Note 36 — Chapter V · THE COLLEGES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Cf. Rogers’ “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” p. 224. “The disease made havoc among the secular and regular clergy, and we are told that a notable decline of learning and morals was thenceforward observed among the clergy, many persons of mean acquirements and low character stepping into the vacant benefices. Even now the cloister of Westminster Abbey is said to contain a monument in the great flat stone, which we are told was laid over the remains of the many monks who perished in the great death.... Some years ago, being at Cambridge while the foundations of the new Divinity Schools were being laid, I saw that the ground was full of skeletons, thrown in without any attempt at order, and I divined that this must have been a Cambridge plague pit.”