, or Ranulf de
Glanvill _Justiciarius_ of England for him, set Inspectors or
Custodiars over us;--not in any breathless haste to appoint a new
Abbot, our revenues coming into his own _Scaccarium_, or royal
Exchequer, in the mean while. They proceeded with some rigour, these
Custodiars; took written inventories, clapt-on seals, exacted
everywhere strict tale and measure: but wherefore should a living monk
complain? The living monk has to do his devotional drill-exercise;
consume his allotted _pitantia_, what we call _pittance_, or ration of
victual; and possess his soul in patience.

Dim, as through a long vista of Seven Centuries, dim and very strange
looks that monk-life to us; the ever-surprising circumstance this,
That it is a _fact_ and no dream, that we see it there, and gaze into
the very eyes of it! Smoke rises daily from those culinary
chimney-throats; there are living human beings there, who chant,
loud-braying, their matins, nones, vespers; awakening _echoes_, not to
the bodily ear alone. St. Edmund's Shrine, perpetually illuminated,
glows ruddy through the Night, and through the Night of Centuries
withal; St. Edmundsbury Town paying yearly Forty pounds for that
express end. Bells clang out; on great occasions, all the bells. We
have Processions, Preachings, Festivals, Christmas Plays, _Mysteries_
shown in the Churchyard, at which latter the Townsfolk sometimes
quarrel. Time was, Time is, as Friar Bacon's Brass Head remarked; and
withal Time will be. There are three Tenses, _Tempora_, or Times; and
there is one Eternity; and as for us,

'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!'

Indisputable, though very dim to modern vision, rests on its
hill-slope that same _Bury_, _Stow_, or Town of St. Edmund; already a
considerable place, not without traffic, nay manufactures, would
Jocelin only tell us what. Jocelin is totally careless of telling:
but, through dim fitful apertures, we can see _Fullones_, 'Fullers,'
see cloth-making; looms dimly going, dye-vats, and old women spinning
yarn. We have Fairs too, _Nundinae_, in due course; and the Londoners
give us much trouble, pretending that they, as a metropolitan people,
are exempt from toll. Besides there is Field-husbandry, with perplexed
settlement of Convent rents: corn-ricks pile themselves within burgh,
in their season; and cattle depart and enter; and even the poor weaver
has his cow,--'dungheaps' lying quiet at most doors (_ante foras_,
says the incident