Financial difficulties also overwhelmed and nearly brought to ruin the Benedictine Convent of St. Mary's, which was reduced to about one half their former number. To the same generous benefactor, Bishop Edyndon, they were indebted for their escape from extinction. In fact, it would appear that at this time many, if not most, of the religious houses of the diocese were protected and supported by the liberality of the Bishop and his relatives, whom he interested in the work of preserving from threatened destruction these monastic establishments. In the document by which the nuns of St. Mary's acknowledge Bishop Edyndon as their second founder, they say that "he counted it a pious and pleasing thing mercifully to come to their assistance when overwhelmed by poverty, and when, in these days, evil doing was on the increase and the world was growing worse, they were brought to the necessity of secret begging. It was at such a time that the same father, with the eye of compassion, seeing that from the beginning our monastery was slenderly provided with lands and possessions, and that now we and our house, by the barrenness of our land, by the destruction of our woods, and by the diminution or taking away from the monastery of due and appointed rents, because of the dearth of tenants carried off by the unheard-of and unwonted pestilence," came to our assistance to avert our entire undoing.[338] Six months later the nuns of Romsey, in almost the same words, acknowledged their indebtedness to the Bishop.[339] Here the results of the pestilence upon the convent, as regards numbers, are even more remarkable than [p183] in the instances already given. At the election of an abbess in A.D. 1333 there were present to record their votes 90 nuns. Early in May, 1349—that is only 16 years later—the abbess died, for the royal assent was given to the election of her successor, Joan Gerneys, on May 7th of that year.[340] What happened to the community can be gathered by the fact that in 1478 their number is found reduced to 18, and they never rose above 25 until their final suppression.