wrought avowedly "that all might enjoy equal liberty" is especially
notable in the twelfth century. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere
sounding the knell of feudal privilege and of national division, long
before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runnymede. Slowly and
fitfully through the reign of his father the new England which had grown
out of conquered and conquerors woke to self-consciousness. It was this
awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted with his clear, shrewd eyes.
To him, we can hardly doubt, the revolt of the town-wives, for instance,
was more than a mere scream of angry women. The "rep-silver," the
commutation for that old service of reaping in the abbot's fields, had
ceased to be exacted from the richer burgesses. At last the poorer sort
refused to pay. Then the cellarer's men came seizing gate and stool by
way of distress till the women turning out, distaff in hand, put them
ignominiously to flight. Sampson had his own thoughts about the matter,
saw perhaps that the days of inequality were over, that in the England
that was coming there would be one law for rich and poor. At any rate he
quietly compromised the question for twenty shillings a year.
The convent was indignant. "Abbot Ording, who lies there," muttered an
angry monk, as he pointed to the tomb in the choir, "would not have done
this for five hundred marks of silver." That their abbot should
capitulate to a mob of infuriated town-wives was too much for the
patience of the brotherhood. All at once they opened their eyes to the
facts which had been going on unobserved for so many long years. There
was their own town growing, burgesses encroaching on the market space,
settlers squatting on their own acre with no leave asked, aldermen who
were once only the abbey servants taking on themselves to give
permission for this and that, tradesmen thriving and markets increasing,
and the abbey never one penny the richer for it all. It was quite time
that Abbot Sampson should be roused to do his duty, and to do it in very
sharp fashion indeed. However we will let one of the monks tell his own
tale in his own gossiping way:--
"In the tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy we monks, after full
deliberation in chapter, laid our formal plaint before the abbot in his
court. We said that the rents and revenues of all the good towns and
boroughs in England were steadily growing and increasing to the
enrichment of their lords, in every case save in that of our town of St.
Edmund. The customary rent of L40 which it pays never rises higher. That
this is so we imputed solely to the conduct of the townspeople, who are
continually building new shops and stalls in the market-place without
any leave of the convent" (abbey-land though it was). "The only
permission, in fact, which they ask is that of their alderman, an
officer who himself was of old times a mere servant of our sacrist, and
bound to pay into his hands the yearly rent of the town, and removable
at his pleasure."
Never, Jocelyn evidently thinks, was a case plainer; but into the
justice or injustice of it the burgesses refused sturdily to enter. When
they were summoned to make answer they pleaded simple possession. "They
were in the King's justice, and no answer would they make concerning
tenements which they and their fathers had held in peace for a year and
a day." Such answer would in fact, they added, be utterly contrary to
the freedom of the town. No plea could have been legally more complete
as none could have been more provoking. The monks turned in a rage upon
the abbot, and simply requested him to eject their opponents. Then they
retired angrily into the chapter-house, and waited in a sort of white
heat to hear what the abbot would do. This is what Sampson did. He
quietly bade the townsmen wait; then he "came into chapter just like one
of ourselves, and told us privily that he would right us as far as he
could, but that if he were to act it must be by law. Be the case right
or wrong, he did not dare eject without trial his free men from land and
property which they had held year after year; in fact, if he did so, he
would at once fall into the King's justice. At this moment in came the
townsfolk into the chapter-house, and offered to compromise the matter
for an annual quit rent of a hundred shillings. This offer we refused.
We preferred a simple adjournment of our claim in the hope that in some
other abbot's time we might get all back again."
Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, in fact, this present
abbot was on these municipal points simply incorrigible. Was it quite by
an oversight, for instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some way, I
don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town got chosen in other
places than in chapter, and without leave of the house,"--in simple
town-motes, that is, and by sheer downright delegation of power on the
part of his fellow-burgesses? At any rate it was by no oversight that
Sampson granted his charter on the day he came back from Richard's
prison, when "we monks were murmuring and grumbling" in his very ear!
And yet was the abbot foolish in his generation? This charter of his
ranks lineally among the ancestors of that Great Charter which his
successor was first to unroll on the altar-steps of the choir (we can
still measure off the site in the rough field by the great piers of the
tower arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At any rate,
half a century after that scene in chapter, the new England that Sampson
had foreseen came surging stormily enough against the abbey gates.
