In the parishes across the river, the mortality was as great as in Tournay itself. Although death as a rule came so suddenly, still the people for the most part were able to receive the Sacraments. The rapidity of the disease, remarked upon by Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy, is also spoken of in the same terms by the Abbot of St. Martin's. People that one had seen apparently well and had spoken to one evening were reported dead next day. He specially remarks upon the mortality among the clergy visiting the sick,[80] and speaks of the creation of two new cemeteries outside the walls of the town. One was in a field near the Leper House _De Valle_, the other at the religious house of the Crutched Friars. Strange to say Li Muisis speaks of the disfavour with which this necessary precaution of establishing new grave-yards was regarded. People, he says, grumbled because they were no longer [p054] allowed to be buried in their own family vaults. The town authorities, however, were firm, and as the pestilence increased deep pits were dug in these two common burying places, and into them numbers of bodies were constantly being thrown and covered up with a slight layer of earth.[81] It has been supposed by many that the accounts given by contemporary writers of the excessive mortality throughout the countries of Europe must be greatly exaggerated, and that the population in the middle of the fourteenth century was not sufficiently large to allow of the number of deaths. On the one hand it is evident that in the majority of cases the round figures stated can be at most nothing more than a rough approximation of the actual deaths, and that the natural tendency of those who have witnessed a catastrophe as great and as universal as that of the plague of 1348 and subsequent years, is to magnify, rather than to diminish, the disaster. On the other hand, whilst allowing that in most cases the actual figures are little more than guesses at the truth, and can only be taken as evidence of the belief of the age in the magnitude of the mortality, it must be admitted that Italy, France, and other countries of Europe were at the time more teeming with population than is perhaps usually understood.