In the year 1010 (or 1011 according to some), the Danes had stormed Canterbury, burnt the fair city, massacred the inhabitants, or carried them captive to their ships at Sandwich. The archbishop Elphege was put on board a small vessel and taken (doubtless by the inland channel which was then open from the Stour to the Thames) to Greenwich, where he was imprisoned for seven months[26]. A council had assembled in London for the purpose of raising forty thousand pounds to buy off the invaders. According to the account used by Higden[27], Elphege refused to sanction the payment of a ransom of three thousand pounds for his own person: he was accordingly taken from prison, and on the 13th of the Calends of May, 1010, was stoned to death by the Danes disappointed of his ransom. Therefore a pestilence fell upon the invaders, a _dolor viscerum_, which destroyed them by tens and twenties so that a large number perished. The earlier narrative of William of Malmesbury[28] is diversified by the introduction of a miracle, and is otherwise more circumstantial. While the archbishop was held in durance, a deadly sickness broke out among the Danes, affecting them in troops (_catervatim_), and proving so rapid in its effects that death ensued before they could feel pain. The stench of their unburied bodies so infected the air as to bring a plague upon those of them who had remained well. As the survivors were thrown into a panic, “sine numero, sine modo,” Elphege appeared upon the scene, and having administered to them the consecrated bread, restored them to health and put an end to the plague. Disregarding what is fabulous, we may take these narratives to establish the fact that a swift and fatal pestilence did break out among the Danes in Kent. It had consisted probably of the same forms of camp sickness, including dysentery (as the name _dolor viscerum_ implies), which have occurred in later times. It is the only instance of the kind recorded in the early history. Medieval Famine-pestilences. The foregoing are all the instances of pestilence in early English history, unconnected with famine, that have been collected in a search through the most likely sources. The history of English epidemics, previous to the Black Death, is almost wholly a history of famine sicknesses; and the list of such famines with attendant sickness, without mentioning the years of mere scarcity, is a considerable one. TABLE OF FAMINE-PESTILENCES IN ENGLAND. Year Character Authority 679 Three years’ famine in Sussex Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ § 290 from droughts 793 General famine and severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, _sub mortality anno_. Roger of Howden. Simeon of Durham