familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she
knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the
keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is
great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous
lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She
is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest
to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It
is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid,
chatty little buttercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon,
from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of
every hound in the kennels.
It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at
luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter,
and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy
mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that
with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take
her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be
for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who
gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about
pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and
liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs
at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till
we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole
atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to
recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup.
It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the
whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more
of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene.
But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm
lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of
shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of
shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the
beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases,
girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one
faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling
effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other
phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the
buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the
child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth
sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her
catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by
clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the
buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as
he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very
shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a
keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude
for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the
confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the
daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a
very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson
of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of
carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes,"
replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her
voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du
Gout_.
Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour
and fidelity of buttercup friendships. In after-life men have friends
and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the
whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old
external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friendship is a much
more vivid and far more universal thing than friendship among boys. The
one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in
school that fades with the next remove, or a partnership in some
venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school
friendship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and devotion of friend
for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They
have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that
no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their
hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan
subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the
same fashion. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business
of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of
holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she
sends. Nothing save friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a
friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing
from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with
the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but the one pet brother.
The pet brother is as necessary an element in buttercup life as the
friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent
of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of
course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of
informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing
and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away
to pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and hurries back
to worship as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine
existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf
between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill
up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry
her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching
and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins,
grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that
dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But
in the pure equality of earlier days the buttercup shares half the games
and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and
sisterhood are very real things indeed.
Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes away like the
holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which
girlhood passes out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the
self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is
the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the
buttercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the worship
of her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it;
but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride
in bringing her suitor to her feet. Nobody is so exacting, so
capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one
is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of passion renders her
more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of
a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her
resentment on her worshipper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he
atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days
when the buttercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and
sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the
wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure
abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup flirts, but she flirts in
such an open and ingenuous fashion that nobody is a bit the worse for
it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young
fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that
hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled
with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her,
and she wings her way from one charming flower to another with little
thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure
girlhood, days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again.
Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are
worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes,
and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure
creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little
puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.
But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential
character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a
pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and
repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get
out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize
with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the
ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its
daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about
the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of
getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder
sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the
buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure
of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the
pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a buttercup
the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere
compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In
Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the
buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a
world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the
pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood.
And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The
next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to
us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the
laugh of the buttercup.
ABBOT AND TOWN.
The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of
St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediaeval names to the bulk of
Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious
Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found
himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys
starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house.
Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmunds has none; no national
chronicle was ever penned in its _scriptorium_ such as that which flings
lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely
monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and
ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the
abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In
the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the
twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows
distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly,
imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the
pages of Mr. Carlyle.
It is however to an incident in this abbot's life, somewhat later than
most of the events told so vividly in 'Past and Present,' that I wish to
direct my readers' attention. A good many eventful years had passed by
since Sampson stood abbot-elect in the court of King Henry; it was from
the German prison where Richard was lying captive that the old abbot was
returning, sad at heart, to his stately house. His way lay through the
little town that sloped quietly down to the abbey walls, along the
narrow little street that led to the stately gate-tower, now grey with
the waste of ages, but then fresh and white from the builder's hand. It
may have been in the shadow of that gateway that a group of townsmen
stood gathered to greet the return of their lord, but with other
business on hand besides kindly greeting. There was a rustling of
parchment as the alderman unfolded the town-charters, recited the brief
grants of Abbots Anselm and Ording and Hugh, and begged from the Lord
Abbot a new confirmation of the liberties of the town.
As Sampson paused a moment--he was a prudent, deliberate man in all his
ways--he must have read in the faces of all the monks who gathered round
him, in the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept within
bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On the other hand there was
the alderman pleading for the old privileges of the town--for security
of justice in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, for
just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts--the simple, efficient
liberty that stood written in the parchment with the heavy seals--the
seals of Anselm and Ording and Hugh. "Only the same words as your
predecessor used, Lord Abbot, simply the same words"--and then came the
silvery jingle of the sixty marks that the townsmen offered for their
lord's assent. A moment more and the assent was won, "given pleasantly
too," the monks commented bitterly, as "murmuring and grunting," to use
their own emphatic phrase, they led Sampson to the chapter-house. But
murmurings and gruntings broke idly against the old abbot's imperious
will. "Let the brethren murmur," he flashed out when one of his friends
told him there was discontent in the cloister at his dealings with the
townsmen; "let them blame me, and say among themselves what they will. I
am their father and abbot. So long as I live I will not give mine honour
to another."
