ide. The wounded man was quickly
overpowered, for the citizens, afraid to forfeit their pledges, did not
come to his aid as he had expected, and he was hurried to the Tower,
where the expectant archbishop sat ready to condemn him. We can imagine
what that drum-head trial would be like. Longbeard was at once
condemned, and with nine of his adherents, scorched and smoking from the
fire, was sentenced to be hung on a gibbet at the Smithfield Elms. For
all this, the fermentation did not soon subside; the people too late
remembered how Fitzosbert had pleaded for their rights, and braved king,
prelate, and baron; and they loudly exclaimed against the archbishop for
breaking sanctuary, and putting to death a man who had only defended
himself against assassins, and was innocent of other crimes. The love
for the dead man, indeed, at last rose to such a height that the rumour
ran that miracles were wrought by even touching the chains by which he
had been bound in the Tower. He became for a time a saint to the poorer
and more suffering subjects of the Normans, and the place where he was
beheaded in Smithfield was visited as a spot of special holiness.

But this riot of Longbeard's was but the threatening of a storm. A
tempest longer and more terrible broke over Cheapside on "Evil May Day,"
in the reign of Henry VIII. Its origin was the jealousy of the Lombards
and other foreign money-lenders and craftsmen entertained by the
artisans and 'prentices of London. Its actual cause was the seduction of
a citizen's wife by a Lombard named Francis de Bard, of Lombard Street.
The loss of the wife might have been borne, but the wife took with her,
at the Italian's solicitation, a box of her husband's plate. The husband
demanding first his wife and then his plate, was flatly refused both.
The injured man tried the case at the Guildhall, but was foiled by the
intriguing foreigner, who then had the incomparable rascality to arrest
the poor man for his wife's board.

"This abuse," says Holinshed, "was much hated; so that the same and
manie other oppressions done by the Lombards increased such a malice in
the Englishmen's hearts, that at the last it burst out. For amongst
others that sore grudged these matters was a broker in London, called
John Lincolne, that busied himself so farre in the matter, that about
Palme Sundie, in the eighth yeare of the King's reign, he came to one
Doctor Henry Standish with these words: 'Sir, I understand that you