For the next seven centuries, the pestilences of Britain are mainly the results of famine and are therefore of indigenous origin. So strongly is the type of famine-pestilence impressed upon the epidemic history of medieval England that the chroniclers and romancists are unable to dissociate famine from their ideas of pestilence in general. Thus Higden, in his reference to the outbreak of the Justinian plague at Constantinople, associates it with famine alone[16]; and the metrical romancist, Robert of Brunne, who had the great English famine of 1315-16 fresh in his memory, describes circumstantially the plague of 664 or the plague of Cadwallader’s time, as a famine-pestilence, his details being taken in part from the account given by Simeon of Durham of the harrying of Yorkshire by William the Conqueror, and in part, doubtless, from his own recent experience of a great English famine[17]. But before we come to these typical famine-pestilences of Britain, which fill the medieval interval between the foreign invasion of plague in Beda’s time and the foreign invasion of 1348, it remains to dispose in this place of those outbreaks on English soil which do not bear the marks of famine-sickness, but, on the other hand, the marks of a virulent infection arising at particular spots probably from a tainted soil. These have to be collected from casual notices in the most unlikely corners of monastic chronicles; but it is just the casual nature of the references that makes them credible, and leads one to suppose that the recorded instances are only samples of epidemics not altogether rare in the medieval life of England. Early Epidemics not connected with Famine. The earliest of these is mentioned in the annals of the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. In the year 829, all the monks save five are said to have died of pestilence, so that the monastery was left almost desolate. The archbishop Ceolnoth, who was also the abbot of the monastery, filled up the vacancies with secular clerks, and he is said to have done so with the consent of the five monks “that did outlive the plague.” The incident comes into the Canterbury MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[18] under the year 870, in connexion with the death of Ceolnoth and the action of his successor in expelling the seculars and completing the original number of regulars. So far as the records inform us, that great mortality within the priory of Christ Church two centuries after it was founded by Augustine, was an isolated event; the nearest general epidemic to it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a great mortality of man and beast about the year 897 following the Danish invasion which Alfred at length repelled.