So far as concerns the other large towns of England, they did not all fare alike. The capital was more luxurious, and probably not less populous, after the mortality than before it. The chancery and exchequer business alone would have served to draw numbers to it; and we may be sure, from all subsequent experience, that the gaps left by the plague were filled up by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three years. Nor does it appear from the poll-tax that York had suffered to anything like the same extent as Norwich; while Bristol and Coventry became towns of much greater consequence than before the plague. On the other hand, Lincoln is described, in a petition for relief in 1399 (1 Hen. IV.) as being “in the greater part empty and uninhabited.” In the same year, Yarmouth has its houses “vacant and void,” although, in 1369, it is said to have “gained so much upon Norwich” that it was made a seat of the wool-staple. Other towns which figure in petitions to Parliament as “impoverished and desolate of people,” are Ilchester (1407) and Truro (1410). Camden instances the ancient borough of Wallingford, on the Thames, as having been permanently reduced by the Black Death, although the inhabitants, he says, traced the decay of the town to the diversion of traffic over the new bridges at Abingdon and Dorchester[372]. Some parts of Cambridge would appear to have borne the traces of the pestilence for a number of years after. A charter of the bishop of Ely, dated 12 September, 1365, mentions that the parishioners of All Saints (on the north-east side) are for the most part dead by pestilence, and those that are alive are gone to the parishes of other churches; that the parishioners of St Giles’s (the adjoining parish, near the Castle) have died; and that the nave of All Saints is ruinous and the bones of dead bodies are exposed to beasts; therefore the bishop unites All Saints and St Giles’s[373]. At that time the churches of those parishes would have been small, perhaps not much larger than the little church of St Peter still standing on the high ground opposite to the great modern church of St Giles.