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up to 2,400 buried in the East Smithfield cemetery from February onwards, and all the victims buried in the dozens of parish and monastic cemeteries across the city. A reasonable estimate might be 35,000 dead – about 58 per cent of a population of 60,000. Of course, we have no idea how many non-residents had fled from the surrounding counties towards London (and indeed vice versa), or how many traders and visitors were trapped and engulfed by the disaster.
    For the West Smithfield cemetery there is correspondence between de Mauny himself and the Pope suggesting a very large death toll. In early 1352, de Mauny petitioned the Pope, signifying that:
he, during the epidemic in England, dedicated a place near London for a cemetery of poor strangers (peregrinorum ) and others in which sixty thousand bodies are buried, and built there a chapel with the licence of the ordinary. He prays for an indulgence of a year and forty days to those who visit the said place on the feasts of Whitsunday, Corpus Christi, and SS Mary Magdalene and Margaret, or who give something to the support of the said chapel and the poor who flock there.
    This petition is evidently a replacement for an even earlier one, perhaps of 1351, which appears to have been lost in transit. The papal reply granted on 14 March 1352 gave him licence to endow the chapel and to erect a college of twelve or more chaplains, according to the ordination of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, and granted the indulgence as requested. 309 However, this letter may also have gone astray on its way back to de Mauny, for the Pope issued a second licence on 12 August 1352, referring in it back to the same huge figure stated by de Mauny, offering ‘relaxation … of one year and forty days of enjoined penance to penitents who visit the chapel of the cemetery founded by Walter near London in which are buried more than sixty thousand bodies of those who died of the epidemic – and who give alms for the same’. 310
    The same papal writings were quoted in the early sixteenth century in the Register of the Charterhouse, where the whole basis for the foundation of the cemetery, and after it the monastery, was set out; a figure on a similar scale was quoted by John Stow nearly 250 years after the event, which he read from a stone cross which once stood in the churchyard:
Anno Domini 1349. Regnante magna pestilentia consecratum huit hoc coemiterium in quo et infra septa presentis monasterii sepulta fuerunt mortuorum corpora plusquam quinquaginta millia, praeter alia multa abhinc usque presens quorum animabus proprietur deus Amen. 311
    This translates as: ‘The year 1349. A great pestilence reigning, this cemetery was consecrated in which, and within the bounds of the present monastery, were buried more than 50,000 bodies of the dead, as well as many others since then to the present day.’ The reference to the monastery (Charterhouse) would date the now-lost cross to at least 1372. A later numerical reference to the dead in this cemetery dates to 1384. A Bull of Urban VI was issued, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, on a petition of Simon, Bishop of London, and Walter de Mauny (who had by this date died). It signalled that the cemetery, in which ‘twenty thousand and more dead are buried, in which de Mauny built a chapel, in which certain chaplains were instituted, be transferred to monks of Carthusian order’. 312 While suggesting a more modest figure than de Mauny’s own, it still implies a very large cemetery indeed.
    What then are we to make of these varying accounts? First, Avesbury has shown himself to be a fairly reliable source on the date of the outbreak in London, and we should therefore not dismiss his claims for burial rates lightly. Second, the issue of de Mauny’s claim must be taken still more seriously. De Mauny was a superlative organiser, a seasoned veteran of the French campaigns and, most importantly, someone who had no need of an