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Worn down in this manner, with incessant toil and tribulation, Abbot Samson had a sore time of it; his grizzled hair and beard grew daily greyer. Those Jews, in the first four years, had 'visibly emaciated him:' Time, Jews, and the task of Governing, will make a man's beard very grey! In twelve years,' says Joce'lin, our Lord Abbot had grown wholly white as snow, totus efficitur ' albus sicut nix.' White, atop, like the granite mountains:-but his clear beaming eyes still look out, in their stern clearness, in their sorrow and pity; the heart within him remains unconquered.

Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too; little snatches of encouragement granted even to a Governor. 'Once my Lord 'Abbot and I, coming down from London through the Forest, I 'inquired of an old woman whom we came up to, Whose wood 'this was, and of what manor; who the master, who the keeper?' -All this I knew very well beforehand, and my Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was! But 'the old woman answered, The wood 'belonged to the new Abbot of St. Edmunds, was of the manor ' of Harlow, and the keeper of it was one Arnald. How did he 'behave to the people of the manor? I asked farther. She an'swered that he used to be a devil incarnate, dæmon vivus, an ' enemy of God, and flayer of the peasants' skins,'-skinning them like live eels, as the manner of some is: 'but that now he dreads 'the new Abbot, knowing him to be a wise and sharp man, and 'so treats the people reasonably, tractat homines pacifice.' Whereat the Lord Abbot factus est hilaris, could not but take a triumphant laugh for himself; and determines to leave that Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for a while.*

A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph, now and then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere we try at least to give the adversary as good as he brings; and, with swift force or slow watchful manœuvre, extinguish this and the other solecism, leave one solecism less in God's Creation; and so proceed with our battle, not slacken or surrender in it! The Fifty feudal Knights, for example, were of unjust greedy temper, and cheated us, in the Installation day, of ten knight's-fees;-but they know now whether that has profited them aught, and I Jocelin know.

*Jocelini Chronica, p. 24.

CHAPTER XIII.

IN PARLIAMENT.

OF Abbot Samson's public business we say little, though that also was great. He had to judge the people as Justice Errant, to decide in weighty arbitrations and public controversies; to equip his milites, send them duly in war-time to the King;strive every way that the Commonweal, in his quarter of it, take no damage.

Once, in the confused days of Lackland's usurpation, while Coeur-de-Lion was away, our brave Abbot took helmet himself, having first excommunicated all that should favour Lackland; and led his men in person to the siege of Windleshora, what we now call Windsor; where Lackland had entrenched himself, the centre of infinite.confusions; some Reform Bill, then as now, being greatly needed. There did Abbot Samson 'fight the battle of reform,'-with other ammunition, one hopes, than tremendous cheering' and such like! For these things he was called 'the magnanimous Abbot.'

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He also attended duly in his place in Parliament de arduis regni; attended especially, as in arduissimo, when the news reached London that King Richard was a captive in Germany.' Here' while all the barons sat to consult,' and many of them looked blank enough, the Abbot started forth, prosiliit coram om'nibus, in his place in Parliament, and said, that he was ready to 'go and seek his Lord the King, either clandestinely by subter'fuge (in tapinagio), or by any other method; and search till he 'found him, and got certain notice of him; he for one! By which 'word,' says Jocelin, 'he acquired great praise for himself,'—unfeigned commendation from the Able Editors of that age.

By which word;-and also by which deed: for the Abbot ac

tually went with rich gifts to the King in Germany;'* Usurper Lackland being first rooted out from Windsor, and the King's peace somewhat settled.

As to these rich gifts,' however, we have to note one thing: In all England, as appeared to the Collective Wisdom, there was not like to be treasure enough for ransoming King Richard; in which extremity certain Lords of the Treasury, Justiciarii ad Scaccarium, suggested that St. Edmund's Shrine, covered with thick gold was still untouched. Could not it, in this extremity, be peeled off, at least in part; under condition, of course, of its being replaced, when times mended? The Abbot, starting plumb up, se erigens, answered: "Know ye for certain, that I will in no wise do this thing; nor is there any man who could force me to consent thereto. But I will open the doors of the Church Let him that likes enter; let him that dares come forward!" Emphatic words, which created a sensation round the woolsack. For the Justiciaries of the Scaccarium answered, 'with oaths, each for himself: "I won't come forward, for my 'share; nor will I, nor I! The distant and absent who offended 'him, Saint Edmund has been known to punish fearfully; much 'more will he those close by, who lay violent hands on his coat, 'and would strip it off!" These things being said, the Shrine 'was not meddled with, nor any ransom levied for it.'†

For Lords of the Treasury have in all times their impassable limits, be it by force of public opinion' or otherwise; and in those days a Heavenly Awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought and must, all earthly Business whatsoever.

