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.