Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

272 THE BLACK DEATH.
and fields were alike deserted. The harvest, ripe
and abundant that year, rotted on the ground for
want of labourers. The whole occupation of the
living was the burying of the dead, and for that, so
great was the mortality, they did not suffice. The
statistics which have reached us may be taken as a
sample of what was going on all over England.
the plague burial ground near the Charterhouse
" 50,000 bodies were interred during twelve months.
From Candlemas to Easter 200 interments are said
to have taken place each day." l
The scourge fell most heavily on the Church. It
swept away two-thirds of the clergy, and decimated
religious houses * to so great an extent, that they had
not recovered either their numbers or their spiritual
tone at the Dissolution. One result of the Plague
wTas to depreciate land and to raise the price of
labour. The wages of labourers rose fifty per cent.
in consequence of the terrible visitation.2 The
monasteries ceased to be landlords on a large scale,
and the system of small land holdings was introduced.
" After the funerals of the laity," says a chronicler,
" I the officiating priests themselves were consumed
by the plague.''3 Norwich suffered very heavily.
During one year 863 livings of the diocese fell vacant
through the plague. This resulted in the appoint*
292.
1 Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, i. 4.
2 T. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and of Prices, i
3 Chronica de Melsa, iii.