During the whole of this period the nations of Europe were visited with various and destructive plagues. In 1477, the Bubo-plague broke out in Italy, and raged without interruption till 1485[382]. It was accompanied by striking natural phenomena, among which we may reckon an enormous flight of locusts in 1478[383] and 1482, and remarkable inter-current diseases, such as inflammatory pain in the side, throughout the whole of Italy in 1482[384]. In Switzerland and Southern Germany malignant epidemics[385] appeared in the train of drought and famine in 1480 and 1481, while putrid fever accompanied by phrenites[386], prevailed in Westphalia, Hesse and Friesland. There had never been in the memory of the inhabitants of these districts so many ignes fatui as during this period. There too the people suffered from the failure of the harvest, so that it was necessary to obtain supplies from Thuringen[387]. France, where, under the fearful reign of Louis XI., oppression and misery seemed to mock the gifts of heaven, became in 1482, after a two years’ scarcity, the scene of a devastating plague. It was an inflammatory fever with delirium, accompanied by such intense pain in the head, that many dashed out their brains against the wall, or rushed into the water; while others, after incessantly running to and fro, died in a state of the greatest agony. According to the notion of the age, this disease was attributed to astral influences, for it could not have been brought on only by famine, which left to the poor peasantry, south of the Loire, nothing but the roots of wild herbs to support their miserable existence[388], since the higher classes were also frequently attacked[389]. This fever was without doubt accompanied by inflammation of the meninges, or even of the brain itself, and was, perhaps, identical with that which at the same period desolated the north-west of Germany as far as the shores of the North Sea, only that it was heightened by the greater natural vivacity and miserable situation of the French people, who were kept in a state of perpetual dread by the cruel executions of Louis[390]. This pestilence occasioned the king to follow the advice of his morose physician[391] in ordinary, and to keep himself closely confined within the town of Plessis des Tours. It was prohibited under a heavy penalty to speak in his presence of death which was carrying off its victims in all directions, and forty crossbowmen kept guard in the fosse of the castle to put to death every living thing which might approach[392]. Two years after, in 1484, virulent diseases[393] again visited Germany and Switzerland; and thus it seemed as if the nations were everywhere threatened with death and destruction. SECT. 5.—RICHMOND’S ARMY.