The plague had apparently fallen with the greatest virulence upon the
coast and along the watercourses, but already in the spring had
reached the neighbourhood of Norwich, and was showing an unsparing
impartiality in its visitation. At Earlham and Wytton and Horsford,
at Taverham and Bramerton, all of them villages within five miles of
the cathedral, the parsons had already died. Round the great city,
then the second city in England, village was being linked to village
closer and closer every day in one ghastly chain of death. What a
ring-fence of horror and contagion for all comers and goers to
overpass!
For two months Thomas de Methwold, the official, stayed where he had
been bidden to stay, in the thick of it all, at the palace. On the
29th of May he could bear it no longer. Do you ask was he afraid? Not
so! We shall see that he was no craven; but the bravest men are not
reckless, and least of all are they the men who are careless about
the lives or the feelings of others. The great cemetery of the city
of Norwich was at this time actually within the cathedral Close. The
whole of the large space enclosed between the nave of the cathedral
on the south and the bishop's palace on the east, and stretching as
far as the Erpingham gate on the west, was one huge graveyard. When
the country parsons came to present themselves for institution at the
palace, they had to pass straight across this cemetery.
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