“I wot well, quod Hunger, what sickness you aileth. Ye have maunged over much, and that maketh you groan ... Let not sir Surfeit sitten at thy board ... And gif thy diet be thus, I dare lay mine ears That Physic shall his furred hoods for his food sell, And his cloak of calabre with all the knaps of gold, And be fain, by my faith, his physic to let, And learn to labour with land, for lyflode is sweet: For murtherers are many leeches, Lord them amend! They do men kill through their drinks, or destiny it would. By Saint Poul, quod Piers, these aren profitable words.” In another place, Hawkin the minstrel confesses to gluttony: “And more meat ate and drank than nature might digest, And caught sickness some time for my surfeits oft.” A liking for the best of food, and plenty of it, when it was to be had, has clearly been an English trait from the earliest times. Conversely thrift does not appear to have been a virtue or a grace of the labouring class in England. Thus a bad harvest brought wide-spread scarcity, and two bad harvests brought famine and famine-pestilences. The contrasts were sharp because the standard of living was high. And although three, at least, of the English famines were disgraceful to so rich a country, and were probably the occasion of the foreign reproach of “Anglorum fames;” yet the significant fact remains that the disease of the European peasantry, which is the truest index of an inferior diet, namely ergotism, has little or no place in our annals of sickness. CHAPTER II. LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. The history of leprosy in Britain can hardly be the history of leprosy alone, but of that disease along with others which were either mistaken for it or conveniently and euphemistically included under it. That there was leprosy in the country is undoubted; but it is just as certain that there was _lues venerea_; that the latter as a primary lesion led an anonymous existence or was called _lepra_ or _morphaea_ if it were called anything; that the remote effects of the lues were not known as such, being taken for detached or original outcomes of the disordered humours and therefore in the same general class as leprous manifestations; and that the popular and clerical notions of leprosy were too superstitious and inexact, even if the diagnostic intention had been more resolute than it was, to permit of any clear separation of the leprous from the syphilitic, to say nothing of their separation from the poor victims of lupus and cancer of the face, of scrofulous running sores, or of neglected skin-eruptions more repulsive to the eye than serious in their nature. I shall give some proof of each of those assertions--as an essential preliminary to any correct handling of the historical records of British leprosy. Leprosy in Medieval Medical Treatises.