The great plague of this period in London should most probably be placed under the years 1478-9. Merely to show the difficulties of the chronology it may be worth while citing the various accounts. The Greyfriars’ Chronicle says, under the year 17 Edward IV., that the term was “deferred from Ester to Michaelmas because of the grete pestylens[457].” The 17th of Edward IV. was 1477. But Fabyan, who was now a citizen of London (afterwards sheriff and alderman), enters it under the civic year 1478-79, or the year which begins for him with the new lord mayor taking office on 30 October. His words are: “This year was great mortality and death in London and many other parts of this realm, the which began in the latter end of Senii [September] in the preceding year and continued in this year till the beginning of November, in the which passed time died innumerable people in the said city and many places elsewhere[458].” Grafton says, under the year 1478, that the chief mortality fell in four months of great heat, during which the pestilence was so fierce and quick that fifteen years’ war had not consumed a third as many people[459]. To reconcile these dates we should have to take the year of the Greyfriars’ Chronicle as 1478, so that the adjournment of the term from Easter to Michaelmas, might suit the four months in Grafton. At the same time, Fabyan’s statement that the plague “continued in this year till November,” is correct for 1479. Sir John Paston writes home from London, 29 Oct. 1479, of his danger from the sickness; he died there on 15th November; and his brother, who came up from Norfolk to bury him, writes to his mother, who wished him “to haste out of the air that he was in,” that the sickness is “well ceased” in December.
The year 1478, the first of two plague-seasons in London, was also a year of plague at Hull, and at Newcastle and Southwell. The account for Newcastle, in its annals under 1478, is merely that great numbers died of the plague[460]. At Southwell, on 5 July, 1478, the canons residentiary again take leave of absence for the summer, “because it may be probably estimated that the dire pestilential affliction in the town of Southwell will continue, and because the venerable men, with their domestics, have a just fear of incurring the infection of the said pestiferous affliction[461].” Next year, 1479, an “incredible number” died of plague at Norwich[462], and at villages like Swainsthorp, where “they have died and been sick nigh in every house[463].”