It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds, and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details, in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn.
It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to reap in the abbot's 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 withhold the use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever he found them. Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll, for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals. First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn, at his hands.