It began at Melcombe Regis in Dorset in the month of July, 1348, but did not reach Lincoln until May, 1349. It got to London in January of that year, and was at its height there in March, April, and May. In May, in the town of Newark, we read that “it waxes day by day more and more, insomuch that the Churchyard will not suffice for the men that die in that place.”
From his palace at Liddington, in Rutland, Bishop Gynewell went in May to consecrate a burial ground at Great Easton, which, being only a chapelry to the parish of Bringhurst, had no burial ground of its own. The licence was granted only during the duration of the pestilence. The bishop in his preamble says: “There increases among you, as in other places of our Diocese, a mortality of men such as has not been seen or heard aforetime from the beginning of the world, so that the old grave-yard of your church [Bringhurst] is not sufficient to receive the bodies of the dead.”
The enormous number of clergy who died in the Diocese of Lincoln is attested by the fact that in July alone 250 institutions were made and all but fifteen owing to deaths, a number which is considerably more than the whole for the first eighteen months of Bishop Gynewell’s episcopate. The average is over eight a day.
The most singular thing which the statistics point to, is that, on the high ground round Lincoln and in the parts of Lindsey the mortality among the clergy was far higher than in other parts of the diocese, whilst in the low lands and fens round Peterborough, and in the parts of Holland, the percentage of deaths was almost invariably low, twenty-seven and twenty-four per cent. as compared with fifty-seven for Stamford and sixty for Lincoln. The worst months in Lincolnshire were July and August, yet even then, in spite of the severity of the plague and the disorganisation which it occasioned in all the social and religious life of the age, ordinary business, we are told, went on, and the bishop never ceased his constant journeys and visitations to all parts of his enormous diocese, reaching as it did from Henley on the Thames to the Humber, and including besides Lincoln, the counties of Northampton, Rutland, Leicester, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford, Buckingham, and Oxford.
That the nation was not more depressed by this state of things was doubtless due to the feeling of national exaltation occasioned by the battle of Cressy in 1346, and the capture of Calais in the next year and the subsequent truce with France.
ITS EFFECT ON BUILDING
One of the results of this plague was the absolute cessation of work for want of hands, which threw land out of cultivation and suspended all building operations. At Gedney, as the architect who restored the church in 1898, Mr. W. D. Caröe, pointed out to me, the history of the Black Death is distinctly written on the tower, and you may plainly see where the fourteenth-century builders ceased and how, above the present clock, the work was recommenced by different hands, with altered design and quite other materials.
Gedney, from Fleet.