Contemporaries agree remarkably in their accounts of the insufferable state of the weather in the eventful year 1529. The winter was particularly mild, and the vegetation was far too early, so that all the world was rejoicing at the mildness and beauty of the spring. The people wore violets, at Erfurt, on St. Matthew’s day, (the 24th of February,) little expecting that this friendly omen was to precede so severe a calamity[552]. Throughout the spring and summer wet weather continued to prevail. Constant torrents of rain overflowed the fields, the rivers passed their banks; all hopes of the cultivation were entirely frustrated[553], and misery and famine spread in all directions. A heavy rain of four days’ continuance, which took place in the south of Germany in the middle of June, and was called the St. Vitus’s Torrent, is still remembered in modern times as an unheard-of event. Whole districts of country were completely laid under water, and many persons perished who had not time to save their lives[554]. A similar, very widely extended, and perhaps universal, storm again occurred on the 10th of August, and occasioned great floods, especially in Thuringia and Saxony[555]. Upon the whole, the sun rarely broke through the heavy dark clouds. The latter part of the summer and the whole of the autumn, with the exception of a series of hot days which commenced the 24th of August[556], remained gloomy, cold, and wet. People fancied they were breathing the foggy air of Britain[557]. We ought not to omit here to notice that in the north of Germany, and especially in the March of Brandenburg, eating fish, which were caught in great abundance, was generally esteemed detrimental. Malignant and contagious diseases were said to have been traced to this cause, and it was a matter of surprise that the only food which nature bounteously bestowed was so decidedly injurious[558]. It might be difficult now to discover the cause of this phenomenon, of which we possess only isolated notices, yet, passing over all other conjectures, it is quite credible either that an actual fish poison was developed[559], or, if this notion be rejected, that a disordered condition of life, such as must be supposed to have existed in a great famine, rendered fish prejudicial to health, in the same way as sometimes occurs after protracted intermittent fevers, when the functions of the bowels are disturbed in a manner peculiar to this disease.