Later abbots had set themselves sturdily against his policy of
concession and conciliation; and riots, lawsuits, royal commissions,
mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey under the first two
Edwards. Under the third came the fierce conflict of 1327.
On the 25th of January in that year the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds,
headed by Richard Drayton, burst into the Abbey. Its servants were
beaten off, the monks driven into choir, and dragged thence with their
prior (for the abbot was away in London) to the town prison. The abbey
itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
kitchen, all disappeared. Chattels valued at L10,000, L500 worth of
coin, 3000 "florins,"--this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But
neither florins nor chasubles were what their assailants really aimed
at. Their next step shows what were the grievances which had driven the
burgesses to this fierce outbreak of revolt. They were as much personal
as municipal. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's
hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of
orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these the town could
never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from Pope and
King, interpreted yet more mysteriously by the wit of the new lawyer
class, were stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained
other and yet more formidable documents. The religious houses,
untroubled by the waste of war, had profited more than any landowners by
the general increase of wealth. They had become great proprietors,
money-lenders to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had
banished from the land. There were few townsmen of St. Edmund who had
not some bond laid up in the abbey registry. Nicholas Fowke and a band
of debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment of 500 marks and
fifty casks of wine. Philip Clopton's mark bound him to discharge a debt
of L22; a whole company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in
a bond for no less a sum than L10,000. The new spirit of commercial
enterprise, joined with the troubles of the time, seems to have thrown
the whole community into the abbot's hands.
It was from the troubles of the time that the burghers looked for
escape; and the general disturbance which accompanied the deposition of
Edward II. seems to have quickened their longing into action. Their
revolt soon disclosed its practical aims. From their prison in the town
the trembling prior and his monks were brought back to their own
chapter-house. The spoil of their registry--the papal bulls and the
royal charters, the deeds and bonds and mortgages of the townsmen--were
laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob, they were forced
to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a guild to the town, and a
full release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
house. But all control over the town was gone. Through spring and summer
no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey
did not dare to show their faces in the streets. Then news came that the
abbot was in London, appealing for aid to King and Court, and the whole
county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought
of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law which had
become a tyranny, poured into the streets of the town. From thirty-two
of the neighbouring villages the priests marched at the head of their
flocks to this new crusade. Twenty thousand in number, so men guessed,
the wild mass of men, women, and children rushed again on the abbey. For
four November days the work of destruction went on unhindered, whilst
gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry, went up in
flames. From the wreck of the abbey itself the great multitude swept
away too the granges and barns of the abbey farms. The monks had become
vast agricultural proprietors: 1,000 horses, 120 oxen, 200 cows, 300
bullocks, 300 hogs, 10,000 sheep were driven off for spoil, and as a
last outrage, the granges and barns were burnt to the ground. L60,000,
the justiciaries afterwards decided, would hardly cover the loss.
Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, there never was a
time in English history when government stood with folded hands before a
scene such as this. The appeal of the abbot was no longer neglected; a
royal force quelled the riot and exacted vengeance for this breach of
the King's peace. Thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to
Norwich; twenty-four of the chief townsmen, thirty-two of the village
priests, were convicted as aiders and abettors. Twenty were at once
summarily hung. But with this first vigorous effort at repression the
danger seemed again to roll away. Nearly 200 persons remained indeed
under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged
on in the King's courts. At last matters ended in a lawless, ludicrous
outrage. Out of patience and irritated by repeated breaches of promise
on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his
manor of Chevington, robbed, bound and shaved him, and carried him off
to London. There he was hurried from street to street, lest his
hiding-place should be detected, till opportunity offered for his
shipping off to Brabant. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope himself,
levelled their excommunications against the perpetrators of this daring
outrage in vain.
The prison of their victim was at last discovered; he was released and
brought home. But the lesson seems to have done good. The year 1332 saw
a concordat arranged between the Abbey and Town. The damages assessed by
the royal justiciaries, a sum enormous now but incredible then, were
remitted, the outlawry was reversed, the prisoners were released. On the
other hand, the deeds were again replaced in the archives of the abbey,
and the charters which had been extorted from the trembling monks were
formally cancelled. In other words, the old process of legal oppression
was left to go on. The spirit of the townsmen was, as we shall see,
crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. It was from a new
quarter that help was for a moment to come. No subject is more difficult
to treat, as nothing is more difficult to explain, than the communal
revolt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the grievances which
prompted it. But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression
which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found
themselves in a mesh of legal claims--old services revived, old dues
enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to
serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it
was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk.
Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in
charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In
sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more
illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, the Breton
Belgabred. He was a man "industrious and subtle;" and subtlety and
industry found their scope in suit after suit with the farmers and
burgesses around. "Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eulogist,
"with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he
owned as his foes, his "adversaries;" but it was the rustics who were
especially to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a perilous
time in which to win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of
the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the
sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous
taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the
population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a
reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords;
with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong,
reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he
has yet fully to emerge. That terrible revolution of social sentiment
had begun which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest
interests of a class, which was with the Statute of Labourers and the
successive labour-regulations that followed to create pauperism, and
with pauperism to create that hatred of class to class which hangs like
a sick dream over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance of
such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while at his manor-house
of Mildenhall he studied his parchments and touched a defter lute than
Nero or the Breton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men arose,
as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round Wat Tyler; in Norfolk,
in Essex, fifty thousand peasants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It
was no longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the old
English revolution headed by the baron and priest. Priest and baron were
swept away before this sudden storm of national hate. The howl of the
great multitude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior John.
He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed him, judged him in rude
mockery of the law that had wronged them, condemned him, killed him.[1]
Five days the corpse lay half-stripped in the open field, none daring to
bury it--so ran the sentence of his murderers--while the mob poured
unresisted into Bury. The scene was like some wild orgy of the French
Revolution than any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head on
a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng reached at
last the gallows where the head of Cavendish, the chief justice, stood
already impaled, and pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery
of the old friendship between the two, set them side by side.
Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates had been burst open, the
cloister was full of the dense maddened crowd, howling for a new victim,
John Lackenheath. Warden of the barony as he was, few knew him as he
stood among the group of trembling monks; there was still amidst this
outburst of frenzy the dread of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had
denounced him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if Lackenheath
resembled the French nobles in the hatred he had roused, he resembled
them also in the cool contemptuous courage with which they fronted
death. "I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a
moment, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! monk! traitor!" he was swept
to the gallows and his head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd
rolled back again to the abbey-gate and summoned the monks before them.
They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their
fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight
of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and their
charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many
which might have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore they
could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, and bade the burgesses
inspect the documents. But the iron had entered too deeply into these
men's souls. Not even in their hour of triumph could they shake off
their awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood before them. A
compromise was patched up. The charters should be surrendered till the
popular claimant of the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do
more, the great crowd ebbed away.
Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the despair when in the
presence of the boy-king Wat Tyler was struck down by a foul treason;
the ruin when the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling in upon
the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. Nationally the movement had
wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the
tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked. But
to Bury it brought little but harm. A hundred years later the town again
sought freedom in the law-courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey
charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The royal council of
Edward IV. decided that "the abbot is lord of the whole town of Bury,
the sole head and captain within the town." All municipal appointments
were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The townsmen had no
communal union, no corporate existence. Their leaders paid for riot and
insult by imprisonment and fine.
The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle,
the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes
before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away
together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the
carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever
other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate
emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been
denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more
heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks'
nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St.
Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the
long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone
recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their
explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a
pleasanter ending. The charter of James--for the town had passed into
the King's hands as the abbot's successor--gave all that it had ever
contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern
reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its
origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in
its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees
the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for
simple self-government.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in
simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells
his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum
praedictae villae de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et
nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti."
HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.
When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the
Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity
as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to
reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's
own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly
entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that
he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German
students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he
is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily
in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We
never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs.
Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular
respectabilities and home decencies to be really themselves. They are
forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little
modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them
something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and
sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or
into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves
and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe
for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain.
He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be
himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore
thunders loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl
after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss
stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at
station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the
outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly
revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first
catch the man himself.
There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in
a run through the Alps than to see how true the various peoples among
their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman
clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of
the mule-track, the German stops at the chalet in the pine-forest. It is
only at the Alpine _table d'hote_, with a proud consciousness of being
seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman
pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains,
and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self
again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in
one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their
trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the
varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall
Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and
sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare
Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson,
the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded
London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the
British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden
sitting alone in the rock-clefts and reviewing the losses and gains of
the last season--all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank
and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of
the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in
a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British
nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real
native peculiarities of Englishmen.