The steward made his entry of one fact only. Thus:-- "The Jurors do present that Simon Must died seized of a Messuage and 4 acres of land in Stradset, and that he has no heir. Therefore it is fitting that the aforesaid land be taken into the hands of the lord." Also that Matilda Stile... was she married or single, widow or mother or maid? What cared the precise man of business on that 24th of July, 1349, as his pen moved over the parchment?...--"Matilda Stile died seized of one acre and one rood of land held in Villenage. Therefore it is fitting that the aforesaid land be taken into the hands of the lord until such time as the heir may appear in court." He never did appear! Next year her little estate was handed over to another. She was the last of her line. Such entries as these swarm in the Court Rolls of this year 1349. They tell their own tale. But it is obvious that their tale is incomplete, and that we must form our own conclusions from the number of the deaths recorded as to the probable number of those whose names have been quite passed over, sometimes, too, these Rolls are eloquent in their silence. When country parsons were dying by scores and hundreds, and the tillers of the soil by thousands and tens of thousands, it could not but be that the lords of manors and their stewards died also. Yes! they, too, were struck down. In one instance that I have met with the first half of the entries of the business carried on at one of these courts in the summer of this year is written in the ordinary court hand of the time, and the rest is rudely scrawled by some one whose hand is _not yet formed;_ it looks like the writing of a lad apprenticed to the scrivener's business. Was the steward of the manor actually smitten by the plague as he was holding the court--a subordinate taking his place and awkwardly finishing the work which his master's glazed eye perhaps never rested on? Again and again I have found that a series of Court Rolls of an important Norfolk manor is perfect for the first twenty-two years of Edward III. and no record remains for the next year or two. Then they begin once more, and have been preserved with unbroken regularity. At Raynham, in a parish of 1,400 acres, there were three small manors. The courts of one of them were held three times in the year 1348. _Upon the same parchment,_ and immediately following the records of the previous year, come some scarcely legible notes of a court held in 1349, the precise day of the month omitted, the entries scrawled informally by a scribe who not only did not know the forms of the court, but who was evidently not a professional writer. He bungled so that he seems actually to have given up his task. The next court of the manor was not held till three years had gone by. At Hellhoughton, a manor now belonging to the Marquis of Townshend, where two courts were held annually, the series of rolls for the first twenty-two years of Edward III. is complete.