For two months Thomas de Methwold, the official, stayed where he had been bidden to stay, in the thick of it all, at the palace. On the 29th of May he could bear it no longer. Do you ask was he afraid? Not so! We shall see that he was no craven; but the bravest men are not reckless, and least of all are they the men who are careless about the lives or the feelings of others. The great cemetery of the city of Norwich was at this time actually within the cathedral Close. The whole of the large space enclosed between the nave of the cathedral on the south and the bishop's palace on the east, and stretching as far as the Erpingham gate on the west, was one huge graveyard. When the country parsons came to present themselves for institution at the palace, they had to pass straight across this cemetery. The tiny churchyards of the city, demonstrably very little if at all larger than they are now, were soon choked, the soil rising higher and higher above the level of the street, which even to this day is in some cases five or six feet below the soppy sod piled up within the old enclosures. To the great cemetery within the Close the people brought their dead, the tumbrels discharging their load of corpses all day long, tilting them into the huge pits made ready to receive them; the stench of putrefaction palpitating through the air, and borne by the gusts of the western breeze through the windows of the palace, where the Bishop's official sat, as the candidates knelt before him and received institution with the usual formalities. It was hard upon him, it was doubly so upon those who had travelled a long day's journey through the pestilential villages; and on the 30th of May the official removed from Norwich to Terlyng, in Essex, where the Bishop had a residence; there he remained for the next ten days, during which time he instituted thirty-nine more parsons to their several benefices. By this time other towns in the diocese had felt the force of the visitation. Ipswich had been smitten, and Stowmarket, and East Dereham—how many more we cannot tell. Then the news came that the Bishop had returned; Thomas de Methwold was at once ordered back to Norwich—come what might, that was his post; there he should stay, whether to live or die.

The Bishop seems to have landed at Yarmouth about the both of June; he did not at once push on to report himself to the King; urgent private affairs detained him in his native county. Seventeen or eighteen miles to the south-west of Yarmouth lies the village of Gillingham, where the Bishop's brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman, a man of great wealth and consideration, had been the lord of the manor. The parish contains about 2,000 acres, and at this time had at least three churches, only one of which now remains. Besides these Sir Bartholomew had a private chapel in his house. Here he kept up much state, as befitted a personage who had more than once represented Norfolk and Suffolk in Parliament. The plague came, and the worthy knight was struck down; the parson too fell a victim; and the Lady Petronilla, Sir Bartholomew's widow, presented to the living a certain Hugh Atte Mill, who was instituted on the 7th of June. The first news that the Bishop heard when he landed was that his brother was dead. He started off at once to Gillingham. Death had been busy all around, and the plague had broken out in the Benedictine Nunnery of Bungay and carried off the prioress among others. Straightway the few nuns that were left chose another prioress; on the morning of the 13th she came for institution, and received it at the Bishop's hands. Hurrying on to Norwich, the Bishop stayed but a single day, leaving his official at the palace. He himself had to present himself before the King to give account of his mission; on the 19th he was in London; on the 4th of July he was back again in his diocese. During the twenty days that had passed since he had left Gillingham, exactly one hundred clergymen had been admitted to vacant cures, all of them crossing the horrible cemetery where the callous gravediggers were at work night and day, the sultry air charged with suffocating stench, poisoning the breath of heaven. Yet there the Bishop's vicar- general had to stay, eat, drink, and sleep—if he could—and there he did stay till the Bishop came back and relieved him of the dreadful work.

Meanwhile the gentry too had been dying. It is clear that in the upper ranks the men died more frequently than the women, explain it how you will. During June and July no fewer than fifteen patrons of livings were widows, while in thirteen other benefices the patronage was in the hands of the executors or trustees of gentlemen who had died. During the month of July in scarcely a village within five miles of Norwich had the parson escaped the mortality, yet in Norwich the intrepid Bishop remained in the very thick of it all, as if he would defy the angel of death, or at least show an example of the loftiest courage. Only towards the end of July did he yield, perhaps, to the persuasion or entreaty of others, and moved away to the southern part of his diocese, taking up his residence at Hoxne, in Suffolk, where he stayed till October, when he once more returned to his house at Thorpe by Norwich. The palace had become at last absolutely uninhabitable.

To Hoxne accordingly the newly-appointed clergy came in troops, and during the first seven weeks after the Bishop's arrival he admitted no less than eighty-two parsons, a larger number than had been the average of a whole year heretofore. Did they all betake themselves to their several parishes and brave the peril and set themselves to the grim work before them? They could not help themselves. Where the benefice was a vicarage an oath to reside upon his cure was in every case rigorously imposed upon the newly-appointed; and though the law did not sanction this in the case of rectors, yet not a single instance of a licence of non-residence occurs; the difficulty of finding substitutes was becoming daily more and more insuperable, and the penalty of deserting a parish without licence was a great deal too serious to be disregarded. In the months of June, July, and August things were at their worst, as might have been expected. In July alone there were two hundred and nine institutions. During the year ending March, 1350, considerably more than two-thirds of the benefices of the diocese had become vacant.

In the religious houses the plague wrought, if possible, worse havoc still. There were seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk. Five of them lost their prioresses. How many poor nuns were taken who can guess? In the College of St. Mary-in-the-fields, at Norwich, five of the seven prebendaries died. In September the abbot of St. Benet's Hulm was carried off. Again we ask and receive no answer—what must have been the mortality among the monks and the servants of the convent? And yet sometimes we do get an answer to that question. In the house of Augustinian Canons at Heveringland prior and canons died to a man. At Hickling, which a century before had been a flourishing house and been doing good work, only one canon survived. Neither of these houses ever recovered from the effects of the visitation; they were eventually absorbed in other monastic establishments.

It is one of the consequences of the peculiar privileges granted to the Friars that no notice of them occurs in the episcopal records. They were free lances with whom the bishops had little to do. It is only by the accident of every one of the Friars of our Lady who had a house in Norwich having been carried off, and the fact that their house was left tenantless, that we know anything of their fate. Wadding, the great annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the notorious decadence in the morale of the mendicant orders during the fourteenth century—a decadence which he does not attempt to deny—attributes it wholly to the action of the Black Death, and is glad to find in that calamity a sufficient cause for accounting for the loss of the old prestige which in little more than a century after St. Francis's death had set in so decidedly. "It was from this cause," he writes, "that the monastic bodies, and especially the mendicant orders, which up to this time had been flourishing in virtue and learning, began to decline, and discipline to become slack; as well from the loss of eminent men as from the relaxation of the rules, in consequence of the pitiable calamities of the time; and it was vain to look for reform among the young men and the promiscuous multitude who were received without the necessary discrimination, for they thought more of filling the empty houses than of restoring the old strictness that had passed away." How could it be otherwise? In the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, at least nineteen religious houses were left without prior or abbot. We may be quite sure that where the chief ruler dropped oft the brethren of the house and the army of servants and hangers-on did not escape. What happened at the great Abbey of St. Edmund's we know not yet, and until we get more light it is idle to conjecture but, as a man stands in that vast graveyard at Bury, and looks around him, he can hardly help trying—trying, but failing—to imagine what the place must have looked like when the plague was raging. What a Valley of Hinnom it must have been! Those three mighty churches, all within a stone's throw of one another, and one of them just one hundred feet longer than the cathedral at Norwich, sumptuous with costly offerings, and miracles of splendour within—and outside ghastly heaps of corruption, and piles of corpses waiting their turn to be covered up with an inch or two of earth. Who can adequately realize the horrors of that awful summer? In the desolate swamps through which the sluggish Bure crawls reluctantly to mingle its waters with the Yare; by the banks of the Waveney where the little Bungay nunnery had been a refuge for the widow, the forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in the valley of the Nar—the Norfolk Holy Land—where seven monasteries of one sort or another clustered, each distant from the other but a few short miles—among the ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the Broads, where the tall reeds wave and whisper, and all else is silent—the glorious buildings with their sumptuous churches were little better than centres of contagion. From the stricken towns people fled to the monasteries, lying away there in their seclusion, safely, favoured of God. If there was hope anywhere it must be there. As frightened widows and orphans flocked to these havens of refuge, they carried the Black Death with them, and when they dropped death- stricken at the doors, they left the contagion behind them as their only legacy. Guilty wretches with a load of crime upon their consciences—desperate as far as this world was concerned, and ready for any act of wickedness should the occasion arrive—shuddered lest they should go down to burning flame for ever now that there was none to shrive them or to give the viaticum to any late penitent in his agony. In the tall towers by the wayside the bells hung mute; no hands to ring them or none to answer to their call Meanwhile, across the lonely fields, toiling dismally, and ofttimes missing the track— for who should guide them or show the path?—parson and monk and trembling nun made the best of their way to Norwich; their errand to seek admission to the vacant preferment. Think of them, after miles of dreary travelling, reaching the city gates at last, and shudderingly threading the filthy alleys which then served as streets, stepping back into doorways to give the dead carts passage, and jostled by lepers and outcasts, the touch of whose garments was itself a horror. Think of them staggering across the great cemetery and stumbling over the rotting carcases not yet committed to the earth, breathing all the while the tainted breath of corruption- sickening, loathsome! Think of them returning as they came, going over the same ground as before, and compelled to gaze again at

Sights that haunt the soul for ever, Poisoning life till life is done.

