There is remarkably little to show how severely the plague affected the University at Cambridge. The only College which furnishes any useful material is King’s Hall where sixteen out of forty resident scholars died between April and August. But one can deduce that the losses among students must have been severe by what is known of events in the town of Cambridge. Though some of the damage may have been done by the second epidemic of 1361, an idea of the devastation is given by a letter from the Bishop of Ely written in 1366 which suggested the amalgamation of two of the city parishes on the grounds that there were not enough people left to fill even one of the churches. Practically the whole of the town on the Castle side of the river, ‘The Ward beyond the Bridge’, seems to have been wiped out. Most people in All Saints in Castro also died and the few parishioners left alive moved out. The nave of All Saints’ Church fell into ruins, leaving ‘the bones of the dead exposed to the beasts.’{339}
If eight hundred beneficed clergy died in East Anglia, well over twice as many priests must in all have perished. Taking into account subsequent desertions there must have been at least two thousand vacancies; nearly two thousand five hundred if Cambridgeshire be included. Given that this was a national and not a local problem and that all the other dioceses were in competition for the limited intake of new priests and remembering the diminished appeal of a priest’s métier when he could not even be guaranteed a living wage, it will be obvious that the task of replacing the dead was prodigious. That it was not altogether impossible is because the Church in 1348, like agriculture, seems to have been a decidedly over-manned profession. Far more of the land-owning families had unloaded their younger sons on the Church than the available parishes could comfortably accommodate and there was therefore a surplus of clergy in search of benefices which could be drawn on at least to plug the more attractive gaps.
But even allowing for this, it was more than the Bishops of Norwich and Ely could do to build up the numbers of their clerics without some loss of standard. Jessop denies that there was any serious decadence in the East Anglian church after the Black Death{340} but certainly the educational level of the new priests was lower than that of their predecessors and, even when they were literate, they were often middle-aged men with little sense of vocation but widowed by the plague and looking for some way to fill the rest of their lives.
Nor were all the new recruits as estimable as this. The Rev. William, priest of the manor of Waltham, was appointed early in 1350. His extra-parochial activities earned him the nickname of ‘William the One-day priest’, a title which he amply justified when he held up Matilda, the wife of John Clement de Gody-chester, and robbed her of her purse. For this offence he was arrested and, one must fear, eventually hanged. The Rev. William was certainly exceptional and such exceptions were not uniquely to be found in the mid-fourteenth century. Delinquent priests cropped up in every generation. But in the conditions of 1350 and 1351 it came as less of a surprise when priests behaved with a striking degree of impropriety. In East Anglia at least the reputation of the clergy stood lower after the plague than before it.
