"Here in Bristol," says the local historian Seyer, quoting an old calendar of the town, "in 1348 the plague raged to such a degree that the living were scarce able to bury the dead. The Gloucestershire men would not suffer the Bristol men to have access to them. At last it reached Gloucester, Oxford, and London; scarce the tenth person was left alive, male or female. At this period the grass grew several inches high in High Street and Broad Street; it raged at first chiefly in the centre of the city. This pestilence came from abroad, and the people near the sea-coast in Dorsetshire and Devonshire were first affected."[142] By the wholesale destruction of the population of this western port the same authority accounts for the reduction of the King's taxation of the city from £245 to £158. [p087] Lastly, in Bristol, as indeed without doubt in most places, the cemeteries did not long suffice for the multitude of the dead. Of this there is an example upon the Patent Rolls. The parson of Holy Cross de la Temple soon found the necessity of enlarging his graveyard. For this purpose he obtained half-an-acre adjoining the old cemetery, and so great and pressing was the need of this fresh accommodation that it was done without the required royal license, for which subsequently a pardon had to be sued from the King.[143] The diocese of Exeter, comprising the two counties of Devon and Cornwall, was stricken by the disease apparently about the same time as the county of Somerset.[144] For eight years before 1348 the average number of livings annually rendered vacant in the diocese was thirty-six,[145] whilst in the single month of January 1349, the Bishop instituted to some thirty livings, which shows that death had already been busy among the clergy. The number of institutions in each month of the year points to the conclusion that the disease lingered somewhat longer in these counties than elsewhere. It is not till the close of September that any great decrease in the number of vacancies is seen, and although probably beginning in December, the height of the plague was not reached till March, April, and May.[146] [p088]