n during the first eighteen years of the personal rule
of Edward III. One sign of the increasing attention paid to suppressing
disorder was an act of 1344, which empowered the local conservators of
the peace, already an element in the administrative machinery, to hear
and determine felonies. A later act made this a part of their regular
functions, and gave them the title of justices of the peace, thus
setting up a means of maintaining local order so effective that the old
machinery of the local courts gradually gave way to it.

A rude ending to this period of prosperity was brought about by the
devastations of the pestilence known to modern readers as the Black
Death, which since 1347 had decimated the Levant. This was the bubonic
plague, almost as familiar in the east of to-day as in the
mid-fourteenth century. It was brought along the chief commercial
highways which bound the western world to the markets of the east. First
introduced into the west at the great ports of the Mediterranean,
Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, it spread over France and Italy by the early
months of 1348. Avignon was a chief centre of the infection, and, amidst
the desolation around him, Clement VI. strove with rare energy to give
peace to a distracted world. The regions of western and northern France,
which had felt the full force of the war, were among the worst
sufferers. Aquitaine, too, was cruelly desolated, and among the victims
was Edward III.'s daughter, Joan, who perished at Bordeaux on her way to
Castile, as the bride of the prince afterwards infamous as Peter the
Cruel. Early in August, 1348, the scourge crossed the channel, making
its first appearance in England at Weymouth. Thence it spread northwards
and westwards. Bristol was the first great English town to feel its
ravages. Though the Gloucestershire men prohibited all intercourse
between the infected port and their own villages, the plague was in no
wise stayed by their precautions. The disease extended, by way of
Gloucester and Oxford, to London, reaching the capital early in
November, and continuing its ravages until the following Whitsuntide.
When it had almost died out in London, it began, in the spring of 1349,
to rage severely in East Anglia,[1] while in Lancashire the worst time
seems to have been from the autumn of 1349 to the beginning of 1350.[2]
Scotland was so long exempt that the Scots, proud of their immunity,
were wont to swear "by the foul death of England". In 1350 t