The most terrible plague the world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the close of 1348 upon Britain.

The traditions of its destructiveness and the panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been amply justified by modern research.

Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations.

Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever.

In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been interred.