Such an extensive and sudden destruction of life could not take place
without leaving its mark in many directions. Monasteries were
depopulated, and the value of their property and the strictness of
their discipline diminished. The need for priests led to the
ordination of those who were less carefully prepared and selected. The
number of students at Oxford and Cambridge was depleted; the building
and adornment of many churches suspended. The war between England and
France, though promptly renewed, involved greater difficulty in
obtaining equipment, and ultimately required new devices to meet its
expense. Many of the towns lost numbers and property that were never
regained, and the distribution of population throughout England was
appreciably changed.

But the most evident and far-reaching results of the series of
pestilences occurring through the last half of the fourteenth century
were those connected with rural life and the arrangement of classes
described in Chapter II.

The lords of manors might seem at first thought to have reaped
advantage from the unusually high death rate. The heriots collected on
the death of tenants were more numerous; reliefs paid by their
successors on obtaining the land were repeated far more frequently
than usual; much land escheated to the lord on the extinction of the
families of free tenants, or fell into his hands for redisposal on the
failure of descendants of villains or cotters. But these were only
temporary and casual results. In other ways the diminution of
population was distinctly disadvantageous to the lords of manors. They
obtained much lower rents for mills and other such monopolies, because
there were fewer people to have their grain ground and the tenants of
the mills could therefore not make as much profit. The rents of assize
or regular periodical payments in money and in kind made by free and
villain tenants were less in amount, since the tenants were fewer and
much land was unoccupied. The profits of the manor courts were less,
for there were not so many suitors to attend, to pay fees, and to be
fined. The manor court rolls for these years give long lists of
vacancies of holdings, often naming the days of the deaths of the
tenants. Their successors are often children, and in many cases whole
families were swept away and the land taken into the hands of the
lord of the manor. Juries appointed at one meeting of the manor court
are sometimes all dead by the time of the