The depopulation emphasized in my preceding chapter was, of course, often due to infectious diseases; but war and famine were possibly even more operative on the whole, when we reckon not only national conflicts, but civil war between province and province, town and town, village and village. Famine was not only a frequent concomitant of plague, but sometimes, apparently, its actual begetter by reducing the frame to defenceless exhaustion: “Fames and mortalitas, for the medieval annalist, are almost inseparable conceptions.” And, happy as the more well-to-do medieval peasant might be in the possession of his own little holding, the majority lived always on the edge of an abyss into which a single bad harvest might, and a succession must, precipitate them. Even in England, where frosts are never so terrible as on the Continent, the primitive plough never scratched deep enough to protect the grain from any very exceptional winter. Nothing in our own annals equals the Belgian winters recorded in the twelfth century, twelve years of bad weather in one case and thirteen in another: but there was a terrible succession of crop failures with us in the early fourteenth century. The Liége chronicler notes minutely the weather from 1195 to 1198: it is a heart-rending story. More than once, at different times, corn went up to ten times its normal price. In England, apart from the frequent formal records of famine in the annals, we sometimes get sidelights which are still more significant.