oped at the
close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and the
panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been
amply justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then
formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its
repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where
filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and
fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased
for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the
Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been
interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the
living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the
villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the
priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich
two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization
of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands produced by the
terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to perform the services
due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by
the landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to refrain from the
abandonment of their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. "The
sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary,
"and there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst
of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous
diminution in the supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding
rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial
employments. Harvests rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled
not merely from scarcity of hands but from the strife which now for the
first time revealed itself between capital and labour.

[Sidenote: Its Social Results]

Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly felt as in its bearing
on the social revolution which had been steadily going on for a century
past throughout the country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a
manor had been reduced over a large part of England to the position of a
modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants and supplying
their place in the cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers. He
was driven