other farm servants. Among other buildings there were two _fishouses_ built of timber and _daubur_, in which apparently the keeper of the fishponds lived, and some elaborate arrangements had existed for keeping up the supply of fish in the ponds by methods of pisciculture to us unknown. The windmill had long ceased to be used, its very grinding stones had disappeared. Worse than all, there was no more any gallows or pillory, or even stocks, _pro_ _libertate servanda_, as the jurors quaintly remark. Yet the records show that at Hockham things had gone on pretty much as before since the big house was deserted. The courts were held with exemplary regularity, the fees had been exacted with unwavering rigour, the homagers settled their own affairs in their own way; but there was this difference, that for a generation the tenants had been living under an absentee landlord, who so far from being the poorer because the big house had been tumbling down, was the richer, inasmuch as he had one mansion the less to keep up out of his income. What happened at Hockham must have happened in hundreds of other parishes; there must have been large tracts of country during the latter half of the reign of Edward the Third where a resident landlord was the exception to that which aforetime had been the rule. * * * * * * * 3. In the present condition of our knowledge, any estimate of the actual numbers who perished in the plague must be the merest guesswork. It may be that two millions were carried off; it may be there were three. It is undeniable that a very large proportion of the inhabitants of this island died in a few months--employers and employed. We must, however, remember that England in the fourteenth century was incomparably more self-supporting than it is in the nineteenth century; that there were no great centres of industry then; that the rural population was largely in excess of the urban population; that we exported the wool which the Flemings manufactured into cloth; and that if there were fewer hands to till the soil, there were fewer mouths to feed. No one can doubt that the labour market must have been seriously disturbed, but it is very easy to exaggerate this disturbance; and whether it were less or more than has been asserted, we shall certainly err by attributing the rise in wages, which undoubtedly took place after the Black Death, to it, and to it alone--_post hoc ergo propter hoc_ is not a safe conclusion. Granted, as we must grant, that the plague accelerated the rise in wages, it is certain the upward movement had already begun before the population had been seriously lessened. The number of clergy, to be sure, was largely in excess of the needs of the country; the clerical profession had become "choked" by the influx of young men presumably with _some_ private means to fall back upon; among them there must have been, and there was, serious competition for every vacant post.