abbey, and for four November days the work of destruction went on unhindered.  When gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry had gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to the granges and barns of the abbey farms.  Their plunder shows what vast agricultural proprietors the monks had become.  A thousand horses, a hundred and twenty plough-oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges and barns burned to the ground.  It was judged afterwards that sixty thousand pounds would hardly cover the loss.

Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, the appeal of the abbot against this outrage was promptly heeded.  A royal force quelled the riot, thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich; twenty-four of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village priests were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack on the abbey, and twenty were summarily hanged.  Nearly two hundred persons remained under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the King’s Courts.  At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage.  Irritated by repeated breaches of promise on the abbot’s part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and carried him off to London.  There he was hurried from street to street lest his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping him off to Brabant.  The Primate and the Pope levelled their excommunications against the abbot’s captors in vain, and though he was at last discovered and brought home it was probably with some pledge of the arrangement which followed in 1332.  The enormous damages assessed by the royal justices were remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed, the prisoners were released.  On the other hand the deeds which had been stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters which had been extorted from the monks were formally cancelled.

[Sidenote:  St. Edmundsbury in 1381]

The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed by their failure, and throughout the reign of Edward the Third the oppression against which they had risen went on without a check.  It was no longer the rough blow of sheer force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the law.  At Richard’s accession Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was in charge of the house.  The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his day.  In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton Belgabred.  John was “industrious and subtle,” and subtlety and industry found their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers around him.  “Faithfully he strove,” says the monastic chronicler, “with the villeins of Bury for the