The great teacher who, with his transcendent genius, has done more to create a school of English history than all who have gone before him, who, in fact, has made English history, not what it is, but what it will be, when his influence shall have permeated our literature, has spoken on this subject of the Black Death with his usual profound suggestiveness. The Bishop of Chester looks with grave distrust upon any theory which ascribes to the Great Plague as a cause "nearly all the social changes which take place in England down to the Reformation: the depopulation of towns, the relaxation of the bonds of moral and social law, the solution of the continuity of national development caused by a sort of disintegration in society generally." [Footnote: "Constitutional History," vol. ii. chap. xvi. p. 399, Section 259, edit. 1875.] And yet this appalling visitation must have constituted a very important factor in the working out of those social and political problems with which the life of every great nation is concerned. Such problems, however, are not simple ones; rather they are infinitely complex; and he who would set himself to analyse the processes by which the ultimate results are arrived at will blunder hopelessly if he takes account of only a single unknown quantity. I. It is obvious that the sudden exhaustion of the large reserve force of clergy must have made itself felt at once in every parish in England. In the diocese of Norwich a considerable number of the parsons who died belonged to the gentry class. Then, as now, there were family livings to which younger sons might hope to be presented, and were presented, as vacancies occurred; but, in the face of the sudden and widely extended mortality, it was inevitable that appointments should be made with very little reference to a man's social grade or intellectual proficiency. Patrons had to take whom they could get. This of itself would tend to a deterioration in the character of the clergy; but this was not all. The clergy died; but other holders of offices, civil and ecclesiastical, were not spared. There was a sudden opening out of careers in every direction for the ambitious and the unemployed: young men who ten years before would never have dreamt of anything but "resorting to holy orders," turned their eyes to other walks and adopted other views; and it is plain that a large number of those who presented themselves for admission to the clerical profession as we now understand it, in many instances belonged to a lower class than their predecessors. Some were devout and earnest, such country parsons as Chaucer described--he does not turn aside to caricature _them_--but others were mere adventurers, hirelings whose heart was not in their work. These clerical scamps gave Archbishop Simon Islip a great deal of trouble. The smaller livings were forsaken, the curate market rose, the chaplains would neither take the country vicarages nor engage