Oh, ho! friend Porter, what is it we have heard men tell? That when the Black Death came upon us, your house was left unto you desolate and there remained neither chick nor child. Who is this? Then some one told the steward, or told the lord, and thereupon ensued inquiry. What right had Thomas Porter to adopt the child? She belonged to the lord, and he had the right of guardianship. Aye! and the right of disposing of her in marriage too. Thomas Porter, with a heavy heart, was summoned before the homage. He pleaded that the marriage of the girl did not belong to the lord by right, and that on some ground or other, which is not set down, she was not his property at all. That might have been very true or it might not, but one thing was certain, Thomas Porter had no right to her, and so the invariable result followed--he had to pay a fine. What else ensued we shall never know. The glimpses we get of the ways and doings of the old stewards of manors are not pleasing; I am afraid that as a class they were hard as nails. Perhaps they could not help themselves, but they certainly very rarely erred on the side of mercy and forbearance. Is not that phrase "making allowances for," a comparatively modern phrase? At any rate the _thing_ is not often to be met with in the fourteenth century. Yet in the plague year every now and then one is pleased to find instances actually of consideration for the distress and penury of the homagers at this place and that. Thus at Lessingham, when the worst was over and a court was held on the 15th of January, 1350, the steward writes down that only thirty shillings was to be levied from the customary tenants by way of tallage, "Because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence." Here and there, too, we come upon heriots remitted because the heir was so very poor, and here and there fines and fees are cancelled _causa miseriæ propter pestilentiam._ Surely it is better to assume that this kind of thing was done, as our friend Bonington puts it, _mero motu pietatis suæ_ than because there was no money to be had. Better give a man the benefit of the doubt, even though he has been dead five hundred years, than kick him because he will never tell any more tales. If it happened sometimes that the plague brought out the good in a man, sometimes changed his life from one of covetous indifference or grasping selfishness into a life of earnestness and devout philanthropy, it happened at other times--and I fear it must be confessed more frequently--that coarse natures, hard and cruel ones, were made more brutal and callous by the demoralizing influences of that frightful summer. I am sure it will be very gratifying to some enlightened and chivalrous people to learn that I have at least one bad story against a parson. Here it is!