The old dame flamed suddenly into white wrath as she stood before
the angry monk: "Listen to me while I lay a curse upon you and
yours!" she cried as she raised her shriveled arms and blighted
him with her flashing eyes--

"As you have done to the house of Loring, so may God do to you,
until your power is swept from the land of England, and of your
great Abbey of Waverley there is nothing left but a pile of gray
stones in a green meadow! I see it! I see it! With my old eyes
I see it! From scullion to Abbot and from cellar to tower, may
Waverley and all within it droop and wither from this night on!"

The monk, hard as he was, quailed before the frantic figure and
the bitter, burning words. Already the summoner and the archers
with their prisoner were clear of the house. He turned and with a
clang he shut the heavy door behind him.



V. HOW NIGEL WAS TRIED BY THE ABBOT OF WAVERLEY


The law of the Middle Ages, shrouded as it was in old
Norman-French dialect, and abounding in uncouth and
incomprehensible terms, in deodands and heriots, in infang and
outfang, was a fearsome weapon in the hands of those who knew how
to use it. It was not for nothing that the first act of the rebel
commoners was to hew off the head of the Lord Chancellor. In an
age when few knew how to read or to write, these mystic phrases