The actual day of the surrender was
January 19, 1538, and we wonder if Robert Sanderson, the Prior, and the
fourteen brethren under him, suffered much from the privations that
must have attended them at that coldest period of the year. At one time
the friars, being of a mendicant order, and inured to hard living and
scanty fare, might have made light of such a disaster, but in these
later times they had expanded somewhat from their austere ways of
living, and the dispersal must have cost them much suffering.
Going back to the reign of Henry VII. or there-abouts, we come across
the curious ballad of 'The Felon Sow of Rokeby and the Freres of
Richmond' quoted from an old manuscript by Sir Walter Scott in
'Rokeby.' It may have been as a practical joke, or merely as a good way
of getting rid of such a terrible beast, that
'Ralph of Rokeby, with goodwill,
The fryers of Richmond gave her till.'
Friar Middleton, who with two lusty men was sent to fetch the sow from
Rokeby, could scarcely have known that she was
'The grisliest beast that ere might be,
Her head was great and gray:
She was bred in Rokeby Wood;
There were few that thither goed,
That came on live [= alive] away.
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