Whatever the cause of this malady, whether it be contagious, i.e. communicated by touch; or infectious, that is, communicated by breathing the same air; or hereditary; it is quite certain that it was greatly aggravated by the habits of the time. Bad food, uncleanly habits, bad air, all contributed to the spread of leprosy. Especially it has been considered that the long fasts during which meat was prohibited encouraged the disease: not because abstinence from meat is in itself a bad thing, but because the people had to eat fish imperfectly cured or kept too long, and unwholesome. Fresh-water fish could not be procured in sufficient quantities and it was impossible to convey fish from the sea more than a certain distance inland. [Illustration: THE LEPERS BEGGING.] The dreadful appearance of the lepers, their horrible sufferings, produced loathing more than pity. People were horror stricken at the sight of them: they drove them out of their sight: they punished them cruelly if they broke the rules of separation: they imprisoned any citizen who should harbour a leper: they kept bailiffs at the City gates to keep them from entering. Fourteen of these afflicted persons were required to be maintained in accordance with Queen Maud's Foundation by the Hospital of St. Giles: there was also a lazar house in the Old Kent Road, Southwark: one between Mile End and Bow: one at Kingsland between Shoreditch and Stoke Newington: one at Knightsbridge, west of Charing Cross, and one at Holloway. On the Dissolution of the Monasteries, all these lazar houses were suppressed. Now, since we hear very little more about lepers, and since no new lazar houses were built, and since the prohibitions to enter churches, towns, &c., are no more renewed, it is tolerably certain that leprosy by the middle of the sixteenth century had practically disappeared. The above will show, however, how great and terrible a thing it was between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. 22. THE TERROR OF FAMINE. Suppose that all the ocean traffic were stopped; that there was no communication, or exchange of commodities, between our country and another; suppose that the people of this island depended entirely on their own harvests and their own cattle for their support. You would then easily understand how a single bad year might produce scarcity of food, and a very bad year might produce a famine. That was our condition down to the fifteenth century. Some corn may have been brought over from Prussia or from Hamburg; but there was no regular supply; the country depended on its own harvests. Therefore, the fear of a famine--or of scarcity--was ever present to the people.