With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under the year 1431, has an entry of “pestilence at Codycote and divers places of this domain in this year.” Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament contain a petition to the king “how that a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as experience daily showeth”--therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the king in doing knightly service, “and the homage to be as though they kissed you.” That may have been a plague both of town and country during famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as “Walsingham” expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots, which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of chronic diseases, 29. “Pestilence” appears to mean specifically bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately _propter infexionem_. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in