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PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

XV. BURY ST. EDMUNDS.

To sing thy beauties and thy environs

Demands great Virgil's hundred mouths and tongues.

Dr. Winter.

I HAVE discovered at last what every man past fifty is for ever in search of, whether consciously or not-a place in which to set up one's rest for the years when the grasshopper becomes a burden. I had heard from many friends of the amenities of St. Edmundsbury, but in these matters one distrusts one's friends. There is no place so uninteresting that there cannot be found people who are content, and more than content, to live in it. The associations of childhood or courtship avail to transfigure with the glories of Paradise the very flattest landscape and the dreariest country town. I confess, and I do so with contrition, that when people spoke to me of Bury St. Edmunds, my memory reverted to a day I had once, by ill-fortune, been compelled to waste in another Suffolk town-the unromantic borough of Sudbury, a sleepy place if there ever was one, the very houses seemed asleep,' and the tired inhabitants looked like the citizens of Gonzalo's commonwealth- no occupation, all men idle, all.' But of what injustice have I not been guilty to this exquisite spot! The arrogance of wishing to be more fastidious than my neighbours has been justly punished by too long ignorance of its charm. If I had but opened a guide-book I might have learned how Defoe spoke of it as ' famed for its pleasant situation and wholesome air, the Montpelier of Suffolk, perhaps of England!' Even then (who knows?) I might have remembered that Defoe retired hither after a year spent in Newgate, and after Newgate even Sudbury might have seemed 'the Montpelier of Suffolk, perhaps of England.' But how absolutely right and how discriminating Defoe was in his praise! Pleasant, indeed, is the situation-a long, sloping hill, stretching down to the valley of the Lark at the point where the Linnet joins it. And how wholesome the air! As I sit at my window upon Angel Hill

the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto my gentle senses.

And I begin, though no sceptic, to have my suspicions that the world-renowned miracle of St. Edmund's incorruptible body may have owed less to the saint's virtue than to that of the delicate atmosphere. And then for the streets and houses. Were ever streets so clean since the great flood; were ever houses so varied and so beautiful? All styles meet here, from the substantial stone house of the Norman Jew, and the timber structures of the medieval shopkeepers with their overhanging storeys, through Tudor brickwork with its new pride in chimney-stacks, to the classical fascias of the brothers Adam. Of the grandeur of the churches I must speak more particularly; but even Dissent, in St. Edmundsbury, has lost half its evil by refusing to be pseudo-Gothic. The meeting-house to which Defoe was wont to turn his enfranchised steps is a dignified and simple structure of red (not brown) brick, built at a time when architects understood the beauty of proportion.

The one drawback to complete peace of mind in Bury comes from a contemplation of the ruins of the monastery. The day has gone by when the virtuoso could admire ruins for ruin's sake, and even construct artificial heaps of his own at the end of picturesque vistas in his pleasure grounds. We are all socialists now; and a ruin is coming to be estimated at its real value in capital loss to the body politic. A twentieth-century poet, if such arises, will find himself inspired by the bare, ruin'd choirs' of Tintern and Fountains to a different strain of sentiment from that to which we are accustomed; and the twentieth-century historian of Henry VIII. will hardly speak of that 'grim wolf' in the endearing phrases of Mr. Froude. Even the casual passenger of to-day, who knows how dead are both architecture and public spirit, mutters a malediction over the short-sighted cupidity which unroofed or pulled down so many magnificent buildings for the mere market price of their lead and stone. If the true tale of the spoliation of the monasteries ever gets into the popular histories, I should not be surprised if Mr. Lloyd-George, when in due course he becomes Prime Minister, saw his way to a bill for escheating a few of the larger English mansions for use as university colleges, as a tardy act of reprisal for the impropriation of these ancient homes of learning by our old nobility. The particular jackal who inherited the carcase of St. Edmund's Abbey, when the royal wolf had drained its blood, picked the bones remarkably clean. He left nothing but two gateways, one of the twelfth and one of the fourteenth century, and both so beautiful that it is a wonder he had

the heart to spare them. His name was John Eyre; and the rest of his acts may be read in the 'History and Fate of Sacrilege' of his relation, Sir Henry Spelman. He died without issue.

If it interests us to know how the monastery impressed Englishmen of that generation who had no desire for ill-gotten gains, we may turn to the 'Itinerary' of the King's librarian-the celebrated John Leland-who visited it during his grand tour through England in search of antiquities. These are his words:

The sun hath not seen either a City more finely seated (so delicately standeth it upon the easy ascent or hanging of an hill, and a little river runneth down on the east side thereof), or a goodlier Abbey; whether a man indifferently consider either the endowment with revenues, or the largeness, or the incomparable magnificence thereof. A man that saw the Abbey wou'd say verily it were a city so many gates there are in it, and some of brass, so many towers, and a most stately church; upon which attend three' others also, standing gloriously in one and the same church-yard; all of passing fine and curious workmanship.

