the defences against
inundations, paying scot and lot to a bailiff and water-wardens and
jurats, just as was done on the Romney marshes by the bailiff and jurats
of that level.

And one of these tenants, holding two hundred acres in a simple fee from
St Radigund's for a hundred and fifty years back, had been always a man
of the name of Hall. It was an Edward Hall that Mary Lascelles had
married when she was a maid at the Duchess of Norfolk's. This Edward
Hall was then a squire, a little above the condition of a groom, in the
Duchess's service. His parents dwelled still on the farm which was
called Neot's End, because it was in the angle of the great dyke called
St Neot's and the little sewer where St Radigund's land had its boundary
stone.

But in the troublesome days of the late Privy Seal, Edward Hall had
informed Throckmorton the spy of a conspiracy and rising that was
hatching amongst the Radigund's men a little before the Pilgrimage of
Grace, when all the north parts rose. For the Radigund's men cried out
and murmured amongst themselves that if the Priory was done away with
there would be an end of their easy and comfortable tenancy. Their rents
had been estimated and appointed a great number of years before, when
all goods and the produce of the earth were very low priced. And the
tenants said that if now the King took their lands to himself or gave
them to some great lord, very heavy burdens would be laid upon them and
exacted; whereas in some years under easy priors the monks forgot their
distant territory, and in bad seasons they took no rents at all. And
even under hard and exacting priors the monks could take no more than
their rentals, which were so small. They said, too, that the King and
Thomas Cromwell would make them into heathen Greeks and turn their
children to be Saracens. So these Radigund's men meditated a rising and
conspiracy.

But, because Edward Hall informed Throckmorton of what was agate, a
posse was sent into that country, and most of the men were hanged and
their lands all taken from them. Those that survived from the jailing
betook themselves to the road, and became sturdy beggars, so that many
of them too came to the gallows tree.

Most of the land was granted to the Sieur Throckmorton with the abbey's
buildings and tithe barns. But the Halls' farm and another of near three
hundred acres were granted to Edward Hall. Then it was that Edward Hall
could marry and take his wife, Mary Las