Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; processions of pilgrims wound through gates and lane to the shrine of St. Frideswide.  Frays were common enough; now the sack of a Jew’s house; now burgher drawing knife on burgher; now an outbreak of the young student lads who were growing every day in numbers and audacity.  But as yet the town was well in hand.  The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his door; the call of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and banners flying to enforce the king’s peace.

[Sidenote:  St. Edmundsbury]

The advance of towns which had grown up not on the royal domain but around abbey or castle was slower and more difficult.  The story of St. Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an imperfect freedom.  Much that had been plough-land here in the Confessor’s time was covered with houses by the time of Henry the Second.  The building of the great abbey-church drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot’s domain.  The troubles of the time helped here as elsewhere the progress of the town; serfs, fugitives from justice or their lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally sought shelter under the strong hand of St. Edmund.  But the settlers were wholly at the Abbot’s mercy.  Not a settler but was bound to pay his pence to the Abbot’s treasury, to plough a rood of his land, to reap in his harvest-field, to fold his sheep in the Abbey folds, to help bring the annual catch of eels from the Abbey waters.  Within the four crosses that bounded the Abbot’s domain land and water were his; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the loan of their cloth the cellarer would refuse the use of the stream and seize their cloths wherever he found them.  No toll might be levied from tenants of the Abbey farms, and customers had to wait before shop and stall till the buyers of the Abbot had had the pick of the market.  There was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk-mote it was before the Abbot’s officers that its meeting was held; if they appealed to the alderman he was the Abbot’s nominee and received the horn, the symbol of his office, at the Abbot’s hands.  Like all the greater revolutions of society, the advance from this mere serfage was a silent one; indeed its more galling instances of oppression seem to have slipped unconsciously away.  Some, like the eel-fishing, were commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and the toll of flax, simply disappeared.  By usage, by omission, by downright forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a present to a needy abbot, the town won freedom.

[Sidenote:  The Towns and Justice]