CHAPTER VII.

EARLY PLANTAGENET TIMES.

OOTH the military Orders which ramified over Europe were represented in Suffolk--the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Battisford, and the Templars at Dunwich and Gislingham. The former were Hospitallers. Originating in a hospital at Jerusalem dedicated to St. John the Baptist, and founded for the tending of sick and weary pilgrims in the middle of the eleventh century, they gradually slipped out of ambulance work and became in the main military. Their sole commandry has no date earlier than the reign of Henry II., who gave it his lands in East Bergholt. When the Templars were dissolved, early in the fourteenth century, their revenues at Dunwich and Gislingham were transferred to the Battisford commandry. At the dissolution, the Gislingham preceptory was granted to John Grene and William Hall; the Battisford possessions passed to Richard Gresham and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, but the Dunwich manor remained ungranted till 1561, when Queen Elizabeth gave it to Thomas Andrews.

The dates of the foundation of the Templars' preceptories are also uncertain. Their dissolution in the time of Edward II., though free from the extreme horrors which accompanied the fate of the Order in France, leaves, nevertheless, ground of grave suspicion of injustice and cruelty behind it. They had existed for about two

centuries since King Baldwin II. gave them part of his palace, occupying the site of Solomon's Temple, whence arose their name.

The convent of Bungay, founded in 1160 by Roger de Glanville and his wife Gundrada, is about the only foundation in the Plantagenet period till the arrival of the Mendicant Orders. The revenues were early drawn from the tithes of parishes which have never recovered their impoverishment. Six Suffolk rectories at once became vicarages-Bungay, St. Mary and St. Thomas; Mettingham; and all the Ilketshalls except St. John's; besides Roughton in Norfolk. It will be well, perhaps, to break a little into our severe chronological order, and note a few points in the history of this nunnery.

A century elapses, and we find the Lady Sarah, Prioress, a very capable woman, driving a hard bargain with a needy neighbour, Sir James de Ilketshall.

This is just in the thick of the Robin Hood adventures, according to most who have treated of that

'Gode outlaw

Who did pore men moche gode,'

and some light on the transaction may be thrown by a scene in the Lytyll Geste of Robin Hode,' where, as Little John was in Barnsdale :

'Then came there a knyght redynge

Full sone they gan hym mete,

All dreari then was his semblaunte,
And lytell was his pride,

Hys one fote in the sterope stode,

That other waved besyde.

Hys hode hangynge over his eyen two :

He rode in simple aray ;

A soryer man than he was one

Rode never in somers day.'

He is bid by Robin Hood to dinner, but has only half a pound to offer his host. Robin asks him the cause of his poverty, and he says that he has lost all by ransoming his son, who had committed murder:

'My londes beth set to wedde [mortgage] Robyn,

Untyll a certain daye,

To a ryche abbot here besyde,

Of Saynt Mary abbay.'

The North-Country knight found friends in these usually generous, but occasionally iniquitous, outlaws, and all eventually went well with him. Had such exceptional luck befallen the distressed landed proprietor of those days, there would have been rejoicing in the hall of Ulchete or Ulfketyl; but there was no Robin Hood in East Anglia to set the affairs of Sir James de Ilketshall in order, and the advowson of Ilketshall St. John followed the other three.

The Bungay nunnery was shortly afterwards presented with a woman and her little boy by Roger de Huntingfield, who succeeded his father in 1286, and died in 1301. The woman was Alveva, the wife of Roger Brunllan, of Metfield, the boy their eldest son Thomas. By that time the distinction between serfdom and villenage had pretty well faded away, and the words were used as convertible terms for all who were not free. The document conveying Alveva and little Tom, with the whole tenement which they held of Roger de Huntingfield, is in the possession of Mr. Rider Haggard, sealed with a fine impression of Roger's seal, and witnessed by Adam, William, and Martin, sanctimoniales,' probably Mendham Cluniacs, and by Godfrey of Linburne, a tenant of the Bungay convent, as well as by others.

With our nineteenth-century ideas, it seems hard that mother and child should be thus handed over as though they were mere fixtures to the tenement, especially as the father was presumably alive, the woman being called ' wife,' not 'widow.' Still, we must consider our inability to read between the lines of these ancient documents, and if we were in possession of all the circumstances of the case, it might be manifest that what was done was really for the benefit of all concerned.

In spite of foreclosures and presents, the nunnery got

into debt, and had to be set straight by further grants. All was not peace within those sacred walls, and on one occasion the authority of the well-known Henry Spencer, the 'fighting' Bishop of Norwich, had to be called in. One of the noble house of Salisbury, Katherine de Montacute, was in the Bungay convent. A sister, Joan, was the wife of William de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk. For some reason or other Katherine ran away. The Prioress informed Bishop Spencer, who by letters patent signified the same to the Crown, and a warrant was issued for her apprehension.

The list of persons to whom the warrant was addressed does not include the Earl, those designated being John Trailly, knight; Andrew Cavendish, knight; Walter Amyas, clerk; Hugh Fastolf, Edmund Gourney, John Caltoft, and Edmund Spicer, all, save the last, local names, and he very likely being a local tradesman, with a good rouncie, or packhorse, useful for business purposes, and now to be utilized in scouring the country in search of the missing nun, who is described as 'fleeing about from parish to parish, in divers parts of our kingdom of England, in secular dress, to the contempt of the dress of her Order, in peril of her soul, and to the manifest scandal of her said Order.' When caught she was to be delivered to the Prioress of the Bungay convent, or to her attorneys in this matter, 'to be punished according to the rule of the said Order.'

It has always seemed to me that this was a case of a mountain from a mole-hill. These set terms in warrants, like those in an old-fashioned writ of latitat, were not supposed to be literally true; and it may be that all the while Katherine de Montacute was with her sister Joan, and that something more than persuasion was wanted to bring her back. This warrant was issued in 1376, and four years afterwards a lady of the same name became Prioress. It is possible that there were two of the same name in the convent; but the more natural solution is, that the quarrel was made up, and the heroine of the

warrant became in the end the successor of the lady whose authority she had resisted.

We have in the pages of Jocelin of Brakelond a continuous and charmingly-written account of the affairs of the Bury abbey from 1173 to 1202. This invaluable narrative is contained in a MS. which passed through the Bacons of Redgrave into the hands of Bishop Stillingfleet, and so into the Harleian Collection. The gratitude of all historical students is due, first, to Mr. John Gage Rokewode, who published it for the Camden Society in 1840; then to Mr. John Greene, of Bury St. Edmunds, who translated and popularized it; and finally to Thomas Carlyle, on whom its honest vivacity made a deep impres

sion.

'Past and Present' is a book not to be criticised here. Suffice it to say that the narrative of Jocelin served as a text for many a sermon, which, like similar homilies, mainly addressed those who wanted them least.

The start is made in 1173, after the battle of Fornham, about which something must be said, battles in Suffolk being about as rare as political peace in a South American republic.

The family relations of Henry II. were notoriously unhappy, and his weakness in allowing his eldest son, Henry, to be crowned during his own life-time only had the effect of precipitating that ambitious young man into a whirlpool of plots, which plots in the end broke forth into a general attack upon the old King. Among the English conspirators were Robert Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, and Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. Leicester landed on the Suffolk coast with a large force of Fleming mercenaries, marched to Framlingham, to effect a junction with Bigod, and thence to Haughley Castle, where Randal de Broc offered only a slight resistance. Their intention was to proceed westward to the relief of Leicester; but in the meanwhile Humphrey Bohun, the King's Constable, one of the few who had remained faithful to his master, not accepting the 'large promises of