“The third universall plauge was that which happened in the raigne of Justinian, and took its beginning in the yeare of Christ 532, and this also, as the former, is sayd to have descended from Æthiopia. Wee have a copious description of it by Procopius in his _Persicorum_, lib. 2. And we are informed by him that it raged very much in Byzantium, or Constantinople, for four months space, and that when it was in its height, there dyed of it every day 10,000 and upwards; and this is the pestilence related by Evagrius the ecclesiasticall historian, which lasted, as he says, fifty–two yeares, not continuall, but by severall returns and revolutions, and of this pestilence he was sick himselfe. And Greece shared not only in the contagion of it, but also Italy, as wee read in Paulus Diaconus, and it swept away Pope Pelagius, the predecessor of Gregory the Great, about the year 580; ffor I conceive this plauge to be that in the raigne of Justinian, propagated into remoter countreys, and lengthened out to this tearme, much according to the forementioned computation of Evagrius. It also overran Fraunce in the year 583, and this I conceive to be that which plauged the Britons here in that vacation betwixt the Romans government and the Saxons, in Vortigern’s tyme, when the living could scarce bury the dead. “The fourth œcumenicall plauge which I have taken notice of, was in the year 1347, ‘_quæ violentissima fuit, et totum mundum pervasit in annis sex et ita vastavit ut nec tertia pars hominum superesset_:’ they are the words of Calvisius, ‘it was most violent and ran over the world in six years, and soe wasted Europe that not the third part of men were left alive.’ To omit other parts, and see what it did at home in our owne countreye, Mr. Cambden reports in his Britannia, that in the yeare 1348 this plauge was soe hot that in Wallingford, in Barkshire, it dyspeopled the town, reducing their twelve churches to one or two, which they now retayne. In London it had soe quick an edge, that in the space of twelve months there was buried in one churchyard, commonly called the Cistercian, or Charter–house, above 50,000. They write further that through the kingdom it made such havock that it tooke away more than half the people; and it is noted there dyed in London alone, between the 1st of January and the 1st of July, 57,374. Soe Daniel, in 22, Edward III.”