To set against this eagerness for pleasure, this avidity after sports of every kind, we must remember the continual recurrence of plague and pestilence, especially in the fourteenth century,[14] when the love of shows and feasting was at its highest, and when the Black Death carried off half the citizens. Is it not a natural result? When life is so uncertain that men know not to-day how many will be alive to-morrow, they snatch impatiently at the present joy; it is too precious to be lost; another moment, and the chance will be gone--perhaps forever. As is the merriment of the camp when the battle is imminent, so is the joy of the people between the comings of the plague. Life never seems so full of rich and precious gifts as at such a time. As for the lessons in sanitation that the plague should teach, the people had not as yet begun to learn them. The lay stalls and the river-bank, despite laws and proclamations, continued to be heaped with filth, and the narrow street received the refuse from every house. And, in addition to the occasional plague, there was ever present typhoidal fever striking down old and young. Perhaps the joy of the present was also intensified by the possibility of famine. At the end of the twelfth century there was a terrible famine. There was one in 1251; there was one in 1314, when "no flesh was to be had ... a quarter of wheat, beans, and peas was sold for twenty shillings." This is something like twenty pounds at present prices. This famine continued throughout the next year, when Stow says "horse-flesh was counted great delicates, the poore stole fatte dogges to eate; some (as it was said), compelled through famine, in hidden places, did eate the fleshe of their owne children, and some stole others, which they devoured. Thieves that were in prison did plucke in pieces those that were newlie brought among them, and greedily devoured them half alive." The uncertainty whether next year would produce any bread at all sweetened the loaf of to-day. In the year 1335 long-continued rains caused a famine. In 1353 there was another; in 1438 the scarcity was so great that bread was made from fern-roots, and so on. The earliest schools of the City were those of St. Paul's, Westminster, and the Abbey of Bermondsey. Each of the religious houses in turn, as it was erected, opened another school. When, however, Henry V. had suppressed the alien priories, of which four certainly, and perhaps more, belonged to London, their schools were also suppressed. So much was the loss felt that Henry VI., the greatest founder of schools of all the kings, erected four new grammar-schools, namely: at St. Martin's le Grand, St. Dunstan in the West, St. Mary le Bow, and St. Anthony's; and in the following year he made four more, namely: in the parishes of St. Andrew's, Holborn; All Hallows the Great, Thames Street; St. Peter's, Cornhill; and St. Thomas of Acon.