Among the penances of Henry II. after the murder of Becket, there is recorded his charity in feeding during a dearth ten thousand persons daily from the first of April, 1171, until the harvest[64]. But, apart from a reference to a flux among the troops in Ireland in 1172, from errors of diet[65], the long reign of Henry II. is marked by only one record of general pestilence. It is recorded by the best contemporary writer, Benedict of Peterborough, and it is the first instance in which the number of burials in a day (perhaps at Peterborough) is given. In the year 1175, he says, there was in England and the adjacent regions a pestilential mortality of men, such that on many days seven or eight corpses were carried out to be buried. And immediately upon that pestilential mortality there followed a dire famine[66]. It is to be observed that the famine is explicitly stated to have come after the pestilence, just as in the great mortality of 1087; and, as in the latter case, it may be that a hard winter, with scarcity of food, brought a general sickness, and that the scarcity had been raised to famine point by a second bad harvest. The entry in the chronicle of Melrose for 1173 may refer to Scotland only: a bad kind of cough, unheard of before, affected almost everyone far and wide, whereof, “or from which pest,” many died. This is perhaps the only special reference to “tussis” as epidemic until the influenzas of the seventeenth century. The comparative freedom of the long reign of Henry II. from famines and national distress probably arose as much from good government as from the clemency of the seasons. The country was growing rich by foreign trade. In 1190 the two leading Jews of York, Joyce and Benedict, were occupying residences in the heart of the town like royal palaces in size and in the sumptuousness of their furniture. The same historian, William of Newburgh, who records the king’s protection of these envied capitalists, mentions also his protection of “the poor, the widows and the orphans,” and his liberal charities. That the king’s protection of his poorer subjects was not unneeded, would be obvious if we could trust the extraordinary account of the keen traders of London which is put by Richard of Devizes into the mouth of a hostile witness[67]. The peoples of all nations, it appears, flocked to London, each nationality contributing to the morals of the capital its proper vices and manners. There was no righteous person in London, no, not one; there were more thieves in London than in all France[68]. In the entirely different account, of the same date, by an enthusiastic Londoner, the monk Fitz-Stephen, the only “plagues” of London are said to be “the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.” The city and suburbs had one hundred and twenty-six small parish churches, besides thirteen greater conventual churches; and it was a model to all the world for religious observances.