Wager of Battle: A Tale of Saxon Slavery in Sherwood Forest
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Title: Wager of Battle: A Tale of Saxon Slavery in Sherwood Forest
Author: Henry William Herbert
Release date: April 7, 2014 [eBook #45341]
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Language: English
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WAGER OF BATTLE;
A TALE OF SAXON SLAVERY IN SHERWOOD FOREST.
BY HENRY W. HERBERT,
AUTHOR OF "HENRY VIII AND HIS SIX WIVES," "THE CAPTAINS OF THE GREEK
AND ROMAN REPUBLICS," "THE ROMAN TRAITOR," "MARMADUKE WYVIL," "OLIVER
CROMWELL," ETC. ETC. ETC.
NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY MASON BROTHERS,
23 PARK ROW.
1855.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by
MASON BROTHERS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District
of New York.
STEREOTYPED BY
THOMAS B. SMITH,
82 & 84 Beekman St.
PRINTED BY
JOHN A. GRAY,
79 Cliff St.
TO
ISRAEL DE WOLF ANDREWS, ESQ.,
OF EASTPORT, MAINE,
THIS HISTORICAL ROMANCE,
"Wager of Battle,"
Descriptive of the manners, customs and institutions of our mutual
ancestry, Saxon and Norman, at the period of their fusion into the
great race, speaking the English tongue, by whatever name, in distant
and widely severed isles and continents, it is destined to be known,
and illustrative of the nature of Saxon serfdom in the twelfth century
of our era, is dedicated, as a slight token of great esteem, of
gratitude for many good offices, and of friendship, which, he hopes
and wishes, will stand all tests of time and change, unaltered,
By his sincere friend and servant,
HENRY WM. HERBERT.
THE CEDARS, July 20, 1855.
PREFACE.
It is, perhaps, unfortunate that the period and, in some degree, the
scene of my present work, coincide nearly with those of the most
magnificent and gorgeous of historical romances, Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe.
It is hoped, however, that--notwithstanding this similarity, and the
fact that in both works the interest turns in some degree on the
contrast between the manners of the Saxon and Norman inhabitants of the
isle, and the state of things preceding the fusion of the two races
into one--notwithstanding, also, that in each a portion of the effect
depends on the introduction of a judicial combat, or "Wager of
Battle"--the resemblance will be found to be external and incidental
only, and that, neither in matter, manner, nor subject, is there any
real similarity between the books, much less any imitation or absurd
attempt, on my part, at rivalry with that which is admitted to be
incomparable. It will be seen, at once, by those who have the patience
to peruse the following pages, that I have aimed at something more than
a mere delineation of outward habits, customs, and details of martial
or pacific life; that I have entered largely into the condition of
classes, the peculiar institution of Serfdom, or White Slavery, as it
existed among our own ancestors--that portion of whom, from which our
blood is in the largest degree descended, being the servile population
of the island--in the twelfth century, and the steps which led to its
gradual abolition.
In doing this, I have been unavoidably led into the necessity of
dealing with the ancient jurisprudence of our race, the common law of
the land, the institution of Trial by Jury, and that singular feature
in our old judicial system, the reference of cases to the direct
decision of the Almighty by Wager of Battle, or, as it was also called,
"the Judgment of God."
I will here merely observe that, while the gist of my tale lies in the
adventures and escape of a fugitive Saxon Slave from the tyranny of his
Norman Lord, my work contains no reference to the peculiar institution
of any portion of this country, nor conceals any oblique insinuation
against, or covert attack upon, any part of the inhabitants of the
Continent, or any interest guaranteed to them by the Constitution.
Nevertheless, I would recommend no person to open a page of this
volume, who is prepared to deny that slavery _per se_ is an evil and a
wrong, and its effects deteriorating to all who are influenced by its
contact, governors alike and governed, since they will find nothing
agreeable, but much adverse to their way of thinking.
That it is an evil and a wrong, in itself, and a source of serious
detriment to all parties concerned, I can not but believe; and that,
like all other wrongs and evils, it will in the end, by God's wisdom,
be provided for and pass away, without violence or greater indirect
wrong and evil, I both believe and hope.
But I neither arrogate to myself the wisdom of imagining how this is to
be peacefully brought about in the lapse of ages, nor hesitate to
dissent from the intemperance of those who would cut the Gordian knot,
like Alexander, with the sword, reckless if the same blow should sever
the sacred bonds that consolidate the fabric of the Union.
HENRY WM. HERBERT.
THE CEDARS, September, 1st., 1855.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE FOREST 11
CHAPTER II.
THE GOOD SERVICE 27
CHAPTER III.
THE GUERDON OF GOOD SERVICE 39
CHAPTER IV.
THE NORMAN LORDS 47
CHAPTER V.
THE SERF'S QUARTER 58
CHAPTER VI.
THE SAXON'S CONSTANCY 69
CHAPTER VII.
THE SLAVE-GIRL'S SELF-DEVOTION 81
CHAPTER VIII.
GUENDOLEN'S BOWER 91
CHAPTER IX.
GUENDOLEN 100
CHAPTER X.
THE LADY AND THE SLAVE 110
CHAPTER XI.
THE LADY'S GAME 126
CHAPTER XII.
THE DEPARTURE 136
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PROGRESS 148
CHAPTER XIV.
THE NEW HOME 159
CHAPTER XV.
THE OLD HOME 166
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ESCAPE 177
CHAPTER XVII.
THE PURSUIT 187
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE SANDS 198
CHAPTER XIX.
THE SUPPLIANT 217
CHAPTER XX.
THE LADY AND HER LOVER 230
CHAPTER XXI.
THE ARREST 245
CHAPTER XXII.
THE SHERIFF 260
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE TRIAL 272
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE ACQUITTAL 285
CHAPTER XXV.
THE FALSE CHARGE AND THE TRUE 300
CHAPTER XXVI.
WAGER OF BATTLE 310
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE BRIDAL DAY 324
SHERWOOD FOREST;
OR,
WAGER OF BATTLE.
CHAPTER I.
THE FOREST.
"He rode half a mile the way;
He saw no light that came of day;
Then came he to a river broad,
Never man over such one rode;
Within he saw a place of green,
Such one had he never erst seen."
EARLY METRICAL ROMAUNTS. GUY OF WARWICK.
In the latter part of the twelfth century--when, in the reign of Henry
II., fourth successor of the Conqueror, and grandson of the first
prince of that name, known as Beauclerc, the condition of the
vanquished Saxons had begun in some sort to amend, though no fusion of
the races had as yet commenced, and tranquillity was partially
restored to England--the greater part of the northern counties, from
the Trent to the mouths of Tyne and Solway, was little better than an
unbroken chase or forest, with the exception of the fiefs of a few
great barons, or the territories of a few cities and free borough
towns; and thence, northward to the Scottish frontier, all was a rude
and pathless desert of morasses, moors, and mountains, untrodden save
by the foot of the persecuted Saxon outlaw.
In the West and North Ridings of the great and important Shire of
York, there were, it is true, already a few towns of more than growing
importance; several of which had been originally the sites, or had
grown up in the vicinity and under the shelter of Roman Stative
encampments; whereof not a few of them have retained the evidence in
their common termination, _caster_, while others yet retain the
more modern Saxon appellations. Of these two classes, Doncaster,
Pontefract, Rotherham, Sheffield, Ripon, may be taken as examples,
which were even then flourishing, and, for the times, even opulent
manufacturing boroughs, while the vastly larger and more wealthy
commercial places, which have since sprung up, mushroom-like, around
them, had then neither hearths nor homes, names nor existence.
In addition to these, many great lords and powerful barons already
possessed vast demesnes and manors, and had erected almost royal
fortalices, the venerable ruins of which still bear evidence to the
power and the martial spirit of the Norman lords of England; and even
more majestic and more richly endowed institutions of the church, such
as Fountains, Jorvaulx, and Bolton Abbayes, still the wonder and
reproach of modern architecture, and the admiration of modern artists,
had created around themselves garden-like oases among the green glades
and grassy aisles of the immemorial British forests; while, emulating
the example of their feudal or clerical superiors, many a military
tenant, many a gray-frocked friar, had reared his tower of strength,
or built his lonely cell, upon some moat-surrounded mount, or in some
bosky dingle of the wood.
In the East Riding, all to the north of the ancient city of the Shire,
even then famous for its minster and its castle, even then the see and
palace of the second archbishop of the realm, was wilder yet, ruder
and more uncivilized. Even to this day, it is, comparatively speaking,
a bleak and barren region, overswept by the cold gusts from the German
ocean, abounding more in dark and stormy wolds than in the cheerful
green of copse or wildwood, rejoicing little in pasture, less in
tillage, and boasting of nothing superior to the dull market towns of
the interior, and the small fishing villages nested among the crags of
its iron coast.
Most pitilessly had this district been ravaged by the Conqueror and
his immediate successor, after its first desperate and protracted
resistance to the arms of the Norman; after the Saxon hope of England
fell, to arise no more, upon the bloody field of Hastings; and after
each one of the fierce Northern risings.
The people were of the hard, old, stubborn, Danish stock, more
pertinacious, even, and more stubborn, than the enduring Saxon, but
with a dash of a hotter and more daring spirit than belonged to their
slower and more sluggish brethren.
These men would not yield, could not be subdued by the iron-sheathed
cavalry of the intrusive kings. They were destroyed by them, the lands
were swept bare,[1] the buildings burned, the churches desecrated.
Manors, which under the native rule of the Confessor had easily
yielded sixty shillings of annual rent, without distress to their
occupants, scarcely paid five to their foreign lords; and estates,
which under the ancient rule opulently furnished forth a living to
two[2] English gentlemen of rank with befitting households, now barely
supported two miserable Saxon cultivators, slaves of the soil, paying
their foreign lords, with the blood of their hands and the sweat of
their brows, scarcely the twelfth part of the revenue drawn from them
by the old proprietors.
[1] Omnia sunt wasta. Modo omnino wasta. Ex maxima parte
wasta.--_Doomsday Book_, vol. i. fol. 309.
[2] Duo Taini tenueri. ibi sunt ii villani cum I carruca.
valuit xl solidos. modo ilii sol.--_Ibid._ vol. i. fol.
845.
When, in a subsequent insurrection, the Norman king again marched
northward, in full resolve to carry his conquering arms to the
frontiers of Scotland, and, sustained by his ferocious energy, did
actually force his way through the misty moorlands and mountainous
mid-regions of Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland, he had to
traverse about sixty miles of country, once not the least fertile of
his newly-conquered realm, in which his mail-clad men-at-arms saw
neither green leaves on the trees, nor green crops in the field; for
the ax and the torch had done their work, not negligently; passed
neither standing roof nor burning hearth; encountered neither human
being nor cattle of the field; only the wolves, which had become so
numerous from desuetude to the sight of man, that they scarce cared to
fly before the clash and clang of the marching squadrons.
To the northward and north-westward, yet, of Yorkshire, including what
are now Lancashire, Westmoreland, Northumberland, and Cumberland,
though the Conqueror, in his first irresistible prosecution of
red-handed victory, had marched and countermarched across them, there
was, even at the time of my narrative, when nearly a century had fled,
little if any thing of permanent progress or civilization, beyond the
establishment of a few feudal holds and border fortresses, each with
its petty hamlet clustered beneath its shelter. The marches, indeed,
of Lancashire, toward its southern extremity, were in some degree
permanently settled by military colonists, in not a few instances
composed of Flemings, as were the Welch frontiers of the neighboring
province of Cheshire, planted there to check the inroads of the still
unconquered Cymri, to the protection of whose mountains, and
late-preserved independence, their whilom enemies, the now persecuted
Saxons, had fled in their extremity.
