Stray Studies from England and Italy Part 5

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 l.u.s.tre 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 Glas...o...b..ry. 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sent. A moment more and the a.s.sent 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 munic.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 bra.s.ses 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 pa.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sed 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 c.h.i.n.king 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 a.s.sembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English fas.h.i.+on, 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."

A moral revolution like this is notable at any time, but a change 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 un.o.bserved for so many long years. There was their own town growing, burgesses encroaching on the market s.p.a.ce, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 40 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 st.u.r.dily 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 s.h.i.+llings. 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 munic.i.p.al 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 st.u.r.dily 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 10,000, 500 worth of coin, 3000 "florins,"--this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But neither florins nor chasubles were what their a.s.sailants 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 munic.i.p.al. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wards.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s, were stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained other and yet more formidable doc.u.ments. 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 22; a whole company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in a bond for no less a sum than 10,000. 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 serf.a.ge, 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 ma.s.s 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 mult.i.tude 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. 60,000, 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 a.s.sessed 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 serf.a.ge. 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 p.r.o.nounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more ill.u.s.trious 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 serf.a.ge 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s to cla.s.s 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 Ess.e.x, 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 mult.i.tude 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 n.o.bles 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 doc.u.ments. 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 mult.i.tude at Barton. Nationally the movement had wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the tendency to reduce a whole cla.s.s to serf.a.ge 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 munic.i.p.al 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 emanc.i.p.ation to the one cla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 munic.i.p.al 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 pa.s.ses, 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 t.i.tiens 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 ill.u.s.trates 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.

In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenis.h.i.+ng influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English education and on the amount of information about other countries which it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice people should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at the absence of police. In the very heart of the n.o.blest home of liberty which Europe has seen our astonis.h.i.+ng nation lives and moves with as contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Const.i.tution than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm.

The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come, the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's "decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of business; the constant a.s.severation of all as to every prospect which they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in their life--form a cataract of boredom which pours down from morn to dewy eve. It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into discussion over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, beguiles the squire towards politics, lures the Indian officer into a dissertation on coolies, leads the British mother through flowery paths of piety towards the new vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there were no fog.

But even a life like this must have its poetry and its hero, and at seven thousand feet above the sea-level it is very natural to find one's poetry in what would be dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or the OEggischorn is naturally enough the Alpine Clubbist. He has hurried silent and solitary through the lower country, he only blooms into real life at the sight of "high work." It is wonderful how lively the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Pa.s.ses, and Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the rope, what places has he done before?--a thousand questions of this sort are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner.

The elderly spinster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for the ascent. The hero stops his dinner politely, and shows her the new little box of lip-salve with which he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say the truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. With him the climb which fills every bystander with awe is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way you know." He has never done this particular peak, and so he has to do it; but it has been too often done before to fill him with any particular interest in the matter. As to the ascent itself, he sets about planning it as practically as if he were planning a run from London to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides, marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining the amount of meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on 'Peaks, Pa.s.ses, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this particular peak.

What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature, which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appet.i.te of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed him in imagination round the edge of the creva.s.ses. All the old awe and terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent description of the _arete_. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls one "dreadful place where you look down five thousand feet clear." The whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught.

Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord p.r.o.nounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must come. At last there is a distant _jodel_, and in an hour or so the hero arrives. He is impa.s.sive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in the very words of 'Peaks and Pa.s.ses,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then, like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appet.i.te of his guides. Then he dines, and then he tells us that what he has really gained from his climb is entire faith in the efficacy of his little box for preventing all injury from sun or from snow. He is a little proud, too, to have done the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and at ten s.h.i.+llings less cost. Altogether, it must be confessed, the Alpine Clubbist is not an imaginative man. His one grief in life seems to be the failure of his new portable cooking apparatus, and he p.r.o.nounces "Liebig's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. But such as he is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is the hero of the Alpine hotel.

At such an elevation the religious developement of the British mind becomes strangely jerky and irregular. The arrival of Sunday is suddenly revealed to the group round the breakfast-table by the severity with which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement over the stove that the English service in the hotel is at ten o'clock. But the announcement is purely speculative. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fiddling and dancing reach the ear from an outbuilding where the guides and the maids are celebrating the day by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the insuperable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. The Indian civilian suggests that we should adopt the naval usage, and that the senior layman read prayers. But the attorney is the senior layman, and he objects to such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford undergraduate tells his little tale of a service on board s.h.i.+p where the major, unversed in such matters, began with the churching service, and ended with the office for the burial of the dead. Then he withers beneath the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading her "lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little buzz of excitement, and every eye is fixed upon the quiet-looking traveller in a brown shooting-coat and a purple tie, who is chipping his egg and imbibing his coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is sure that the stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney doubts whether such a remarkable preacher would go about in such a costume. The British mother solves the whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and with an eye on the announcement in question, asking point-blank whether she has the pleasure of addressing that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is lost. His egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the chairs arranged with as little regard to comfort as may be. The divine retires for the sermon which--prescient of his doom--he has slipped into his valise. The landlord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different origins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is common to both. When the time comes for singing it, the landlord joins in with a fine but wandering ba.s.s, catching an English word here and there as he goes along. The sermon is as usual on the Prodigal Son, and the Indian civilian nods at every mention of "going into a far country," as a topic specially appropriate for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more.

His cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at the very hour of afternoon service. The British maiden wanders out to read Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and is wonder-struck to come upon the unhappy sufferer reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insufferable, and poetry is the expression of the deepest and most sacred emotions. This is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a British parson in regions above the clouds.

aeNEAS:

A VERGILIAN STUDY.

In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with which he reflects the strength and weakness of his time, its humanity, its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity of man, its att.i.tude of curious but condescending interest towards the past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of Rome.