[Footnote 114: _Parl. Writs_, i. ii.] CHAPTER VI _The Seigniory of the Prior and Queen Isabella_ Hitherto it had fared ill with the Earl's-men in their struggle with the convent. Were they to be worsted like the men of S. Alban's or Bury S. Edmund's? The former were now utterly broken in spirit. After a hard fight lasting from the days of Henry III., they obtained in 1327 a charter, conferring on them the control over the local courts and the privileges of a free and independent borough. And yet they were powerless. Five years later they voluntarily surrendered their charter into the abbot's hands. They gave up the perambulation of their borough. They took their handmills--the initial cause of the contention--and left them in the churchyard in token of renunciation. They presented to the abbot the town chest with the keys belonging thereto, thus relinquishing all their rights as a free and independent community. Nor did better success attend the Bury S. Edmund's men, who had the same high hopes as the S. Alban's folk, and who in the same year compelled their abbot to concede to them a guild merchant, a community, a common seal, and the custody of their gates. Five years later they too were forced to abandon these claims, and, after a fruitless effort at the time of the Peasant Revolt in 1381,[115] both towns sank into apathy, each under the rule of the great local religious house. But alone among convent towns, a piece of supreme good fortune awaited Coventry. The townsmen, just at a critical time, gained a powerful champion. In 1327, by some bargain between Isabella, widow of Edward II. and the representatives of the Chester family, the rents coming from the Earl's-half passed into the Queen's hands, to become after her death parcel of the duchy of Cornwall, heritage of the princes of Wales. We have nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the quarrel which raged for twenty years between the Queen and the prior of S. Mary's convent. The undoubted gainers in this conflict were the men of Coventry; for, helpless under Isabella's repeated attacks, the monks conceded to their tenants those rights of self-government whereof they had stood in need so long.