Think of them foot-sore, half-famished, hardly daring to buy bread and meat for their hunger, or to beg a cup of cold water for Christ's sake, or entreat shelter for the night in their faintness and weariness, lest men should cry out at them—"Look! the Black Death has clutched another of the doomed!"

* * * * * * *

I have said that upwards of 800 of the beneficed clergy perished in East Anglia during this memorable year. Besides these we must make allowance for the non-beneficed among the regulars; the chaplains, who were in the position of curates among ourselves; the vicars of parishes whose endowments were insufficient to maintain a resident parson under ordinary circumstances, and the members of the monastic and mendicant orders. Putting all these together, it seems to me that we cannot estimate the number of deaths among regular and secular clergy in East Anglia during the year 1349 at less than two thousand. [Footnote: In the diocese of Ely, where the mortality was less severe than in Norfolk and Suffolk, 57 parsons died in the three months ending the 1st of October, 1349. When an ordination was held by the Bishop of Ely's suffragan at the priory of Barnwell on the 19th of September, the newly-ordained were fewer by 35 than those who had died at their posts since the last ordination.] This may appear an enormous number at first hearing, but it is no incredible number. Unfortunately the earliest record of any ordinations in the diocese of Norwich dates nearly seventy years after the plague year, but there is every reason for believing that there were at least as many, and probably many more, candidates at ordinations in the fourteenth century as presented themselves in the fifteenth. During the year ending January, 1415, Bishop Courtenay's suffragan ordained 382 persons, and assuming that in Bishop Bateman's days an equal number were admitted to the clerical profession, the losses by death in the plague year would have absorbed all the clergy who had been ordained during the six previous years, but no more. Even so this constituted a tremendous strain upon the reserve force of clergy unbeneficed and more or less unemployed, and it was inevitable that with such a strain, there would be a deterioration in the character and fitness of the newly- appointed incumbents. Yet nothing has surprised me more than the exceeding rareness of evidence damaging to the reputation of the new men. That these men were less educated than their predecessors we know; but that they were mere worthless hypocrites there is nothing to show, and much to disprove. Nay! the strong impression which has been left upon my mind, and which gathers strength as I study the subject, is that the parochial clergy of the fourteenth century, before and after the plague, were decidedly a better set than the clergy of the thirteenth. The friars had done some of their best work in "provoking to jealousy" the country clergy and stimulating them to increased faithfulness; they had, in fact, made them more respectable; just as the Wesleyan revival acted upon the country parsons and others four centuries later. Until the episcopal visitations of the monasteries during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are made public—they exist in far larger numbers than is usually supposed—it will be impossible to estimate the effect of the plague upon the religious houses; but I am inclined to think that the monasteries suffered very greatly indeed from the terrible visitation, and that the violent disturbance of the old traditions and the utter breakdown in the old observances acted as disastrously upon these institutions as the first stroke of paralysis does upon men who have passed their prime—they never were again what they had been.

It must be remembered that in the great majority of the smaller monasteries, and indeed in any religious house where there were chaplains to do the routine work in the church, there was nothing to prevent an absolutely illiterate man or woman from becoming monk or nun. It was, however, impossible for a man to discharge the duties of his calling as a parish priest without some education and without at least a knowledge of Latin. I will not stop to argue that point; they who dispute the assumption have much to learn. Moreover it is only what we should expect, that while some were hardened and brutalized by the scenes through which they had passed, some were softened and humbled. The prodigious activity in church building—church restoration is perhaps the truer term-during the latter part of the fourteenth century in East Anglia is one of many indications that the religious life of the people at large had received a mighty stimulus. Here, again, the evidence near at hand requires to be carefully looked into. In historical no less than in physical researches, the microscope requires to be used. As yet it has scarcely been used at all. History is in the empirical stage. Meanwhile, such hints as that of Knighton's are significant when he tells us that, as the parsons died, a vast multitude of laymen whose wives had perished in the pestilence presented themselves for holy orders. Many, he says—not all—were illiterate, save that they knew how to read their missals and go through the services though unintelligently, they hardly understood what they read. Were they, therefore, the worst of the new parsons? Men bowed down by a great sorrow, bewildered by a bereavement for which there is none but a make-shift remedy, men whose "life is read all backwards and the charm of life undone," are not they whose sorrow usually makes them void of sympathy for the distressed. Nay! their own sadness makes them responsive to the cry of the needy, the lonely, and the fallen. Experience proves to us every day that among such men you may find, not the worst parish priests, but the best.

* * * * * * *

I wonder whether John Bonington, steward of the manor of Waltham, was one of those whom Knighton alludes to.

Sometime during the year 1343 there had been a disastrous fire in the house of one Roger Andrew; the dwelling, with all that it contained, was burnt to the ground. Poor Roger lost all his household stuff and furniture and much else besides; worse than all, he lost all his title deeds, the evidences and charters whereby he held his little estate. As for Roger himself, he either perished in the flames or his heart broke and he died very shortly afterwards. He left a son behind him, young Richard Andrew, who must have found himself in sorry plight when he came to take up his patrimony and enter upon his inheritance. Those were not the days when the weak man and the beaten man excited much pity in England. No! they were not, whatever sentimental people may say who maunder about the ages of faith and refresh themselves with other such lackadaisical phrases. So, poor Richard being down in his luck, John Bonington, acting for Henry, Earl of Lancaster, [Footnote: His son and heir, Henry, Earl of Derby, was created Duke of Lancaster in 1351.] the lord of the manor, put the screw on, and boldly claimed a heriot from the young man as the right of the lord. Richard disputed the right, and protested that his land was not heriotable. Bonington pleaded his might in a very effectual way, and took his heriot—to wit, the best horse which Richard had in his stable, the best and probably the only one. Then Richard appealed to the homage. The homagers were afraid to give a verdict against the steward, and timidly objected that all Richard's evidences had been burnt in the fire. Bonington trotted off triumphant, leaving Richard to his bitter wrath. Six years went by, and the plague came. It fell upon the district round with terrific fury, and the people died in that dreadful April, 1349, as the locusts die when the hurricane drives them seaward, and they rot in piles upon the shore. The Roll of the Manor Court is a horrible record of the suddenness and the force with which the Black Death smote the wretched Essex people. When the steward's day's work was done, and the long, long list of the dead had been written down, he added a note wherein he gives us the facts which have come down to us; and then he adds that, inasmuch as he, John Bonington, had come to see that the aforesaid horse had been unrighteously taken from Richard Andrew six years before, and that the conviction of his own iniquity had been brought home to his contrite heart, as well by the dreadful mortality and horrible pestilence at that time raging as by the stirring of religious emotion within his soul, therefore the full value of the horse was to be restored to the injured Richard, and never again was heriot to be levied on his land. After six years' hard riding and scant feeding, peradventure Richard Andrew would rather have had the hard cash than the poor brute, which by this time, probably, had died and gone to the dogs! A shudder of penitence and remorse had thrilled through John Bonington when the plague was stalking grimly up and down the land; and this is what we learn about him—this and no more.

Had John Bonington lost his wife; and was he meditating a life of usefulness and penitence and prayer?

Infert se sptus nebula (mirabile dictu) Per medics miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli,

A shadowy form looming out from the mists that have gathered over the ages past, we see him for a moment, and he is gone.

Fill up the gaps and tell all the tale, poet with the dreamy eyes, eyes that can pierce the gloom—poet with the mobile lips, lips that can speak with rhythmic utterance the revelations of the future or the past.

