Chapter 12

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 pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more illustrious 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 serfage 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 class, 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 class to class 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 Essex, 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 multitude 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 friendship 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 nobles 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 documents. 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 multitude at Barton. Nationally the movement had wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage 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 municipal 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 emancipation to the one class 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 masses 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 passed 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 municipal 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 prædictæ villæ 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 fashion, 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 passes, the American pauses at the end of the mule-track, the German stops at the châlet in the pine-forest. It is only at the Alpine _table d'hôte_, 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 Titiens 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 illustrates 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 replenishing 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 noblest home of liberty which Europe has seen our astonishing 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 Constitution 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 asseveration 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, Passes, 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, Passes, 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 appetite 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 snatch a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent description of the _arête_. 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 pronounces 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 impassive 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 Passes,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then, like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appetite 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 shillings 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 pronounces "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 ship 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 bass, 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.

ÆNEAS:

A VERGILIAN STUDY.