ABSTRACT
Always the first casualty of every recession is the building industry; and building in medieval England would never again be as extravagant as in the half-century preceding the Black Death. When the Black Death harvested the labour force in 13489, ushering in a new era of lower rents and higher wages, only the King could continue unaffected by it. One such architectural casualty of the Black Death was the costly building campaign, almost at an end by 1349, at Patrington Church, in East Yorkshire. Parrington the so-called Queen of Holderness, where Hedon Church is the King was the huge new parish church of a little market town at its most prosperous in the generation before the pestilence. Patrington Church, Queen of Holderness, is arguably the best-conceived and most complete decorated parish church of pre-plague England. For half a century from the Black Death, Patrington's fine steeple went without its spire.
