It commenced seemingly about Easter time, and lasted till St. Michael's, and a third part of the population was carried off by it.[103] Each day there died 500 or 600, and one day 960.[104] The dead were buried in trenches, each of which, according to one chronicle, contained some 6,000 corpses. The parish of St. Stephen lost 54 ecclesiastics during the course of the epidemic, and when it passed some 70 families were found to be entirely extinct, whilst the property of many more had passed into the hands of very distant relations. Another account declares that in the city and neighbourhood barely a third of the population survived. "Because of the odour, and horror inspired by the dead bodies, burials in the church cemeteries were not allowed; but as soon as life was extinct the corpses were carried out of the city to a common burial-place (called) 'God's acre.' There the deep and broad pits were quickly filled to the top with the dead. And this plague lasted from Pentecost to St. Michael's; and not alone in Vienna, but in the surrounding country it raged with great fury. It spared not the monks and the nuns, for in (the Cistercian Abbey of) Heiligenkreuz 53 religious at the same time passed out of this life."[105] In Bohemia the winter cold apparently put a stop to the sickness at its commencement. "The mortality commenced to be severe in Bohemia, but the recent cold and snow stayed it." However, "in the year 1350 the plague again [p066] devastated various countries, and then in Bohemia likewise it was to be found."[106] The wave of pestilence which passed up the Rhine Valley and attacked Basle passed on to Colmar, and appeared in Strasburg in July, 1349.[107] At the end of the same year, about December 18th, it had reached Cologne. "In the first year of archbishop William von Gennep (who succeeded to the See of that city on the above date) there was," says the chronicle, "a great pestilence in Cologne and its neighbourhood."[108] Meanwhile the wave had divided lower down the valley of the Rhine, for in the summer of 1349 the plague was raging at Frankfort. "In that year," writes Caspar Camentz, "from the feast of St. Mary Magdalene (June 22nd) to the feast of the Purification following (February 2nd, 1350) the universal pestilence was at Frankfort. In the space of 72 days more than 2,000 people died. Every second hour they were buried without bell, priest, or candle. On one day 35 were buried at one time."[109]