Grinstead, as well as other benefices out of England. [1] It may be that the officials who did the work of these archdeacons were quite con- scientious and efficient, even as the vicars who supplied the places of absentee rectors often proved to be faithful and devoted pastors ; but at the best it must have been an unsatisfactory state of affairs.
The Great Pestilence fell heavily upon all the Midland counties, and Buckinghamshire had to bear its full share of the burden of sorrow and suffering it brought with it. In the month of May 1349 the Episcopal Registers record four deaths amongst the clergy of the arch- deaconry : the numbers increase steadily through the summer months and rise to a total of seventy-seven in the year.[2] Some of these may have died from other causes than the plague ; on the other hand, some names may well have been omitted in the distress and difficulty of the time ; so that the number of actual victims of the pestilence cannot be exactly given. The accounts given by Matthew Paris and others lead us to suppose that the religious houses suffered severely at this time ; the prior of Bradwell and Luffield and the prioress of Ankerwyke in this county died during the summer of 1 349, and we may well believe that some of their subjects perished with them, though it is impossible to say how many.
As the violence of the pestilence abated, the first outward signs were seen of that great religious upheaval which, beginning from Oxford under the leadership of Wiclif, spread gradually along the northern shores of the Lower Thames, and produced indeed its most lasting as well as its most immediate effects in the Eastern Midlands. It is very improbable that Wiclif himself had any personal influence in Buckinghamshire while he was rector of Ludgershall, from 1368 to 1374.[3] His connexion with this county belongs to the earlier part of his career, when he did not disdain to be reckoned amongst absentee rectors, nor yet to seek and obtain a papal dispensation to hold his church in plurality with an expected canonry and prebend of Lincoln, and the prebend of Aust in Westbury.[4] He exchanged Ludgershall for Lutterworth in 1374, while he was still at Oxford, and may never have been in Buckinghamshire at all. But the opinions rightly and wrongly connected with his name clung with peculiar pertinacity to this part of England, as will be seen in the course of its history. A member of a well known Buckinghamshire family, Sir John Cheyne, was in 1397 condemned to suffer the death of a traitor with Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard chief, but at this time they were both pardoned at the intercession of the Lords, and their sentence was com- muted to perpetual imprisonment.[5] That branch of the Cheyne family which was settled at Chesham Bois[6] was associated with the Lollards
- ↑ Cal. of Pap. Letters, ii. 379, 384 ; iii. 362, 419, etc. He received at least four dispensations to visit his archdeaconries by deputy.
- ↑ Linc. Epis. Reg. Inst. Gynwell, 235-245.
- ↑ Fascicula Zizaniorum (Rolls Series), Introd. rxrviii.
- ↑ Cal. of Pap. Letters, iv. 193.
- ↑ English Chronicle (Camden Soc.), II.
- ↑ See Records of Bucks, vi. 297.
