Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/460

440 beads' dangling about his body; and there he hung till the clothes rotted away,, and the carrion crows had pecked him into a skeleton; and down below in St Thomas's church order reigned, and a new vicar read the English liturgy.

The eastern counties had been the scene meanwhile of another insurrection scarcely less formidable.

On the 6th of July, four days after the commencement of the siege of Exeter, there was a gathering of the people for an annual festival at Wymondham, a few miles from Norwich. The crowd was large, and the men who were brought together found themselves possessed with one general feeling—a feeling of burning indignation at the un-English conduct of the gentlemen. The peasant, whose pigs, and cow, and poultry had been sold or had died, because the commons were gone where they had fed—the yeoman dispossessed of his farm—the farm servant out of employ, because where ten ploughs had turned the soil one shepherd now watched the grazing of the flocksthe artisan smarting under the famine prices which the change of culture had brought with it:all these were united in suffering; while the gentlemen were doubling, trebling, quadrupling their incomes with their sheep-farms, and adorning their persons and their houses with splendour hitherto unknown.

The English commons were not a patient race. To them it was plain that the commonwealth was betrayed for the benefit of the few. The Protector, they knew, wished them well, but he could not right them for want