* Jocelini Chronica, pp. 39, 40.

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† Ibid., p. 71.

CHAPTER XIV.

HENRY OF ESSEX.

Or St. Edmund's fearful avengements have they not the remarkablest instance still before their eyes? He that will go to Reading Monastery may find there, now tonsured into a mournful penitent Monk, the once proud Henry Earl of Essex; and discern how St. Edmund punishes terribly, yet with mercy! This Narrative is too significant to be omitted as a document of the Time. Our Lord Abbot, once on a visit at Reading, heard the particulars from Henry's own mouth; and thereupon charged one of his monks to write it down;-as accordingly the Monk has done, in ambitious rhetorical Latin; inserting the same, as episode, among Jocelin's garrulous leaves. Read it here; with ancient yet with modern eyes.

Henry Earl of Essex, standard-bearer of England, had high places and emoluments; had a haughty high soul, yet with various flaws, or rather with one many-branched flaw and crack, running through the texture of it. For example, did he not treat Gilbert de Cereville in the most shocking manner? He cast Gilbert into prison; and, with chains and slow torments, wore the life out of him there. And Gilbert's crime was understood to be only that of innocent Joseph the Lady Essex was a Potiphar's Wife, and had accused poor Gilbert! Other cracks, and branches of that widespread flaw in the Standard-bearer's soul we could point out: but indeed the main stem and trunk of all is too visible in this, That he had no right reverence for the Heavenly in Man,-that far from showing due reverence to St. Edmund, he did not even shew him common justice. While others in the Eastern Counties were adorning and enlarging with rich gifts St. Edmund's resting-place, which had become a

city of refuge for many things, this Earl of Essex flatly defrauded him, by violence or quirk of law, of five shillings yearly, and converted said sum to his own poor uses! Nay, in another case of litigation, the unjust Standard-bearer, for his own profit, asserting that the cause belonged not to St. Edmund's Court, but to his in Lailand Hundred, 'involved us in travellings and innu'merable expenses, vexing the servants of St. Edmund for a long 'tract of time.' In short, he is without reverence for the Heavenly, this Standard-bearer; reveres only the Earthly, Goldcoined; and has a most morbid lamentable flaw in the texture of him. It cannot come to good.

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Accordingly, the same flaw, or St.-Vitus' tic, manifests itself ere long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom we saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. A somewhat disastrous War; in which while King Henry and his force were struggling to retreat Parthian-like, endless clouds of exasperated Welshmen hemming them in, and now we had come to the difficult pass of Coleshill,' and as it were to the nick of destruction, Henry Earl of Essex shrieks out on a sudden (blinded doubtless by his inner flaw, or 'evil genius' as some name it), That King Henry is killed, That all is lost, and flings down his Standard to shift for itself there! And, certainly enough, all had been lost, had all men been as he;-had not brave men, without such miserable jerking tic-douloureux in the souls of them, come dashing up, with blazing swords and looks, and asserted That nothing was lost yet, that all must be regained yet. In this manner King Henry and his force got safely retreated, Parthian-like, from the pass of Coleshill and the Welsh War.* But, once home again, Earl Robert de Montfort, a kinsman of this Standard-bearer's, rises up in the King's Assembly to declare openly that such a man is unfit for bearing English Standards, being in fact either a special traitor, or something almost worse, a coward namely, or universal traitor. Wager of Battle in consequence; solemn Duel, by the King's appointment, in a certain Island of the Thames-stream at Reading, apud Radingas, short way from the Abbey there.' Kings,

* See Lyttelton's Henry II., ii. 384.

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