TWELFTH CENTURY.
Our Abbot being dead, the _Dominus Rex_, Henry II., or Ranulf de
Glanvill _Justiciarius_ of England for him, set Inspectors or
Custodiars over us;--not in any breathless haste to appoint a new
Abbot, our revenues coming into his own _Scaccarium_, or royal
Exchequer, in the mean while. They proceeded with some rigour, these
Custodiars; took written inventories, clapt-on seals, exacted
everywhere strict tale and measure: but wherefore should a living monk
complain? The living monk has to do his devotional drill-exercise;
consume his allotted _pitantia_, what we call _pittance_, or ration of
victual; and possess his soul in patience.
Dim, as through a long vista of Seven Centuries, dim and very strange
looks that monk-life to us; the ever-surprising circumstance this,
That it is a _fact_ and no dream, that we see it there, and gaze into
the very eyes of it! Smoke rises daily from those culinary
chimney-throats; there are living human beings there, who chant,
loud-braying, their matins, nones, vespers; awakening _echoes_, not to
the bodily ear alone. St. Edmund's Shrine, perpetually illuminated,
glows ruddy through the Night, and through the Night of Centuries
withal; St. Edmundsbury Town paying yearly Forty pounds for that
express end. Bells clang out; on great occasions, all the bells. We
have Processions, Preachings, Festivals, Christmas Plays, _Mysteries_
shown in the Churchyard, at which latter the Townsfolk sometimes
quarrel. Time was, Time is, as Friar Bacon's Brass Head remarked; and
withal Time will be. There are three Tenses, _Tempora_, or Times; and
there is one Eternity; and as for us,
'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!'
Indisputable, though very dim to modern vision, rests on its
hill-slope that same _Bury_, _Stow_, or Town of St. Edmund; already a
considerable place, not without traffic, nay manufactures, would
Jocelin only tell us what. Jocelin is totally careless of telling:
but, through dim fitful apertures, we can see _Fullones_, 'Fullers,'
see cloth-making; looms dimly going, dye-vats, and old women spinning
yarn. We have Fairs too, _Nundinae_, in due course; and the Londoners
give us much trouble, pretending that they, as a metropolitan people,
are exempt from toll. Besides there is Field-husbandry, with perplexed
settlement of Convent rents: corn-ricks pile themselves within burgh,
in their season; and cattle depart and enter; and even the poor weaver
has his cow,--'dungheaps' lying quiet at most doors (_ante foras_,
says the incidental Jocelin), for the Town has yet no improved police.
Watch and ward nevertheless we do keep, and have Gates,--as what Town
must not; thieves so abounding; war, _werra_, such a frequent thing!
Our thieves, at the Abbot's judgment-bar, deny; claim wager of battle;
fight, are beaten, and _then_ hanged. 'Ketel, the thief,' took this
course; and it did nothing for him,--merely brought us, and indeed
himself, new trouble!
Everyway a most foreign Time. What difficulty, for example, has our
_Cellerarius_ to collect the _repselver_, 'reaping silver,' or penny,
which each householder is by law bound to pay for cutting down the
Convent grain! Richer people pretend that it is commuted, that it is
this and the other; that, in short, they will not pay it. Our
_Cellerarius_ gives up calling on the rich. In the houses of the poor,
our _Cellerarius_ finding, in like manner, neither penny nor good
promise, snatches, without ceremony, what _vadium_ (pledge, _wad_) he
can come at: a joint-stool, kettle, nay the very house-door,
'_hostium_;' and old women, thus exposed to the unfeeling gaze of the
public, rush out after him with their distaffs and the angriest
shrieks: '_vetulae exibant cum colis suis_,' says Jocelin, '_minantes
et exprobrantes_.'
