rights of his house.”  The townsmen he owned specially as his “adversaries,” but it was the rustics who were to show what a hate he had won.  On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler’s fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John.  He strove to fly, but he was betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein and bondsman, condemned and killed.  The corpse lay naked in the open field while the mob poured unresisted into Bury.  Bearing the prior’s head on a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish, was already impaled; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery of their friendship set them side by side.  Another head soon joined them.  The abbey gates were burst open, and the cloister filled with a maddened crowd, howling for a new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of the barony.  Few knew him as he stood among the group of trembling monks, but he courted death with a contemptuous courage.  “I am the man you seek,” he said, stepping forward; and in a minute, with a mighty roar of “Devil’s son!  Monk!  Traitor!” he was swept to the gallows, and his head hacked from his shoulders.  Then the crowd rolled back again to the abbey gate, and summoned the monks before them.  They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and charters.  The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many which were demanded they swore they could not find.  A compromise was at last patched up; and it was agreed that the charters should be surrendered till the future abbot should confirm the liberties of the town.  Then, unable to do more, the crowd ebbed away.

[Sidenote:  Close of the rising]

A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went on the same day at St. Albans.  William Grindecobbe, the leader of its townsmen, returned with one of the charters of emancipation which Richard had granted after his interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, and breaking into the abbey precincts at the head of the burghers, forced the abbot to deliver up the charters which bound the town in bondage to his house.  But a more striking proof of servitude than any charters could give remained in the millstones which after a long suit at law had been adjudged to the abbey and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness that no townsman might grind corn within the domain of the abbey save at the abbot’s mill.  Bursting into the cloister, the burghers now tore the mill-stones from the floor, and broke them into small pieces, “like blessed bread in church,” which each might carry off to show something of the day when their freedom was won again.  But it was hardly won when it was lost anew.  The quiet