Norwich was probably the second city in the kingdom at the time, and Norfolk was certainly the richest county; but the number is twice as much as the population of both city and county at the time. Joshua Barnes, the author of a diffuse life of Edward III., pretends to give exact information as to the persons who died in the principal English cities. His numbers are undoubtedly untrustworthy. The nearest estimate to likelihood which I have seen is that of Knighton. He was a canon of Leicester, and lived a short time after the events. He tells us that the deaths in the three parishes of Leicester town were 1,480. Even this number I believe to be exaggerated, for there is reason to conclude that at this time the population of Leicester was under 3,500.

Every town had its plague-pit. That of London was a spot afterwards occupied by the Charterhouse, and purchased for the purpose of sepulture by Sir Walter Manny, one of Edward's captains. Some years ago, being at Cambridge while the foundations of the new Divinity School were being laid, I saw that the ground was full of skeletons, thrown in without any attempt at order, and I divined that this must have been a Cambridge plague-pit. I have no doubt that the principal place of burial for the Oxford victims was at some part of New College garden, for when Wykeham bought the site, it appears to have been one which had been previously populous, but was deserted some thirty years before during the plague, and apparently made a burialground by the survivors of the calamity. Hecker estimates the loss of population in Europe at twenty-five millions, a moderate and probable calculation.

No doubt the ravages of the pestilence were more general among the poorer classes. But, as I have already stated, the more opulent were not unaffected by it. The disease made havoc among the secular and regular clergy, and we are told that a notable decline of learning and morals was thenceforward observed among the clergy, many persons of mean acquirements and low character stepping into the vacant benefices. Even now the cloister of Westminster Abbey is said to contain a monument in the great flat stone, which we are told was laid over the remains of the many monks who perished in the great death. The novelist

Boccacio dwells on the effect which the mortality caused in the character of the survivors, and how panic or despair made men callous, reckless, superstitious, heartless, cruel, and licentious; and Sismondi, in his great history of the French people, and of the Italian Republics, has collected contemporaneous evidence to the same effect.

The Black Death formed an epoch, and, for many years afterwards, facts were computed according to their nearness from the great pestilence. A century after the event, Gascoigne makes it the era of the new departure in Oxford, after which learning, morality, and the adequate discharge of duties began to wane; the universities were, relatively speaking, deserted, and the whole spirit of society was changed. It is said by Sir Harris Nicolas that of the three years, 1349, 1361, and 1369, in which note was made of the extraordinary virulence of a disease now become sporadic, the first pestilence was said to have lasted four months; the second through the winter, for eight months and nineteen days; the third for nearly three months. These dates of duration, given centuries after the event, cannot be accepted as authentic, but they are indirect testimony of the singular impression which the calamity left on the mind of England. I have been struck with the fact, from more trustworthy sources, when I have noted certain entries made in the records of several Hertfordshire manors, where the plague appears to have been specially deadly. In these manors it was the practice for thirty years to head the schedule of expenditure with an enumeration of the lives which were lost and the tenancies which were vacated after the great death of 1348. Nor have I any doubt, if some antiquary were to have the patience to peruse and tabulate the taxing rolls of Edward I., and compare the names of residents in the several manors with the entries of tax-paying inhabitants resident in the same manors after the great plague, he would find that thousands of names perish from the manor registers, as that of the Oldhams did from Cuxham. It may be noted that the foundation of colleges in Oxford, which was rapidly proceeding before this stupendous event, ceased for many years, when it was taken up with renewed vigour.

At first, as is constantly the case in times of panic, there was a

suspicion that the disease was the work of human agencies. As usual, the Jews were credited with having contrived the calamity. They were charged with poisoning the wells, and throughout France, Switzerland, and Germany, thousands of these unhappy people were destroyed on evidence derived from confessions obtained under torture, or even from the fact of their religion and origin. They were protected as far as possible by the Emperor, Charles IV., whose own influence in Germany was very circumscribed. They escaped persecution, too, in the dominions of Albrecht of Austria. It is said that the large Jewish population of Poland is due to the fact that Casimir the Great was induced, by the entreaties of Esther, a favourite Jewish mistress, to give them harbour and shelter in his kingdom. The story is curiously corroborated by the respect which is still paid by the Podolian Jews at the present time to the memory of this second Esther, who, being taken into the harem of another king, also alien to the race of Israel, remembered her kindred in the day of their trouble, and to the generosity of the Polish monarch who yielded to her wish. It ought to be added that Clement VI. forbad the persecution of the Jews at Avignon, where the pope was still residing. The English people was saved from being tempted to the crime of murdering the Jews, because the king's grandfather had expelled the whole race from England. And yet, in this our own day, one sometimes wonders whether we have really escaped from the contingency, even in countries calling themselves civilised, of witnessing again the bigotry, the malignity, the spirit of hatred which accepts impossible lies, for which there was the excuse of ignorance in the Middle Ages, but not the shadow of

an excuse now.