What a historical picture, glowing visible, as St. Edmund's Shrine by
night, after Seven long Centuries or so! _Vetulae cum colis_: My
venerable ancient spinning grandmothers,--ah, and ye too have to
shriek, and rush out with your distaffs; and become Female Chartists,
and scold all evening with void doorway;--and in old Saxon, as we in
modern, would fain demand some Five-point Charter, could it be
fallen-in with, the Earth being too tyrannous!--Wise Lord Abbots,
hearing of such phenomena, did in time abolish or commute the
reap-penny, and one nuisance was abated. But the image of these justly
offended old women, in their old wool costumes, with their angry
features, and spindles brandished, lives forever in the historical
memory. Thanks to thee, Jocelin Boswell. Jerusalem was taken by the
Crusaders, and again lost by them; and Richard Coeur-de-Lion 'veiled
his face' as he passed in sight of it: but how many other things went
on, the while!
Thus, too, our trouble with the Lakenheath eels is very great. King
Knut namely, or rather his Queen who also did herself honour by
honouring St. Edmund, decreed by authentic deed yet extant on
parchment, that the Holders of the Town Fields, once Beodric's,
should, for one thing, go yearly and catch us four thousand eels in
the marsh-pools of Lakenheath. Well, they went, they continued to go;
but, in later times, got into the way of returning with a most short
account of eels. Not the due six-score apiece; no, Here are two-score,
Here are twenty, ten,--sometimes, Here are none at all; Heaven help
us, we _could_ catch no more, they were not there! What is a
distressed _Cellerarius_ to do? We agree that each Holder of so many
acres shall pay one penny yearly, and let-go the eels as too slippery.
But, alas, neither is this quite effectual: the Fields, in my time,
have got divided among so many hands, there is no catching of _them_
either; I have known our Cellarer get seven-and-twenty pence formerly,
and now it is much if he get ten pence farthing (_vix decem denarios
et obolum_). And then their sheep, which they are bound to fold
nightly in our pens, for the manure's sake; and, I fear, do not always
fold: and their _aver-pennies_, and their _avragiums_, and their
_fodercorns_, and mill-and-market dues! Thus, in its undeniable but
dim manner, does old St. Edmundsbury spin and till, and laboriously
keep its pot boiling, and St. Edmund's Shrine lighted, under such
conditions and averages as it can.
* * * * *
How much is still alive in England; how much has not yet come into
life! A Feudal Aristocracy is still alive, in the prime of life;
superintending the cultivation of the land, and less consciously the
distribution of the produce of the land, the adjustment of the
quarrels of the land; judging, soldiering, adjusting; everywhere
governing the people,--so that even a Gurth, born thrall of Cedric,
lacks not his due parings of the pigs he tends. Governing;--and, alas,
also game-preserving; so that a Robert Hood, a William Scarlet and
others have, in these days, put on Lincoln coats, and taken to living,
in some universal-suffrage manner, under the greenwood-tree!
How silent, on the other hand, lie all Cotton-trades and suchlike;
not a steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea! North of the
Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquaestor burnt the Country, finding it
unruly, into very stern repose. Wild fowl scream in those ancient
silences, wild cattle roam in those ancient solitudes; the scanty
sulky Norse-bred population all coerced into silence,--feeling that,
under these new Norman Governors, their history has probably as good
as _ended_. Men and Northumbrian Norse populations know little what
has ended, what is but beginning! The Ribble and the Aire roll down,
as yet unpolluted by dyers' chemistry; tenanted by merry trouts and
piscatory otters; the sunbeam and the vacant wind's-blast alone
traversing those moors. Side by side sleep the coal-strata and the
iron-strata for so many ages; no Steam-Demon has yet risen smoking
into being. Saint Mungo rules in Glasgow; James Watt still slumbering
in the deep of Time. _Mancunium_, Manceaster, what we now call
Manchester, spins no cotton,--if it be not _wool_ 'cottons,' clipped
from the backs of mountain sheep. The Creek of the Mersey gurgles,
twice in the four-and-twenty hours, with eddying brine, clangorous
with sea-fowl; and is a _Lither_-Pool, a _lazy_ or sullen Pool, no
monstrous pitchy City, and Seahaven of the world! The Centuries are
big; and the birth-hour is coming, not yet come. _Tempus ferax, tempus
edax rerum._