All the lonely ones, and all the childless ones, did not turn parsons we may be sure; yet it is good for us to believe that John Bonington's was not a solitary instance of a man coming out of the furnace of affliction softened, not hardened; purified, not merely blistered, by the fire.

Was Thomas Porter at Little Cornard somewhat past his prime when the plague came? It spared him and his old wife, it seems; but for his sons and daughters, the hope of his eld and the pride of his manhood, where were they? He and the good wife, cowering over the turf fire, did they dare to talk with quivering lips and clouded eyes about the days when the little ones had clambered up to the strong father's knee, or tiny arms were held out to the rough yeoman as he reached his home? "Oh! the desolation and the loneliness. No fault of thine dear wife—nor mine. It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good!"

Thomas Porter had a neighbour, one John Stone, a man of small substance: he owned a couple of acres under the lord; poor land it was, hardly paying for the tillage, and I suppose the cottage upon it was his own, so far as any man's copyhold dwelling was his own in those days. The Black Death came to that cottage among the rest, and John Stone and wife and children, all were swept away. Nay! not all: little Margery Stone was spared; but she had not a kinsman upon earth. Poor little maid, she was barely nine years old and absolutely alone! Who cared? Thomas Porter and his weeping wife cared, and they took little Margery to their home, and they comforted themselves for all that they had lost, and the little maid became unto them as a daughter. Henceforth life was less dreary for the old couple. But five years passed, and Margery had grown up to be a sturdy damsel and very near the marriageable age.

Oh, ho! friend Porter, what is it we have heard men tell? That when the Black Death came upon us, your house was left unto you desolate and there remained neither chick nor child. Who is this? Then some one told the steward, or told the lord, and thereupon ensued inquiry. What right had Thomas Porter to adopt the child? She belonged to the lord, and he had the right of guardianship. Aye! and the right of disposing of her in marriage too. Thomas Porter, with a heavy heart, was summoned before the homage. He pleaded that the marriage of the girl did not belong to the lord by right, and that on some ground or other, which is not set down, she was not his property at all. That might have been very true or it might not, but one thing was certain, Thomas Porter had no right to her, and so the invariable result followed—he had to pay a fine. What else ensued we shall never know.

The glimpses we get of the ways and doings of the old stewards of manors are not pleasing; I am afraid that as a class they were hard as nails. Perhaps they could not help themselves, but they certainly very rarely erred on the side of mercy and forbearance. Is not that phrase "making allowances for," a comparatively modern phrase? At any rate the thing is not often to be met with in the fourteenth century. Yet in the plague year every now and then one is pleased to find instances actually of consideration for the distress and penury of the homagers at this place and that. Thus at Lessingham, when the worst was over and a court was held on the 15th of January, 1350, the steward writes down that only thirty shillings was to be levied from the customary tenants by way of tallage, "Because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence."

Here and there, too, we come upon heriots remitted because the heir was so very poor, and here and there fines and fees are cancelled causa miseri propter pestilentiam. Surely it is better to assume that this kind of thing was done, as our friend Bonington puts it, mero motu pietatis su than because there was no money to be had. Better give a man the benefit of the doubt, even though he has been dead five hundred years, than kick him because he will never tell any more tales.

If it happened sometimes that the plague brought out the good in a man, sometimes changed his life from one of covetous indifference or grasping selfishness into a life of earnestness and devout philanthropy, it happened at other times—and I fear it must be confessed more frequently—that coarse natures, hard and cruel ones, were made more brutal and callous by the demoralizing influences of that frightful summer.

I am sure it will be very gratifying to some enlightened and chivalrous people to learn that I have at least one bad story against a parson.

Here it is!

The rolls of the manor of Waltham show that the plague lingered about there till late in the spring of 1350. As elsewhere, there must needs have been much change in the benefices of the neighbourhood. Of course some of the new parsons were scamps, the laity who survived being, equally of course, models of all that was lovely and estimable. One of these clerical impostors had got a cure somewhere in the neighbourhood—where is not stated, but, inasmuch as his clerical income had not come up to his expectations or his necessities, or his own estimate of his deserts, he found it necessary to supplement that income by somewhat unprofessional conduct. In fact, the Rev. William—that was his name—seems actually to have thrown up his clerical avocations and by his flagrant irregularities had got to himself the notorious sobriquet of William the One-day priest. I should not be surprised to find out that this worthy was captain of a band of robbers who infested Epping Forest. In the end of January, 1351. Matilda, wife of John Clement de Godychester, was quietly riding homewards when, as she passed by the sheepfold of Plesset, out came the Rev. William and bade the lady stand and deliver. Her attendants, it is to be presumed, took to their heels, and the lady, being unable to help herself, delivered up her purse—the account says the Rev. William cut it off—and moreover surrendered a ring of some value, after which she continued her journey. She raised the hue and cry to some purpose, and the clerical king of the road was taken and... there is no more. No! It is a story without an end.

But there were then, as there are now, other ways of preying upon our fellow-creatures and levying blackmail from them, without going to the length of highway robbery—cold work, and a little risky at times.

Henry Anneys, at Lessingham, could work upon the fears of Alice Bakeman and extort a douceur from her without resorting to violence. Mrs. Bakeman had succeeded to the property of some dead kinsman, and Mr. Anneys heard of it. He called on the lady and informed her that for a consideration he would save her from paying any heriot to the lord; he had certain information which he could use either way. Finally, it was agreed that Alice should give the rogue a cow as hush-money, and with the cow Mr. Anneys departed. His triumph was brief. When the time for holding the next court arrived, others came round the poor woman, and made it quite evident that the lands she had succeeded to were not heriotable at all, and that Henry Anneys was a swindler. So the case was brought before the homage as usual, the cow was ordered to be returned, and a substantial fine imposed upon Anneys.

Almost the first thing that strikes a novice who looks into the village history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the astounding frequency of bloody quarrels among the rustics. In the records of the Courts Leet for Norfolk it is very seldom indeed, that you can find a court held at which one or more persons, male and female, are not amerced for "drawing blood" from somebody. Whether it was by punching their opponents on the nose, or whether they used their knives, I hesitate to decide; but I suspect, from the frequent mention of knives and daggers, that sticking one's enemy with cold steel was not so very un-English a practice as popular prejudice is wont to assume it to be. One thing is very certain, and that is—that all over East Anglia, five hundred years ago, there was such an amount of bloodletting in village frays as would hardly have disgraced the University of Heidelberg. In Norfolk these sanguinary fights must have been a passion; but one would have thought that, while the plague was raging and after it had begun to subside, then, if ever, men and women would have become less savage and ferocious. So far from it, such records of the years 1349 and 1350 as I have examined are fuller than ever of fights and quarrels At Lessingham, about Christmas time, 1349, there was a free fight of a most sanguinary character, men and women joining in it freely. It seems to have arisen from some one finding a horse wandering about the deserted fields. As a stray it belonged to the lord—the finder took a different view, somebody cried "Halves!" and somebody else said, "Til give information," and somebody else replied, "So will I," whereupon arose a bloody battle as has been told. About the same time at Hunstanton, Catherine Busgey, evil-disposed old hag that she was, had stript a dead man of his leather jerkin. Did she proceed to wear the manly attire that she might be dagger-proof for the next encounter? Rash woman! The dead man's friends recognized the well- known coat, it was forfeited and delivered over to the lord.

It might well be supposed that, while the whole executive machinery of the country was being subject to a tremendous strain, there would be in some districts a condition of affairs which differed very little from downright anarchy. Yet here, again, the existing records are surprisingly free from any evidence tending to support such an assumption, England was not governed by the Home Secretary in those days. Every parish was a living political unit with its own police and its own local government. However desirable it may appear to some to bring back such a state of things, the question nevertheless remains how far it is ever possible to revivify an organization which has long since died a natural death. That, in the fourteenth century, the country districts governed themselves there can be no doubt at all; with what results, as far as the greatest happiness of the greatest number is concerned, this is not the time or the place to inquire or to decide. Yet I cannot withhold my conviction that, if any such gigantic calamity were to fall upon our people now as fell upon them when the Black Death swept over the face of the land five centuries ago—a calamity so sweeping, so overwhelming—its consequences upon the whole social fabric would be incomparably more disastrous than it was in times when centralization was almost unknown and practically impossible. Be it as it may, since the days when the Roman Senate passed a vote of confidence in a beaten general because he had not despaired of the republic, I know nothing in history that impresses a student more profoundly with a sense of the magnificent self-possession, self-control, and self-respect of a suffering nation, under circumstances of unexampled agony and horror, than the simple prosaic annals which remain to us of the great plague year in England.

