Often enough these plagues were preceded and accompanied by famines, sometimes local and sometimes general. The English famines had long been notorious and were enshrined in a popular proverb: "Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra"[535]. The three greatest outbreaks took place in 1194-6, in 1257-9 and in 1315-6 (before the plague of 1318-9). The dearth which culminated in the last of these famines had begun as early as 1289; and the misery in 1315 was acute: "The beastes and cattell also," says Stow, translating from Trokelowe, "by the corrupt grane whereof they fed, dyed, whereby it came to passe that the eating of flesh was suspected of all men, for flesh of beasts not corrupted was hard to finde. Horse-flesh was counted great delicates the poore stole fatte dogges to eate; some (as it was sayde) compelled through famine, in hidden places did eate the flesh of their owne children, and some stole others, which they devoured. Theeves that were in prisons did plucke in peeces those that were newly brought among them and greedily devoured them halfe alive." There was another severe famine in 1322, and in 1325 a great drought, so that the cattle died for lack of water. Famine accompanied the pestilences of 1361, 1369, 1391 and 1439; and these are only the more outstanding instances. Here again, however, the fourteenth century was on the whole worse off than the fifteenth; almost every year was a year of scarcity and the average price of wheat during the period 1261 to 1400 was nearly six shillings (i.e. nearly six pounds of modern money)[536]. Moreover the ravages of murrain among cattle and sheep were hardly intermittent from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century[537]. The fatal years 1315-9 included not only a famine and a plague but also (1318-9) a murrain among the cattle, which was so bad that dogs and ravens, eating the dead bodies, were poisoned and died, and no man dared eat any beef. In the year of the Black Death also there was "a great plague of sheep in the realm, so that in one place there died in pasturage more than five thousand sheep and so rotted that neither beast nor bird would touch them"; and murrains accompanied the four other great plagues of the century. Indeed dearth, murrain and pestilence went hand in hand, in that unhappy time we call the "good old days."