he Great Charter for the realm at large which had not in
borough after borough been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses
whom the "mailed barons" who wrested it from their king would have
despised. That out of the heap of borough-charters which he flung back
to these townsmen that Charter was to be born, Richard could not know;
but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as he really was could have
been driven by mere greed of gold, or have been utterly blind to the
real nature of the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is
impossible. We have no such pithy hints of what was passing in his mind
as we shall find Abbot Sampson dropping in the course of our story. But
Richard can hardly have failed to note what these hints proved his
mitred counsellor to have noted well--the silent revolution which was
passing over the land, and which in a century and a half had raised
serfs like those of St. Edmunds into freeholders of a town.

It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give
that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the
tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set
him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds,
and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In
the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the
market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and
furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of
England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their
ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied
battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details,
in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and
striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two
centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for
itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to
another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard
indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy
with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of
their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us
how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate
up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight
of the first steps towards civic life, of m