ingle 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 t