great annual Fair on S. James' Day. That is the great event of the year, eagerly looked forward to, and long remembered. To understand a mediæval Fair we must visit Cairo or Damascus, or some other Eastern City, or still better, we must wander through the marvellous streets and alleys of the great Fair ground at Nijni Novgorod on the Volga. There we shall see, on an enormously magnified scale, a picture of the Gainsburgh Fair of the 14th century.

Let us step into this busy scene for a short time. It is a wonderful sight. Merchants or their agents are here from the Republics of Genoa and Venice, from Lombardy, Guienne, and the Hanse Towns, from Norway, and from every part of England; and the men of Lindsey have brought the wool of which they are so proud, and which they will sell to Flemish merchants at £6 or more the sack of 864lbs. Here we meet with the Smith, haggling over the price of Sussex iron, there with the Miller, seeking new mill-stones, and doubtful whether those at £6 a pair from Paris or the Rhine will serve him better than the less expensive ones of homely Yorkshire grit. Yonder cassocked priest is the Vicar, who means to replenish his store of incense, olive oil, and wax, and keeps his eye open for plough shares, for he too is an agriculturalist, and farms his own glebe. Those coifed women are well-to-do householders, laying in pepper and spices, currants, raisins, and almonds from the Levant, linen from Flanders, iron and copper vessels for domestic use, and who look enviously at the bright silks and jewelry brought from the Eastern Mediterranean by the Genoese merchants. Here is the Bailiff, sniffing at barrels of Norwegian tar, for he wishes to cure his sheep from that lately introduced and tiresome disease, the scab. There is the Forester, choosing bow-staves from the region of the Elbe. Every one desires to lay out his money wisely, and many gallons of spiced ale will be quaffed ere the bargains are completed. Even the children have amusements suited to their age, although business rather than pleasure is the main object of the Fair.

The population of Gainsburgh in 1337 is only a few hundreds, and even London itself would look small beside many a provincial town of the present day. Lincoln, which seems to have been the

sixth city in the Kingdom, is believed to have contained about 5,000 persons at the accession of King Richard II.

It is not easy to make comparisons of other kinds. Many think that, notwithstanding bad sanitation, poor houses, unsuitable food, and an almost total absence of the conveniences of modern life, the working-men of the 14th century were upon the whole not less well off, or were even better off, than they are to-day. That they were as happy is at least extremely probable. Life was a simpler matter, and there was usually no difficulty in at least procuring bread and beer. There was no rush of whirling machinery, and men were not the bond slaves of progress that they became in the 19th century. Moreover they all went to Church on Sundays, and there learnt something of the true proportion of things, and for a time forgot the discomforts of life in the contemplation of the eternal Verities.

It is almost impossible for modern Englishmen to realise how frightful were the scourges of pestilence and disease to which this country was subject in the Middle Ages. No such accurate statistics were, of course, preserved as those which are available for modern times, but the statements of the chroniclers are in some cases borne out by the most careful investigations, and it is now generally believed that, in this matter at least, they have not been guilty of much exaggeration.

Leprosy, for instance, whose loathsome terrors we have ourselves witnessed in Norway and in Syria, became common in England during some centuries following the first Crusade. There were perhaps a hundred leper hospitals or lazar-houses in this country, including one outside Lincoln, and another near Grimsby; whilst some have thought that the unglazed "low-sidewindows" in the chancels of many Churches were inserted for the purpose of enabling lepers and other contaminating persons to hear Mass.

But the worst visitation of sickness of which human history has preserved a record appears to have been the Black Death, which

first reached our shores towards the close of the year 1348, which raged all through 1849, and recurred at intervals during the next twenty years, especially in 1361 and 1868. There were many other terrible epidemics, but the Great Plague of 1848-9, the "Black Death" par excellence, appears to have surpassed all others in its destructiveness. In that year more than half the clergy of Yorkshire and some other counties are known to have died. In Bristol the living were scarcely able to bury the dead. In the repeated visitations of this epidemic it is believed that at least one third of the population of England perished, and a large part of the land was left untilled for want of labourers to till it.

We have not been able to ascertain the mortality that took place among the clergy in the whole of Lincolnshire, although the numbers might be fairly gathered from Bishop Gynwell's Register of Institutions, but we have from that source learned that, in what is now the Deanery of Corringham, the Rectors or Vicars of Gainsburgh, Grayingham Australis, Heapham, Hibaldstow, Lea, Northorpe, Pilham, Southorpe, Upton, Wading ham S. Peter, two Vicars of Redbourne, and the Chantry Priest of Scotton, certainly died in that year. As to those of Blyton, Laughton, Scotton, and Springthorpe, there is no record. The only beneficed clergy in the Deanery who are known to have survived were those of Blyburgh, Corringham, Grayingham Borealis, Kirton, Manton, Scotter, and Wadingham S. Mary, seven clergy in twenty four benefices.

clergy in the Deanery The clergy, although,

We may be quite sure that if half the died in that year, they did not die alone. like medical men, exposed to special dangers, are nevertheless a longlived class, and we fear that it is only too probable that at least half of their flocks followed them to the grave.

Two curious results are said to have following this terrible mortality. "The sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary writer, "there were none left who I could drive them." So hedges were planted all round the meadows and fields near the villages, and thus originated one of the most picturesque features of an English landscape. And the wages of the labourers were doubled, through scarcity of labour.