ot, and
spending in such fashion the whole day till evening, nor would they
desist at the Lord Abbot's order! Night coming on, they broke the
bolts of the Town-Gates, and went off by violence!'[21] Was the like
ever heard of? The roysterous young dogs; carolling, howling, breaking
the Lord Abbot's sleep,--after that sinful chivalry cockfight of
theirs! They too are a feature of distant centuries, as of near ones.
St. Edmund on the edge of your horizon, or whatever else there, young
scamps, in the dandy state, whether cased in iron or in whalebone,
begin to caper and carol on the green Earth! Our Lord Abbot
excommunicated most of them; and they gradually came in for
repentance.

Excommunication is a great recipe with our Lord Abbot; the prevailing
purifier in those ages. Thus when the Townsfolk and Monks' menials
quarrelled once at the Christmas Mysteries in St. Edmund's Churchyard,
and 'from words it came to cuffs, and from cuffs to cutting and the
effusion of blood,'--our Lord Abbot excommunicates sixty of the
rioters, with bell, book and candle (_accensis candelis_), at one
stroke.[22] Whereupon they all come suppliant, indeed nearly naked,
'nothing on but their breeches, _omnino nudi praeter femoralia_, and
prostrate themselves at the Church-door.' Figure that!

In fact, by excommunication or persuasion, by impetuosity of driving
or adroitness in leading, this Abbot, it is now becoming plain
everywhere, is a man that generally remains master at last. He tempers
his medicine to the malady, now hot, now cool; prudent though fiery,
an eminently practical man. Nay sometimes in his adroit practice there
are swift turns almost of a surprising nature! Once, for example, it
chanced that Geoffrey Riddell Bishop of Ely, a Prelate rather
troublesome to our Abbot, made a request of him for timber from his
woods towards certain edifices going on at Glemsford. The Abbot, a
great builder himself, disliked the request; could not, however, give
it a negative. While he lay, therefore, at his Manorhouse of Melford
not long after, there comes to him one of the Lord Bishop's men or
monks, with a message from his Lordship, "That he now begged
permission to cut down the requisite trees in Elmswell Wood,"--so said
the monk: Elms_well_, where there are no trees but scrubs and shrubs,
instead of Elm_set_, our true _nemus_ and high-towering oak-wood, here
on Melford Manor! Elmswell? The Lord Abbot, in surprise, inquires
privily of Richard h