I have said that upwards of 800 of the beneficed clergy perished in East Anglia during this memorable year. Besides these we must make allowance for the non-beneficed among the regulars; the _chaplains,_ who were in the position of curates among ourselves; the vicars of parishes whose endowments were insufficient to maintain a resident parson under ordinary circumstances, and the members of the monastic and mendicant orders. Putting all these together, it seems to me that we cannot estimate the number of deaths among regular and secular clergy in East Anglia during the year 1349 at less than _two_ _thousand._ [Footnote: In the diocese of Ely, where the mortality was less severe than in Norfolk and Suffolk, 57 parsons died in the three months ending the 1st of October, 1349. When an ordination was held by the Bishop of Ely's suffragan at the priory of Barnwell on the 19th of September, the newly-ordained were fewer by 35 than those who had died at their posts since the last ordination.] This may appear an enormous number at first hearing, but it is no incredible number. Unfortunately the earliest record of any ordinations in the diocese of Norwich dates nearly seventy years after the plague year, but there is every reason for believing that there were at least _as many,_ and probably many more, candidates at ordinations in the fourteenth century as presented themselves in the fifteenth. During the year ending January, 1415, Bishop Courtenay's suffragan ordained 382 persons, and assuming that in Bishop Bateman's days an equal number were admitted to the clerical profession, the losses by death in the plague year would have absorbed all the clergy who had been ordained during the six previous years, but no more. Even so this constituted a tremendous strain upon the reserve force of clergy unbeneficed and more or less unemployed, and it was inevitable that with such a strain, there would be a deterioration in the character and fitness of the newly-appointed incumbents. Yet nothing has surprised me more than the exceeding rareness of evidence damaging to the reputation of the new men. That these men were less educated than their predecessors we know; but that they were mere worthless hypocrites there is nothing to show, and much to disprove. Nay! the strong impression which has been left upon my mind, and which gathers strength as I study the subject, is that the parochial clergy of the fourteenth century, before _and after_ the plague, were decidedly a better set than the clergy of the thirteenth. The friars had done some of their best work in "provoking to jealousy" the country clergy and stimulating them to increased faithfulness; they had, in fact, made them more _respectable_; just as the Wesleyan revival acted upon the country parsons and others four centuries later. Until the episcopal _visitations_ of the monasteries during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are made public--they exist in far larger numbers