The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls somewhere between 1405 and 1407. “So great pestilence,” says the St Albans annalist, under the year 1407, “had not been seen for many years.” In London “thirty thousand men and women” are reported to have died in a short space; and “in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a numerous family were left almost empty[428].” But it is under the 7th of Henry IV. (1405) that Hall’s chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in Essex, and so to Plashey, “there to pass his time till the plague were ceased” (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues “because the town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are unable to pay the said ferme,” and for the cancelling of all arrears due since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. (1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent “that the said town is impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default of inhabitants in the said town”--a petition apparently similar in terms to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and Yarmouth; the former was “in great part empty and uninhabited,” while the latter had “its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other things.”