"Faithfully he strove," says the monastic chronicler, "with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned specially as his "adversaries," but it was the rustics who were to show what a hate he had won.

On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler's fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John.

He strove to fly, but he was betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein and bondsman, condemned and killed.

The corpse lay naked in the open field while the mob poured unresisted into Bury.

Bearing the prior's head on a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish, was already impaled; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery of their friendship set them side by side.