But upon the bridge, and by the river side, and within the little village, many persons were assembled, conversing gravely and anxiously together, and looking out towards the hills, where other groups were gathered, as if in expectation of some afflicting event.  Most of these were herdsmen and farming men, but some among them were poor monks in the white habits of the Cistertian brotherhood, but which were now stained and threadbare, while their countenances bore traces of severest privation and suffering.  All the herdsmen and farmers had been retainers of the abbot.  The poor monks looked wistfully at their former habitation, but replied not except by a gentle bowing of the head to the cruel scoffs and taunts with which they were greeted by the passing soldiers; but the sturdy rustics did not bear these outrages so tamely, and more than one brawl ensued, in which blood flowed, while a ruffianly arquebussier would have been drowned in the Calder but for the exertions to save him of a monk whom he had attacked.

This took place on the eleventh of March, 1537—­more than three months after the date of the watching by the beacon before recorded—­and the event anticipated by the concourse without the abbey, as well as by those within its walls, was the arrival of Abbot Paslew and Fathers Eastgate and Haydocke, who were to be brought on that day from Lancaster, and executed on the following morning before the abbey, according to sentence passed upon them.

The gloomiest object in the picture remains to be described, but yet it is necessary to its completion.  This was a gallows of unusual form and height, erected on the summit of a gentle hill, rising immediately in front of the abbot’s lodgings, called the Holehouses, whose rounded, bosomy beauty it completely destroyed.  This terrible apparatus of condign punishment was regarded with abhorrence by the rustics, and it required a strong guard to be kept constantly round it to preserve it from demolition.

Amongst a group of rustics collected on the road leading to the north-east gateway, was Cuthbert Ashbead, who having been deprived of his forester’s office, was now habited in a frieze doublet and hose with a short camlet cloak on his shoulder, and a fox-skin cap, embellished with the grinning jaws of the beast on his head.

“Eigh, Ruchot o’ Roaph’s,” he observed to a bystander, “that’s a fearfo sect that gallas.  Yoan been up to t’ Holehouses to tey a look at it, beloike?”

“Naw, naw, ey dunna loike such sects,” replied Ruchot o’ Roaph’s; “besoide there wor a great rabblement at t’ geate, an one o’ them lunjus archer chaps knockt meh o’ t’ nob wi’ his poike, an towd me he’d hong me wi’ t’ abbut, if ey didna keep owt ot wey.”

“An sarve te reet too, theaw craddinly carl!” cried Ashbead, doubling his horny fists.  “Odds flesh! whey didna yo ha’ a tussle wi’ him?  Mey honts are itchen for a bowt wi’ t’ heretic robbers.  Walladey! walladey! that we should live to see t’ oly feythers driven loike hummobees owt o’ t’ owd neest.  Whey they sayn ot King Harry hon decreet ot we’re to ha’ naw more monks or friars i’ aw Englondshiar.  Ony think o’ that.  An dunna yo knoa that t’ Abbuts o’ Jervaux an Salley wor hongt o’ Tizeday at Loncaster Castle?”