ABBOT AND TOWN.
ABBOT AND TOWN.
The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediæval 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."