These eighteenth-century instances have been brought in to illustrate Knighton’s account of the epidemic of 1340. The next strange outbreak of the fourteenth century is recorded by the St Albans historian (“Walsingham”) under a year between 1361 and 1365, probably the year 1362. Like so many more of the medieval records of epidemic sickness, it is a meagre and confused statement: “Numbers died of the disease of lethargy, prophesying troubles to many; many women also died by the flux; and there was a general murrain of cattle[126].” Along with that enigmatical entry, we may take the last of the kind that here concerns us. At Cambridge, in 1389, there occurred an epidemic of “phrensy;” it is described as “a great and formidable pestilence, which arose suddenly, and in which men were attacked all at once by the disease of phrensy of the mind, dying without the _viaticum_, and in a state of unconsciousness[127].” The names of phrensy and lethargy occur in the manuscript medical treatises of the time in the chapters upon diseases of the brain and nerves[128]; strictly they are names of symptoms, and not of forms or types of disease, and they may be used loosely of various morbid states which have little in common. A lethargy would in some cases be a name for coma in fever, or for a paralytic stroke; a phrensy might be actual mania, or it might be the delirium of plague or typhus fever. The “lethargy” of 1362 is alleged of a number of people as if in an epidemic, whatever the singular phrase “prophetantes infortunia multis” may mean; and the “phrensy of the mind” of which many died suddenly at Cambridge in 1389, does not look as if it had been a symptom of plague or pestilential fever. The judicious reader will make what he can of these disappointingly meagre details. But for his guidance it may be added that the French accounts of ergotism in 1676 give one of the poisonous effects as being “to cause sometimes malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” which terms might stand for lethargy and phrensy; also that it has not always been easy, in an epidemic among the peasantry after a bad harvest, to distinguish the cases of ergotism from the cases of typhus, the contractures of the limbs, which seem so special to ergotism, having been described also for undoubted cases of typhus[129].