…being the first to suffer from the dread disease which was later to carry off his monks. He began to feel the first symptoms on Maundy Thursday, but out of reverence for the festival and remembering our Lord’s humility, he celebrated High Mass and then, before taking his dinner, humbly and devoutly washed the feet of the poor. After he had taken his dinner he proceeded to wash and kiss the feet of all the brethren and to carry out all the offices of the day alone and without assistance. The next day when his sickness became worse, he took to his bed and, as a true Catholic, made his confession with a contrite heart and received the sacrament of extreme unction. Amidst the sorrow of all who surrounded him he endured until noon on Easter Day…. And there died at that time forty-seven monks…{320}
The neighbouring archdeaconry of Bedford lost 38.6 per cent of its beneficed clergy.{321} At Millbrook, to the south of the town of Bedford, the lord of the manor Peter de St Croix was among those who died. At the inquisition it was said that all the bondmen and cottars were dead and, a few months later, his son and heir Robert followed his father.{322} With incidents such as this a commonplace it is not surprising that Bedford, whose main function was to serve as a centre for the agricultural lands around it, lost drastically in prosperity. Certainly the general decline of the English rural economy began long before 1350 and would probably have continued even if there had been no epidemic but, in the case of Bedford at least, the County History believes the plague to have been the decisive factor. It took the town a hundred and fifty years to recover its former strength.
In East Anglia, arbitrarily defining this somewhat fluid concept to include Cambridgeshire as well as Norfolk, Suffolk and the north of Essex, the Black Death seems to have arrived in March 1349, reached its peak in May, June and July and died out during the autumn.{323} A typical case was that of the manor of Cornard Parva where nine deaths were recorded at the Court held on 31 March. By 1 May another fifteen were dead of whom seven left no heir; leaving the presumption, though by no means the certainty, that in such cases an entire family had been exterminated. By 3 November, after a long gap during which, presumably because of the plague, no Court was held, the parson and a further thirty-six tenants were dead, this time twenty leaving no heir. The lasting economic damage done by the Black Death was demonstrated in the market town of Sudbury in Suffolk. In 1340 there were 107 ancient stalls licensed for the weekly market. By 1361 the number had dropped to sixty-two.{324}
Yarmouth at this period was one of the most flourishing towns and certainly the leading sea-port of East Anglia. Seebohm believed that the population in 1348 must have been more than ten thousand{325} and Cardinal Gasquet, pointing out that Yarmouth had two hundred and twenty ships and furnished three times more sailors than London for the attack on Calais, argued that this estimate must be much too low.{326} Modern research, which almost always seems to lead to the reduction of earlier estimates, would on the contrary consider it decidedly too high. But the plague certainly wreaked terrible havoc and recovery was slow. At the beginning of the sixteenth century a petition of the burgesses to Henry VIII referred to the great pestilence: ‘by reason whereof the most part of the dwelling places and inhabitants of the said town stood desolate and fell into utter ruin and decay, which at this day are gardens and void grounds…’ The unfinished tower of St Nicholas, begun in the age of prosperity and abandoned when money and labour were alike lacking, pays tribute to the thoroughness with which the Black Death did its work.