But within a year or two this goodly abbey was to have visitors of another type sent by Master Crumwell to spy out the land. There are preserved two letters relating to their visitation which throw light upon the methods employed to trump up a plausible case against the poor abbot and monks :

Please it your Mastership, forasmuche as I suppose ye shall have sute made unto you touching Burie ere we retorne, I thought convenient to advertise you of our Procedings there and also of the Compleints of the same: As for th' Abbot, we founde nothing suspect as touching his lyving. But it was detected that he laye moche foorth in his granges; that he delited moche in playing at Dice and Cardes; and therin spente moche money, and in buylding for his Plesure. He did not preche openly; also that he converted divers fermes into copieholdes, whereof poore men doth complaine: also he semeth to be addict to the maynteyning of suche superstitious ceremonies as hath ben used hertofore. As touching the

1 Weever, who extracts this passage in his Funeral Monuments, notes in the margin that of the three churches there were but two then remaining, and these happily survive to this year of grace. They are large and good specimens of the Perpendicular style, and contain some notable features. St. Mary's open-timber roof is said to be one of the finest in the world, and the other, dedicated to St. James of Compostella, and built by Abbot Anselm (1119-48) in redemption of a pledge to go on pilgrimage to Santiago, has some Flemish glass, the purples in which on the robes of some wicked elders-make us for once understand the taste of Dives. The churchyard passed with the monastic buildings to John Eyre, and in the eighteenth century was even sold by auction. It contains some interesting remains of a chapel called The Charnel,' built by Abbot John de Northwold in 1301, who noted not without sorrow of heart and pressure of vehement grief,' that the bones of the poor whose graves were wanted for some new tenant were 'indecently cast forth and left.' An attempt was made in the days of the Methodists to make these dry bones live by converting ' Le Charnelle' into a meeting. house.

Covent, we could get litle or no complaints amonge them, although we did use moche diligens in oure examination, and therby, with some other arguments gathered of their examinacions formerly, I beleve and suppose they had confedered and compacted before our comyng, that they should disclose nothing. Amongst the reliques we found moch vanite and supersticion &c. And thus Almightie God have you in his tuition. Your servaunt moste bounden

From Burie, 5 Nov.

JOHN AP RICE.

An extract from the second letter shows where the real offence of the convent lay :

Pleasyth it youre Lordship to be advertised that wee have ben at Saynt Edmondsbury, where we found a riche shryne which was very comberous to deface. We have takyn in the seyde monastery in Golde and sylver 5000 markes and above, besyds as well a Riche Cross with emeredds, as also dyvers and sundry stones of grete value; and yet we have left the churche, Abbott, and Covent very well furneshed with plate of sylver necessary for the same.

When the monastery was finally dissolved on November 4, 1539, the abbot Dominus Johannes Reve, of Melford,1 received a pension of five hundred marks; but he was not long a burden upon his impoverished Supreme Head, for within half a year he died of a broken heart. The researches of Dr. Montague James have revealed the fact that the library of the monastery contained some two thousand five hundred volumes, so that perhaps poor Abbot Reve and his forty-four monks did not spend their whole time in playing cards. From the Bury cloisters in the fifteenth century came the celebrated monk, John Boston, who roamed through England to make a single catalogue of the books in all the monastic libraries. From Bury came also a little later the poet John Lydgate, of whose voluminous works, if little is now read, much is still written by those who offer themselves for examination in English literature. And there were not a few chroniclers, Jocelin of Brakelonde and John of Everisden being the most famous, to whose labours we are indebted for a picture of the times when kings, and queens, and parliaments were proud to be the guests of St. Edmund, and the town earned its motto, Sacrarium Regis Cunabula Legis.

1 Melford was a manor belonging to Bury, and a favourite residence of the abbots. As every reader of Lavengro will remember, the town is famous for its length; the beautiful church is also remarkably long (180 feet), and beyond this again is a Lady chapel. Round the cornice of one of the side chapels runs a scroll inscribed with verses by Bury's poet Lydgate. The church has nearly a hundred windows, once filled with fifteenth-century glass. The remains of this, containing some pieces of an exquisite blue, have been collected into the lights of the east window, and as if to point the contrast of the centuries, it has been framed in a border of blue, such as only a nineteenth-century artist could have conceived.

Everybody knows the delightful chapters in 'Past and Present' in which Carlyle, following the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelonde, which had just been edited for the Camden Society (1840), tells again the story of the most famous of the abbots of St. EdmundAbbot Samson. Pure historians have objected that his account of his hero is rhetoric rather than history,'' and pure Latinists may point out that he has not always rendered his text with exactness; 2 but he has given a fascinating picture of a great medieval abbot, and probably has done more than any Churchman to render intelligible to modern England the part the monasteries once played. It is interesting also to remember that it was Carlyle who first, in our days, pointed out the absurdity of our praising Henry VIII. for robbing the commonwealth of these magnificent endowments. The manors belonging to Bury alone would be worth half a million in modern money. A sorrowful waste of noble wood and umbrage, perhaps among the saddest our England ever saw. Why will men destroy noble forests, even when in part a nuisance, in such reckless manner, turning loose four-footed beasts, and cattle, and Henry-the-Eighths into them?' Carlyle's name as a philosopher and man of letters is not for the moment current in England. His reputation has been sadly wounded in the house of his friends. But a modern reader in search of the picturesque might still do worse than take down 'Past and Present,' and read the section that treats of St. Edmundsbury. One of the quaintest of Jocelin's stories, which Carlyle reproduces, is that of Samson's mission to Rome on the convent's behalf, while he was a schoolmaster and before he became a monk. It was in the days of the anti-pope Octavian, who was supported by the Emperor, and so messengers carrying letters to Rome had to run the risk, as they crossed Germany, of being hanged or maimed by the honest German knights. Samson, even thus early, showed himself a person of resource. England sided with the pope of Rome, and Scotland, in consequence, with the anti-pope, Samson thought it prudent to travel as a Scot. This is the account he gave to his chaplain Jocelin, in Carlyle's rendering: 'Putting on the garb of a Scotchman, and taking the

1 See the life in Dictionary of National Biography.

2 Thus when Samson, on his election after paying homage to the King, turns to the altar and sings the Miserere' with firm voice, firm step and head, no change in his countenance whatever,' the King is made to say: ' By God's eyes, that one, I think, will govern the Abbey well!' What the King did say was that abbot elect seems to think he can govern an abbey' (iste electus videtur sibi dignus abbatiæ custodienda).