The Statute of Labourers declares, no doubt with perfect truth, that "a great part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers," died in the pestilence known as the Black Death of 1349, which had important consequences, socially and politically. There were many subsequent outbreaks, though they fortunately did not attain to the enormous proportions of the great mortality. We have from the graphic hand of Chaucer a life-like portrait of a medical man of the fourteenth century who had gained his money in the time of pestilence. At the end of the fifteenth and middle of the sixteenth century, we have as alternating with bubo plague, the _Sudor Anglicanus_. Its appearance coincided with the invasion by which Richard III. lost his crown, and his rival became Henry VII. Dr. Thomas Forrester, who was in London during the outbreak of 1485, gives instances of suddenness with which the "sweat" became fatal. "We saw two prestys standing togeder and speaking togeder, and we saw both of them die suddenly." The symptoms were sweating, bad odour, redness, thirst, headache, "and some had black spots as it appeared in our frere Alban, a noble leech, on whose soul God have mercy." Forrester complains of the quacks who put letters on poles and on church doors, promising to help the people in their need. He lays stress upon astrological causes, but does not overlook the defective sanitation which gave the plague some of its firm hold. The _Sudor Anglicanus_ returned in 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551. The last visitation was the occasion of a treatise by the worthy Cambridge founder, to whom Gonville and Caius College owes so much.