So terrible a mortality cannot but have had its effect and left its traces upon the education, arts, and architecture of the country. In the first, besides the temporary interference with the education at the Universities, "this pestilence forms," write the authors of the _History of Shrewsbury_, "a remarkable era in the history of our language. Before that time, ever since the Conquest, the nobility and gentry of this country affected to converse in French; children even construed their lessons at school into that language. So, at least, Higden tells us in his _Polychronicon_. But from the time of 'the first Moreyn,' as Trevisa, his translator, terms it, this 'manner' was 'som del ychaungide.' A school-master, named Cornwall, was the first that introduced English into the instruction of his pupils, and this example was so eagerly followed that by the year 1385, when Trevisa wrote, it had become nearly general. The clergy in all Christian countries are the chief persons by whom the education of youth is conducted, and it is probable that the dreadful scourge of which we have been treating, by carrying off many of those ancient instructors, enabled Mr. Cornwall to work a change in the mode of teaching, which but for that event he would never have been able to effect, and which has operated so mighty a revolution in our national literature." With regard to architecture, traces of the effects of the great plague are to be seen in many places. In some cases great additions to existing buildings, which had only been partially executed, were put a stop to and never completed. In others they were finished only after a change had been made in the style in vogue when the great mortality swept over the country. Dr. Cox, in his [p203] _Notes on the Churches of Derbyshire_, has remarked upon this. "The awful shock," he says, "thus given to the nation and to Europe at large by the Black Death paralyzed for a time every art and industry. The science of church architecture, then about at its height, was some years recovering from the blow. In some cases, as with the grand church of St. Nicholas, Yarmouth, where a splendid pair of western towers were being erected, the work was stopped and never resumed. . . . The recollection of this great plague often helps to explain the break that the careful eye not unfrequently notes in church buildings of the 14th century, and accounts for the long period over which the works extended. We believe this to be the secret of the long stretch of years that elapsed before the noble church of Tideswell was completed in that century; and it also affords a clue to much other work interrupted, or suddenly undertaken, in several other fabrics of the country."[377] To this may be added the fact that the history of stained-glass manufacture shows the same break with the past at this period. Not only just at this time does there appear a gap in the continuity of manufacture,