together, and looking out towards the hills, where other groups were
gathered, as if in expectation of some afflicting event. Most of these
were herdsmen and farming men, but some among them were poor monks in
the white habits of the Cistertian brotherhood, but which were now
stained and threadbare, while their countenances bore traces of severest
privation and suffering. All the herdsmen and farmers had been retainers
of the abbot. The poor monks looked wistfully at their former
habitation, but replied not except by a gentle bowing of the head to the
cruel scoffs and taunts with which they were greeted by the passing
soldiers; but the sturdy rustics did not bear these outrages so tamely,
and more than one brawl ensued, in which blood flowed, while a ruffianly
arquebussier would have been drowned in the Calder but for the exertions
to save him of a monk whom he had attacked.

This took place on the eleventh of March, 1537--more than three months
after the date of the watching by the beacon before recorded--and the
event anticipated by the concourse without the abbey, as well as by
those within its walls, was the arrival of Abbot Paslew and Fathers
Eastgate and Haydocke, who were to be brought on that day from
Lancaster, and executed on the following morning before the abbey,
according to sentence passed upon them.

The gloomiest object in the picture remains to be described, but yet it
is necessary to its completion. This was a gallows of unusual form and
height, erected on the summit of a gentle hill, rising immediately in
front of the abbot's lodgings, called the Holehouses, whose rounded,
bosomy beauty it completely destroyed. This terrible apparatus of
condign punishment was regarded with abhorrence by the rustics, and it
required a strong guard to be kept constantly round it to preserve it
from demolition.