102 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND, 



till his extravagant expenditure and amazing wastefulness 

 devoured the resources which came into his hands, he seems to 

 have contemplated a general distribution of the lands possessed 

 by the dissolved monasteries among new institutions. He 

 claimed in short, under his new title, all that authority over the 

 temporalities of the Church, which the Pope, with the general 

 assent of Christendom, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 

 had exercised. 



The plague, which had produced such remarkable effects in 

 England, and indeed over the whole of Europe in the middle 

 of the fourteenth century, reappeared, but it would seem only 

 sporadically from time to time in the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries,, and again in its last serious visitation in the seven- 

 teenth. But I have not found any entry of its ravages in the 

 accounts before me, till 1477-9, during which three years the 

 register of the Norwich corporation and the books of King's 

 College, Cambridge note its occurrence. It is noted again at 

 Cambridge in the summer of 1509, which was probably, for 

 there was a very plentiful harvest this year, dry and hot ; in 

 1521 also at Cambridge; in 1538, in 1545, and 1546, the first 

 year at Oxford, the last at Cambridge; in 1555, 1556, at 

 Cambridge; in 1570, 1572, and 1577 at Oxford; and in 1579 

 at Norwich, when the town register informs us that 4918 

 persons died, i.e. probably at least a fourth of the population. 

 But it does not appear that the disease was peculiarly or 

 generally destructive, though it may have operated as a check to 

 the growth of population, especially in the large towns. There 

 is no reason to believe that the conditions of health in such 

 towns as London were better during the fifteenth and six- 

 teenth centuries than they were in the eighteenth, and we know 

 that during the latter period the deaths in the metropolis 

 regularly and greatly exceeded the births, that in short, the 

 supply of population in the large towns was entirely maintained 

 by fresh immigration. 



During the period comprised in these volumes, a new and 

 very fatal disease occurred in England. Singular to say, it was 



