693 ROGER ΟΓ WEN'DOVEK. [A .U. 1234. A miraculous circumstance relating lo a certain bishop. In this year, which was the third of tho unfruitful ones, a dreadful mortality and famine raged everywhere ; and these pestilences were doubtless brought on, as well by the sins of the inhabitants as by the previous unseasonable state of the atmosphere and the general sterility of the land. The poor in various places pined away and died from hunger, and met with no good Samaritan to give them in charge of the host to be fed, or to heal their deadly wounds. Almsgiving too, which usually augments wealth, now languished, and the rich, who abounded in worldly possessions, were struck with such blindness that they suffered Christian men, men made after God's image, to die from want of food. Blind indeed were they, since they boasted that they had amassed wealth, not by the gift of God, but by their own industry. Disgraceful as this was to the generality of Christians, it was most shameful in bishops and church-prelates, and amongst the principal ones who were notorious for their avarice, I mention Walter archbishop of York, as a sample of the rest ; for when the provosts and agents of several of his manors went to him and told him that he had a great deal of corn which had been growing old for five years, and which they very much suspected was either eaten away by the mice or had grown rotten in some way, he, even at a time of such want, showing no respect to God or regard to the poor, gave orders to his agents and provosts to give this oldcorn to the labourers of his manors, who, he said, should return him new for the old after the autumn. It happened that the said archbishop's agent was examining the corn at the town of Itipon, and having put it outside the barns for the purpose of thrashing it, there appeared, amongst the sheaves the heads of vermin, such as snakes, toads and other reptiles ; and the servants who had come with the agent to look at the corn, fled in alarm lest they should be injured by the vermin. When all this was told to the archbishop, he was struck with shame, and sent his seneschals to see what was necessary to be done. They, on coming to the place, notwithstanding the hosts of reptiles, set ladders to the rick, and compelled some labourers to ascend and examine the corn ; on their reaching the top, a black smoke issued from the rick attended by such an unearthly and unendurable stench that they came down from the rick in all haste to escape being suffocated, declaring that they had never before smelt such a stench ; they also heard a voice telling them not to lay their hands on the com, for that the archbishop and everything belonging to him were the property of the devil. The seneschal and those who had come with him, seeing the danger which would arise from the numbers of reptiles, built and fuming within himself for grief, turned pirate, and lay in wait for merchants and others trading by sea, from which he acquired the name it ' ilaucicrc,' and indulged in rapine by sea."