Mortality in fourteenth-century Exeter.

For many years, pioneer work has begun to uncover the history of mortality in England during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, before the Black Death. Nearly a hundred years ago, Creighton collected chronicle references to outbreaks of disease and mortality in his History ofepidemics in England.' In 1948 and 1966, J. C. Russell analysed the inquisitions post mortem to reveal patterns of death among the feudal land-holding aristocracy.2 In 1959, M. M. Postan and J. Titow showed how manorial records could yield statistics ofheriots (death duties) between 1245 and 1350, and how the annual fluctuations of such heriots could be compared with (and sometimes related to) the price and availability ofcorn.3 In 1973, 1. Kershaw developed this technique into a deeper study of 'The agrarian crisis in England, 1315-1322', demonstrating how poor harvests and animal diseases led to starvation and epidemics among humans, which reached a peak in 1316-17.4 Most of the evidence so far assembled relates to annual rather than seasonal mortality. Chroniclers chiefly note occasional spectacular crises, heriots cannot easily be translated into precise death dates, and wills, which have been used to estimate seasonal mortality in the fifteenth century, do not exist in significant numbers before the middle of the fourteenth.5 The best early evidence for seasonal mortality is that which Russell has deduced for the aristocracy from the inquisitions post mortem. The medieval archives of Exeter Cathedral contain two series of records which modestly increase our knowledge of seasonal mortality in the early fourteenth century. The obit accounts, which survive from Midsummer 1305 to Michaelmas 1467, are records of monetary offerings in the cathedral (made at Whitsuntide, at funerals, and in the public collecting boxes) and certain payments to the cathedral clergy (notably for attending the obit masses held on the anniversaries ofpeople's deaths).6 It is the funeral