It is from these industrious artisans, then the scorn of the high-born
men-at-arms, that the trade had its origin, which has filled the bleak
moors, and every torrent gorge of Lancaster and Western York, with a
teeming population and a manufacturing opulence, such as, elsewhere,
the wide earth has not witnessed. Even at the time of which I write,
the clack of their fulling-mills, the click of their looms, and the
din of their trip-hammers, resounded by the side of many a lonely
Cheshire stream; but all to the north and westward, where the wildest
hillsides and most forbidding glens are now more populous and richer
than the greatest cities of those days, all was desolate as the aspect
of the scenery, and inhospitable as the climate that lowers over it in
constant mist and darkness.
Only in the south-western corner of Westmoreland, the lovely land of
lakes and mountains and green pastoral glens, beyond Morecambe Bay and
the treacherous sands of Lancaster, had the Norman nobles, as the
entering tide swept upward through the romantic glens and ghylls of
Netherdale and Wharfedale, past the dim peaks of Pennigant and
Ingleborough, established their lines in those pleasant places, and
reared their castellated towers, and laid out their noble chases,
where they had little interruption to apprehend from the tyrannic
forest laws of the Norman kings, which, wherever their authority
extended, bore not more harshly on the Saxon serf than on the Norman
noble.
To return, however, toward the midland counties, and the rich regions
with which this brief survey of Northern England in the early years of
the twelfth century commenced--a vast tract of country, including much
of the northern portions of Nottingham and Derbyshire, and all the
south of the West Riding of York, between the rivers Trent and Eyre,
was occupied almost exclusively by that most beautiful and famous of
all British forests, the immemorial and time-honored Sherwood--theme
of the oldest and most popular of English ballads--scene of the most
stirring of the old Romaunts--scene of the most magnificent of modern
novels, incomparable Ivanhoe--home of that half historic personage,
King of the Saxon greenwoods, Robin Hood, with all his northern
merry-men, Scathelock, and Friar Tuck, and Little John, Allen-a-Dale,
wild forest minstrel, and the blythe woodland queen, Maid Marion--last
leafy fortalice, wherein, throughout all England proper, lingered the
sole remains of Saxon hardihood and independence--red battle-field of
the unsparing conflicts of the rival Roses.
There stand they still, those proud, majestic kings of bygone ages;
there stand they still, the
"Hallowed oaks,
Who, British-born, the last of British race,
Hold their primeval rights by nature's charter,
Not at the nod of Cæsar;"
there stand they still, erect, earth-fast, and massive, grasping the
green-sward with their gnarled and knotty roots, waving "their free
heads in the liberal air," full of dark, leafy umbrage clothing their
lower limbs; but far aloft, towering with bare, stag-horned, and
splintered branches toward the unchanged sky from which so many
centuries of sunshine have smiled down, of tempest frowned upon their
"secular life of ages."
There stand they, still, I say; alone, or scattered here and there, or
in dark, stately groups, adorning many a noble park of modern days, or
looming up in solemn melancholy upon some "one-tree hill," throughout
the fertile region which lies along the line of that great ancient
road, known in the Saxon days as Ermine-street, but now, in common
parlance, called "the Dukeries," from seven contiguous domains,
through which it sweeps, of England's long-lined nobles.
Not now, as then, embracing in its green bosom sparse tracts of
cultivated lands, with a few borough-towns, and a few feudal keeps, or
hierarchal abbayes, but itself severed into divers and far-distant
parcels, embosomed in broad stretches of the deepest meadows, the most
teeming pastures, or girded on its swelling, insulated knolls by the
most fertile corn-lands, survives the ancient Sherwood.
Watered by the noblest and most beautiful of northern rivers, the calm
and meadowy Trent, the sweet sylvan Idle, the angler's favorite,
fairy-haunted Dee, the silver Eyre, mountainous Wharfe, and pastoral
Ure and Swale; if I were called upon to name the very garden-gem of
England, I know none that compares with this seat of the old-time
Saxon forest.
You can not now travel a mile through that midland region of plenty
and prosperity without hearing the merry chime of village bells from
many a country spire, without passing the happy doors of hundreds of
low cottage homes, hundreds of pleasant hamlets courting the mellow
sunshine from some laughing knoll, or nestling in the shrubberies of
some orchard-mantled hollow.
Nor are large, prosperous, and thriving towns, rich marts of
agricultural produce, or manufactures of wealth richer than gold of El
Dorado, so far apart but that a good pedestrian may travel through the
streets of a half a dozen in a day's journey, and yet stand twenty
times agaze between their busy precincts in admiration--to borrow the
words of the great northern Romancer, with the scene and period of
whose most splendid effort my humble tale unfortunately coincides--in
admiration of the "hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed,
wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed, perhaps, the stately march of
the Roman soldiers."
And here, let none imagine these to be mere exaggerations, sprung from
the overflowing brain of the Romancer, for, not fifty miles distant
from the scene described above, there is yet to be seen a venerable
patriarch of Sherwood, which boasted still, within a few short years,
some garlands of surviving green--the oak of Cowthorpe--probably the
largest in the island; which is to this day the boundary corner of
two marching properties, and has been such since it was constituted
so in Doomsday Book, wherein it was styled _quercum ingentem_, the
gigantic oak.
Since the writing of those words eight centuries have passed, and
there are many reasons for believing that those centuries have added
not an inch to its circumference, but rather detracted from its vigor
and its growth; and, to me, it seems far more probable that it was a
full-grown tree, with all its leafy honors rife upon it, when the
first Cæsar plunged, waist-deep, into the surges of the British
Channel from the first Roman prow, than that it should have sprung up,
like the gourd of a Jonah, in a single night, to endure a thousand
years' decay without entirely perishing.
In those days, however, a man might ride from "eve to morn, from morn
to dewy eve," and hear no sound more human than the deep "belling" of
the red deer, if it chanced to be in the balmy month of June; the
angry grunt of the tusky boar, startled from his mud-bath in some
black morass; or, it may be, the tremendous rush of the snow-white,
black-maned bull, crashing his way through shivered saplings and rent
under-brush, mixed with the hoarse cooings of the cushat dove, the
rich song-gushes of the merle and mavis, or the laughing scream of the
green woodpecker.
Happy, if in riding all day in the green leafy twilight, which never,
at high noon, admitted one clear ray of daylight, and, long before the
sun was down, degenerated into murky gloom, he saw no sights more
fearful than the rabbits glancing across the path, and disappearing in
the thickets; or the slim doe, daintily picking her way among the
heather, with her speckled fawns frolicking around her. Thrice happy,
if, as night was falling, cold and gray, the tinkling of some lonely
chapel bell might give him note where some true anchorite would share
his bed of fern, and meal of pulse and water, or jolly clerk of
Copmanhurst would broach the pipe of Malvoisie, bring pasties of the
doe, to greet the belated wayfarer.
Such was the period, such the region, when, on a glorious July
morning, so early that the sun had not yet risen high enough to throw
one sweeping yellow ray over the carpet of thick greensward between
the long aisles of the forest, or checker it with one cool
shadow--while the dew still hung in diamonds on every blade of grass,
on every leaf of bush or brackens; while the light blue mists were
still rising, thinner and thinner as they soared into the clear air,
from many a woodland pool or sleepy streamlet--two men, of the ancient
Saxon race, sat watching, as if with some eager expectation, on a low,
rounded, grassy slope, the outpost, as it seemed, of a chain of gentle
hills, running down eastward to the beautiful brimful Idle.
Around the knoll on which they sat, covered by the short mossy turf,
and over-canopied by a dozen oaks, such as they have been described,
most of them leafy and in their prime, but two or three showing above
their foliage the gray stag-horns of age, the river, clear as glass,
and bright as silver, swept in a semicircle, fringed with a belt of
deep green rushes and broad-leaved water-lilies, among which two or
three noble swans--so quietly sat the watchers on the hill--were
leading forth their little dark-gray black-legged cygnets, to feed on
the aquatic flies and insects, which dimpled the tranquil river like a
falling shower. Across the stream was thrown a two-arched freestone
bridge, high-backed and narrow, and half covered with dense ivy, the
work, evidently, of the Roman conquerors of the island, from which a
yellow, sandy road wound deviously upward, skirting the foot of the
rounded hill, and showing itself in two or three ascending curves, at
long intervals, above the tree-tops, till it was lost in the distant
forest; while, far away to the eastward, the topmost turret of what
seemed a tall Norman keep, with a square banner drooping from its
staff in the breezeless air, towering above the dim-wood distance,
indicated whither it led so indirectly.
In the rear of the slope or knoll, so often mentioned, was a deep
tangled dell, or dingle, filled with a thickset growth of holly,
birch, and alder, with here a feathery juniper, and there a graceful
fern bush; and behind this arose a higher ridge, clothed with tall,
thrifty oaks and beeches, of the second growth, and cutting off in
that direction all view beyond its own near horizon.
It was not in this direction, however, nor up the road toward the
remote castle, nor down across the bridge over the silver Idle, that
the watchers turned their eager eyes, expecting the more eagerly, as,
at times, the distant woods before them--lying beyond a long stretch
of native savanna, made probably by the beaver, while that industrious
animal yet figured in the British fauna--seemed to mourn and labor
with a deep, indefinite murmuring sound, half musical, half solemn,
but liker to an echo than to any known utterance of any living human
being. It was too varied for the noise of falling waters, too
modulated for the wind harp of the west, which was sighing fitfully
among the branches. Eagerly they watched, with a wild look of almost
painful expectation in their keen, light-blue eyes, resembling in no
respect the lively glance with which the jovial hunter awaits his
gallant quarry; there was something that spoke of apprehension in the
haggard eye--perhaps the fear of ill-performing an unwilling duty.
And if it were so, it was not unnatural; not at that day, alas!
uncommon; for dress, air, aspect, and demeanor, all told them at first
sight, to be of that most wretched, if not most abject class, the
Saxon serfs of England. They were both clad alike, in short, close-cut
frocks, or tunics, of tanned leather, gathered about their waists with
broad buff belts, fastened with brazen buckles, in each of which stuck
a long buckhorn-hafted two-edged Sheffield whittle; both were
bare-headed, both shod with heavy-clouted shoes, and both wore,
soldered about their necks, broad brazen dog-collars, having the brand
of their condition, with their own names and qualities, and that and
the condition of their master.
Here, however, ended the direct resemblance, even of their garb; for,
while the taller and better formed man of the two, who was also
somewhat the darker haired and finer featured, wore a species of rude
leather gauntlets, with buskins of the same material, reaching as high
as the binding of the frock, the other man was bare-armed and
bare-legged also, with the exception of an inartificial covering of
thongs of boar-hide, plaited from the ankle to the knee upward. The
latter also carried no weapon but a long quarter-staff, though he held
a brace of noble snow-white alans--the wire-haired grayhounds of the
day--in a leash of twisted buckskin; while his brother--for so strong
was their personal resemblance, that their kinship could scarcely be
doubted--carried a short, steel-headed javelin in his hand, and had
beside him, unrestrained, a large coarser hound, of a deep brindled
gray color, with clear, hazel eyes; and what was strange to say, in
view of the condition of this man, unmaimed, according to the cruel
forest code of the Norman kings.
This difference in the apparel, and, it may be added, in the neatness,
well-being, and general superior bearing of him who was the better
armed, might perhaps be explained by a glance at the engraving on the
respective collars. For while that of the one, and he the better clad
and better looking, bore that he was "Kenric the Dark, thral of the
land to Philip de Morville," that of the other stamped him "Eadwulf
the Red, gros thral" of the same Norman lord.
