginning of the gangrenous form also; but the affection of the sensory nerves, instead of leading to a breakdown in the nutrition of the parts and to gangrene, was followed by disorder of the motor nerves,—by spasms of the hands and arms, feet and legs, very often passing into contractures of the joints which no force could unbend, and in some cases passing into periodic convulsive fits of the whole body like epilepsy, whence the name of convulsive ergotism[113].

Side by side with these German, Swedish and Russian outbreaks of convulsive ergotism, or Kriebelkrankheit (called by Linnaeus in Sweden by the Latin name raphania), there had been a renewal or continuance of the medieval epidemics in France, notably in the Sologne; but the French ergotism has retained its old type of ignis or gangrene. It was not until the eighteenth century that the learned world became clear as to the connexion between either of those forms of disease among the peasantry and a damaged rye-crop, although the country people themselves, and the observant medical practitioners of the affected districts, had put this and that together long before. Thus, as late as 1672-75, there were communications made to the Paris Academy of Medicine[114] by observers in the Sologne and especially around Montargis, in which ergot of rye is clearly described, as well as the associated symptoms of gangrenous disease in the peasantry; but the connexion between the two was still regarded as open to doubt, and as a question that could only be settled by experiment; while there is not a hint given that these modern outbreaks were of the same nature as the notorious medieval ignis sacer. According to Häser, it was not until the French essay of Read (Strasbourg, 1771) that the identity of the old ignis with the modern gangrenous ergotism was pointed out.

The result of the modern study of outbreaks of ergotism, including the minute record of individual cases, has been to show that there is no hard and fast line between the gangrenous and convulsive forms, that the French epidemics, although on the whole marked by the phenomena of gangrene, have not been wanting in functional nervous symptoms, and that the German or northern outbreaks have often been of a mixed type. Thus, in the French accounts of 1676, “malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” are mentioned along with “the gangrene in the arms but mostly in the legs, which ordinarily are corrupted first.”

Again, the observations of Th. O. Heusinger[115] on an outbreak near Marburg in 1855-56, led him decidedly to conclude for the essential sameness of ignis and Kriebelkrankheit, and for the existence of a middle type, although undoubtedly the sensory and motor disorders, including hyperaesthesia, pain and anaesthesia on the one hand, and contractures of the joints, choreic movements and convulsions on the other, were more distinctive of the epidemics of ergotism on German or northern European soil.

Thus far the foreign experience of ergotism, both medieval and modern, and of its several types. We shall now be in a position to examine the English records for indications of the same effects of damaged grain.

In the English medieval chronicles an occasional reference may be found to ignis or wild fire. The reference to wild fire in Derbyshire in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1049, probably means some meteorological phenomenon, elsewhere called ignis sylvaticus: “Eac þ wilde fyr on Deorbyscire micel yfel dyde[116].” Whatever the ignis sylvaticus or ignis aereus was, which destroyed houses as well as crops, there appears to be no warrant for the conclusion of C. F. Heusinger that it was the same as the ignis sacer of the French peasantry[117]. An undoubted reference to ignis infernalis as a human malady occurs in the Topography of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis: a certain archer who had ravished a woman at St Fechin’s mill at Fore was overtaken by swift vengeance, “igne infernali in membro percussus, usque in ipsum corpus statim exarsit, et nocte eadem exspiravit.” Taking the incident as legendary, and the diagnosis as valueless, we may still conclude that the name, at least, of ignis infernalis was familiar to English writers. But in all the accounts of English famines and wide-spread sicknesses in the medieval period which have been extracted from the nearest contemporary authorities, I have found no mention of any disease that might correspond to ergotism[118].