In only one district in Norfolk have I found evidence of any widespread lawlessness. Even there one hears of it only to hear of vigorous grappling with the ruffians, who were not allowed to have it all their own way.

The hundred of Depwade, lying to the south of Norwich, contains twenty-three parishes; and at the time we are concerned with had very few resident gentry of any consideration. Then, as now, the country parsons were the most important people in the district, and the benefices were above the average in value. In the summer and autumn, at least fifteen of these clergymen fell victims to the plague; among them the rector of Bunwell and the vicar of Tibenham, adjoining parishes. The vicarage was a poor one; it was worth no one's holding; the rectory had been held by William Banyard, a near relative of Sir Robert Banyard, lord of the manor; the plague carried him off in July, and his successor was instituted on the 25th of the month, but does not seem to have come into residence immediately. There had been a clean sweep of the old incumbents from all the parishes for miles round; the poor people, left to themselves, became demoralized; there seems to have been a general scramble, and for a while no redress anywhere. It is recorded that the cattle roamed at will over the standing corn with none to tend them, and that there had been none to make the lord's hay; that among others who had died there were five substantial men among the homagers on whose lands heriots of more or less value were due; but no heriot was recoverable, inasmuch as since the last court certain persons unknown had plundered all that could be carried off—cattle and sheep and horses and goods, and there was nothing to distrain upon but the bare lands and the bare walls.

It may be presumed that where a scoundrel escaped the contagion altogether, while others were dying all round him, or where another recovered after being brought to death's door, in such cases the man would, as a rule, be a person of exceptional strength and vigorous constitution. Such fellows, when the evil spirit was upon them, would be ugly customers to deal with. Gilbert Henry, of Tibenham, was a somewhat audacious thief when he walked into John Smith's house, where there was none alive to bar the door, and carried off certain bushels of malt and barley, with other goods not specified; and, not content therewith, stripped the dead man of his coat and waistcoat. The value of these articles of apparel was not assessed very highly— only sixpence each—and Master Gilbert, after paying the price of the garments, seems to have gone away with them. It is hardly to be wondered at that neither steward nor lord greatly coveted that coat and waistcoat. At the same court, too, William Hessland was amerced for appropriating the few trumpery chattels of Walter Cokstone, a villein belonging to the lord. Another wretched pair—a man and his wife—had deliberately cleared a crop of oats off an acre and a half of land, and stacked it in their own barn. Their view was that it belonged to no one; the steward took a different view, and reminded them that what grew on no man's land was the property of some one other than the smart man who ventured to lift it.

It was at Bunwell, too, that William Sigge was by way of becoming a terror to his neighbours. It was laid to his charge, generally, that he had from time to time during the pestilence carried off and appropriated various articles of property (diversa catalla) too numerous to specify. They must have been a very miscellaneous lot, for they included several hurdles and the lead stripped off a dead man's roof, not to mention such trifles as garments and pots and pans. Sigge was a very successful plunderer, and, his success rather turned his head. When the autumn of 1350 came, he refused to do his autumn service, protested that there was none to do, and was fined accordingly; not only so, but he was found to have stubbed up a hedge which had been the boundary of the land of Robert Attebrigge, who had died with no one to represent him. The women were as bad as the men; they had their rights in those days. One of these beldames was caught walking away with a couple of handmills from a plague-struck dwelling, and another had looted a tenement where John Rucock's corpse lay; she too had stripped the dead!

It is not a little curious to notice how that love of going to law which old Fuller two hundred years ago remarked upon as a characteristic of Norfolk men comes out again when the confusion had begun to subside. The plague is no sooner at an end than the local courts are resorted to for the hearing of every kind of odd question which the complications arising from the abnormal mortality had occasioned.

When Edward Burt died at Lessingham, he left his widow Egidia all he had; but he owed Margery Brown the sum of thirty shillings. Egidia at once provided herself with a second husband, and surrendered herself and her belongings to Edward Bunting. Mrs. Brown applied for her little bill. Egidia, now no longer a widow, but lawful wife of Mr. Bunting, repudiated the debt; she was widow no longer, she had become the property of another man; the debt, she pleaded, was buried in her first husband's grave. That little quibble was soon overruled. But there were often cases which were by no means so easily disposed of. Robert Bokenham was lord of the manor of Tibenham, and Robert Tate was one of his tenants. Tate died; then Bokenham died. Bokenham's son was only nine years old, and no guardian had been appointed when Tate's son died. Then followed a dispute as to who was guardian of young Bokenham, and of whom Tate's land was held, and who was the true heir. A pleasant little brief there for a rising barrister to hold.

A complication of much the same kind arose at Croxton. William Galion, a man of some consideration, died in July, leaving his wife Beatrix with two sons; but he died intestate..Beatrix had just time to pay a heavy fine to the lord for the privilege of being her eldest son's guardian when the plague took her. Before she died she left the guardianship of her first-born son John to her husband's brother Adam; a few days afterwards the boy John died, and his brother Robert alone remained; the guardianship of the boy John is of course at an end, and uncle Adam applies for the guardianship of the surviving nephew; but by this time he is unable to find the money; whereupon the child's estate is taken into the hands of the lord till such time as the uncle can pay the fees demanded.

Walter Wyninge had a wise woman for his wife, and her name was Matilda. The Black Death left her & widow, but she speedily married without any license from the lord to William Oberward. The second husband had a very brief enjoyment of his married life; in a few days he too died, and Matilda married a third husband, one Peter the carpenter. At this point Matilda's turn came and she died. All this had happened in the interval of two months since the last manor court was held. The steward of the manor claimed a heriot from Wyninge's land and another from Oberward's. But the astute Peter was equal to the occasion: he pleaded that, according to the custom of the manor, no heriot could be levied from a widow till she had survived her husband a year and a day, and he demanded that the court rolls should be searched to confirm or correct his assertion. I suspect he knew his business, and no heriot came to that grasping steward. Who pities him?

Ladies and gentlemen of the romantic order of mind will be shocked at the indelicacy of Mistress Matilda—she of the many names. I suspect that they would be shocked by a great many things in the domestic life of England five centuries ago. Marrying for love has a sweet sound about it, but the thing did not exist in the old days. When did it exist? History is very hard upon romance; History, disdaining courtesy, lifts one veil after another, opens closed doors, reveals long-buried secrets, turns her bull's-eye upon the dark corners, and breaks the old seals. She is very cynical, and will by no means side with this appellant or with that. Beautiful theories crumble into dust when they stand before her judgment-seat, and old dreams, offspring of brains that were wrestling with slumber in the darkness, pass away as the dawn comes, bringing with it, too often, such revelations as are not altogether lovely to dwell on. In the fourteenth century an unmarried woman was a chattel, and belonged to somebody who had the right to sell her or to give her away. That is the naked truth. You may make a man an offender for a word if you will, and object that "sell" is an incorrect term; but the fact remains, however much some may—

leave the sense their learning to display, And some explain the meaning quite away.

Hence, when a wretched woman was mourning alone over the husband who had just been hustled into his grave, the men were after her like wolves, every one of her neighbours knowing exactly what she was worth even to the fraction of a rood of land, or the last lamb that had been dropped, or the litter of pigs that were rootling up the beech-nuts in the woods. They gave her short time to make up her mind. Sentiment? We in the East—the land of the wise men since time was young—we know nothing of sentiment. We can hate with a sullen tenacity of resentment which knows no forgiveness; but love—nay we leave that for the "intense" of other climes. And women in the good old times—positively women—love one man more than another? What they?

"Whose love knows no distinction but of gender, And ridicules the very name of choice!"

Why, where were you born?

The records of the marriages on the court rolls of the plague year are hardly more startling than the deaths. Whether men and women paid less to the lord for a license than they were compelled to pay if they married without license I cannot tell; but that hundreds of widows must have married only a few weeks or a few days after their husbands' deaths is clear. Matilda's case was not a rare one. Alice Foghal, at Lessingham, was another of those ladies who in a couple of months had been the property successively of three husbands—the last was actually a stranger. Where he came from is not stated, but he sate himself down by the widow's hearth, claimed it as his own, and paid a double fee for his successful gallantry. How he managed the matter remains unexplained, but young brides were plentiful in the parish just about that time; and at the same court where Alice's matrimonial alliances were compounded for, no less than fifteen other young women paid their fees for marrying without license from the lord. I have only noticed one instance of anything like remission of marriage fees, though I hope it was less uncommon than appears on the rolls. The lady in this case was a butcher's widow, and it was too much to expect that she could wait till the next court, wherefore the steward graciously knocked off seventy-five per cent. of his due; and, in lieu of two shillings, charged her only sixpence—ratione temporis et in misericordia, as he sententiously observes. Magnanimous steward!

