Chapter V: Part 5

The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt rises from the naive simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon of Liege is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist. There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the Florentine victory of Campaldino:--

"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their
standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by
Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them,
they had received no little damage; but such was not the will
of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called
Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array
of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to
the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white
ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop,
who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be
they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer
Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and
well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms
together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men
were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted
but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill.
Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their
ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and
let them assault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of
Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force
that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The
fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of
the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels
from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo
had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they
were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a
very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to
creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and
disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in
the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part.
Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that
day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men
of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but
by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the
rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to
fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."

"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.

And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the vendetta.

What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy" and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout Italy, lay wholly with its _noblesse_. It was equally perilous for an Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes, hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled.

The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him, and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her," said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the outraged house--"stone dead has no fellow"--and as Dino puts it, in the most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple. The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty of his blood."

Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:--

"Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and
manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in
figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing,
prudent, and eloquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great
ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too
of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he
was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers,
full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."

Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:--

"Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he
passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the
land seemed all his own."

He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city throughout Tuscany--a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the 'Inferno.'

From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed, whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day. On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had seen an Emperor at all.

But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city, daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior, Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300; both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his fellows in Santa Trinita is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it has its own pathetic force:--"My masters, why will ye confound and undo so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren? What victory will ye gain?--none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground. Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can know.

BUTTERCUPS.

It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn, and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the town the buttercup was nobody, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the hedges she is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads the way.

All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes in the chatty familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid, chatty little buttercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon, from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of every hound in the kennels.

It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter, and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup.

It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene. But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes," replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du Gout_.

Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour and fidelity of buttercup friendships. In after-life men have friends and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friendship is a much more vivid and far more universal thing than friendship among boys. The one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in school that fades with the next remove, or a partnership in some venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school friendship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and devotion of friend for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the same fashion. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she sends. Nothing save friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but the one pet brother. The pet brother is as necessary an element in buttercup life as the friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away to pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and hurries back to worship as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins, grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But in the pure equality of earlier days the buttercup shares half the games and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and sisterhood are very real things indeed.

Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes away like the holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which girlhood passes out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the buttercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the worship of her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it; but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride in bringing her suitor to her feet. Nobody is so exacting, so capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of passion renders her more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her resentment on her worshipper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days when the buttercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup flirts, but she flirts in such an open and ingenuous fashion that nobody is a bit the worse for it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her, and she wings her way from one charming flower to another with little thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure girlhood, days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again. Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes, and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.

But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a buttercup the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood. And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the laugh of the buttercup.

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 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."

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 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.