In this same court of March 23rd also several law cases are disposed of, for they had been settled by the death of one or other or both of the parties. Thus, in January, 1349, a claim had been laid, at the sitting of the court, against one John Lager, for the return of some cattle by three tenants, William, John, and Roger Richeman. At the March sitting of the court in due course the case was called on. No plaintiffs, however, appeared, and inquiry elicited the fact that all three had died in the great pestilence. The actual document which contains these particulars has, moreover, a tale of its own to tell. The long entries [p170] on these two skins of parchment are not all in the same hand. Before the record of the heavy business done at this court had been all transcribed, the clerk was changed. The hand which had so long kept the rolls of these Manor Courts ceases to write. What happened to him? Did he too die? Of course nothing can be known for certain, but it is not difficult to conjecture why another at this very time takes up the writing of the Chedzoy manor records.[315] Another glimpse of the desolate state to which the country was generally reduced by this disastrous sickness is afforded by the case of Hinton and Witham, the two Somerset Carthusian houses. The King had endeavoured by every means in his power to restrain the tenants, who survived the plague, from leaving their old holdings and seeking for others where they could better themselves. Not only were fines ordered to be inflicted upon such labourers and tenants, as endeavoured to take advantage of the market rise in wages, but under similar penalties landowners were prohibited from giving employment to them. That such a law must have proved hard in the case of those owning manors, in which some or all of the tenants and labourers had died, is obvious. It was this hardship which some years after the epidemic, in 1354, made the Carthusians of Witham plead for some mitigation of the royal decree. "Our beloved in Christ, the prior and brethren of the Carthusian Order at Witham, in the county of Somerset," runs the King's reply, "have petitioned us that since their said house and all their lands and tenements thereto belonging are within a close in the forest of Selwood, placed far from every town, and they possess no domain beyond the said close, they have nothing to support the prior and his brethren," (and this) "both because almost all their servants and retainers died in the last pestilence, and [p171] because by reason of a command lately made by us and our Parliament, in which _inter alia_ it is ordered that servants should not leave their villages and parishes in which they dwelt, as long as they could be hired there, they have been brought to great need on account of the want of servants and labourers. Further, that a large part of their lands (for this same reason) remain waste and untilled, and the corn in the rest of their