but at the same time it is quite evident from his account that the epidemic at Leicester was most severe, and had serious consequences. There are two factors which may partly explain the town's rapid recovery. In the first place, it has been observed that the mortality was greatest "among the meaner sort of the people," so that it would not fall as heavily upon a community of well-to-do traders as on agriculturalists. And, in the second place, the fame of Leicester's prosperity was at this period sufficiently wide-spread to attract fresh comers to take the place of those who fell in the course of the epidemic.
An analysis of three of the tallage rolls, those for 1318, 1336 and 1354, gives the following results bearing upon this point.
The number of names on the roll of 13 18 is about 460; in 1336 it is 460, and in 1354 about 455. Of the names given in 1336, no less than 127 occur also in the roll of 1318, identical both as to Christian and sur-name, and, generally speaking, they may be said to betoken the same persons as those who were living at Leicester eighteen years before. Again, 167 persons on the 1336 roll had family names which occur in the 1318 roll, but different Christian names, and they may be taken to be, as a rule, members of the families which were settled in Leicester in 1318, There were thus on the 1336 roll something like 290 persons who, or whose families, had been settled in the town eighteen years before that time. The names in 1336 that were quite new in Leicester were only 166.
Now if we pass over another eighteen years, and turn to the roll of 1354, the result of a comparison of that with the roll of 1336 is as follows: The identical names are only 58, the names identical as to family are 145, and the new names are no fewer than 247. Thus the old settlers were then about 203, and the new settlers considerably outnumbered them; whereas in 1336 the old settlers were very greatly more numerous than the new comers. Leicester therefore, it is clear, made up its losses in well-to-do taxpayers by drawing to itself settlers from without. It is even possible to learn, to some extent, whence
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