Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/503



In Norwich, then the chief east-coast port north of the Thames, we hear of 60,000 deaths. We hear, too, of whole villages being wiped out, and nowhere were sufficient hands left to cultivate the soil.

Crops were ungathered, cattle roamed at will. The pestilence lasted through the whole of 1349, after which, though occasionally recurring, it died away.

In Lincolnshire it was very bad, and some knowledge of it can be gathered from the memoranda of the Bishop of Lincoln, John Gynewell, who held office from September 23, 1347, to August 5, 1362; the appalling frequency of the institutions to the various benefices in his diocese give some measure of the severity of this dreadful visitation.

It began at Melcombe Regis in Dorset in the month of July, 1348, but did not reach Lincoln until May, 1349. It got to London in January of that year, and was at its height there in March, April, and May. In May, in the town of Newark, we read that "it waxes day by day more and more, insomuch that the Churchyard will not suffice for the men that die in that place."

From his palace at Liddington, in Rutland, Bishop Gynewell went in May to consecrate a burial ground at Great Easton, which, being only a chapelry to the parish of Bringhurst, had no burial ground of its own. The licence was granted only during the duration of the pestilence. The bishop in his preamble says: "There increases among you, as in other places of our Diocese, a mortality of men such as has not been seen or heard aforetime from the beginning of the world, so that the old grave-yard of your church [Bringhurst] is not sufficient to receive the bodies of the dead."

The enormous number of clergy who died in the Diocese of Lincoln is attested by the fact that in July alone 250 institutions were made and all but fifteen owing to deaths, a number which is considerably more than the whole for the first eighteen months of Bishop Gynewell's episcopate. The average is over eight a day.

The most singular thing which the statistics point to, is that, on the high ground round Lincoln and in the parts of Lindsey the mortality among the clergy was far higher than in other parts of the diocese, whilst in the low lands and fens round Peterborough, and in the parts of Holland, the percentage of deaths was almost invariably low, twenty-seven and twenty