The plague in Cambridge.

THE Black Death was part ofthe second pandemic ofplague which wrought inconceivable devastation throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. It invaded Europe from the East in the autumn of I347, and entered England through Weymouth early in August I348. By the end of 1349 it had spread all over the country and it remained until i666. During this time when the plague was domesticated there were four major epidemics and many smaller ones. At the time the plague reached England, Cambridge was already a flourishing university town with numerous hostels and two colleges. The town had grown first on the high ground to the north of the river and later spread to the south side, on to a number of gravel patches in an area enclosed by a bend of the river and a ditch called the King's Ditch, which joined the two ends of the bend. It was in this portion of the town, enclosed between the river and the ditch, that the University developed. The plague soon spread through the whole town, but the mortality appears to have been greatest on the Castle side of the river, which was almost completely depopulated; in the rest of the town probably half the population died. When the foundations for the New Divinity School in Trinity Street were being dug the ground was found to be full of the skeletons of bodies which had been thrown into a pit without any attempt at order. About half the beneficed clergy in the country died, and many parish churches were left without curate or priest to minister to the sick and poor and administer the rites of the Church. This loss was a stimulus to the foundation of some Cambridge colleges. One of the existing colleges was University Hall which had been founded in I326 through the influence of Richard Badew, Chancellor of the University. Its fellows were installed in houses on the site of the present Clare College. The houses had been bequeathed to the University by a physician, Nigel de Thornton; but the fellows had no endowments and struggled against poverty until Elizabeth, Lady of Clare, became their patron in 1336. The preamble to the Statutes which she gave to Clare Hall in 1359 states that she founded the college to further the type ofknowledge acquired in a university which can be profitably applied to the furtherance of Divine Worship and the good ofthe State which 'in consequence of a great number