- 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.
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Gedney, from Fleet.
