[1] A. Jessopp, The Black Death in East Anglia, in The Coming of the Friars and Other Essays(1889).  For general details see F. Seebohm, The Black Death, in Fortnightly Review (1865 and 1866); J.E.T.  Rogers, England before and after the Black Death, in Fortnightly Review (1866); F.A.  Gasquet’s Great Pestilence (1893); and C. Creighton, History of Epidemics in Britain, i., 114-207(1891).

    [2] A.G.  Little, The Black Death in Lancashire, in Engl. 
    Hist.  Review, v. (1890), 524-30

    [3] See for Ireland, however, the vivid details in J. Clyn of
    Kilkenny, Annales Hibevnia:  ad annum 1349, ed.  R. Butler,
    Irish Archaological Soc. (1849).

The wild exaggerations of the chroniclers reflect the horror and desolation wrought by the epidemic.  There died so many, we are told, that the survivors scarcely sufficed to bury the victims, and not one man in ten remained alive.  The more moderate estimate of Froissart sets down the proportion dead of the plague as one in three throughout all Christendom, and some modern inquirers have rashly reckoned the mortality in England as amounting to a half or a third of the population.  In truth, complete statistics are necessarily wanting, and if the records of the admissions of the clergy attest that, in certain dioceses, half the livings changed hands during the years of pestilence, it is not permissible to infer from that circumstance that there was a similar rate of mortality from the plague over the whole of the population.  The sudden and overwhelming character of the disorder increased the universal terror.  One day a man was healthy:  within a few hours of the appearance of the fatal swelling, or of the dark livid marks which gave the plague its popular name, he was a corpse.  The pestilence seemed to single out the young and robust as its prey, and to spare the aged and sick.  The churchyards were soon overflowing, and special plague pits had to be dug where the dead were heaped up by the hundred.  Comparatively few magnates died, but the poor, the religious, and the clergy were chief sufferers.  The law courts ceased to hold regular sessions.  When the people had partially recovered from the first visitations of the plague, others befel them which were scarcely less severe.  The years 1362 and 1369 almost rivalled the horrors of 1348 and 1349.

The immediate effects of the calamity were overwhelming.  At first the horror of the foul death effaced all other considerations from men’s minds.  There were not enough priests to absolve the dying, and special indulgences, with full liberty to choose confessors at discretion, were promulgated from Avignon and from many diocesan chanceries.  The price of commodities fell for the moment, since there were few, we are told, who cared for riches amidst the general fear of death.  The pestilence played