I have met with no evidence leading to the belief that anywhere in the country villages there was anything approaching to a panic. Only a novice would be led astray by what he might read occurred at Coltishall. Five brothers named Gritlof and two other brothers named Primrose, being nativi, i.e., villeins born, and so the property of the lord, had decamped whither none could tell; the court solemnly adjudicated upon the case, and decreed that the seven runaways should be attached per corpora, whatever that may mean. But Coltishall is barely five miles from Norwich, and from the villages round the great city the villeins were always running away in the hopes of getting their freedom if they could keep in hiding within the city walls for a year and a day. Oh, ye seven, had the yellow primrose less charm for you, and the barley loaves that were sure for you in breezy Coltishall—gritty though they might be— less charm than the garbage that might be picked up in Norwich, in its noisome alleys reeking with corruption, and all that flesh and blood revolts from? Ah! but to be free—to be free! How that thought made their poor hearts throb!

That there was panic—mad, unreasoning, insensate panic—elsewhere than in the country villages there is abundant evidence to prove, but it was among the well-to-do classes—the traders and the moneyed men, bourgeoisie of the towns—that a stampede prevailed. Any one who chooses may satisfy himself of this by looking into Rymer's Faedera, to go no further.

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Enough has been told in the foregoing pages to illustrate the overwhelming violence with which the Great Plague ran its career in East Anglia. Only a small part of the evidence still ready to our hands has been examined; but if no more were scrutinized, the impression left upon us of the severity of the visitation would be quite sufficiently appalling. It is, however, when an attempt to estimate the immediate effects and the remoter consequencs that followed that our difficulties begin.

Before a man is qualified to dogmatize upon those effects, he must have gone some way towards making himself familiar with the social and economic conditions of the country during at least the century before the plague. Unfortunately the history of economics in England has never been attempted by any one at all duly qualified for dealing with so complex and difficult a subject, and the crudest theories have been substituted for sound conclusions, then only to be accepted when based upon the solid ground of ascertained fact. In the childhood of every science dogmatism precedes induction, and in the absence of clear knowledge, foolish and wild-eyed visionaries have posed as discoverers again and again. Yet bluster and audacity have their use, if only to stimulate the timid and the dilatory to quicken their pace and move forwards. For my part, however, if it be necessary to choose between the two, I should prefer to err with the slow and cautious rather than with the rash and over-bold; the former may for a while serve as a drag upon the chariot wheels of progress, the latter are sure to thrust us out of the road and land us at last in some quagmire whence it will be very hard to get back into the right track.

The great teacher who, with his transcendent genius, has done more to create a school of English history than all who have gone before him, who, in fact, has made English history, not what it is, but what it will be, when his influence shall have permeated our literature, has spoken on this subject of the Black Death with his usual profound suggestiveness. The Bishop of Chester looks with grave distrust upon any theory which ascribes to the Great Plague as a cause "nearly all the social changes which take place in England down to the Reformation: the depopulation of towns, the relaxation of the bonds of moral and social law, the solution of the continuity of national development caused by a sort of disintegration in society generally." [Footnote: "Constitutional History," vol. ii. chap. xvi. p. 399, Section 259, edit. 1875.] And yet this appalling visitation must have constituted a very important factor in the working out of those social and political problems with which the life of every great nation is concerned. Such problems, however, are not simple ones; rather they are infinitely complex; and he who would set himself to analyse the processes by which the ultimate results are arrived at will blunder hopelessly if he takes account of only a single unknown quantity.

I. It is obvious that the sudden exhaustion of the large reserve force of clergy must have made itself felt at once in every parish in England. In the diocese of Norwich a considerable number of the parsons who died belonged to the gentry class. Then, as now, there were family livings to which younger sons might hope to be presented, and were presented, as vacancies occurred; but, in the face of the sudden and widely extended mortality, it was inevitable that appointments should be made with very little reference to a man's social grade or intellectual proficiency. Patrons had to take whom they could get. This of itself would tend to a deterioration in the character of the clergy; but this was not all. The clergy died; but other holders of offices, civil and ecclesiastical, were not spared. There was a sudden opening out of careers in every direction for the ambitious and the unemployed: young men who ten years before would never have dreamt of anything but "resorting to holy orders," turned their eyes to other walks and adopted other views; and it is plain that a large number of those who presented themselves for admission to the clerical profession as we now understand it, in many instances belonged to a lower class than their predecessors. Some were devout and earnest, such country parsons as Chaucer described—he does not turn aside to caricature them—but others were mere adventurers, hirelings whose heart was not in their work. These clerical scamps gave Archbishop Simon Islip a great deal of trouble. The smaller livings were forsaken, the curate market rose, the chaplains would neither take the country vicarages nor engage themselves as regular helpers to the parish priests. London swarmed with itinerants who preferred picking up a livelihood by occasional duty, when they could make their own terms, to binding themselves to a cure of souls. [Footnote: Compare Chaucer's words—"He sette not his benefice to hire, And lette his sheep accombred in the mire, And ran unto London, into Seint Paules To seken him a chanterie for Soules"—-with Wilkins' "Concilia," vol. iii. I.] The primate denounced these greedy ones again and again, but it was all in vain; the bishops found it impossible to draw the reins of discipline as tightly as they wished, and found it equally impossible to prevent the extortionate demands of such curates as could be got. The evil grew to such a height that the faithful Commons took the matter up and petitioned the King to interfere, inasmuch as "les chappeleins sont devenuz si chers" that they actually demanded ten or even twelve marks a year as their stipend—"a grant grevance & oppression du poeple." The usual methods were resorted to, and if people could be made good by Act of Parliament the evils complained of would have disappeared. They did not disappear, and the evil grew. Unhappily the increased stipends did not serve to produce a better article, and it is only too plain that the religious convictions and the religious life of the people suffered seriously. Ten years after the Black Death the Archbishop expresses his deep sorrow at the neglect of Sunday, the desertion of the churches and the decline in religious observances. Yet we must be cautious how we attribute this break-up in the old habits of the people to the plague exclusively, or even mainly. Some of the evils complained of had already begun to be felt before the plague came, and may fairly be attributed, not to the falling short of the numbers of the clergy, but exactly the reverse.

Already a strong reaction had set in against the friars, their influence and their teaching had begun to be regarded as menacing to the stability of existing creeds and existing institutions. Langland hated them. Chaucer held them up to scorn. Wickliffe denounced them with a righteous wrath. Fitz-Ralph, Archbishop of Armagh, carried on open war against them. All these leaders of the chosen bands that fight the battles of God had arrived at man's estate when the Black Death came, and all survived it. They certainly were not the product of the great visitation; they were the spokesmen and representatives of a generation that had begun to look at the world with larger, other eyes than their fathers. That which was coming would have come if there had been no plague at all, and so far from its being certain that that calamity was in any great degree the cause of the upheaval that ensued, it is at least as probable that the sudden decrease in the population served to retard the action of forces already working mightily in the direction of revolution—revolution it might be for the better, or it might be for the worse.

