Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph thus describes the state of the Exeter episcopal registers at this period:—"There is very little direct information about the Black Death in Bishop Grandisson's register; but there is a great deal of indirect information. The _Registrum Commune_, which is wonderfully full before and after the fatal year, records scarcely anything during the year itself. The ordinary work of the diocese seems to have been all suspended, with a single exception. The register of institutions—a separate volume—is a record of incessant and most distressing work. Its very outward aspect for this period tells a tale of woe. The entries are made hurriedly and roughly, in striking contrast with the neatness and regularity of the rest of the Register. They are no longer grouped, as before, in years, but in months, and the changes in each month exceed the changes of a whole ordinary year, when there was no pestilence. The scribe leaves off the customary 'vacant _per mortem_,' as if he dreaded to write the fatal word. The clergy must have fallen by wholesale; evidently they were faithful, and, for their flocks' sake, faced the foe without flinching. And, as each of them fell, another was ready at his Bishop's call fearlessly to fill the vacant place. Some incumbencies lasted but a few weeks. And, when all was over, the survivors were, comparatively, so few that there was no small difficulty in filling many a subsequent vacant benefice; this result of the sickness is to be traced for some time after the mortality had ceased. "The Bishop never left his diocese, and the continuous presence of so strong, so earnest, and devoted a prelate must have been an unspeakable consolation and help to his grievously afflicted flock." An examination of the institutions of the diocese, in relation to the time when the plague visited the various parts of it, appears to show that it commenced almost simultaneously in both north and south. In North Devon it is found at both Northam and Alverdiscott on the 7th of [p089] November, at Fremington in the same district on the 8th, and at Barnstaple on December the 23rd. It is found in November at villages on the Exe, and had possibly also reached Exeter before the close of the month. In the South, the fact of the close proximity of the part first infected to Dorsetshire explains the course of the epidemic; but the early outbreak in the coast villages at the mouth of the estuary leading to Barnstaple points to the conclusion that the infection was brought by a ship passing up the Bristol Channel, which subsequently infected other towns further up on the Somerset shore of the passage.