H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 197 
backward, but on examination it was clearly seen that these features were 
not due to innate characters but to truancy and lack of discipline during 
the absence of their fathers. 
Famine took its toll in Western Europe in the medieval period, but 
England was the country in which the mass of the people soonest attained 
to fairly constant comfort. A poem, attributed to Henry of Huntingdon, 
contains the stanza: 
“Anglia terra ferax et fertilis angulus orbis 
Externas gentes consumptis rebus egentes 
Quando fames laedit, recreat et reficit.’ 16 17 
This was a great contrast to France, which repeatedly suffered from long 
years of famine, but England certainly had occasional periods of scarcity 
at long intervals. Creighton,® it is true, draws attention to a medieval 
saying ‘ Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, 
Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra’; probably, however, the English 
were so used to good feeding that they indulged in the national habit of 
grumbling over a scarcity that elsewhere would have been taken as a 
matter of course. The ‘ Vision of Piers Ploughman ’ 1 seems to bear this 
out: 
‘ And tho wolde wastour nouzt werche, but wandren aboute 
Ne no begger ete bred that benes Inne were, 
But of coket or clerematyn or eles of clene whete : 
Ne none halpeny ale in none wise drinke, 
But of the best and the brounest that in burghe is to selle.’ 
_ While Harrison in his ‘ Description of Britain ’*° quotes a Spaniard in 
Queen Mary’s day as saying ‘ These English have their houses made of 
sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly as well as the king.’ In modern 
times the only state of affairs which could be compared with events in the 
medizval period is the Irish potato famine, in which actual starvation was 
accompanied, as of old, by outbreaks of fever and an abandonment of effort 
from sheer despair. In general any morbid influences on nutrition arose 
rather from a seasonal scarcity of certain essential articles of diet than from 
famine in the ordinary acceptation of the term. 
Disease, throughout the historic period, must have been the most 
lethal of all the morbid agencies. There is nothing to suggest that there 
are important diseases to-day from which our ancestors were free, with the 
possible exception of syphilis, which is first recorded at the very end of the 
medieval period. Anglo-Saxon leechdoms reveal that there were then, as 
now, cancer and consumption, gout and stone, the falling sickness and 
St. Vitus’ dance, fevers, catarrhs and rheums. Even congenital defects were 
_ noted, Giraldus Cambrensis ** in his ‘ Topographia Hiberniae’ referring 
to the many individuals who were born blind, lame, maimed or having some 
16 De praerogativis Angliac. Quoted by Higden, Polychronicon, Rolls ed., ii., 18. 
17 Creighton, l.c., vol. i., p. 8. 
18 Jc. vol. i., p. 52, with reference to Fuchs Das heilige Feuer im Mittelalter 
Hecker’s Annalen, vol. 28, p.1. This latter cites Alberici Chronic., Bouquet, xii., 690. 
19 William Langland, Piers the Plowman, passus vi.,1. 304-308. Skeat’s ed., p. 77. 
#0 William Harrison, Elizabethan England, the Scott Library edition, p. 114. 
*l Rolls ed., vol. v., p. 21. 