2. Whoever else may have been losers or sufferers by the plague, there was one class which emerged from that dreadful year very much richer than before. The lords of the manors, the representatives of what we now call the country gentry, were great gainers. Not only did the extraordinary amount paid in heriots and fees make up an aggregate which in itself constituted a very large percentage upon the capital embarked in agriculture, but the extent of land which escheated to the lords was very considerable. Moreover, the manors themselves, or as we should say, the landed property of the country, came into fewer hands; the gentry became richer and their estates larger. Knighton draws attention to the fact that in the towns a large number of houses became ruinous for want of occupants, but he adds that in the hamlets and villages the same effects followed, and that everywhere. Here again, the rolls of Parliament corroborate the assertion and inform us that not only the dwellings of the homagers but the capital mansions themselves, were deserted and falling to decay. When, in the next reign, the manor of Hockham came into the possession of Richard, Earl of Arundel, in right of his wife, he took the precaution of having a careful survey made of the condition of the estate as it came into his hands. The manor-house had not been tenanted for thirty years. It had been a mansion of considerable pretension and two stories high; on the ground-floor the doors were all gone; on the upper floor the windows were open to the air; the chamber "vocata ladyes chambre" was roofless, the offices were too dilapidated to be worth repair. The enclosing walls and the moat had been utterly neglected. The offices had formerly been adapted for a large establishment; there had been extensive farm buildings, and at least six substantial houses for the bailiff and other farm servants. Among other buildings there were two fishouses built of timber and daubur, in which apparently the keeper of the fishponds lived, and some elaborate arrangements had existed for keeping up the supply of fish in the ponds by methods of pisciculture to us unknown. The windmill had long ceased to be used, its very grinding stones had disappeared. Worse than all, there was no more any gallows or pillory, or even stocks, pro libertate servanda, as the jurors quaintly remark. Yet the records show that at Hockham things had gone on pretty much as before since the big house was deserted. The courts were held with exemplary regularity, the fees had been exacted with unwavering rigour, the homagers settled their own affairs in their own way; but there was this difference, that for a generation the tenants had been living under an absentee landlord, who so far from being the poorer because the big house had been tumbling down, was the richer, inasmuch as he had one mansion the less to keep up out of his income. What happened at Hockham must have happened in hundreds of other parishes; there must have been large tracts of country during the latter half of the reign of Edward the Third where a resident landlord was the exception to that which aforetime had been the rule.

* * * * * * *

3. In the present condition of our knowledge, any estimate of the actual numbers who perished in the plague must be the merest guesswork. It may be that two millions were carried off; it may be there were three. It is undeniable that a very large proportion of the inhabitants of this island died in a few months—employers and employed. We must, however, remember that England in the fourteenth century was incomparably more self-supporting than it is in the nineteenth century; that there were no great centres of industry then; that the rural population was largely in excess of the urban population; that we exported the wool which the Flemings manufactured into cloth; and that if there were fewer hands to till the soil, there were fewer mouths to feed. No one can doubt that the labour market must have been seriously disturbed, but it is very easy to exaggerate this disturbance; and whether it were less or more than has been asserted, we shall certainly err by attributing the rise in wages, which undoubtedly took place after the Black Death, to it, and to it alone—post hoc ergo propter hoc is not a safe conclusion. Granted, as we must grant, that the plague accelerated the rise in wages, it is certain the upward movement had already begun before the population had been seriously lessened. The number of clergy, to be sure, was largely in excess of the needs of the country; the clerical profession had become "choked" by the influx of young men presumably with some private means to fall back upon; among them there must have been, and there was, serious competition for every vacant post. When the reserve of supernumeraries became absorbed, the competition turned the other way, and the surviving clergy could make their own terms. It was otherwise with the masses, especially with the peasantry. If there were an insufficient number of labourers to till the land heretofore in cultivation, the worst land fell out of cultivation, and no one was much the worse. It was all very well for some landlords to complain that their rents had fallen off. Yes! Then—as now, as always—the small proprietors suffered severely, and needy men are wont to be clamorous. Then—as now, as always— the sufferers looked about them for a cause of their distress, and found it in any event that was nearest at hand. But we know that the style of living after the plague was incomparably more luxurious and extravagant than it was before. The country was producing less, it may be; but the people, man for man, were much richer than before.

When we find ourselves confronted with the rhetorical stuff which the literature of preambles and parliamentary petitions in the fourteenth century flaunts so liberally before our eyes, we must learn to accept the statements of draughtsmen cum grano, and to read between the lines. The Commons were quite equal to making the most of any calamity that occurred. When the Parliament, which had not met since mid Lent, 1348, assembled once more in February, 1350, the plague was not forgotten. In the petitions presented to the King, the havoc wrought is dwelt upon and deplored, not with a view to remedy any of the distress that had ensued, but in the hope that the arrears of taxation due from the dead might be excused to the survivors who had succeeded to the others' property. If they complain of the scarcity and dearness of corn, this is to give point to their protest against the King's servants taking it for the victualling of his army and the town of Calais. If, again, they sound a note of alarm at the outrageous insolence of the labourers who presumed to demand a large increase of wage, and would not work at the old scale of pay, there is no pretence that the employers could not afford to accede to the increased demand; the "grand meschief du poeple" consisted in this, that the tillers of the soil should have dreamt of asserting themselves in any way whatever. Moreover, when it came to legislating against the mutinous labourers, King and Parliament, while sternly setting their faces against the rise in wages, do not take the twenty-third year of the King as the standard year by which to settle what the normal rate of wages should be. They go back to the twentieth year, ou cynk ou sis ans devans. That is to say, the wages had been steadily rising for ten years before the plague; the labourers had been getting their share of the increased prosperity of the country; and the Statute of Labourers was only one of the clumsy attempts to interfere with the action of a great economical law which had been working silently for the advantage of the operatives long before the Black Death had come to perplex and confuse men's minds and disturb their calculations.

* * * * * * *

Some of us remember when the science of geology was young—and we were young too—we remember how there was a certain romance and fascination about those fearless and richly imaginative theories which explained all the great changes in the crust of the earth by magnificent cataclysms, upheaving, exploding, overwhelming. The crack of doom meant something after all! What had been should be again. Old times had stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of systems, and the swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in the yawning abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself inside out. Alas! the cataclysm theories had to die the death, and we had to comfort ourselves with a dull prosaic dream of forces acting with infinite slowness, grinding, and evolving through unnumbered ages, the great laws working themselves out without haste or any tendency to those picturesque paroxysms which have a certain charm for us in our nonage. When Sociology shall have risen to the dignity of a science—and that day may come—I think she too will be chary of resorting to the cataclysm theory; she and her handmaid History will hardly smile approval upon pretenders who are anxious to discover a single efficient cause for results which a million influences have combined to bring about, or who assume that every new phenomenon must disturb the equilibrium of the world. To take up with theories first in the hope, and sometimes with the determination, that facts shall be found to support them at last, is the vice—I had almost said the crime—of too many of those who now are styled historians.

* * * * * * *

If at this point I leave to others the further pursuit of a subject which deserves a more comprehensive treatment than it has yet received, it is not because I have not much more that I could tell. If it be true that the proper study of mankind is man, it is at least as true that the proper study of Englishmen is the history of England; that, however, means a great deal more than is usually understood by the words. It means the history of English institutions, of the social, the intellectual, and the religious life of our forefathers—it means a great deal more than the life of our sovereigns, their wars, their virtues or their follies. Unhappily historic studies in England, notwithstanding the splendid impetus that has been given to them of late by the brilliant achievements of some philosophic enquirers, receive but scant encouragement, and for the most part a man's labour must be his own reward. In our elementary schools History is almost utterly ignored. A whole people is rapidly breaking with the past from sheer ignorance that there is any past that is worth knowing. Who shall estimate the immeasurable harm that must be wrought to a nation that has lost touch with the past? Let men but believe, to their shame, that

The glories of our birth and state Are shadows, not substantial things,

and what becomes of patriotism? Granted, if you will, that English history has been made too often a dry and repulsive study by those who have undertaken to teach it and write it; need it remain so? It must remain so as long as we keep to the old lines and content ourselves with the old methods. What is wanted to make any science interesting is that it should push its inquiries into new fields of research. The means and appliances, and opportunities for pursuing historical researches open to those whose youth is not all behind them, are such as we, their seniors, never dreamt of when we were in our early manhood. There are whole worlds as yet unexplored and waiting to be won. Do men whimperingly complain that there is no longer a career for genius? Tush! It is enthusiasm that is wanted. Give us that, and the career will follow. But the enthusiasm must be of the real sort—not self-asserting, self-conscious, self-seeking; but earnest, patient, resolute, and reticent: for science, too, needs heroism no less than war.

In the domain of Physical Science there has been in our own time no lack of intelligent co-operation, and volunteers have been many and earnest, nor have they spared themselves or shrunk from sacrifices. In the domain of Historical Science the labourers are few and far between; there research proceeds with lagging steps. No one sneers at a philosopher who travels to Iceland to investigate the habits of a gnat, or who counts it the pride of his life to have discovered a new fungus, but simpletons are pleased to make themselves merry with caricaturing any student of his country's institutions who is "always poring over musty old parchments." And yet these minute researches will have to be made sooner of later, and till we can bring ourselves to study the structure and the tissues and the comparative anatomy of Institutions, and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards loathe and fools deride, the light of truth will be dim for us all; our Ethical, equally with our political Philosophy must remain in a condition of hopeless sterility. Nevertheless History too has her mission, though her time has not yet come. It will not always be that the past will be to us "as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith I cannot, for it is sealed; and the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned."

