f a hundred shillings. This offer we refused.
We preferred a simple adjournment of our claim in the hope that in some
other abbot's time we might get all back again."

Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, in fact, this present
abbot was on these municipal points simply incorrigible. Was it quite by
an oversight, for instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some way, I
don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town got chosen in other
places than in chapter, and without leave of the house,"--in simple
town-motes, that is, and by sheer downright delegation of power on the
part of his fellow-burgesses? At any rate it was by no oversight that
Sampson granted his charter on the day he came back from Richard's
prison, when "we monks were murmuring and grumbling" in his very ear!
And yet was the abbot foolish in his generation? This charter of his
ranks lineally among the ancestors of that Great Charter which his
successor was first to unroll on the altar-steps of the choir (we can
still measure off the site in the rough field by the great piers of the
tower arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At any rate,
half a century after that scene in chapter, the new England that Sampson
had foreseen came surging stormily enough against the abbey gates.
Later abbots had set themselves sturdily against his policy of
concession and conciliation; and riots, lawsuits, royal commissions,
mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey under the first two
Edwards. Under the third came the fierce conflict of 1327.

On the 25th of January in that year the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds,
headed by Richard Drayton, burst into the Abbey. Its servants were
beaten off, the monks driven into choir, and dragged thence with their
prior (for the abbot was away in London) to the town prison. The abbey
itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
kitchen, all disappeared. Chattels valued at L10,000, L500 worth of
coin, 3000 "florins,"--this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But
neither florins nor chasubles were what their assailants really aimed
at. Their next step shows what were the grievances which had driven the
burgesses to this fierce outbreak of revolt. They were as much personal
as municipal. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's
hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of
orphans born w