No account has been preserved of the ravages of the pestilence at the abbey of Colchester; but the death of the abbot at this time makes it not unlikely that the disease was as disastrous here as in other monasteries of which there is preserved some record. It is known that the town suffered considerably. "One of the most striking effects was," writes one author, "that wills to the unusual number of 111 were enrolled at Colchester, which at that time had the privilege of their probate and enrolment."[324] Talkeley, an alien priory in Essex, was reduced to complete destitution. It was a cell of St. Valery's Abbey, in Picardy, and when seized into the King's hands on account of the war with France the prior was allowed to hold the lands on condition of his paying £126 a year into the royal purse. Two years after the plague had visited the county this payment had fallen into arrears, "by reason of the pestilence lately raging, from which time the said land [p177] remained uncultivated, and the holdings, from which the revenues of the priory were derived, remained unoccupied after the death of the tenants. So terribly is it impoverished that it has nothing upon which to live, and on account of the arrears no one is willing to rent the lands and tenements of the priory." In the end the King was compelled to forgive the arrears of rent.[325] In the county of Hertfordshire 34 benefices were in the diocese of London, whilst 22 more were under the jurisdiction of no Bishop, but formed a peculiar of the abbey of St. Alban's. In both of these consequently the actual institutions made in the year of the great plague are unknown. For the portion within the diocese of Lincoln 27 institutions were made in the summer of 1349; so that probably at least 50 Hertfordshire clergy died at this time. The values of land and produce fell, as in other places. In one instance, given in an _Inquisitio post mortem_ into the estate of Thomas Fitz-Eustace, the lands and tenements, formerly valued at 67 shillings, were on the 3rd of August this year, 1349, estimated to produce only 13 shillings, and this only "if the pasture can be let."[326] In the same way the Benedictine convent of Cheshunt, in the county, is declared shortly afterwards "to be oppressed with such poverty in these days that the community have not wherewith to live."[327]