No! It will not be always so.



VI.

THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY.

. . . . "so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising."

Some years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and pride it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic showman, and I am bound to say he showed us a great deal; but the most memorable moment of that instructive day was when he stopped before, what seemed to us, a respectable mansion in a respectable street, and announced to us that "you" was "the Free Kirk Univairsity." It was the first time in my life that I had heard four stone walls with a roof over them called a University. It was not long, however, before I discovered that I myself had been living with my head in a sack and, in more senses than one, had been of those

Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry, And all the world go by them.

Only so could it have come to pass that this new meaning for an old word had struck me as strange, not to say ludicrous.

Licuit semperque licebit Signatum praesente nota producere nomen.

Allowable? Yes! and much more than merely allowable; it is inevitable that as the ages roll we should attach new meanings to old words. And if this is inevitable, not the less inevitable is it that, when we desire to trace the history of the thing signified, we should be compelled to recur to the original meaning of the name by which the thing is designated.

A word at starting upon the remarkable book [Footnote: "The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton." By the late Robert Willis, M.A., F.R.S. Edited, with large additions, and brought up to the present time, by John Willis Clark, M.A., late Fellow of Trin. Coll., Camb. 4 vols. super-royal 8vo Cambridge: The University Press.] which has suggested the following article. To say of it that it is quite the most sumptuous work that has ever proceeded from the Cambridge Press, is to say little. It is hardly too much to say that it is one of the most important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The title of the work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of the encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it displays, and, least of all, of the abundance of human interest which characterizes it so markedly. It is because of this wealth of human interest that the book must needs exercise a powerful fascination upon those who have a craving to get some insight into the life of their forefathers; and it is because I believe the number of such students of history is in our times rapidly on the increase, that I am anxious to draw attention to some few of the many matters treated of so ably in these magnificent volumes.

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The term University, in its original acceptation, was used to designate any aggregate of persons associated in a political, religious, or trading corporation, having common interests, common privileges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the members of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or canons of a religious house, when addressed in formal instruments, were addressed as a University. Nay! when the whole body of the faithful is appealed to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made use of by lay or ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes or intentions, is "Noverit Universitas vestra." A University in this sense, regarded as an aggregate of persons, might be localized or it might not; its members might be scattered over the whole Christian world, or they might constitute an inner circle of some larger community, of which they—though a Universitas- formed but a part. A University in its original signification meant no more than our modern term an Association. When men associated together for purposes of trade, they were a trading Universitas; when they associated for religious objects, they were a religious Universitas; when they associated for the promotion of learning, they were a learned Universitas. But the men came first, the bricks and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in its merely technical and professional details, could only start at a point where the University, as an association of scholars and students, had already acquired power and influence, had been at work for long, and had got to make itself felt as a living force in the body politic and in the national life. It was because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the assumption that stonewalls make an institution, they professed to tell when the Universities came into existence and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern Magnum Opus have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us how "the glorious fellowship of living men," which constituted the personal University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by slow degrees into the brick-and- mortar Universities of the nineteenth—such Universities as are springing up all over the world; their teachers advertised for in The Times, and their students tempted to come and be taught in them by the bait of money rewards.

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As to the exact time when a band of scholars and teachers first made their home in Cambridge or Oxford, and began to attract to themselves from the four winds classes of eager youths hungry for intellectual food and anxious to listen and learn, that we must be content to leave undetermined. They who like the flavour of the old antiquarianism may enjoy it in its spiciest form, if they choose to hunt up among certain forgotten volumes now grown scarce. They may read what John Caius (pronounced Keys) wrote as the champion of Cambridge, and Thomas Caius wrote as champion of Oxford; they may rejoice their hearts over the Battle of the Keys, and come to what conclusion they prefer to arrive at. For most of us, however, this sort of old-world lore has lost its charm. A man lives through his taste for some questions. The student of history nowadays is inclined to say with St. Paul, "So fight I not as one that beateth the air," and to reject with some impatience the frivolous questions which help not a jot towards bringing us into closer relation with the life and personality of our ancestors.

"I am halt sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott;

and we, too, have grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs to the light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask for firm ground on which to plant our footsteps, if we would move onwards.

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It would have been very galling to the Oxford antiquaries of Queen Elizabeth's days to have to acknowledge that there was a Cambridge before there was an Oxford. Nevertheless the fact is so. Hide your diminished heads, ye rash ones who would fain have us believe that a thousand years before our era, King Mempric, the wicked king whom the wolves ate—as was right and fitting they should—built a noble city, which as time went on "was called Oxonia, or by the Saxons Oxenfordia." Alack! it turns out that we must make an enormous step along the course of time before we can find trace of any such city or anything like it. It turns out that "the year 912 saw Oxford made a fortified town, with a definite duty to perform and a definite district assigned to it." What! Seven years after the great Alfred had closed his eyes in death, and left to others the work which he had showed them how to do? Yes! Even so. It may be very hard to have to confess the odious crime of youth; but it seems almost capable of demonstration that Cambridge, as a fortress and a a town existed a thousand years before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery village, where a handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and laboriously manufactured earthenware pots. What have we to do with thee, thou daughter of yesterday? Stand aside while thine elder sister—ay, old enough to be thy mother—takes her place of honour. She has waited long for her historian; he has come at last, and he was worth waiting for.

In times before the Roman legionaries planted their firm feet in Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It contained about sixty acres; it was surmounted by one of those mighty earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer brute force, or rather by enormous triumph of organized labour. The Romans drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the place. Two of the great Roman roads intersected at this point, and the conquerors called it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining some portion of the old one. In their language it was known as Caniboritum. The primeval fortress stood on the left bank of the river, which some called the Granta and some called the Cam; and for reasons best known to themselves, the Romans did not think fit to span that river by a bridge, but they made their great Via Devana pass sheer through the river-as some Dutch or German Irrationalist has pretended that the children of Israel did when they found the Jordan barring their progress—that is, those Roman creatures constructed a solid pavement in the bed of the sluggish stream, over which less audacious engineers would have thrown an arch. Through the water they carried a kind of causeway, and the name of the place for centuries indicated that it was situated on the ford of the Cam. But what the Roman did not choose to do, that the people that came after him found it needful to do. In the Saxon Chronicle we find that the old fortress which the Romans had held and strengthened, and then perforce abandoned, had got to be called Granta-brygge; and this name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close. By this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the river, and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended by walls and gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses, and on the site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle, and in doing that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.

The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case. There were no monks at Cambridge at any time; there never were any nearer than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old times a long day's journey off, and accessible in the winter, if accessible at all, only by water. King Knut, we are told, greatly favoured the Abbey of Ely, visited it, was entertained there, in fact restored it. But at Cambridge there were no monks. No real monks; a fact which ought to be a significant hint to "all educated men," but which, unhappily, is likely to be significant only to the few who have taken the trouble to learn what a real monk professed to be. If there were no monks at Cambridge, there was something else. Outside the walls of the town there rose up, in the twelfth century, the priory of Barnwell-a priory of Augustinian canons; and, moreover, a nunnery-the Benedictine nunnery of St. Rhadegunda. Within the walls there was another house of Augustinians, which was known as St. John's Hospital; that is, a house where the canons made it part of their duty to provide a spurious kind of hospitality to travellers, much in the same way that the Hospice of St. Bernard offers food and shelter now to the wayfarer, and with such food and shelter something more—to wit, the opportunity of worshipping the Most High in peace, up there among the eternal snows. At St. John's Hospital, as at St. Bernard's, the grateful wanderer who had found a refuge would leave behind him his thankoffering in recognition of the kindly treatment he had met with, and it might happen that these free gifts constituted no small portion of the income on which the canons— for the most part a humble and unpretentious set of men-kept up their houses.

With the dawn of the thirteenth century came the great revivalists— the friars. Wherever the friars established themselves they began not only to preach, but to teach. They were the awakeners of a new intellectual life; not only the stimulators of an emotional pietism always prone to run into religious intoxication and extravagance. With the coming of the friars what may be called the modern history of Cambridge begins. Not that it can be allowed that there were no schools of repute on the banks of the Cam till the coming of the friars; it is certain that learning had her home at Cambridge long before this time.

