The next famine with pestilence in England, seven years later, or in the seventh year of William Rufus, introduces us to a new set of considerations. It was the time when the exactions of tribute for the king’s wars in Normandy, or for the satisfaction of his greed and that of his court, were severely felt both by the church and the people. England, says one[50], was suffocated and unable to breathe. Both clergy and laity, says another[51], were in such misery that they were weary of life. But the most remarkable phraseology is that of William of Malmesbury, the chief historian of the period, who seldom descends from the region of high political and ecclesiastical affairs to take notice of such things as famine and pestilence. In the 7th year of Rufus, he says, “agriculture failed” on account of the tributes which the king had decreed from his position in Normandy. The fields running to waste, a famine followed, and that in turn was succeeded by a mortality so general that the dying were left untended and the dead unburied[52]. The phrase about the lack of cultivation is a significant and not incredible statement, which places the England of Rufus in the same light as certain belated feudal parts of India within recent memory. In the villages of Gujerat, when the festival comes round early in May, the chief of a village collects the cultivators and tells them that it is time for them to commence work. They say: “No! the assessment was too heavy last year, you lay too many taxes upon us.” However, after much higgling, and presents made to the more important men, a day is fixed for cultivation to begin, and the clearing and manuring of the fields proceeds as before[53]. But while Gujerat was still possessed by hundreds of petty feudal chiefs under the Mahratta rule, previous to the establishment of the British Agency in 1821, the exactions of tribute by the Baroda government were so extreme, and enforced by so violent means[54], that cultivation was almost neglected; the towns and villages swarmed with idlers, who subsisted upon milk and ghee from their cows, while indolence and inactivity affected the whole community[55]. A dreadful famine had “raged with destructive fury” over Gujerat and Kattiwar for more than one year about 1812-13-14, which was followed, not by a contagious fever, but by the true bubo-plague.