With a great show of ecclesiastical pomp, forth came the prior with his monks in attendance, and closely following them the haughty Lord of Mortimer; with his son-in-law, Sir Edward Chadwell, by his side, and his daughter following her husband.  With these came many knights and persons of standing in the county; and whilst the prior and the monks grouped themselves upon one platform, the barons, knights, and nobles took their appointed places on the other, the owners of Mortimer and Chad being for once in their lives elbow to elbow, and constrained to exchange words and looks of greeting.

A deep hush fell upon the crowd, and the people surged back against the walls, leaving the centre space vacant.  At the same time certain men wearing the garb and the air of jailers or executioners came forth and stood in the midst of the open space—­one of them bearing the glowing brazier and the branding iron, which he placed on a slab of stone in the very centre of the enclosure.

When all preparations were complete, the prior arose, and in a loud and solemn voice commanded that the prisoners should be brought forth—­those persons who had not been merely suspected of heresy, but had been found with heretical books in their possession, or were known to be in the habit of meeting together to read such books and hear the pestilent doctrines which vile and wicked persons were propagating in the land.

At that command a number of monks appeared, leading bound, and in scant and miserable clothing, about a score of men and women, foremost amongst whom was the hunchback, whose face and voice were alike well known to Edred.  Most of the prisoners were trembling and cowering; but he held his head erect, and looked calmly round upon the assembled potentates.  There was no fear or shrinking in his pinched face.  He eyed the prior with a look as unbending as his own.

Then began a long harangue from the great man, in which the wiles of the devil in the pestilent doctrines of the heretics, so-called Lollards, were forcibly and not illogically pointed out.  When no man might give answer, when none might show where misrepresentation came in, where there was nothing given but the one side of the question, it was not difficult to make an excellent case against the accused.  The early heretics, mostly unlettered people, always marred the purity of the cause by falling into exaggeration and foolishness, by denouncing what was good as well as what was corrupt in a system against which they were revolting—­thus laying themselves open to attack and confutation, and alienating from them many who would have striven to stand their friend and to have gently set them right had they been less headstrong and less prone to tear away and condemn every practice the meaning of which they were, through ignorance and want of comprehension, unable to enter into.