The first undoubted instance of ergotism in England belongs to the eighteenth century. On or about the 10th of January, 1762, a peasant’s family (father, mother, and six children) of Wattisham in Suffolk, were attacked almost simultaneously with the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, several of them eventually losing portions of their limbs. The disease began with intense pain in the legs, and contractures of the hands and feet. It was proved that they had not been using rye flour; but their bread for a short time before had been made exclusively from damaged wheat, grown in the neighbourhood and kept apart from the farmer’s good corn so as not to spoil his sample. It had been sent to the mill just before Christmas, and had been used by some others besides the family who developed the symptoms of ergotism[119].

In that authentic instance of ergotism (although not from rye), there was one symptom, the contractures of the hands and feet, which is distinctive of the convulsive form; so that the English type may be said to have been a mixture of the French form and of the form special to the north-eastern countries of Europe. With that instance as a type, let us now inquire whether any epidemics in England at earlier periods may not be brought under the head of ergotism. It is to be kept in mind that none of the medieval outbreaks were called by their present name, or traced to their true source, until centuries after; so that our task is, not to search the records for the name of ergotism, but to scrutinize any anomalous outbreak of disease, or any outbreak distinguished in the chronicles by some unusual mark, with a view to discovering whether it suits the hypothesis of ergotism. I shall have to speak of three such outbreaks in the fourteenth century, and of one in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702[120].

The first of these is given by Knighton for a period and a locality that may have been within his own cognizance. In the summer of 1340 there happened in England generally, but especially in the county of Leicester, a certain deplorable and enormous infirmity. It was marked by paroxysms or fits, attended by intolerable suffering; while the fit lasted, the victims emitted a noise like the barking of dogs. A “great pestilence,” or perhaps a great mortality, is said to have ensued[121]. In that record the salient points are, firstly the wide or epidemic incidence of the malady, at all events in Leicestershire, which was Knighton’s own county; secondly the paroxysmal nature of the attacks, and the strange noises emitted therewith; thirdly the intolerable suffering (poena) that attended each fit (passio). Except for the clear indication of pain, one might think of the strange hysterical outbreaks, extending, by a kind of psychical contagion, to whole communities, which were observed about the same period in some parts of the continent of Europe. But of these medieval psychopathies, as they are called, there is hardly any trace in England. The Flagellants came over from Zealand to London in 1349, and gave exhibitions at St Paul’s, but that pseudo-religious mania does not appear to have taken hold among the English. The epidemic recorded by Knighton had probably a more material cause. To illustrate the somewhat meagre reference by Knighton to the strange epidemic of 1340, I shall proceed at once to the remarkable outbreak in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702, which was clearly not a psychopathy or hysterical outbreak, and yet had a seemingly hysterical element in it. An account of it was sent to the Royal Society by Dr Charles Leigh “of Lancashire[122].”

This epidemic of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire was recorded as something unusual. It had certain intestinal symptoms such as colic, which may well have followed the use of poisoned food and are indeed described among the symptoms of ergotism; there were also convulsions, large purple spots with blisters coming and going on the skin near them, and, in the single case that is given with details, there were contractures of the legs “so that no person could reduce them to their natural position,” and a continuance for several days of painful epileptiform fits attended with noises like the barking of a dog, or the hissing of a goose, “all which different sounds (I take it) proceed from the different contractions of the lungs variously forcing out the air.” The remarkable case of the boy, certified by several witnesses, is expressly given as one belonging to the general epidemic of the locality, others having been affected “much after the same manner.” Whatever suggestion there may be of ergotism in these particulars, nothing is said of gangrene of the limbs, although the livid spots and blisters are part of the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, just as the convulsions and contractures are of convulsive ergotism. In the Suffolk cases of 1762 there were both contractures of the limbs and gangrene.

Knighton’s mention of the barking noises emitted by the sufferers of 1340 has suggested to Nichols, the author of the History of Leicestershire[123], a comparison of them with the cases investigated by Dr Freind in the year 1700, at the village of Blackthorn in Oxfordshire. Having heard a great rumour in the summer of that year that certain girls at that Oxfordshire village were taken with frequent barkings like dogs, Dr Freind made a journey to the place to investigate the cases[124].