It is one of the consequences of the peculiar privileges granted to the Friars that no notice of them occurs in the episcopal records. They were free lances with whom the bishops had little to do. It is only by the accident of every one of the Friars of our Lady who had a house in Norwich having been carried off, and the fact that their house was left tenantless, that we know anything of their fate. Wadding, the great annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the notorious decadence in the _morale_ of the mendicant orders during the fourteenth century--a decadence which he does not attempt to deny--attributes it wholly to the action of the Black Death, and is glad to find in that calamity a sufficient cause for accounting for the loss of the old prestige which in little more than a century after St. Francis's death had set in so decidedly. "It was from this cause," he writes, "that the monastic bodies, and especially the mendicant orders, which up to this time had been flourishing in virtue and learning, began to decline, and discipline to become slack; as well from the loss of eminent men as from the relaxation of the rules, in consequence of the pitiable calamities of the time; and it was vain to look for reform among the young men and the promiscuous multitude who were received without the necessary discrimination, for they thought more of filling the empty houses than of restoring the old strictness that had passed away." How could it be otherwise? In the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, at least _nineteen_ religious houses were left without prior or abbot. We may be quite sure that where the chief ruler dropped oft the brethren of the house and the army of servants and hangers-on did not escape. What happened at the great Abbey of St. Edmund's we know not yet, and until we get more light it is idle to conjecture but, as a man stands in that vast graveyard at Bury, and looks around him, he can hardly help trying--trying, but failing--to imagine what the place must have looked like when the plague was raging. What a Valley of Hinnom it must have been! Those three mighty churches, all within a stone's throw of one another, and one of them just one hundred feet longer than the cathedral at Norwich, sumptuous with costly offerings, and miracles of splendour within--and outside ghastly heaps of corruption, and piles of corpses waiting their turn to be covered up with an inch or two of earth. Who can adequately realize the horrors of that awful summer? In the desolate swamps through which the sluggish Bure crawls reluctantly to mingle its waters with the Yare; by the banks of the Waveney where the little Bungay nunnery had been a refuge for the widow, the forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in the valley of the Nar--the Norfolk Holy Land--where seven monasteries of one sort or another clustered, each distant from the other but a few short miles--among the ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the Broads, where the tall reeds