Both Saxon serfs of the mixed Northern race, which, largely intermixed
with Danish blood, produced a nobler, larger-limbed, loftier, and more
athletic race than the pure Saxons of the southern counties--they had
fallen, with the properties of the Saxon thane, to whom they had
belonged in common, into the hands of the foreign conqueror. Yet
Kenric was of that higher class--for there were classes even among
these miserable beings--which could not be sold, nor parted from the
soil on which they were born, but at their own option; while Eadwulf,
although his own twin-brother, for some cause into which it were
needless to inquire, could be sold at any time, or to any person, or
even swapped for an animal, or gambled away at the slightest caprice
of his owner.
To this may be added, that, probably from caprice, or perhaps from
some predilection for his personal appearance and motions, which were
commanding, and even graceful, or for his bearing, which was evidently
less churlish than that of his countrymen in general, his master had
distinguished him in some respects from the other serfs of the soil;
and, without actually raising him to any of the higher offices
reserved to the Normans, among whom the very servitors claimed to be,
and indeed were, gentlemen, had employed him in subordinate stations
under his huntsman, and intrusted him so far as occasionally to permit
his carrying arms into the field.
With him, as probably is the case in most things, the action produced
reaction; and what had been the effect of causes, came in time to be
the cause of effects. Some real or supposed advantages procured for
him the exceeding small dignity of some poor half-conceded rights; and
those rights, the effect of perhaps an imaginary superiority, soon
became the causes of something more real--of a sentiment of half
independence, a desire of achieving perfect liberty.
In this it was that he excelled his brother; but we must not
anticipate. What were the characters of the men, and from their
characters what events grew, and what fates followed, it is for the
reader of these pages to decipher.
After our men had tarried where we found them, waiting till
expectation should grow into certainty for above half an hour, and the
morning had become clear and sunny, the distant indescribable sound,
heard indistinctly in the woods, ripened into that singularly
modulated, all sweet, but half-discordant crash, which the practiced
ear is not slow to recognize as the cry of a large pack of hounds,
running hard on a hot scent in high timber.
Anon the notes of individual hounds could be distinguished; now the
sharp, savage treble of some fleet brach, now the deep bass of some
southron talbot, rising above or falling far below the diapason of the
pack--and now, shrill and clear, the long, keen flourish of a Norman
bugle.
At the last signal, Kenric rose silently but quickly to his feet,
while his dog, though evidently excited by the approaching rally of
the chase, remained steady at his couchant position, expectant of his
master's words. The snow-white alans, on the contrary, fretted, and
strained, and whimpered, fighting against their leashes, while Eadwulf
sat still, stubborn or stupid, and animated by no ambition, by no
hope, perhaps scarce even by a fear.
But, as the chase drew nigher, "Up, Eadwulf!" cried his brother,
quickly, "up, and away. Thou'lt have to stretch thy legs, even now, to
reach the four lane ends, where the relays must be, when the stag
crosses. Up, man, I say! Is this the newer spirit you spoke of but
now? this the way you would earn largess whereby to win your freedom?
Out upon it! that I should say so of my own brother, but thou'lt win
nothing but the shackles, if not the thong. Away! lest my words prove
troth."
Eadwulf the Red arose with a scowl, but without a word, shook himself
like a water-spaniel, and set off at a dogged swinging trot, the
beautiful high-bred dogs bounding before his steps like winged
creatures, and struggling with the leashes that debarred their perfect
freedom--the man degraded, by the consciousness of misery and
servitude, into the type of a soulless brute--the brutes elevated, by
high breeding, high cultivation, and high treatment, almost into the
similitude of intellectual beings.
Kenric looked after him, as he departed, with a troubled eye, and
shook his head, as he lost sight of him among the trees in the
fore-ground. "Alack!" he said, "for Eadwulf, my brother! He waxes
worse, not better." But, as he spoke, a nearer crash of the hounds'
music came pealing through the tree-tops, and with a stealthy step he
crossed over the summit to the rear of the hillock, where he concealed
himself behind the boll of a stupendous oak, making his grayhound lie
down in tall fern beside him.
The approaching hounds came to a sudden fault, and silence, deep as
that of haunted midnight, fell on the solitary place.
CHAPTER II.
THE GOOD SERVICE.
"'Tis merry, 'tis merry, in good green wood,
When mavis and merle are singing;
When the deer sweeps by, and the hounds are in cry,
And the hunter's horn is ringing."
LADY OF THE LAKE.
There is something exceedingly singular in the depth of almost
palpable silence which seems to fall upon a tract of woodland country,
on the sudden cessation of a full cry of stag-hounds; which cry has in
itself, apart from its stirring harmony of discords, something of
cheerfulness and sociality, conveyed by its sound, even to the lonely
wayfarer.
Although, during that hush of the woods, the carol of the birds, the
hum of insects, the breezy voice of the tree-tops, the cooing of the
ringdove, the murmur of falling waters, and all the undistinguished
harmonies of nature, unheard before, and drowned in that loud
brattling, sound forth and fill the listener's ear, yet they disturb
it not, nor seem to dissipate, but rather to augment, the influence of
the silence.
Kenric had not the educated sentiments which lead the most highly
civilized of men to sympathize most deeply with the beautiful sounds
and sights of nature. Yet still, as is mostly the case with dwellers
in the forest or on the wild mountain tops, he had a certain untutored
eye to take in and note effects--an unlearned ear with which to
receive pleasant sounds, and acquire a fuller pleasure from them than
he could perfectly comprehend or explain to his own senses. And now,
when the tumult of the chase had fallen asleep, he leaned against the
gnarled and mossy trunk, with his boar-spear resting listlessly
against his thigh, and a quiet, meditative expression replacing on his
grave, stern features the earnest and excited gaze, with which he had
watched the approach of the hunt.
The check, however, lasted not long; the clear, shrill challenge of a
favorite hound soon rose from the woodlands, accompanied by loud
cheers, "Taró, Taró, tantáro!" and followed by the full crash of the
reassembled pack, as they rallied to their leader, and struck again on
the hot and steaming scent.
Nearer and nearer came the cry, and ever and anon uprose, distant and
mellow, the cadenced nourishes of the clear French horns, giving new
life to the trackers of the deer, and filling the hearts of the riders
with almost mad excitement. Ere long, several cushats might be seen
wheeling above the tree-tops, disturbed from their procreant cradles
by the progress of the fierce din below them. A moment afterward,
dislodged from their feeding-grounds along the boggy margin of the
Idle, a dozen woodcock flapped up from the alder-bushes near the
brink, and came drifting along before the soft wind, on their feebly
whistling pinions, and, fluttering over the head of the watcher,
dropped into the shelter of the dingle in his rear, with its thick
shade of varnished hollies. The next instant, a superb red deer, with
high branching antlers, leaped with a mighty spring over and partly
through the crashing branches of the thicket, and swept with long,
graceful bounds across the clear savanna. A single shout, "Tayho!"
announced the appearance of the quarry in the open, and awakened a
responsive clangor of the horns, which, all at once, sounded their gay
tantivy, while the sharp, redoubled clang of the whips, and the cries
of "arriere! arriere!" which succeeded, told Kenric that the varlets
and attendants of the chase were busy stopping the slow hounds, whose
duty was accomplished so soon as the stag was forced into the field;
and which were now to be replaced by the fleet and fiery alans, used
to course and pull down the quarry by dint of downright strength and
speed.
The stretch of green savanna, of which I have spoken as running along
the northern margin of the Idle, below the wooded ridges of the lower
hills, could not have been less than four miles in length, and was
traversed by two sandy paths, unguarded by any fence or hedge-row,
which intersected each other within a few hundred yards of the belt of
underwood, whence the hunted deer had broken covert. At this point of
intersection, known as the Four-Lane-Ends, a general term in Yorkshire
for such cross-roads, stood a gigantic oak, short-boughed, but of vast
diameter, with gnarled and tortuous branches sweeping down almost to
the rank greensward which surrounded it, and concealing any person who
stood within their circumference, as completely as if he were within
an artificial pavilion.
That way, winged by terror, bounded the beautiful hart royal; for no
less did his ten-tined antlers, with their huge cupped tops denote
him; and, though it presented no real obstacle to his passage, when he
saw the yellow road, winding like a rivulet through the deep grass, he
gathered all his feet together, made four or five quick, short
buck-leaps, and then, soaring into the air like a bird taking wing,
swept over it, and alighted ten feet on the hither side, apparently
without an effort--a miracle of mingled grace, activity, and beauty.
As he alighted, he paused a moment, turned his long, swan-like neck,
and gazed backward for a few seconds with his large, lustrous,
melancholy eyes, until, seeing no pursuers, nor hearing any longer the
crash which had aroused him from his harbor, he tossed his antlers
proudly, and sailed easily and leisurely across the gentle green.
But at this moment, Eadwulf the Red, who was stationed beneath that
very oak-tree with the first relay of grayhounds, uttered a long,
shrill whoop, and casting loose the leashes, slipped the two
snow-white alans on the quarry. The whoop was answered immediately,
and, at about half a mile's distance from the spot where the deer had
issued, two princely-looking Norman nobles, clearly distinguishable as
such by their richly-furred short hunting-coats, tight hose, and
golden spurs of knighthood, came into sight, spurring their noble
Andalusian coursers--at that period the fleetest strain in the world,
which combined high blood with the capacity to endure the weight of a
man-at-arms in his full panoply--to their fullest speed; and followed
by a long train of attendants--some mounted, some on foot, huntsmen
and verdurers, and yeomen prickers, with falconers, and running
footmen, some leading alans in the leash, and some with nets and
spears for the chase of the wild boar, which still roamed not
unfrequent in the woody swamps that intersected the lower grounds and
lined many of the river beds of Sherwood.
It was a gay and stirring scene. The meadow, late so quiet in its
uniform green garniture, was now alive with fluttering plumes, and
glittering with many-colored scarfs and cassocks, noble steeds of all
hues, blood-bay and golden chestnut, dappled and roan, and gleamy
blacks, and one, on which rode the foremost of the noble Normans,
white as December's snow; and in the middle of the picture, aroused by
the shouts in his rear, and aware of the presence of his fresh
pursuers, the superb stag, with his neck far stretched out, and his
grand antlers pressed close along his back, straining every nerve, and
literally seeming to fly over the level sward; while the snow-white
alans, with their fierce black eyes glowing like coals of fire, and
their blood-red tongues lolling from their open jaws, breathless and
mute, but stanch as vindictive fiends, hung hard upon his traces.
At first, the hunted stag laid his course upward, diagonally, aiming
for the forest land on the hillside; and although, at first, he had
scarce thirty yards of law, and was, moreover, so nearly matched in
speed by his relentless enemies, that, for many hundred yards, he
neither gained nor lost a yard's distance, still he gradually gathered
way, as yards fell into furlongs, furlongs into miles, and drew ahead
slowly, but surely, until it appeared almost certain that he must soon
gain the shelter of the tall timber, where the keen eyes of the alans,
impotent of scent, would be worthless in pursuit, and where he must
again be dislodged by slow hounds, or the chase abandoned.
Just as he was within fifty yards, however, of the desired covert's
edge, Sir Philip de Morville--for he it was who rode the
foremost--raised his bugle to his lips, and sounded it long and
shrill, in a most peculiar strain, to which a whoop responded, almost
from the point for which the stag was making, and, at the same time, a
second brace of alans--one a jet black, and the other a deep-brindled
fawn color--darted out, and flew down the gentle slope, right at the
head of the yet unwearied quarry.
Springing high into air, he instantly made a perfect demivolte, with
an angry toss of his antlers, and shot, with redoubled efforts in the
contrary direction, cutting across the very noses of his original
pursuers, which, when they had turned likewise, were brought within
fifty yards of his haunches, and away like an arrow toward the bridge
across the Idle. From this moment, the excitement of the spectacle was
redoubled; nor could any one, even the coldest of spectators, have
looked on without feeling the blood course, like molten lava, through
his veins.
