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