But progress was not always unconscious, and one incident in the history of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, not merely as indicating the advance of law, but yet more as marking the part which a new moral sense of man’s right to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.  Rude as the borough was, it possessed the right of meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law.  Justice was administered in presence of the burgesses, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his neighbours.  Without the borough bounds however the system of Norman judicature prevailed; and the rural tenants who did suit and service at the Cellarer’s court were subjected to the trial by battle.  The execution of a farmer named Ketel who came under this feudal jurisdiction brought the two systems into vivid contrast.  Ketel seems to have been guiltless of the crime laid to his charge; but the duel went against him and he was hung just without the gates.  The taunts of the townsmen woke his fellow farmers to a sense of wrong.  “Had Ketel been a dweller within the borough,” said the burgesses, “he would have got his acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is”; and even the monks were moved to a decision that their tenants should enjoy equal freedom and justice with the townsmen.  The franchise of the town was extended to the rural possessions of the Abbey without it; the farmers “came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman’s roll, and paid the town-penny.”  A chance story preserved in a charter of later date shows the same struggle for justice going on in a greater town.  At Leicester the trial by compurgation, the rough predecessor of trial by jury, had been abolished by the Earls in favour of trial by battle.  The aim of the burgesses was to regain their old justice, and in this a touching incident at last made them successful.  “It chanced that two kinsmen, Nicholas the son of Acon and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas, waged a duel about a certain piece of land concerning which a dispute had arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns.  Then one of them fleeing from the other till he came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and was about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him ’Take care of the pit, turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.’  Thereat so much clamour and noise was made by the bystanders and those who were sitting around that the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he enquired of some how it was there was such a clamour, and answer was made to him that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood over the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him.  Then the townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they should give him threepence yearly for each house in the High Street that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among themselves.”