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Updated: May 22, 2025
Then, as now, the country parsons were the most important people in the district, and the benefices were above the average in value. In the summer and autumn, at least fifteen of these clergymen fell victims to the plague; among them the rector of Bunwell and the vicar of Tibenham, adjoining parishes.
Their view was that it belonged to no one; the steward took a different view, and reminded them that what grew on no man's land was the property of some one other than the smart man who ventured to lift it. It was at Bunwell, too, that William Sigge was by way of becoming a terror to his neighbours.
When I find in a stray roll of an insignificant little manor at Croxton, near Thetford, held on the 24th of July, that seventeen tenants had died since the last court, eight of them without heirs; that at another court held the same day at Raynham, at the other end of the county, eighteen tenements had fallen into the lord's hands, eight of them certainly escheated, and the rest retained until the appearance of the heir; that in the manor of Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, which could not possibly have had four hundred inhabitants, fifty-four men and fourteen women were carried off by the pestilence in six months, twenty-four of them without a living soul to inherit their property; that in manor after manor the lord was carried off as well as the tenants and the steward; that in a single year upwards of eight hundred parishes lost their parsons, eighty-three of them twice, and ten of them three times in a few months; and that it is quite certain these large numbers represent only a portion of the mortality among the clergy and the religious orders when, I say, I consider all this and a great deal more that might be dwelt on, I see no other conclusion to arrive at but one, namely, that during the year ending March, 1350, more than half the population of East Anglia was swept away by the Black Death.
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