not touch their bodies. The great harvest of that year rotted on the ground. About half the population of England died.
As long after as the seventeenth year of Henry VII., a petition to the King says that "by reason of the great visitation of Almighty God, there was so great dearth of people," that "most of the dwelling places and inhabitations" of Great Yarmouth "stood desolate and fell into utter ruin and decay, which at this day are gardens and void grounds"; and so the value of the benefice had fallen from 700 marks to £40 a year. Land fell in value, because labour was dear, there being so few labourers. The assessments of towns had to be lowered. Three years after the Black Death Oxford's assessment was reduced to one-third less than it had been in the Domesday Survey!
And, as always happens when life becomes peculiarly insecure, the restraints of morality were cast off, and men grew worse instead of better, because they were so likely to be dead to-morrow.
A learned German Professor, Dr Heckel, of Berlin, who wrote upon the Black Death from its medical side, says of the effect in England: "Smaller losses were sufficient to cause those convulsions, whose consequences were felt for some centuries, in a false impulse given to civil life, and whose indirect influence, unknown to the English, has, perhaps, extended even to modern times."
Especially did the Black Death effect an entire change in the system of farming. Both secular landlords and monasteries took more and more to letting on lease, instead of under the old system of farming by stewards. Labour was commuted for money. The losses in sheep upset taxation—for wool had been the King's chief resource when he wanted money. On the other hand, now that tillage was become so much more expensive, and even in some parts impossible, owing to the shortage of labour, land was put down in pasture. There was more profit in ten acres of grazing than in twenty of tillage. Moreover, there was some restriction on the export of corn, but none on the export of wool; and so it often happened that "hundreds of acres were watched by one shepherd and his dog." Villages fell into decay, houses were pulled down, tenants were ejected, and the first beginning was made of the great
