ax, the total number of the inhabitants of England seems
to have been two millions and a half. A quarter of a century
earlier--in the days of Chaucer's boyhood--their numbers had been
perhaps twice as large. For not less than four great pestilences (in
1348-9, 1361-2, 1369, and 1375-6) had swept over the land, and at least
one-half of its population, including two-thirds of the inhabitants of
the capital, had been carried off by the ravages of the obstinate
epidemic--"the foul death of England," as it was called in a formula of
execration in use among the people. In this year 1377, London, where
Chaucer was doubtless born as well as bred, where the greater part of
his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those
associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the historic
river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently numbered not more
than 35,000 souls. But if, from the nature of the case, no place was
more exposed than London to the inroads of the Black Death, neither was
any other so likely elastically to recover from them. For the reign of
Edward III had witnessed a momentous advance in the prosperity of the
capital,--an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes
introduced during the same period into the architecture of the city.
Its wealth had grown larger as its houses had grown higher; and
mediaeval London, such as we are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems
to have derived those leading features which it so long retained, from
the days when Chaucer, with downcast but very observant eyes, passed
along its streets between Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as
elsewhere in England the remembrance of the most awful physical
visitations which have ever befallen the country must have long
lingered; and, after all has been said, it is wonderful that the traces
of them should be so exceedingly scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only
in his poems does he refer to the Plague:--once in an allegorical
fiction which is of Italian if not of French origin, and where,
therefore, no special reference to the ravages of the disease IN
ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a thousand slain
this pestilence,"--

he hath slain this year
Hence over a mile, within a great village
Both men and women, child and hind and page.

The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs in the
description of the "Doctor of Physic," the grave graduate in purple