In September things got to
their worst, and in this month the parson died, and was speedily
succeeded by another. When the court of the 16th of October sat, it
was found that in two months sixty-three men and fifteen women had
been carried off. In thirty-one instances there were only women or
children to succeed; in nine cases there were no heirs, and the
little estates had escheated to the lord. Incredible though it may
sound the fact is demonstrable, that in this one parish of
Hunstanton, which a man may walk round in two or three hours, and the
whole population of which might have assembled in the church then
recently built, one hundred and seventy-two persons, tenants of the
manor, died off in eight months; seventy-four of them left no heirs
male, and nineteen others had no blood relation in the world to claim
the inheritance of the dead.
I have no intention of laying before my readers a detailed statement
of the documentary evidence which has passed under my notice. The
time has not come yet for an elaborate report on the case, nor can I
pretend to have done more than break ground upon what must be
regarded still as virgin soil; but this I may safely say, that I have
not found one single roll of any Norfolk manor during this dreadful
23rd year of Edward, dating after April or May, which did not contain
only too abundant proof of the ravages of the pestilence--evidence
which forces upon me the conviction that hardly a town or village in
East Anglia escaped the scourge; and which in its cumulative force
makes it impossible to doubt that the mortality in Norfolk and
Suffolk must have exceeded the largest estimate which has yet been
given by conjecture.
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