Aire, which had been cultivated at great cost and from which they derived their maintenance[527]; and in 1434 Archbishop Rotherham appealed for help for the nuns of Thicket, whose fields and pasturages had been inundated and who had suffered much loss by the death of their cattle[528]. Heavy storms are mentioned as contributing to the distress of Shaftesbury in 1365[529] and of St Radegund's, Cambridge, in 1390[530]. Moreover some houses suffered by their situation in barren and unproductive lands. Easebourne in 1411 complained of "the sterility of the lands, meadows and other property of the priory, which is situated in a solitary, waste and thorny place"[531]; Heynings put forward the same plea in 1401[532]; and Flamstead in 1380[533]. But far more terrible than fire and flood were those two other scourges, with which nature afflicted the men of the middle ages, famine and pestilence. The Black Death of 1348-9 was only one among the pestilences of the fourteenth century; it had the result of "domesticating the bubonic plague upon the soil of England"; for more than three centuries afterwards it continued to break out at short intervals, first in one part of the country and then in another[534]. The epidemics of the fourteenth century were so violent that in forty years the chroniclers count up five great plagues, beginning with the Black Death, and Langland, in a metaphor of terrible vividness, describes the pestilence as "the rain that raineth where we rest should." The Black Death was preceded by a famine pestilence in 1317-8, when there was "a grievous mortalitie of people so that the sicke might vnneath burie the dead." It was followed in 1361 by the Second Plague, which was especially fatal among the upper classes and among the young. The Third Plague in 1368-9 was probably primarily a famine sickness, mixed with plague. The Fourth plague broke out in 1375; and the Fifth, in 1390-1 was so prolonged and so severe as to be considered comparable with the Black Death itself. Moreover these are only the great landmarks, and scattered between them were smaller outbreaks of sickness, due to scarcity or to spoiled grain and fruit. The pestilences continued in the fifteenth century (more than twenty-one are recorded in the chronicles), but, except perhaps for the great plague of 1439, they were seldom universal and came by degrees to be confined to the towns, so that all who could used to flee to the country when the summer heat brought out the disease in crowded and insanitary streets. But if country convents escaped the worst disease, those situated in borough towns ran a heavy risk.