as they have done since the days of the first Edward, and perhaps for
centuries before.

Although their use, if not their necessity, has passed away, not far
from the Abbey gate the stocks and whipping-post, the latter arranged
with three sets of iron loops fixed at different heights and of varying
diameters to accommodate the wrists of man, woman, and child, may still
be found in the middle of the Priests' Green. These stand, it will be
remembered, under a quaint old roof supported on rough, oaken pillars,
and surmounted by a weathercock which the monkish fancy has fashioned
to the shape of the archangel blowing the last trump. His clarion
or coach-horn, or whatever instrument of music it was he blew, has
vanished. The parish book records that in the time of George I a boy
broke it off, melted it down, and was publicly flogged in consequence,
the last time, apparently, that the whipping-post was used. But Gabriel
still twists about as manfully as he did when old Peter, the famous
smith, fashioned and set him up with his own hand in the last year of
King Henry VIII, as it is said to commemorate the fact that on this spot
stood the stakes to which Cicely Harflete, Lady of Blossholme, and her
foster-mother, Emlyn, were chained to be burned as witches.

So it is with everything at Blossholme, a place that Time has touched
but lightly. The fields, or many of them, bear the same names and remain
identical in their shape and outline. The old farmsteads and the few
halls in which reside the gentry of the district, stand where they
always stood. The glorious tower of the Abbey still points upwards to
the sky, although bells and roof are gone, while half-a-mile away the
parish church that was there before it--having been rebuilt indeed
upon Saxon foundations in the days of William Rufus--yet lies among its
ancient elms. Farther on, situate upon the slope of a vale down which