The Roll of the Manor Court is a
horrible record of the suddenness and the force with which the Black
Death smote the wretched Essex people. When the steward's day's work
was done, and the long, long list of the dead had been written down,
he added a note wherein he gives us the facts which have come down to
us; and then he adds that, inasmuch as he, John Bonington, had come
to see that the aforesaid horse had been unrighteously taken from
Richard Andrew six years before, and that the conviction of his own
iniquity had been brought home to his contrite heart, _as well by
the dreadful mortality and horrible pestilence at that time raging as
by the stirring of religious emotion within his soul,_ therefore
the full value of the horse was to be restored to the injured
Richard, and never again was heriot to be levied on his land. After
six years' hard riding and scant feeding, peradventure Richard Andrew
would rather have had the hard cash than the poor brute, which by
this time, probably, had died and gone to the dogs! A shudder of
penitence and remorse had thrilled through John Bonington when the
plague was stalking grimly up and down the land; and this is what we
learn about him--this and no more.
Had John Bonington lost _his_ wife; and was he meditating a life
of usefulness and penitence and prayer?
Infert se s?ptus nebula (mirabile dictu)
Per medics miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli,
A shadowy form looming out from the mists that have gathered over the
ages past, we see him for a moment, and he is gone.
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