[379] Cited in Owen and Blakeway’s History of Shrewsbury, II. 524: “per advenas qui in dicta villa post ultimam pestilenciam de novo sunt inhabitati ... at regimen dictae ville ad se attrahere ... machinantes.” By the “ultima pestilencia” could hardly have been meant the pestis secunda of 1361, the year of the patent, as the learned antiquaries suppose.
[380] Rotul. Parl. IV. 60. 7. The petition of Chesterton, near Cambridge: “And also they seiden that there was made gret waste in the same Manor of Chesterton of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a Shepcote or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses byside to putte in bestes.”
[381] “After the cessation of the Black Plague a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception prolific,” etc.
[382] Eulogium Historiarum, III. 213.
[383] Fasciculi Zizan. Rolls series, No. 5, ed. Shirley, p. 263: “Dimitto alias rationes palpabiles: quod exhinc regnum nostrum sensibiliter depauperetur pecunia; quod, praetextu subtractionis hujus thesauri, qui expenderetur in Anglia, decrescit populus;” etc.
[384] Political Songs and Poems, Ed. II.-Ric. II. Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright, I. 2. 53.
[385] The only monograph that I know is Peinlich’s Pest in Steiermark, 2 Bde. Graz, 1877-78. From 1349 to 1716, seventy years are marked in the annals of Styria as plague-years. Corradi gives the plague-years in Italy in his Annali.
[386] Guy de Chauliac for Avignon, in Häser, III. 176. Other foreign references in the same work.
[387] Political Songs and Poems. Ed. II.-Ric. II. Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright, I. 173, 190, &c.
[388] Ibid. I. 229, from a MS. in the library of Cambridge University.