As early as 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his Expugnatio Hiberniae in public lectures, and entertained the doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars. [Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's "Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned, but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars settled at Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was a suitable home for them there—an opening as we say—which the flourishing condition of the University afforded. There were scholars to teach, there were masters to dispute with, there were doctors to criticize, oppose, or befriend. Doubtless, too, there were already strained relations between the townsmen and the gownsmen at Cambridge as at Oxford. The first great "town and gown row" which we hear of took place at Oxford in 1209, but when we do hear of it we find the other University mentioned by the historian in close connection with the event recorded. The townsmen under great provocation had seized three of the gownsmen in hospitio suo and threw them into the gaol. King John came down to make inquiry, and he hung those three, guiltless though they were, as Matthew Paris assures us. Hereupon there was intense indignation, and the University dispersed. Three thousand of the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some to Cambridge we learn. Oxford for a while was deserted. This was fifteen years before the Franciscans settled among us. It was the year in which King John was excommunicated. There were only three bishops left in England; the king had worried all the rest away. There was misery and anarchy everywhere. Yet, strange to say, in the midst of all the bitterness men would have their sons educated, and the Universities did not despair of the republic. Shadowy and fragmentary as all the evidence is on which we have to rely for the history of the Universities during the twelfth century, it is enough to make us certain that the friars settled at Cambridge because there they found scope for their labours. There was undoubtedly a University there long before they arrived. Nevertheless, it is not till the middle of the reign of Henry the Third (A.D. 1216-1272) that we come upon any direct mention of a corporation which could be regarded as a chartered society of scholars at Cambridge, and it is difficult to resist the conviction that, whatever may have been its previous history, and however far back its infancy may date, the friars were to some extent nursing fathers of the University of Cambridge.

And this brings us again to the point from which we started a page or two back, and gives me the opportunity of quoting a passage from Professor Willis's introduction, which will serve at once as a continuation of and comment upon what has been said, while leading us on to what still lies before us.

The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned men, associated for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the privilege that no one should be allowed to teach within their dominion unless he had received their sanction, which could only be granted after trial of his ability. The test applied consisted of examinations and public disputations; the sanction assumed the form of a public ceremony, and the name of a degree; and the teachers or doctors so elected or created carried out their office of instruction by lecturing in the public schools to the students who, desirous of hearing them, took up their residence in the place wherein the University was located. The degree was in fact merely a license to teach; the teacher so licensed became a member of the ruling body.

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We have arrived at this point—we find ourselves at the beginning of the thirteenth century face to face with a University at Cambridge, a University which, existing originally in its inchoate condition of an association vaguely aiming at the improvement of the methods of education and the encouragement of scholars, had gradually grown into a recognized and powerful body, with direct influence and control over its members; a body, too, which had become so identified with the interests of culture and research that a change had already begun in the generally received acceptation of its name, and already the word "university" had begun to be restricted to such a Universitas as was identified with the life and pursuits of learning and learned men. This means that, pari passu with its increase in power, the University had grown too, in the number of its members—the teachers and the taught. The time had arrived when the demands of professors and students for adequate accommodation would become pressing. Lecturers with popular gifts would expect a hall capable of holding their audiences. Public disputations could not be held in a corner. Receptions of eminent scholars from a distance, and all those ceremonials which were so dear to gentle and simple in the middle ages, required space, and were the more effective the grander the buildings in which they were displayed, Yet how little the Cantabs of the thirteenth century could have dreamt of what was coming! What a day of small things it was! Six hundred years ago the giant was in his cradle.

Meanwhile, another need than that of mere schools and lecture-halls had begun to be felt. The scholars who came for what they could get from the teachers—the regents and the doctors—flocked from various quarters; they were young, they were not all fired with the student's love of learning; they were sometimes noisy, sometimes frolicsome, sometimes vicious. As now is the case at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, so it was then at Cambridge, the bonds of discipline were very slight; the scholars had to take their chance; they lodged where they could, they lived anyhow, each according to his means; they were homeless. It was inevitable that all sorts of grave evils should arise.

The lads—they were mere boys—got into mischief, they got into debt with the Jews; for there were Jews at Cambridge, not a few; they were preyed upon by sharpers, were fleeced on the right hand and on the left; many of them learned more harm than good. The elder men, and they who had consciences and hearts, shook their heads, and asked what could be done? For a long time the principle of laissez faire prevailed: the young fellows were left to the tender mercies of the townsfolk. There was no grandmotherly legislation in those days. Gradually a kind of joint-stock arrangement came into vogue. Worthy people seemed to have hired a house which they called a hostel or hall, and sub-let the rooms to the young fellows; the arrangement appears to have been clumsily managed, and led to dissensions between town and gown; the townsmen soon discovered that the gownsmen were gainers by the new plan, and they themselves were losers. They grumbled, protested, quarrelled. But it was a move in the right direction, and a beginning of some moral discipline was made, and that could not but be well. These hostels were set up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and how long before we cannot tell; but it was at Oxford that the first college, as we understand the term, rose into being. It was Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, who was the father of the collegiate system in England. So far from embarking upon a new experiment without careful deliberation, he spent twelve years of his life in working out his ideas and in elaborating the famous Rule of Merton, of which it is not at all too much to say that its publication constituted an era in the history of education and learning in England. Merton died in 1277. Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, who survived him nine years, appears to have been moved with a desire to do for Cambridge what Merton had done for Oxford. Balsham is spoken of as the founder of St. Peter's College, and in one sense he was so. The bishops of Ely were the patrons of Cambridge. Bishop Balsham asked himself what could be done, and set himself to deal with the problems which presented themselves for solution in the condition of his own University. He was not a great man, that seems clear enough: his schemes were crude; he bungled. The truth seems to me to be that the feeling at Cambridge was one of suspicion, and there are indications that the bishops of Ely in an awkward fashion were opposed to anything like secular education. We hear of money being left to support priests studying theology, and of an experiment for introducing scholars as residents in the Hospital of St. John. The canons were to take in the young scholars as boarders into their house, and look after their conduct and morals. The plan did not answer. It was an attempt to put new wine into old bottles. There came an explosion. Cambridge in the thirteenth century had not the men that Oxford had, so Oxford kept the lead. Perhaps there was some soreness. Did ecclesiastics shake their heads as they saw the walls of Balliol College rise, and learnt that there was just a little too much importance given to mere scholarship, and no prominence given to theology in those early statutes of 1282? Did they, without knowing why, anticipate with anxiety the awakening of a spirit of free thought and free inquiry among those scholars of the Merton, Rule? Did the orthodox party resort to prophecy, which is seldom very complimentary or cheerful in its utterances?

This is certain, that while Balliol College was building there was a stir among the Benedictines, and an effort made to assert themselves and take their place among the learned. John Giffard started his great college for the reception of student monks at Oxford. It became, and for centuries continued to be, the resort of the Benedictine order, and was supported by levies from a large number of the old monasteries. The inference is forced upon us that the English monasteries no longer stood in the front rank as seats of learning. Students and scholars would no longer go to the monks; the monks must go to the scholars. But the establishment of a seminary for the reception of young monks at Oxford tended to the strengthening of the ecclesiastical influence in that University. Cambridge lost in the same proportion that Oxford gained. Even the great Priory of Norwich sent its promising young monks to Qxford, passing by the nearer and more conveniently situated University. As early as 1288 we find entries in the Norwich Priory Rolls of payments for the support of the schools and scholars at Oxford. It was long after this that Cambridge offered any similar attraction to the "religious."

Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of what we now understand by a college. It was a novelty in English institutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in societies that were essentially religious in their character. Some of those societies, and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet homes of learning as well as of devotion; but the main business-the raison d'tre of monks and nuns and canons-was the practice of asceticism, the keeping up of unceasing worship in the church of the monastery—the endeavour to be holier than men of the world need be, or the endeavour to make the men of the world holier than they cared to be. The religious orders were religious or they were nothing. Each new rule for the reformation of those orders aimed at restoring the primitive idea of self-immolation at the altar—a severer ritual, harder living, longer praying. Nay! the new rules, in not a few instances, were actually aimed against learning and culture. The Merton Rule was a bringer in of new things. Merton would not call his society of scholars a convent, as the old monkish corporations had been designated. That sounded too much as though the mere promotion of pietism was his aim; he revived the old classical word collegium. There had been collegia at Rome before the imperial times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane objects. Why should not there be a collegium of scholars? Why should students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by his statutes that he did not intend to found a society after the old conventual type, but to enter upon a new departure.