It was no longer a stern chase, where the direct speed only of the
rival and hostile animals was brought into play; for, as the stag
turned to the left about, the black and brindled alans, which had been
started at his head, were thrown by the movement some thirty yards
wide on his right quarter; while the white dogs, who had pursued him
so savagely from the beginning, were brought to a position nearly
equidistant on his left flank.
Henceforth it was a course of fleet bounds, short turns, and windings
of wonderful agility; and at this instant a new spectator, or
spectatress rather, was added to the scene.
This was a young girl of some sixteen or seventeen years, at the
utmost, beautifully formed, and full of easy grace and symmetry, who
came careering down the road, from the direction of the castle, as
fast as the flying bounds of a beautiful red roan Arab--with mane and
tail of silver, scarcely larger or less fleet than the deer in the
plain below--could carry her.
Her face and features were not less beautiful than her form; the
latter would have been perfectly Grecian and classical but for the
slightest possible upward turn in the delicate thin nose, which
imparted an arch, half-saucy meaning to her rich, laughing face. Her
eyes were clear, bright blue, with long, dark lashes, a pure
complexion, ripe, crimson lips, and a flood of dark auburn tresses,
which had escaped from the confinement of her purple velvet bonnet,
and flowed on the light breeze in a flood of glittering ringlets,
completed her attractions.
Her garb was the rich attire peculiar to her age, rank, and the period
of which we write--the most picturesque, perhaps, and appropriate to
set off the perfections of a female figure of rare symmetry, that ever
has been invented. A closely-fitting jacket, following every curve and
sinuous line of her beauteous shape, of rich green velvet, furred
deeply at the cape and cuffs with white swansdown, and bordered at the
hips by a broad band of the same pure garniture; loose-flowing skirts,
of heavy sendal of the same hue, a crimson velvet shoulder-belt
supporting a richly-embroidered hawking-pouch, a floating plume of
white ostrich feathers, and a crimson-hooded merlin on her wrist, with
golden bells and jesses, completed her person's adornment; and
combined, with the superb housings and velvet headstall of her
exquisite palfrey, to form a charming picture.
So rapidly did she ride, that a single page--a boy of ten or twelve
years, who followed her--spurring with all his might, could scarcely
keep her in sight; and, as she careered down toward the bridge, which
she had almost reached, was lost to view in the valley immediately
behind the ridge, the southern slope of which she was descending.
The stag, by this time, which had been aiming hitherto to cross the
road on which she was galloping, had been turned several times by the
fresh relay of alans, which were untired and unimpaired of speed, and
had been thus edged gradually away from the road and bridge, toward
the white dogs, which were now running, as it is technically termed,
_cunning_, laying up straight ahead, on a parallel line, and
almost abreast with the deer. Now they drew forward, shot ahead, and
passed him. At once, seeing his peril, he wheeled on his haunches,
and, with a desperate last effort, headed once more for the road,
striving, for life! for life! to cut across the right-hand couple of
deer grayhounds; but, fleet as he was, fleeter now did they show
themselves, and once more he was forced to turn, only to find the
white dogs directly in his path.
One, the taller and swifter of the two, was a few yards in advance of
the other, and, as the stag turned full into his foaming jaws, sprang
at its throat with a wild yell. But the deer bounded too, and bounded
higher than the dog, and, as they met in mid air, its keen,
sharp-pointed hoofs struck the brave staghound in the chest, and
hurled him to the ground stunned, if not lifeless. Four strides more,
and he swept like a swallow over a narrow reach of the little river;
and then, having once more brought the three surviving hounds directly
astern, turned to the westward along the river shore, and cantering
away lightly, no longer so hard pressed, seemed likely to make his
escape toward a broad belt of forest, which lay some mile and a half
that way, free from ambuscade or hidden peril.
At this turn of the chase, fiercer was the excitement, and wilder
waxed the shouting and the bugle blasts of the discomfited followers
of the chase, none of whom were nearer to the bridge than a full half
mile. But so animated was the beautiful young lady, whose face had
flushed crimson, and then turned ashy pale, with the sudden excitement
of that bold exploit of dog and deer, that she clapped her hands
joyously together, unhooding and casting loose her merlin, though
without intention, in the act, and crying, gayly, "Well run, brave
Hercules! well leaped, brave Hart o' Grease;" and, as she saw the
hunters scattered over the wide field, none so near to the sport as
she, she flung her arm aloft, and with her pretty girlish voice set up
a musical whoop of defiance.
Now, at the very moment when the deer's escape seemed almost more than
certain--as often is the case in human affairs, no less than
cervine--"a new foe in the field" changed the whole aspect of the
case. The great brindled gray deerhound, which had lain thus far
peaceful by Kenric's side, seeing what had passed, sprang out of the
fern, unbidden, swam across the Idle in a dozen strokes, and once more
headed the hunted deer.
The young girl was now within six horses' length of the bridge, when
the deer, closely pursued by its original assailants, and finding
itself now intercepted by Kenric's dog "Kilbuck" in front, turned once
again in the only direction now left it, and wheeled across the bridge
at full speed, black with sweat, flecked with white foam-flakes, its
tongue hanging from its swollen jaws, its bloodshot eyeballs almost
starting from its head, mad with terror and despair. All at once, the
Arab horse and the gorgeous trappings of the rider glanced across its
line of vision; fire seemed, to the affrighted girl, to flash from its
glaring eyes, as it lowered its mighty antlers, and charged with a
fierce, angry bray.
Pale as death, the gallant girl yet retained her courage and her
faculties; she pulled so sharply on her left rein, striking the
palfrey on the shoulder with her riding-rod, that he wheeled short on
his haunches, and presented his right flank to the infuriated deer,
protecting his fair rider by the interposition of his body.
No help was nigh, though the Norman nobles saw her peril, and spurred
madly to the rescue; though Kenric started from his lair with a
portentous whoop, and, poising his boar spear, rushed down, in the
hope to turn the onset to himself. But it was too late; and, strong as
was his hand, and his eyes steady, he dared not to hurl such a weapon
as that he held, in such proximity to her he would defend.
With an appalling sound, a soft, dead, crushing thrust, the terrible
brow antlers were plunged into the defenseless flanks of the poor
palfrey; which hung, for a second on the cruel prongs, and then, with
a long, shivering scream, rolled over on its side, with collapsed
limbs, and, after a few convulsive struggles, lay dead, with the
lovely form of its mistress rolled under it, pale, motionless, with
the long golden hair disordered in the dust, and the blue eyes closed,
stunned, cold, and spiritless, at least, if not lifeless.
Attracted by the gay shoulder-belt of the poor girl, again the savage
beast stooped to gore; but a strong hand was on his antler, and a keen
knife-point buried in his breast. Sore stricken he was, yet, not
slain; and, rearing erect on his hind legs, he dealt such a storm of
blows from his sharp hoofs, each cutting almost like a knife, about
the head and shoulders of his dauntless antagonist, as soon hurled
him, in no better condition than she, beside the lady he had risked so
much to rescue.
Then the dogs closed and seized him, and savage and appalling was the
strife of the fierce brutes, with long-drawn, choking sighs, and
throttling yells, as they raved, and tore, and stamped, and battled,
over the prostrate group.
It was a fearful sight that met the eyes of the first comer. He was
the Norman who had ridden second in the chase, but now, having
outstripped his friendly rival in the neck-or-nothing skurry that
succeeded, thundered the first into the road, where the dogs were now
mangling the slaughtered stag, and besmearing the pale face of the
senseless girl with blood and bestial foam.
To spring from his saddle and drop on his knees beside her, was but a
moment's work.
"My child! my child! they have slaughtered thee. Woe! woe!"
CHAPTER III.
THE GUERDON OF GOOD SERVICE.
"'Twere better to die free, than live a slave."
EURIPIDES.
It was fortunate, for all concerned, that no long time elapsed before
more efficient aid came on the ground, than the gentleman who first
reached the spot, and who, although a member of that dauntless
chivalry, trained from their cradles to endure hardship, to despise
danger, and to look death steadfastly and unmoved in the face, was so
utterly paralyzed by what he deemed, not unnaturally, the death of his
darling, that he made no effort to relieve her from the weight of the
slaughtered animal, though it rested partially on her lower limbs, and
on one arm, which lay extended, nevertheless, as it had fallen, in the
dust. But up came, in an instant, Philip de Morville, on his superb,
snow-white Andalusian, a Norman baron to the life--tall, powerful,
thin-flanked, deep-chested, with the high aquiline features and dark
chestnut hair of his race, nor less with its dauntless valor, grave
courtesy, and heart as impassive to fear or tenderness or pity, as his
own steel hauberk. Up came esquires and pages, foresters and grooms,
and springing tumultuously to the ground, under the short, prompt
orders of their lord, raised the dead palfrey bodily up, while Sir
Philip drew the fair girl gently from under it, and raising her in his
arms more tenderly than he had ever been known to entreat any thing,
unless it were his favorite falcon, laid her on the short, soft
greensward, under the shadow of one of the huge, broad-headed oaks by
the wayside.
"Cheer thee, my noble lord and brother," he exclaimed, "the Lady
Guendolen is not dead, nor like to die this time. 'Tis only fear, and
perchance her fall, for it was a heavy one, that hath made her faint.
Bustle, knaves, bustle. Bring water from the spring yonder. Has no one
a leathern bottiau? You, Damian, gallop, as if you would win your
spurs of gold by riding, to the sumpter mule with the panniers. It
should be at the palmer's spring by this time; for, hark, the bells
from the gray brothers' chapel, in the valley by the river, are
chiming for the noontide service. Bring wine and essences, electuaries
and ambergris, if the refectioner have any with him. You, Raoul," he
continued, addressing a sturdy, grim-featured old verdurer, who was
hanging over the still senseless girl with an expression of solicitude
hardly natural to his rugged and scar-seamed countenance, "take a led
horse, and hie thee to the abbey; tell the good prior what hath
befallen, and pray the brother mediciner he will ride this way, as
speedily as he may; and you," turning to the old, white-haired
seneschal, "send up some of the varlets to the castle, for the
horse-litter; she may not ride home this day."
In the mean time, while he was accumulating order on order, while
pages and horse-boys, grooms and esquires, were galloping off, in
different directions, as if with spurs of fire, and while the barons
themselves were awkwardly endeavoring to perform those ministrations
for the fair young creature, which they were much more used themselves
to receive at the hands of the softer sex, who were in those rude days
often the chirurgeons and leeches, as well as the comforters and
soothers of the bed of pain and sickness, than to do such offices for
others, the bold defender of Guendolen--Kenric the dark-haired--lay in
his blood, stark and cold, deemed dead, and quite forgotten, even by
the lowest of the Norman varletry, who held themselves too noble to
waste services upon a Saxon, much more upon a thral and bondsman.
They--such of them, that is to say, as were not needed in direct
attendance on the persons of the nobles, or as had not been dispatched
in search of aid--applied themselves, with characteristic zeal and
eagerness, to tend and succor the nobler animals, as they held them,
of the chase; while they abandoned their brother man and
fellow-countryman, military Levites as they were, to his chances of
life or death, without so much as even caring to ask or examine
whether he were numbered with the living or the dead.
The palfrey was first seen to, and pronounced dead; when his rich
housings were stripped off carefully, and cleaned as well as time and
place permitted; when the carcass was dragged off the road, and
concealed, for the moment, with fern leaves and boughs lopped from the
neighboring bushes, while something was said among the stable boys of
sending out some of the "dog Saxon serfs" to bury him on the morrow.
