General Notes

Henry de Strode of Chalmington, Dorset married Elizabeth Brent of Cossington, in the adjacent county of Somerset about 1385. The union produced one known son. She came from a well established family with a recorded history of six generations in Somerset dating back to 1160. Henry was born about 1350 during one of the darkest periods of English history... the Black Death of 1348 to 1352. This horrendous outbreak of bubonic plague affected almost the whole of Europe. Its' greatest impact on Britain occurred in 1348-49, when a third or more of the population died from the epidemic. During the plague, city people went into the countryside to escape the scourge. They sought sustenance from wild game, unharvested crops and abandoned livestock. They made shelters in the forest as best as they could. A writer of the period noted, "They dug troughs to sleep in, and cut up cloth to make covers; when a gift of straw came, it was to them like a featherbed". The severe reduction in population precipitated a change in the agricultural production of the manors. Labor for tilling the fields was in extremely short supply, necessitating conversion of the land to pastures for the less labor intensive raising of sheep. Out of this response to adversity, grew the great woolen cloth industries for which Britain was to become famous. Meanwhile, the Hundred Years war resumed periodically. With the economic stress and taxes to support the war, peasants in 1381 rose in bloody revolt across southern England. Although the region where the Strodes lived was involved in the uprising, what effect this may have had on their lives and livelihood, can not be ascertained.  From A Family History by Don Faust, 1997.