(A) In any group of 779 individuals of varied age, a certain number of people would have died anyway, from old age, other disease, or accident.

(B) Other members of the group would have retired, and the social situation occasioned by the Black Death may have precipitated some early retirements and delayed others; some would have proceeded to retirement precisely as planned.

(C) Some lawyers would have stopped functioning as an attorney in common pleas because someone else died: the mortality of others inevitably created professional vacancies, so that there was a larger field of promotion and patronage available right after the Black Death. The number of manorial courts and towns, for instance, did not decline even nearly in the same proportion as the population, so that skilled individuals who survived had a rather better chance of securing a different position if desired. The lure of another position would be even greater, because the amount of litigation was relatively tied to the size of the population and, in the short term, declined drastically. With less litigation and thus a lower demand for attorneys and a large number of vacant positions for legally skilled people, a certain number of attorneys would have gladly terminated their attorney functions.

(D) Non-reappearance may have been related to none of these reasons. At all periods a local lawyer might occasionally appear only once or twice as attorney in common pleas at any time. Thus, those pre-Black Death attorneys who appeared only infrequently and who did not re-appear after the Black Death may have survived the plague but also might never have functioned again as attorney if there had been no plague.

(E) Some pre-Black Death attorneys would have inherited from those who died in the plague to a sufficient degree to allow them to leave their practice or even to compel them to do so in order to manage their own estates (ie, a brother or younger son unexpectedly inheriting the family estate).

(F) Finally, some of the pre-Black Death attorneys died of the plague, but because of the variety of other reasons for non-appearance, we cannot know how many.