We learn from contemporary accounts, and here we can trust them, that a rapid growth of population followed on the destruction of the Black Death. It is said that after this event, double and triple births were frequent; that marriages were singularly fertile; and that, in a short time, the void made by the pestilence was no longer visible. The repressive check of a high standard of living was removed by the ease with which the survivors could obtain that standard, and accumulate from a considerable margin beyond it. The physiologists of the time, however, averred that

the human race suffered a permanent diminution in the number of teeth, which had been always possessed by those who were born before the visitation of the Black Death. I make no doubt that the population speedily righted itself, as it has done on many other occasions when a sudden or abnormal destruction of human life has occurred in a people and the people has a recuperative power. That they had this power is proved by the events which followed.

Probably a third of the population perished. Froissart made the same estimate a generation later, when fear had ceased to disturb the judgment; and, as I have said, it is described as having been peculiarly deadly to persons in the vigour of life. It is certain that the immediate consequence of the plague was a dearth of labour, an excessive enhancement of wages, and a serious difficulty in collecting the harvests of those landowners who depended on a supply of hired labour for the purpose of getting in their crops. We are told that these crops were often suffered to rot in the fields for want of hands; that cattle and sheep roamed at large over the country for lack of herdsmen; that land went out of cultivation; and that the grandees were utterly impoverished. I have referred already to the collateral evidence of an extraordinary falling off in the assessments under customary taxes. Many of the lords excused their tenants' rents lest they should quit their holdings from a want of labour and the increasing and excessive cost of materials; the omission of rent sometimes extending to a half, sometimes for a term of years, as the landowner could arrange with the tenant. So, says Knighton, "they who had let lands on labour-rents to tenants, such rents as are customary in villeinage, were compelled to relieve and remit such labour, and either to utterly excuse them or to rehabilitate their tenants on easier terms and less payments, lest the loss and ruins should become irreparable and the land lie utterly uncultivated." It appears, therefore, that in the panic, the confusion, and the loss which ensued on the Great Plague, that process which, as I said before, was going on already, the commutation of labour-rents for money payments, was precipitated; that the lords readily gave in to compositions; and that even less than had hitherto been demanded in exchange for the service was arranged for the future. The plague, in short, had almost emancipated the surviving serfs

I shall point out below what were the actual effects of this great and sudden scarcity of labour. At present I merely continue the narrative. Parliament was broken up when the plague was raging. The king, however, issued a proclamation, which he addressed to William, the primate, and circulated among the sheriffs of the different counties, in which he directed all officials that no higher than customary wages should be paid, under the penalties of amercement. The king's mandate, however, was universally disobeyed, for the farmers were compelled to leave their crops ungathered, or to comply with the demands of the labourers. When the king found that his proclamation was unavailing, he laid, we are told, heavy penalties on abbots, priors, barons, crown tenants, and those who held land under mesne lords, if they paid more than customary rates. But the labourers remained masters of the situation. Many were said to have been thrown into prison for disobedience; many, to avoid punishment or restraint, fled into forests, where they were occasionally captured. The captives were fined, and obliged to disavow under oath that they would take higher than customary wages for the future. But the expedients were vain, labour remained scarce, and wages, according to all previous experience, excessive.

As soon as Parliament could meet, the proclamation was reduced to the form of a statute, which remained, with the proclamation, a law, till both were formally repealed by 5 Elizabeth, Cap. 4. The statute contained eight clauses :--(1) No person under sixty years of age, whether serf or free, shall decline to undertake farm labour at the wages which had been customary in the king's twentieth year (1347), except they lived by merchandize, were regularly engaged in some mechanical craft, were possessed of private means, or were occupiers of land. The lord was to have the first claim to the labour of his serfs, and those who declined to work for him or for others are to be sent to the common gaol. (2) Imprisonment is decreed againt all persons who may quit service before the time which is fixed in their agreements. (3) No other than the old wages are to be given, and the remedy against those who seek to get more is to be sought in the lord's court. (4) Lords of manors paying more than the customary amount are to be liable to treble damages. (5) Artificers are to be liable