The words were impatient, wilful enough; but it was the impatience of a
man who frets at the blindness of others to what is clear and evident to
his own finer sense. The shrewd, experienced eye of the old Churchman
read with a perfect sagacity the signs of the times. He had just stood
face to face in his German prison with one who, mere reckless soldier as
he seemed, had read them as clearly, as sagaciously as himself. When
History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of
Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade
or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish
recognition of municipal life. When, busy with the preparations for his
Eastern journey, the King sold charter after charter to the burgesses of
his towns, it seemed a mere outburst of royal greed, a mere carrying out
of his own bitter scoff that he would have sold London itself could he
have found a purchaser. But the hard cynical words of the Angevins were
veils which they flung over political conceptions too large for the
comprehension of their day. Richard was in fact only following out the
policy which had been timidly pursued by his father, which was to find
its fullest realization under John.
The silent growth and elevation of the English people was the real work
of their reigns, and in this work the boroughs led the way. Unnoticed
and despised, even by the historian of to-day, they had alone preserved
the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The right of self-government,
the right of free speech in free parliament, the right of equal justice
by one's peers,--it was these that the towns had brought safely across
the ages of Norman rule, these that by the mouth of traders and
shop-keepers asked recognition from the Angevin kings. No liberty was
claimed in the Great Charter for the realm at large which had not in
borough after borough been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses
whom the "mailed barons" who wrested it from their king would have
despised. That out of the heap of borough-charters which he flung back
to these townsmen that Charter was to be born, Richard could not know;
but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as he really was could have
been driven by mere greed of gold, or have been utterly blind to the
real nature of the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is
impossible. We have no such pithy hints of what was passing in his mind
as we shall find Abbot Sampson dropping in the course of our story. But
Richard can hardly have failed to note what these hints proved his
mitred counsellor to have noted well--the silent revolution which was
passing over the land, and which in a century and a half had raised
serfs like those of St. Edmunds into freeholders of a town.
It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give
that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the
tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set
him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds,
and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In
the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the
market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and
furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of
England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their
ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied
battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details,
in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and
striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two
centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for
itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to
another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard
indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy
with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of
their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us
how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate
up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight
of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of
flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work
along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of
town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn.
It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear
peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the
Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the
great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all
the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with
the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time
too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from
justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter
under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked
kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought
fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year
and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his
lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to
reap in the abbot's harvest field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds,
to help bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey-waters. Within the
four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were his;
the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the
fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer would withhold the
use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever he found them.
Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll,
for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey
farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals.
First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the
low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop
and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the
market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in
the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting
must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's
nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn,
at his hands.
By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy
burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their
silver marks in the ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard
to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a
silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to
have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishery, were
commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and
the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one could tell when the
retainers of the abbey came to lose their exemption from local taxation
and to pay the town penny to the alderman like the rest of the
burgesses. "In some way, I don't know how,"--as Jocelyn grumbles about
just such an unnoted change,--by usage, by omission, by downright
forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a little present to a
needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always
unconscious, and one incident in the history of Bury St. Edmunds,
remarkable if only regarded as marking the advance of law, is yet more
remarkable as indicating the part which a new moral sense of human right
to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.
The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old English right of
meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the
presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English
fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his
neighbours, the "compurgators," out of whom our jury was to grow. Rough
and inadequate as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial
justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers as thoroughly as
the belted earl. Without the borough bounds however the system of the
Norman judicature prevailed. The rural tenants who did suit and service
at the cellarer's court were subject to the "judicial duel" which the
Conqueror had introduced. In the twelfth century however the strong
tendency to national unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and
the barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too apparent even
for the baronage or the Church to uphold it. "Kebel's case," as a lawyer
would term it, brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. In
the opinion of his neighbours Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the
robbery with which he had been charged; but he was "of the cellarer's
fee," and subject to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went
against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
townsmen woke the farmers to a sense of their wrong. "Had Kebel been a
dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is." The
scandal at last moved the convent itself to action. The monks were
divided in opinion, but the saner part determined that their tenants
"should enjoy equal liberty" with the townsmen. The cellarer's court was
abolished; the franchise of the town was extended to the rural
possessions of the abbey; the farmers "came to the toll-house, and were
written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny."