And when at last he went his ways, and the Abbot expected something kingly, he merely left a handsome silk cloak for St. Edmund, or rather, pretended to leave it, for one of his retinue borrowed it, “and _we_,” says Jocelin, or Carlyle for him, “never got sight of it again.” And all else the King gave was “one shilling and one penny, to say a mass for him; and so departed—like a shabby Lackland as he was! Thirteen pence sterling! this was what the Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had made away with. We, of course, said our mass for him, having covenanted to do it—but let impartial posterity judge with what degree of fervour!” The memory of King John’s hungry hordes and his shabby thirteen pence lingered at Bury, and it must have been with a peculiar satisfaction that the Abbot saw assembled at the high altar of his church the representative concourse of Barons who, on St. Edmund’s Day, 1214, swore to obtain from the King that Magna Charta which they did actually wring unwillingly from him in the following year. Royal visits continued until the time of Henry VI., who held a Parliament here, but all the glories of the place are gone, and are only dimly perceived amid the mouldering ruins and damp churchyard walks that alone are left. The spot where the liberties of the English people were sworn to be upheld is accurst by the memory of how, three hundred years later, in the Marian persecution, twelve martyrs suffered at the stake for liberty of religious thought XXIX A GREAT open space stretches outside the boundary walls of the old Abbey precincts. Here, on “Angel Hill,” as it is called, Bury fair was held in days of old. It was no mere rustic saturnalia, but a fashionable institution, and lasted a fortnight. A one-day fair still held annually, on September 21st, is the sole relic of this once important event, famous not only for the business, but also for the matrimonial matches concluded there.