c'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
_fodercorns_, 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 suchlike;
not a steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea! North of the
Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquaestor 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_