The deer was then dragged roughly whence it lay, across the breast of
Kenric, in whose left shoulder one of its terrible brow antlers had
made a deep gash, while his right arm was badly shattered by a blow of
its sharp hoofs. So careless were the men of inflicting pain on the
living, or dishonor on the dead, that one of them, in removing the
quarry, set his booted foot square on the Saxon's chest, and forced,
by the joint effect of the pressure and the pain, a stifled, choking
sound, half involuntary, half a groan, from the pale lips of the
motionless sufferer. With a curse, and a slight, contemptuous kick,
the Norman groom turned away, with his antlered burthen, muttering a
ribald jest on "the death-grunt of the Saxon boar;" and drawing his
keen wood-knife, was soon deep in the mysteries of the _cureé_,
and deeper yet in blood and grease, prating of "nombles, briskets,
flankards, and raven-bones," then the usual terms of the art of
hunting, or butchery, whichever the reader chooses to call it, which
are now probably antiquated. The head was cabbaged, as it was called,
and, with the entrails, given as a reward to the fierce hounds, which
glared with ravenous eyes on the gory carcass. Even its peculiar
morsel was chucked to the attendant raven, the black bird of St.
Hubert, which--free from any apprehension of the gentle hunters, who
affected to treat him with respectful and reverential awe--sat on the
stag-horned peak of an aged oak-tree, awaiting his accustomed portion,
with an observant eye and an occasional croak. By-and-by, when the
sumpter mule came up, with kegs of ale and bottiaus of mead and
hypocras, and wine of Gascony and Anjou, before even the riders'
throats were slaked by the generous liquor, the bridle-bits and
cavessons, nose-bags and martingales of the coursers were removed, and
liberal drenches were bestowed on them, partly in guerdon of past
services, partly in order to renew their strength and stimulate their
valiant ardor.
Long ere this, however, fanned by two or three pages with fans of fern
wreaths, and sprinkled with cold spring-water by the hands of her
solicitous kinsman, the young girl had given symptoms of returning
life, and a brighter expression returned to the dark, melancholy
visage of her father.
Two or three long, faint, fluttering sighs came from her parted lips;
and then, regular, though low and feeble, her breathing made itself
heard, and her girlish bosom rose and fell responsive.
Her father, who had been chafing her hands assiduously, pressed one of
them caressingly, at this show of returning animation, and raised it
to his lips; when, awakening at the accustomed tenderness, her languid
eyes opened, a faint light of intelligence shone forth from them, a
pale glow of hectic color played over her face, and a smile glittered
for a second on her quivering lips.
"Dear father," she whispered, faintly; but, the next moment, an
expression of fear was visible in all her features, and a palpable
shiver shook all her frame. "The stag!" she murmured; "the stag! save
me, save"--and before the word, uttered simultaneously by the two
lords--"He is dead, dear one," "He will harm no one any more"--had
reached her ears, she again relapsed into insensibility, while with
equal care, but renewed hope, they tended and caressed her.
But Kenric no one tended, no one caressed, save, "faithful still,
where all were faithless found," the brindled staghound, "Kilbuck,"
who licked his face assiduously, with his grim, gory tongue and lips,
and besmearing his face with blood and foam, rendered his aspect yet
more terrible and death-like.
But now the returning messengers began to ride in, fast and frequent;
first, old Raoul, the huntsman, surest, although not fleetest, and
with him, shaking in his saddle, between the sense of peril and the
perplexity occasioned him by the high, hard trot of the Norman
war-horse pressed into such unwonted service, "like a boar's head in
aspick jelly," the brother mediciner from the neighboring convent,
with his wallet of simples and instruments of chirurgery.
By his advice, the plentiful application of cold water, with essences
and stimulants in abundance, a generous draught of rich wine of
Burgundy, and, when animation seemed thoroughly revived, the gentle
breathing of a vein, soon restored the young lady to her perfect
senses and complete self-possession, though she was sorely bruised,
and so severely shaken that it was enjoined on her to remain perfectly
quiet, where she lay, with a Lincoln-green furred hunting-cloak around
her, until the arrival of the litter should furnish means of return to
the castle of her father's host and kinsman.
And, in good season, down the hill, slowly and toilsomely came the
horse-litter, poor substitute for a wheeled vehicle; but even thus the
best, if not only, conveyance yet adopted for the transport of the
wounded, the feeble, or the luxurious, and, as such, used only by the
wealthy and the noble.
With the litter came three or four women; one or two, Norman maidens,
the immediate attendants of the Lady Guendolen, and the others, Saxon
slave girls of the household of Sir Philip de Morville, who hurried
down, eager to gain favor by show of zealous duty, or actuated by
woman's feelings for woman's suffering, even in different grades and
station.
The foremost of them all, bounding along with all the wild agility and
free natural gracefulness of wood-nymph or bacchante, was a girl of
seventeen or eighteen, not above the middle height of her sex, but
plump as a partridge, with limbs exquisitely formed and rounded, a
profusion of flaxen tresses floating unrestrained on the air, large
dark-blue eyes, and a complexion all of milk and roses--the very type
of rural Saxon youth and beauty.
As she outstripped all the rest in speed, she was the first to tender
gentle service to the Lady Guendolen, who received her with a smile,
calling her "Edith the Fair," and thanking her for her ready aid.
But, ere long, as the courtlier maidens arrived on the ground, poor
Edith was set aside, as is too often the case with humble merit, while
the others lifted the lady into the horse-litter, covered her with
light and perfumed garlands, and soon had all ready for her departure.
But, in the mean time, Edith had turned a hasty glance around her; and
descrying the inanimate body of the Saxon serf, lying alone and
untended, moved by the gentle sympathy of woman for the humblest
unknown sufferer, she hastened to assist, if assistance were still
possible. But, as she recognized the limbs, stately, though cold and
still, and the features, still noble through gore and defilement, a
swift horror smote her, that she shook like a leaf, and fell, with a
wild, thrilling shriek, "O, Kenric, Kenric!" on the body of the
wounded man.
"Ha! what is this?" cried Sir Philip, who now first saw or remembered
what had passed. "How is this? Knaves, is there a man hurt here?"
"A Saxon churl, Beausire," replied one of the pages, flippantly, "who
has gotten his brisket unseamed by his brother Saxon yonder!" and he
pointed to the dead carcass of the stag.
"Our lady save us," murmured the gentle Guendolen, who seemed about to
relapse into insensibility; "he saved my life, and have ye let him
perish?"
"Now, by the splendor of our lady's eyes!" cried Yvo de Taillebois,
the father of the fair young lady, "this is the gallant lad we saw
afar, in such bold hand-to-hand encounter with yon mad brute. We have
been ingrately, shamefully remiss. This must be amended, Philip de
Morville."
"It shall, it shall, my noble friend," cried Philip; "and ye, dogs,
that have let the man perish untended thus, for doing of his devoir
better than all the best of ye, bestir yourselves. If the man die, as
it seems like enow, ye shall learn ere ye are one day older, what
pleasant bed-rooms are the vaults of Waltheofstow, and how tastes the
water of the moat."
Meantime the monk trotted up, and, after brief examination, announced
that, though badly hurt, his life was in no immediate peril, and set
himself at once to comfort and revive him.
"He is not slain; he will not die, my child," said Sir Yvo, softly,
bending over the litter to his pale lily, who smiled faintly as she
whispered in reply--
"Dear father, nor be a slave any longer?"
"Not if I may redeem him," he answered; "but I will speak with Sir
Philip at once. Meanwhile be tranquil, and let them convey you
homeward. Forward, there, with the litter--gently, forward!"
And, therewith, he turned and spoke eagerly to De Morville, who
listened with a grave brow, and answered;
"If it may be, my noble friend and brother. If it may be. But there
are difficulties. Natheless, on my life, I desire to pleasure you."
"Nay! it comports not with our name or station, that the noble
Guendolen de Taillebois should owe life to a collared thral--a mere
brute animal. My lord, your word on it! He must be _free_, since
Yvo de Taillebois is his debtor."
"My word _is_ pledged on it," replied De Morville. "If it can be
at all, it _shall_ be. Nay, look not so black on it. It shall be.
We will speak farther of it at the castle! And now, lo! how he opes
his eyes and stares. He will be right, anon; and ye, knaves, bear him
to the castle, when the good brother bids ye, and gently, if ye would
escape a reckoning with me. And now, good friends, to horse! to horse!
The litter is half-way to the castle gates already. To horse! to
horse! and God send us no more such sorry huntings."
CHAPTER IV.
THE NORMAN LORDS.
"Oh! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but tyrannous
To use it like a giant."
MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
High up in a green, gentle valley, a lap among the hills, which,
though not very lofty, were steep and abrupt with limestone crags and
ledges, heaving themselves above the soil on their upper slopes and
summits, perched on a small isolated knoll, or hillock, so regular in
form, and so evenly scarped and rounded, that it bore the appearance
of an artificial work, stood the tall Norman fortalice of Philip de
Morville.
It was not a very large building, consisting principally of a single
lofty square keep, with four lozenge-shaped turrets at the angles,
attached to the body of the place, merlonwise, as it is termed in
heraldry, or corner to corner, rising some twenty feet or more above
the flat roof of the tower, which was surrounded with heavy projecting
battlements widely overhanging the base, and pierced with crenelles
for archery, and deep machicolations, by which to pour down boiling
oil, or molten lead, upon any who should attempt the walls.
In the upper stories only, of this strong place, were there any
windows, such as deserved the name, beyond mere loops and arrowslits;
but there, far above the reach of any scaling-ladder, they looked out,
tall and shapely, glimmering in the summer sunshine, in the rich and
gorgeous hues of the stained glass--at that time the most recent and
costly of foreign luxuries, opening on a projecting gallery, or
bartizan, of curiously-carved stonework, which ran round all the four
sides of the building, and rendered the dwelling apartments of the
castellan and his family both lightsome and commodious. One of the
tall turrets, which have been described, contained the winding
staircase, which gave access to the halls and guard-rooms which
occupied all the lower floors, and to the battlements above, while
each of the others contained sleeping-chambers of narrow dimensions,
on each story, opening into the larger apartments.
This keep, with the exception of the tall battlemented flanking walls,
with their esplanades and turrets, and advanced barbican or
gate-house, was the only genuine Norman portion of the castle, and
occupied the very summit of the knoll; but below it, and for the most
part concealed and covered by the ramparts on which it abutted, was a
long, low, roomy stone building, which had been in old times the
mansion of the Saxon thane, who had occupied the rich and fertile
lands of that upland vale, in the happy days before the advent of the
fierce and daring Normans, to whom he had lost both life and lands,
and left an empty name alone to the inheritance, which was not to
descend to any of his race or lineage.
Below the walls, which encircled the hillock about midway between the
base and summit, except at one spot, where the gate-house was thrust
forward to the brink of a large and rapid brook, which had been made
by artificial means completely to encircle the little hill, the slopes
were entirely bare of trees or underwood, every thing that could
possibly cover the advances of an enemy being carefully cut down or
uprooted, and were clothed only by a dense carpet of short, thick
greensward, broidered with daisies pied, and silver lady's smocks; but
beyond the rivulet, covering all the bottom of the valley with rich
and verdant shade, were pleasant orchards and coppices, among which
peeped out the thatched roofs and mud walls of the little village,
inhabited by the few free laborers, and the more numerous thralls and
land-serfs, who cultivated the demesnes of the foreign noble, who
possessed them by right of the sword.
Through this pleasant little hamlet, the yellow road, which led up to
the castle, wound devious, passing in its course by an open green, on
which half a dozen sheep and two or three asses were feeding on the
short herbage, with a small Saxon chapel, distinguished by its low,
round, wolf-toothed arch and belfry, on the farther side; and, in
singular proximity to the sacred edifice, a small space, inclosed by a
palisade, containing a gallows, a whipping-post, and a pair of
stocks--sad monuments of Saxon slavery, and Norman tyranny and wrong.
