e abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses
seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and
carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street lest
his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping
him off to Brabant. The Primate and the Pope levelled their
excommunications against the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at
last discovered and brought home it was probably with some pledge of the
arrangement which followed in 1332. The enormous damages assessed by the
royal justices were remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed,
the prisoners were released. On the other hand the deeds which had been
stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters
which had been extorted from the monks were formally cancelled.

[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury in 1381]

The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed by their failure, and
throughout the reign of Edward the Third the oppression against which they
had risen went on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow of sheer
force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the law. At
Richard's accession Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was
in charge of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his
day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more
illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton
Belgabred. John was "industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry
found their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers around
him. "Faithfully he strove," says the monastic chronicler, "with the
villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned
specially as his "adversaries," but it was the rustics who were to show
what a hate he had won. On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler's
fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall
broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly, but he was
betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein
and bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay naked in the open field
while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's head on a
lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached
the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Caven