The summer and autumn of 1348 were abnormally wet in England, and the chronicles record that from St. John the Baptist's Day (June 24th) to Christmas it rained either by night or by day with hardly an exception. In such a season, naturally unhealthy, the sickness, of its own nature most deadly, found every condition suitable for its rapid development. Starting from Melcombe Regis, the wave of contagion spread itself very quickly over Dorset, Devon, and Somerset, with the other counties comprised in the dioceses of Salisbury, Exeter, and Wells. "It passed," writes Robert of Avesbury, the contemporary Registrar of the Court of Canterbury, "most rapidly from place to place, swiftly killing ere mid-day many who in the morning had been well, and without respect of persons (some few rich people excepted), not permitting those destined to die to live more than three, or at most four, days. On the same day twenty, forty, sixty, and very often more corpses were committed to the same grave."[129] In fact, over the West of England during the late autumn of 1348 and the first months of the following year the words of the old play must have had only too true an application— "One news straight came huddling on another Of death, and death, and death." [p075] In dealing with a case of this kind a first object is to control as far as possible, by means of definite statistics, the general and vague statements of chroniclers and other contemporary writers; whilst in the absence of such statistics lies one of the great difficulties in dealing with the history of the Middle Ages. Owing partly to the troublesome and intricate nature of the subject, as well as to the poverty of the material and the inherent dryness of such matters, modern writers have made little advance to a more correct knowledge of the population of European countries in those ages. Much, however, might be done. As usual, the ecclesiastical documents form the surest basis for any calculation, and the episcopal registers enable us to arrive at actual numbers. Accordingly, in the present inquiry, these registers are of the highest importance, and it is necessary constantly to recur to them, as they furnish the only means of arriving at any adequate knowledge of the proportion of the population swept away by the plague. Possibly the mortality may have been greater among ecclesiastics than among lay persons; but only from the number of the clergy carried off by the epidemic can an estimate be formed as to the number of lay people who died. Accordingly, in the course of this work, the mortality of the clergy is systematically investigated.