In one of the upper chambers of the feudal keep, a small square room,
with a vaulted roof, springing from four clustered columns in the
corners, with four groined ribs, meeting in the middle, from which
descended a long, curiously-carved pendant of stone, terminating in a
gilt iron candelabrum of several branches, two men were seated at a
board, on which, though the solid viands of the mid-day meal had been
removed, there were displayed several silver dishes, with wastel
bread, dried fruits, and light confections, as well as two or three
tall, graceful flasks of the light fragrant wines of Gascony and
Anjou, and several cups and tankards of richly-chased and gilded
metal, intermixed with several large-bowled and thin-stemmed goblets
of purple and ruby-colored glass.
The room was a very pleasant one, lighted by two tall windows, on two
different sides, which stood wide open, admitting the soft, balmy,
summer air, and the fresh smell of the neighboring greenwoods, the
breezy voice of which came gently in, whispering through the casement.
The walls were hung with tapestries of embossed and gilded Spanish
leather, adorned with spirited figures of Arab skirmishers and
Christian chivalry, engaged in the stirring game of warfare; while, no
unfit decoration for a wall so covered, two or three fine suits of
chain and plate armor, burnished so brightly that they shone like
silver, with their emblazoned shields and appropriate weapons, stood,
like armed knights on constant duty, in canopied niches, framed
especially to receive them.
Varlets, pages, and attendants, had all withdrawn; and the two Norman
barons sat alone, sipping their wine in silence, and apparently
reflecting on some subject which they found it difficult to approach
without offense or embarrassment. At last, the younger of the two, Sir
Philip de Morville, after drawing his open hand across his fair, broad
forehead, as if he would have swept away some cloud which gloomed over
his mind, and drinking off a deep goblet of wine, opened the
conversation with evident confusion and reluctance.
"Well, well," he said, "it must out, Sir Yvo, and though it is not
very grateful to speak of such things, I must needs do so, lest I
appear to you uncourtly and ungracious, in hesitating to do to you,
mine own most tried and trusty friend, to whom I owe no less than my
own life, so small a favor as the granting liberty to one poor devil
of a Saxon. I told you I would do it, if I might; yet, by my father's
soul, I know not how to do it!"
"Where is the rub, my friend?" replied the other, kindly. "I doubt
not, if we put both our heads together, we can accomplish even a
greater thing than making a free English yeoman of a Saxon thrall."
"I never was rich, as you well know, De Taillebois; but at the time of
the king's late incursion into Wales, when I was summoned to lead out
my power, I had no choice but to mortgage this my fortalice, with its
demesne of Waltheofstow, and all its plenishing and stock, castle and
thralls, and crops and fisheries, to Abraham of Tadcaster, for
nineteen thousand zecchins, to buy their outfitting, horses, and
armor; and this prohibits me from manumitting this man, Kenric,
although I would do so right willingly, not for that it would pleasure
you only, but that he is a faithful and an honest fellow for a thrall,
and right handy, both with arbalast and longbow. I know not well how
to accomplish it."
"Easily, easily, Philip," answered Sir Yvo, laughing. "Never shall it
be said that nineteen thousand zecchins stood between Yvo de
Taillebois and his gratitude; besides, this will shoot double game
with a single arrow. It will relieve our trusty Kenric from the actual
bondage of a corporeal lord and master, and liberate my right good
friend and brother in arms, Philip de Morville, from the more galling
spiritual bondage of that foul tyrant and perilous oppressor, debt.
Tush! no denial, I say," he continued, perceiving that Sir Philip was
about to make some demur; "it is a mere trifle, this, and a matter of
no moment. I am, as you well know, passing rich, what with my rents in
Westmoreland, and my estates beyond the sea. I have even now well-nigh
twice the sum that you name, lying idle in my bailiff's hands at
Kendall, until I may find lands to purchase. It was my intent to have
bought those border lands of Clifford's, that march with my moorlands
on Hawkshead, but it seems he will not sell, and I am doubly glad that
it gives me the occasion to serve you. I will direct my bailiff at
once to take horse for Tadcaster and redeem your mortgage, and you can
take your own time and pleasure to repay it. There is no risk, Heaven
knows, for Waltheofstow is well worth nineteen thousand zecchins three
times told, and, in lieu of usance money, you shall transfer the man
Kenric from thee and thine to me and mine, forever. So shall my
gratitude be preserved intact, and my pretty Guendolen have her fond
fancy gratified."
"Be it so, then, in God's name; and by my faith I thank you for the
loan right heartily; for, on mine honor! that same blood-sucker of
Israel hath pumped me like the veriest horse-leech, these last twelve
months, and I know not but I should have had to sell, after all. We
must have Kenric's consent, however, that all may be in form; for he
is no common thrall, but a serf of the soil, and may not be removed
from it, nor manumitted even, save with his own free will."
"Who ever heard of a serf refusing to be free, more than of a Jew not
loving ducats? My life on it, he will not be slow to consent!"
"I trow not, I trow not, De Taillebois, but let us set about it
presently; a good deed can not well be done too quickly. You pass the
wine cup, too, I notice. Let us take cap and cloak, and stroll down
into the hamlet yonder; it is a pleasant ramble in the cool afternoon,
and we can see him in his den; he will be scant of wind, I trow, and
little fit to climb the castle hill this evensong, after the battering
he received from that stout forester. But freedom will be a royal
salve, I warrant me, for his worst bruises. Shall we go?"
"Willingly, willingly. I would have it to tell Guendolen at her
wakening. 'T will be a cure to her also. She is a tender-hearted child
ever, and was so from her cradle. Why, I have known her cry like the
lady Niobe, that the prior of St. Albans told us of--who wept till she
was changed into a chipping fountain, when blessed St. Michael and St.
George slew all her tribe of children, for that she likened herself,
in her vain pride of beauty, to the most holy virgin mother, St. Mary
of Sienna--at the killing of a deer by a stray shaft, that had a
suckling fawn beside her foot; and when I caused them to imprison
Wufgitha, that was her nurse's daughter, for selling of a hundred
pounds of flax that was given her to spin, she took sick, and kept to
her bed two days and more, all for that she fancied the wench would
pine; though her prison-house was the airiest and most lightsome
turret chamber in my house at Kendal, and she was not in gyves nor on
prison diet. Faith! I had no peace with her, till I gave the whole
guidance of the women into her hands. They are all ladies since that
day at Kendal, or next akin to it."
"Over god's forbode!" answered Philip, laughing. "It must have been a
black day for your seneschal. How rules he your warders, since? My
fellow, Hundibert, swears that the girls need more watching than the
laziest swine in the whole Saxon herd. But come; let us be moving."
With that they descended the winding stone stairway into the great
hall or guard-room, which occupied the whole of one floor of the
castle--a noble vaulted room, stone-arched and stone-paved, its walls
hung with splendid arms and well-used weapons,
"Old swords, and pikes, and bows,
And good old shields, and targets, that had borne some stout old
blows."
Thence, through an echoing archway, above which in its grooves of
stone hung the steel-clinched portcullis, and down a steep and almost
precipitous flight of steps, without any rail or breastwork, they
reached the large court-yard, where some of the retainers were engaged
in trying feats of strength and skill, throwing the hammer, wrestling,
or shooting with arbalasts at a mark, while others were playing at
games of chance in a cool shadowy angle of the walls, moistening their
occupation with an occasional pull at a deep, black tankard, which
stood beside them on the board.
After tarrying a few minutes in the court, observing the wrestlers and
cross-bowmen, and throwing in an occasional word of good-humored
encouragement at any good shot or happy fall, the lords passed the
drawbridge, which was lowered, giving access to the pleasant country,
over which the warder was gazing half-wistfully, and watching a group
of pretty girls, who were washing clothes in the brook at about half a
mile's distance, laughing as merrily and singing as tunefully as
though they had been free maidens of gentle Norman lineage, instead of
contemned and outlawed Saxons, the children, and the wives and mothers
of slaves and bond-men in the to be hereafter.
"Hollo! old Stephen," cried the Knight of Morville, gayly, as he
passed the stout dependent; "I thought thou wert too resolute a
bachelor to cast a sheep's-eye on the lasses, and too thorough-paced a
Norman to let the prettiest Saxon of them all find favor in your
sight."
"I don't know, sir; I don't know that," answered the man, with a grin,
half-bashfully, and between bantering and earnest. "There's little
Edith down yonder; and, bond or free, there's not a girl about the
castle, or within ten miles of it, for that matter, that has got an
eye to come near those blue sparklers of her's; and as for her voice,
when she's singing, it would wile the birds out of heaven, let alone
the wits of a poor soldier's brain-pan. Hark to her now, Sir Philip.
Sang ever nightingale so sweetly as yon trill, Sir Knight?"
"Win her, Stephen. Win her, I'll grant you my permission, for your
paramour; and if you do, I'll give her to you for your own. I owe you
a boon of some sort, for that service you did me when you knocked that
Welch churl on the head, who would have driven his long knife into my
ribs, that time I was dismounted in the pass near Dunmailraise. Win
her, therefore, if you may, Stephen, and yours she shall be, as surely
and as steadfastly as though she were the captive of your spear."
"Small chance, Sir Philip," replied the man, slowly; "all thanks to
you, natheless. But she's troth-plighted to that tall, well-made
fellow, Kenric, they say, that saved the lady Guendolen from the stag
this morning. They'll be asking your consent to the wedding and the
bedding, one of these days, Beausire. To-morrow, as like as not,
seeing this feat of the good youth's will furnish forth a sort of plea
for the asking of a favor."
"That will not much concern you, warder," said Sir Yvo. "Your rival
will be out of your way shortly. I have asked his freedom but now of
Sir Philip, and shall have him away with me the next week, to the
North country."
"I don't know that will do me much good. They say she loves him
parlously, and he her; and she ever looks coldly on me."
"A little perseverance is a certain remedy for cold looks, Stephen.
So, don't be down-hearted. You will have a clear field soon."
"I am not so sure of that, sir. I should not wonder if he refused to
go."
"Refused to go--to be free--to be his own master, and a thrall and
slave no longer!"
"Who can tell, sir?" answered the man. "Saxon or Norman, bond or free,
we're all men, after all; and women have made fools of us all, since
the days of Sir Adam in Paradise, and will, I fancy, to the end of all
time. I'd do and suffer a good deal myself to win such a look out of
Edith's blue eyes, as I saw her give yon Saxon churl, when he came to
after we had thrown cold water on him. And, after all, if Sir
Hercules, of Greece, made a slave of himself, and a she-slave, too, as
that wandering minstrel sang to us in the hall the other day, all to
win the love of the beautiful Sultana, Omphale, I don't see, for
myself, why a Saxon serf, that's been a serf all his life, and got
pretty well used to it by this time, shouldn't stay a serf all the
rest of it, to keep the love of Edith, who is prettier a precious
sight than the fair Turk, Omphale, I'll warrant. I don't know but what
I would myself."
"Pshaw! Stephen; that smacks Norman--smacks of the _gai science_,
chivalry, sentiment, and fine high romance. You'll never see a Saxon
sing 'all for love,' I'll warrant you."
"Well, sir, well. We shall see. A Saxon's a man, as I said before; and
a Saxon in love is a man in love; and a man in love isn't a man in his
senses any more than Sir Hercules of Greece was, and when a Saxon's in
love, and out of his senses, there's no saying what he'll do; only one
may guess it will be nothing over wise. And so, as I said before, I
should not wonder if Kenric should not part with collar, thong, and
shackles, if he must needs part too with little Edith the Fair. I
would not, any wise, if I were he, Beausire."
