ce; many
which might have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore they
could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, and bade the burgesses
inspect the documents. But the iron had entered too deeply into these
men's souls. Not even in their hour of triumph could they shake off
their awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood before them. A
compromise was patched up. The charters should be surrendered till the
popular claimant of the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do
more, the great crowd ebbed away.

Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the despair when in the
presence of the boy-king Wat Tyler was struck down by a foul treason;
the ruin when the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling in upon
the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. Nationally the movement had
wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the
tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked. But
to Bury it brought little but harm. A hundred years later the town again
sought freedom in the law-courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey
charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The royal council of
Edward IV. decided that "the abbot is lord of the whole town of Bury,
the sole head and captain within the town." All municipal appointments
were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The townsmen had no
communal union, no corporate existence. Their leaders paid for riot and
insult by imprisonment and fine.

The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle,
the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes
before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away
together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the
carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever
other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate
emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been
denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more
heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks'
nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St.
Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the
long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone
recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their
explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a
ple