For so early as the fruitful year 1503, the plague, which had already appeared partially, made great advances, and France in particular was visited by so fatal a pestilence, that the inhabitants of towns and villages, in order to escape the infection, fled in bodies to the woods, and even the house-dogs became wild, which never happens, unless a country be extensively depopulated[439]. They were obliged to establish great hunts, in order to free the country from these new beasts of prey, and from wolves which appeared in great multitudes[440]. The dry and continued heat of the following year, 1504, having given rise to still more extensive sickness, and caused a failure in the crops, the bubo plague raged in Germany with such violence, that in some places a third part, and in others as many as half the inhabitants perished. Various kinds of fevers accompanied this overwhelming disease, among which there was one distinguished by headache and phrensy similar to that which appeared in France, in 1482[441]. Various putrid fevers and putrid inflammations of the lungs with bloody expectoration, are also no less plainly discernible from the accounts[442]. This diversified and general sickness throughout the whole of Germany, terminated in the cold winter of 1504–5 and the following summer, during which there was a continued murrain among cattle. It is certain, that at that time the petechial fever in Italy, had not yet passed the Alps. _From all these facts it is a probable conjecture, that the Sweating Sickness which visited England in the year 1506, although accompanied in that country itself by no prominent circumstances, was not without connexion with the morbid commotion of human and animal life in the south and middle of Europe, and may perhaps be regarded as having been the last feeble effort of mysterious agencies in the domain of organized being._ CHAPTER III. THE THIRD VISITATION OF THE DISEASE.—1517 “This learned Lord, this Lord of wit and art, This metaphysick Lord, holds forth a Glasse, Through which we may behold in every part This boisterous prince.”—HOWELL[443]. SECT. 1.—POVERTY.