such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while at his manor-house
of Mildenhall he studied his parchments and touched a defter lute than
Nero or the Breton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men arose,
as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round Wat Tyler; in Norfolk,
in Essex, fifty thousand peasants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It
was no longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the old
English revolution headed by the baron and priest. Priest and baron were
swept away before this sudden storm of national hate. The howl of the
great multitude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior John.
He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed him, judged him in rude
mockery of the law that had wronged them, condemned him, killed him.[1]
Five days the corpse lay half-stripped in the open field, none daring to
bury it--so ran the sentence of his murderers--while the mob poured
unresisted into Bury. The scene was like some wild orgy of the French
Revolution than any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head on
a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng reached at
last the gallows where the head of Cavendish, the chief justice, stood
already impaled, and pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery
of the old friendship between the two, set them side by side.

Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates had been burst open, the
cloister was full of the dense maddened crowd, howling for a new victim,
John Lackenheath. Warden of the barony as he was, few knew him as he
stood among the group of trembling monks; there was still amidst this
outburst of frenzy the dread of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had
denounced him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if Lackenheath
resembled the French nobles in the hatred he had roused, he resembled
them also in the cool contemptuous courage with which they fronted
death. "I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a
moment, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! monk! traitor!" he was swept
to the gallows and his head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd
rolled back again to the abbey-gate and summoned the monks before them.
They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their
fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight
of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and their
charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-pla