ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



Grinstead, as well as other benefices out of England. 1 It may be that 

 the officials who did the work of these archdeacons were quite con- 

 scientious and efficient, even as the vicars who supplied the places of 

 absentee rectors often proved to be faithful and devoted pastors ; but at 

 the best it must have been an unsatisfactory state of affairs. 



The Great Pestilence fell heavily upon all the Midland counties, 

 and Buckinghamshire had to bear its full share of the burden of sorrow 

 and suffering it brought with it. In the month of May 1349 the 

 Episcopal Registers record four deaths amongst the clergy of the arch- 

 deaconry : the numbers increase steadily through the summer months 

 and rise to a total of seventy-seven in the year. 2 Some of these may 

 have died from other causes than the plague ; on the other hand, some 

 names may well have been omitted in the distress and difficulty of the 

 time ; so that the number of actual victims of the pestilence cannot be 

 exactly given. The accounts given by Matthew Paris and others lead 

 us to suppose that the religious houses suffered severely at this time ; 

 the prior of Bradwell and Luffield and the prioress of Ankerwyke in 

 this county died during the summer of 1 349, and we may well believe 

 that some of their subjects perished with them, though it is impossible 

 to say how many. 



As the violence of the pestilence abated, the first outward signs 

 were seen of that great religious upheaval which, beginning from 

 Oxford under the leadership of Wiclif, spread gradually along the 

 northern shores of the Lower Thames, and produced indeed its most 

 lasting as well as its most immediate effects in the Eastern Midlands. 

 It is very improbable that Wiclif himself had any personal influence 

 in Buckinghamshire while he was rector of Ludgershall, from 1368 to 

 1 374." His connexion with this county belongs to the earlier part of 

 his career, when he did not disdain to be reckoned amongst absentee 

 rectors, nor yet to seek and obtain a papal dispensation to hold his 

 church in plurality with an expected canonry and prebend of Lincoln, 

 and the prebend of Aust in Westbury. 4 He exchanged Ludgershall 

 for Lutterworth in 1 374, while he was still at Oxford, and may never 

 have been in Buckinghamshire at all. But the opinions rightly and 

 wrongly connected with his name clung with peculiar pertinacity to 

 this part of England, as will be seen in the course of its history. 



A member of a well known Buckinghamshire family, Sir John 

 Cheyne, was in 1397 condemned to suffer the death of a traitor with 

 Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard chief, but at this time they were both 

 pardoned at the intercession of the Lords, and their sentence was com- 

 muted to perpetual imprisonment. 5 That branch of the Cheyne family 

 which was settled at Chesham Bois e was associated with the Lollards 



i Cal. of Pap. Letters, ii. 379, 384 ; iii. 362, 419, etc. He received at least four dispensations to 

 visit his archdeaconries by deputy. 



> Line. Epis. Reg. Inst. Gynwell, 235-245. 



* Fascicula Zizaniorum (Rolls Series), Introd. rxrviii. 

 Cal. of Pap. Letters, iv. 193. 



* English Chronicle (Camden Soc.), II. 6 See Records of Bucks, vi. 297. 



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