The Great Plain extends from the Yang-tzŭ River to the mountains which divide Chih-li and Shan-hsi and Manchuria, and supports a population estimated at more than a hundred millions, reminding one in density of inhabitants of the province of Bengal.

Selling them whiskey and taking their gold. Enslaving the young and destroying the old.

Oh, by what plots, by what forswearings, betrayings, oppressions, imprisonments, tortures, poisonings, and under what reasons of state and politic subtilty, have these forenamed kings […] pulled the vengeance of God upon themselves […]

Some landlords started to make fundamental reassessments of their systems of estate management at varying points in the 1370s and 1380s. The 1380s saw the start of general leasing on the estates of the archbishopric of Canterbury, for example, and the same chronology fits Durham Cathedral Priory.³¹ In this respect, however, 1376 is an imprecise turning point. Most of the literature on this topic stresses the late 1380s and the 1390s, rather than the earlier 1380s, as a period of crisis in estate management. Regional circumstances allowed the recovery to be more prolonged in some regions than others. In the Breckland land values were rising into the later 1370s and 1380s.³²