Stray Studies from England and Italy

by John Richard Greene

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."

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 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 £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 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."