f Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard
to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a
silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to
have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishery, were
commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and
the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one could tell when the
retainers of the abbey came to lose their exemption from local taxation
and to pay the town penny to the alderman like the rest of the
burgesses. "In some way, I don't know how,"--as Jocelyn grumbles about
just such an unnoted change,--by usage, by omission, by downright
forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a little present to a
needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always
unconscious, and one incident in the history of Bury St. Edmunds,
remarkable if only regarded as marking the advance of law, is yet more
remarkable as indicating the part which a new moral sense of human right
to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.

The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old English right of
meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the
presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English
fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his
neighbours, the "compurgators," out of whom our jury was to grow. Rough
and inadequate as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial
justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers as thoroughly as
the belted earl. Without the borough bounds however the system of the
Norman judicature prevailed. The rural tenants who did suit and service
at the cellarer's court were subject to the "judicial duel" which the
Conqueror had introduced. In the twelfth century however the strong
tendency to national unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and
the barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too apparent even
for the baronage or the Church to uphold it. "Kebel's case," as a lawyer
would term it, brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. In
the opinion of his neighbours Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the
robbery with which he had been charged; but he was "of the cellarer's
fee," and subject to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went
against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
townsmen woke the farmers to a sense of th