arket and market-toll, of
flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work
along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of
town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn.

It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear
peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the
Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the
great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all
the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with
the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time
too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from
justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter
under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked
kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought
fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year
and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his
lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to
reap in the abbot's harvest field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds,
to help bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey-waters. Within the
four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were his;
the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the
fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer would withhold the
use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever he found them.
Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll,
for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey
farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals.
First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the
low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop
and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the
market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in
the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting
must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's
nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn,
at his hands.

By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy
burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their
silver marks in the ears o