CHAPTER V.
THE SERF'S QUARTER.
"As they sat in Englyshe wood,
Under the greenwode tree,
They thought they heard a woman wepe,
But her they mought not see."
ADAM BELL, ETC.
Leaving the warder lounging listlessly at his post, as in a
well-settled district and in "piping times of peace," with no feudal
enemies at hand, and no outlaws in the vicinity, none at least so
numerous as to render any guard necessary, except as a matter of
dignity and decorum, the two knights strolled down the sandy lane
toward the village, or quarter of the serfs; who were not admitted
generally to reside within the walls, partly as a precaution, lest, in
case of some national affray, they might so far outnumber the Norman
men-at-arms as to become dangerous, partly because they were not
deemed fitting associates for the meanest of the feudal servitors.
The two gentlemen in question were excellent specimens of the Norman
baron of the day, without, however, being heroes or geniuses, or in
any particular--except perhaps for good temper and the lack of
especial temptation toward evil--manifestly superior to others of
their class, caste, and period. Neither of them was in any respect a
tyrant, individually cruel, or intentionally an oppressor; but both
were, as every one of us is at this day, used to look at things as we
find them, through our own glasses, and to seek rather for what is the
custom, than for what is right, and therefore ought to be; for what it
suits us, and is permitted to us by law to do to others, than for what
we should desire others to do unto us.
Reckless of life themselves, brought up from their cradles to regard
pain as a thing below consideration, and death as a thing to be risked
daily, they were not like to pay much regard to the mere physical
sufferings of others, or to set human life at a value, such as to
render it worth the preserving, when great stakes were to be won or
lost on its hazard. Accustomed to set their own lives on the die, for
the most fantastic whim of honor, or at the first call of their feudal
suzerains, accustomed to see their Norman vassals fall under shield,
and deem such death honorable and joyous, at their own slightest
bidding, how should they have thought much of the life, far more of
the physical or mental sufferings, of the Saxon serf, whom they had
found, on their arrival in their newly-conquered England, a thing
debased below the value, in current coin, of an ox, a dog, or a
war-horse--a thing, the taking of whose life was compensated by a
trivial fine, and whom they naturally came to regard as a dull,
soulless, inanimate, stupid senseless animal, with the passions only,
but without the intellect of the man. Of the two barons, Sir Yvo de
Taillebois was the superior, both in intellect and culture; he was in
easy circumstances also, while his far younger friend, Sir Philip de
Morville, was embarrassed by the _res angusta domi_, and by the
importunity of relentless creditors, which often drives men to do, as
well as to suffer, extremes.
It was no hardness of nature or cruelty of disposition, therefore,
which led either of these noble men--for they were noble, not in birth
only, but in sentiment and soul, according to the notions of their
age, which were necessarily _their_ notions, and to the lights
vouchsafed to them--to speak concerning the Saxon serfs, and act
toward them, ever as if they were beasts of burden, worthy of care,
kindness, and some degree of physical consideration, rather than like
men, as themselves, endowed with hearts to feel and souls to
comprehend. Had they been other than they were, they had been
monsters; as it was, they were excellent men, as men went then, and go
now, fully up to the spirit of their own times, and to the strain of
morality and justice understood thereby, but not one whit above it.
Therefore, Sir Yvo de Taillebois, finding himself indebted for his
daughter's life to the hardihood and courage of the Saxon serf, whom
he regarded much as he would have done his charger or his hound,
desired, as a point of honor, rather than of gratitude, to secure to
the serf an indemnity from toil, punishment, or want, during the rest
of his life, just as he would have assigned a stall, with free rack
and manger, to the superannuated charger which had saved his own life
in battle; or given the run of kitchen, buttery, and hall, to the
hound which had run the foremost of his pack. The sensibilities of the
Saxon were as incomprehensible to him as those of the charger or the
staghound, and he thought no more of considering him in his social or
family relations, than the animals to which, in some sort, he likened
him.
He would not, it is true, if asked as a philosophical truth, whether
the life of a Saxon serf and of an Andalusian charger were equivalent,
have replied in the affirmative; for he was, according to his lights,
a Christian, and knew that a Saxon had a soul to be saved; nor would
he have answered, that the colt of the high-bred mare, or the whelp of
the generous brach, stood exactly in the same relation as the child of
the serf to its human parent; but use had much deadened his
perceptions to the distinction; and the impassive and stolid
insensibility of the Saxon race, imbruted and degraded by ages of
serfdom, caused him to overlook the faint and rarely seen displays of
human sensibilities, which would have led him less to undervalue the
sense and sentiment of his helpless fellow-countrymen. As it was, he
would as soon have expected his favorite charger or best brood mare to
pine hopelessly, and grieve as one who could not be consoled, at being
liberated from spur and saddle, and turned out to graze at liberty
forever in a free and fertile pasture, while its colts should remain
in life-long bondage, as he would have supposed it possible for the
Saxon serf to be affected beyond consolation by the death, the
deportation, or the disasters of his family.
Nor, again, did he regard liberty or servitude in an abstract sense,
apart from ideas of incarceration, torture, or extreme privation, as
great and inherent right or wrong.
The serf owed him absolute service; the free laborer, or villeyn,
service, in some sort, less absolute; his vassals, man-service,
according to their degree, either in the field of daily labor, the
hunting-field, or the battle-field; he himself owed service to his
suzerain; his suzerain to the King. It was all service, and the
difference was but in the degree; and if the service of the serf was
degraded, it was a usual, a habitual degradation, to which, it might
be presumed, he was so well accustomed, that he felt it not more than
the charger his demipique, or the hawk his bells and jesses; and, for
the most part, he did not feel it more, nor regret it, nor know the
lack of liberty, save as connected with the absence of the fetters or
the lash.
And this, indeed, is the great real evil of slavery, wheresoever and
under whatsoever form it exists, that it is not more, but less,
hurtful to the slave than to the master, and that its ill effects are
in a much higher and more painful degree intellectual than physical;
that, while it degrades and lowers the inferiors almost to the level
of mere brutes, through the consciousness of degradation, the absence
of all hope to rise in the scale of manhood, and the lack of every
stimulus to ambition or exertion, it hardens the heart, and deadens
the sensibilities of the master, and renders him, through the strange
power of circumstance and custom, blind to the existence of wrongs,
sufferings, and sorrows, at the mere narration of which, under a
different phase of things, his blood would boil with indignation.
Such, then, was in some considerable degree, the state of mind,
arising from habit and acquaintance with the constitution of freedom
and slavery, intermingled every where in the then world, any thing to
the contrary of which they had never seen nor even heard of, in which
the two Norman lords took their way down the village street, if it
could be so called, being a mere sandy tract, passable only to
horsemen, or carts and vehicles of the very rudest construction,
unarmed, except with their heavy swords, and wholly unattended, on an
errand, as they intended, of liberality and mercy.
The quarter of the serfs of Sir Philip de Morville was, for the most
part, very superior to the miserable collection of huts, liker to
dog-houses than to any human habitation, which generally constituted
the dwellings of this forlorn and miserable race; for the knight was,
as it has been stated, an even-tempered and good-natured, though
common-place man; and being endowed with rather an uncommon regard for
order and taste for the picturesque, he consequently looked more than
usual to the comfort of his serfs, both in allotting them small plots
of garden-ground and orchards, and in bestowing on them building
materials of superior quality and appearance.
All the huts, therefore, rudely framed of oak beams, having the
interstices filled in with a cement of clay and ruddle, with thatched
roofs and wooden lattices instead of windows, were whole, and for the
most part weather-proof. Many of the inhabitants had made porches,
covered with natural wild runners, as the woodbine and sweet-brier;
all had made gardens in front, which they might cultivate in their
hours of leisure, when the day's task-work should be done, and which
displayed evidently enough, by their orderly or slovenly culture, the
character and disposition of their occupants.
The few men whom the lords met on their way, mostly driving up beasts
laden with fire-wood or forage to the cattle, for the day was not yet
far spent, nor the hours devoted to toil well-nigh passed, were hale,
strong, sturdy varlets, in good physical condition, strong-limbed, and
giving plentiful evidences in their appearance of ample coarse
subsistence; they were well-dressed, moreover, although in the
plainest and coarsest habiliments, made, for the most part, of the
tanned hides of beasts with the hair outward, or in some cases of
cheap buff leather, their feet protected by clumsy home-made sandals,
and their heads uncovered, save by the thick and matted elf-locks of
their unkempt and dingy hair.
They louted low as their lord passed them by, but no gleam of
recognition, much less any smile of respectful greeting, such as
passes between the honored superior and the valued servant, played
over their stolid and heavy countenance, begrimed for the most part
with filth, and half-covered with disordered beards and unshorn
mustaches.
Neither in form, motion, nor attire, did they show any symptom of
misusage; there were no scars, as of the stripes, the stocks, or the
fetters, on their bare arms and legs; they were in good physical
condition, well-fed, warmly-lodged, sufficiently-clad--perhaps in the
best possible condition for the endurance of continuous labor, and the
performance of works requiring strength and patience, rather than
agility or energetic exertion.
But so also were the mules, oxen, or horses, which they were employed
in driving, and which, in all these respects, were fully equal to
their drivers, while they had this manifest advantage over them, that
they were rubbed down and curry-combed, and cleaned, and showed their
hides glossy and sleek, and their manes free from scurf and burrs,
which is far more than could be stated of their human companions, who
looked for the most part as if their tanned and swart complexions were
as innocent of water as were their beards and elf-locks of brush or
currycomb.
In addition, however, to their grim and sordid aspect, and their
evident ignorance, or carelessness, of their base appearance, there
was a dull, sullen, dogged expression on all their faces--a look not
despairing, nor even sorrowful, but perfectly impassive, as if they
had nothing to hope for, or regret, or fear; the look of a caged bear,
wearied and fattened out of his fierceness, not tamed, civilized, or
controlled by any human teaching.
The stature and bearing, even of the freeborn and noble Saxon, in the
day when his fair isle of Albion was his own, and he trod the soil its
proud proprietor, had never been remarkable for its beauty, grace, or
dignity. He was, for the most part, short, thick-set, sturdy-limbed,
bull-necked, bullet-headed; a man framed more for hardihood,
endurance, obstinate resolve, indomitable patience to resist, than for
vivid energy, brilliant impulsive vigor, or ardor, whether
intellectual or physical; but these men, though they neither lounged
nor lagged behind, plodded along with a heavy, listless gait, their
frowning brows turned earthward, their dull gray eyes rolling beneath
their light lashes, meaningless and spiritless, and the same scowl on
every gloomy face.
The younger women, a few of whom were seen about the doors or gardens,
busied in churning butter, making cheese, or performing other duties
of the farm and dairy, were somewhat more neatly, and, in some few
cases, even tastefully attired. Some were of rare beauty, with a
profusion of auburn, light brown, or flaxen hair, bright rosy
complexions, large blue eyes, and voluptuous figures; and these bore
certainly a more cheerful aspect, as the nature of woman is more
hopeful than that of man, and a more gentle mood than their fellows;
yet there were no songs enlivening their moments of rest or
alleviating their hours of toil--no jests, no romping, as we are wont
to see among young girls of tender years, occupied in the lighter and
more feminine occupations of agricultural life.
Some one or two of these, indeed, smiled as they courtesied to their
lord, but the smile was wan and somewhat sickly, nor seemed to come
from the heart; it gave no pleasure, one would say, to her who
gave--no pleasure to him who received it.
The little children, however, who tumbled about in the dust, or built
mud-houses by the puddles in the road, were the saddest sight of all.
Half-naked, sturdy-limbed, filthy little savages, utterly untaught and
untamed, scarcely capable of making themselves understood, even in
their own rude dialect; wild-eyed, and fierce or sullen-looking as it
might, subject to no control or correction, receiving no education, no
culture whatsoever--not so much even as the colt, which is broken at
least to the menage, or the hound-puppy, which is entered at the
quarry which he is to chase; ignorant of every moral or divine
truth--ignorant even that each one of them was the possessor of a
mortal body, far more of an immortal soul!
But not a thought of these things ever crossed the mind of the stately
and puissant Normans. No impression such as these, which must needs
now strike home to the soul of every chance beholder, had ever been
made on their imaginations, by the sight of things, which, seeing
every day, they had come to consider only as things which were
customary, and were, therefore, right and proper--not the exception
even to the rule, but the rule without exception.
So differently, indeed, did the circumstances above related strike Sir
Yvo de Taillebois, that he even complimented his friend on the general
comfort of his villenage, and the admirable condition of his people,
the air of capacity of his men, and the beauty of his women; nay! he
commented even upon the plump forms and brawny muscles of the young
savages, who fled diverse from before their footsteps, shrieking and
terrified at the lordly port and resounding strides of their masters,
as indicative of their future strength, and probable size and stature.
And Philip replied, laughing, "Ay! ay! they are a stout and burly set
of knaves and good workers on the main. The hinges of the stocks are
rusted hard for want of use, and the whipping-post has not heard the
crack of the boar's hide these two years or better; but then I work
them lightly and feed them roundly, and I find that they do me the
more work for it, and the better; besides, the food they consume is
all of their own producing, and I have no use for it. They raise me
twice as much now as I can expend, on this manor. Now I work my folk
but ten hours to the day, and give them meat, milk, and cheese, daily,
and have not flogged a man since Martinmas two twelvemonths; and I
have thrice the profit of them that my friend and neighbor, Reginald
Maltravers, has, though his thralls toil from matin to curfew, with
three lenten days to the week, and the thong ever sounding. It is bad
policy, I say, to over-do the work or under-do the feeding. Besides,
poor devils, they have not much fun in life, and if you fill their
bellies, you fill them with all the pleasure and contentment they are
capable of knowing. But, hold! here is Kenric's home--the best cabin
in the quarter, as the owner is the best man. Let us go in."
"And carry him a welcome cure for his aching bones," said Sir Yvo, as
they entered the little gate of a pretty garden, which stretched from
the door down to a reach of the winding stream, overshadowed by
several large and handsome willows. "By my faith! he must needs be a
good man," resumed the speaker--"why, it is as neat as a thane's
manor, and neater, too, than many I have seen."
But as he spoke, the shrill and doleful wail of women came from the
porch of the house. "Ah, well-a-day! ah, well-a-day! that I should
live to see it. Soul of my soul, Kenric, my first-born and my best
one--thou first borne in, almost a corpse; and then, my darling and
delight--my fair-haired Edgar's son dead of this doleful fever. Ah,
well-a-day! ah, well-a-day! Would God that I were dead also, most
miserable that I am, of women!"
And then the manly voice of Kenric replied, but faint for his wounds
and wavering for the loss of blood; "Wail not for me, mother," he
said; "wail not for me, for I am strong yet, and like to live this
many a day--until thy toils are ended, and then God do to me as seems
him good. But, above all, I say to thee, wail not for Adhemar the
white-haired. His weakness and his innocence are over, here on earth.
He has never known the collar or the gyves--has never felt how bitter
and how hard a thing it is to be the slave of the best earthly master!
His dream--his fever-dream of life is over; he is free from yoke and
chain; he has awoken out of human servitude, to be the slave of the
everlasting God, whose strictest slavery is perfect liberty and
perfect love."
But still the woman wailed--"Ah, well-a-day! ah, well-a-day! would God
that I were dead, most miserable of mothers that I am!"
And the Norman barons stood unseen and silent, smitten into dumbness
before the regal majesty of the slave's maternal sorrow, perhaps
awakened to some dim vision of the truth, which never had dawned on
them until that day, in the serf's quarter.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SAXON'S CONSTANCY.
"And I'll be true to thee, Mary,
As thou'lt be true to me;
And I never will leave thee, never, Mary,
As slave man or as free;
For we're bound forever and ever, Mary,
Till death shall set us free--
Free from the chain of the flesh, Mary,
Free from the devil's chain--
Free from the collar and gyves, Mary,
And slavery's cursed pain;
And then, when we're free in heaven, Mary,
We'll pray to be bound again."
OLD ENGLISH SONG.
It was with grave and somewhat downcast brows, and nothing of
haughtiness or pride of port or demeanor, that the lord and his friend
entered under the lowly roof, invested for the moment with a majesty
which was not its own, by the strange sacredness of grief and death.
There never probably, in the whole history of the world, has been a
race of men, which entertained in their own persons a more boundless
contempt of death, or assigned less value to the mere quality of life,
than the warlike Normans. Not a man of them, while in the heyday of
life and manhood, would have hesitated for a moment in choosing a
death under shield, a death of violence and anguish, winning renown
and conferring deathless honor, to the gentlest decay, the most
peaceful dissolution. Not a man would have shed a tear, or shown a
sign of sorrow, had he seen his favorite son, his most familiar
friend, his noblest brother in arms, felled from his saddle in the
mêlée, and trampled out of the very form of humanity beneath the hoofs
of the charging cavalry. Not a man but would have ridden over a
battlefield, gorged with carcasses and drunk with gore, without
expressing a thought of terror, a sentiment beyond the victory, the
glory, and the gain. But such is the sovereignty of death, in the
silence and solitude of its natural gloom, stripped of the pomp and
paraphernalia of funereal honors, and unadorned by the empty braveries
of human praise and glory--such is the empire of humble, simple,
overruling sorrow, that, as they entered the low-roofed, undecorated
chamber, where lay the corpse of the neglected, despised serf--the
being, while in life, scarce equal to the animals of the chase--with
his nearest of kin, serfs likewise, abject, ignorant, down-trodden,
and debased--in so far as man can debase God's creations--mourning in
Christian sorrow over him, the nobles felt, for a moment, that their
nobility was nothing in the presence of the awful dead; and that they,
too, for all their pride of antique blood, for all their strength of
limb and heaven-daring valor, for all their lands and lordships, must
be brought down one day to the dust, like the poor slave, and go
forth, as they entered this world, bearing nothing out, before one
common Lord and Master, who must in the end sit in universal judgment.
Such meditations are not, perhaps, very common to the great, the
powerful, and the fortunate of men, in any time or place, so long as
the light of this world shine about, and their ways are ways of
pleasantness; but if rare always, and under all ordinary
circumstances, with the chivalrous, high-hearted, and hot-headed
knights of the twelfth century, they were assuredly of the rarest.
Yet now so powerfully did they come over the strong minds of the two
grave nobles, that they paused a moment on the threshold before
entering; and Yvo de Taillebois, who was the elder man, and of deeper
thoughts and higher imagination than his friend, raised his plumed
bonnet from his brow, and bowed his head in silence.
It was a strange and moving scene on which they looked. The room,
which was the ordinary dwelling-place of the family, was rather a
large, dark parallelogram, lighted only through the door and a couple
of narrow latticed windows, which, if closed, would have admitted few
half-intercepted rays, but which now stood wide open, to admit the
fresh and balmy air, so that from one, at the western end of the
cottage, a clear ruddy beam of the declining sun shot in a long pencil
of light, bringing out certain objects in strong relief against the
surrounding gloom.
The door, at which the two knights stood, chanced to be so placed
under the shadow of one of the great trees which overhung the house,
that there was little light for them to intercept. Hence, those who
were within, occupied by their own sad and bitter thoughts, did not at
first so much as observe their presence. Facing the entrance, a large
fire-place, with great projecting jambs, inclosing on each side a long
oaken settle, occupied one half the length of the room; and on one of
these, propped up with some spare bedding and clothing, lay the
wounded man, Kenric, to whom the Baron de Taillebois owed his beloved
child's life, half recumbent, pale from the loss of blood, yet chafing
with annoyance, that he should be thus bedridden, when his strength
might have been of avail to others, feebler and less able to exert
themselves almost than he, bruised though he was, and gored from the
rude encounter.
A little fire was burning low on the hearth, with a pot simmering over
it--for, in their bitterest times of anguish and desolation, the very
poor must bestir themselves, at least, to house service--and from the
logs, which had fallen forward on the hearth, volumes of smoke were
rolling up and hanging thick about the dingy rafters, and the few hams
and flitches which, with strings of oat-cakes garnished the roof, its
only ornament.
But, wholly unconscious of the ill-odored reek, though it streamed up
close under his very eyes, and seeing nothing of the chevaliers, who
were watching not six paces from him, Kenric lay helpless, straining
his nerveless eyes toward the spot where the ruddy western sunlight
fell, like a glory, on the pale, quiet features of the dead child, and
on the cold, gray, impassive head of the aged mourner, aged far beyond
the ordinary course of mortal life, who bent over the rude bier; and,
strange contrast, on the sunny flaxen curls, and embrowned ruddy
features of two or three younger children, clustered around the
grandam's knee, silent through awe rather than sorrow, for they were
too young as yet to know what death meant, or to comprehend what was
that awful gloom which had fallen upon hearth and home.
Every thing in that humble and poor apartment was scrupulously clean
and tidy; a white cloth was on the table, with two or three platters
and porringers of coarse earthenware, as if the evening meal had been
prepared when death had entered in, and interposed his awful
veto--some implements of rustic husbandry, an ax or two, several
specimens of the old English bill and Sheffield whittle; and one short
javelin, with a heavy head, hung on the walls, with all the iron work
brightly polished and in good order; fresh rushes were strewn on the
floor, a broken pitcher, full of newly-gathered field-flowers, adorned
the window-sill; and what was strange indeed at that age, and in such
a place, two or three old, much tattered, dingy manuscripts graced a
bare shelf above the chimney corner.
The aged woman had ceased from the wild outbreak of grief with which
she had bewailed the first sign of death on the sick boy's faded brow,
and was now rocking herself to and fro above the body, with a dull,
monotonous murmur, half articulate, combining fragments of some old
Saxon hymn with fondling epithets and words of unmeaning sorrow, while
the tears slowly trickled down her wan cheeks, and fell into her lap
unheeded. Kenric was silent, for he had no consolation to offer, even
if consolation could have been availing, in that
The first dark hour of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress.
Such was the spectacle which met the eyes of those high-born men, who
had come down from their high place into the lowly village, with the
intention of bestowing happiness and awakening gratitude, and who now
found themselves placed front to front with one far mightier than
themselves, whose presence left no room for joy, even with those the
least used to such emotion.
It is, however, I fear, but too much the case even with the more
refined and better nurtured classes of the present century, while they
are compassionating the sorrows and even endeavoring to alleviate the
miseries of their poorer and less-cultivated brethren, to undervalue
the depth of their sensations, to fancy that the same events harrow
not up their less vivid sensibilities, and inflict not on their
coarser and less intellectual natures the same agonies, which they
effect upon their own. But, although it may be true that, in the very
poor, the necessity of immediate labor, of all-engrossing occupation,
rendering thought and reflection on the past impossible, sooner
removes from them the pressure of past grief, than from those who can
afford to brood over it in indolent despair, and indulge in morbid and
selfish woe, there can be no doubt that, in the early moments of a new
bereavement, the agony is as acute to the dullest and heaviest as to
the loftiest and most imaginative intellect. Since it is the heart
itself, that is touched in the first instance; and, though in after
hours imagination may assume its share, so that the most imaginative
minds dwell longest on the bygone suffering, the heart is the same in
the peasant as in the peer, and that of the wisest of the sons of men
bleeds neither more nor less profusely than that of the rudest clown.
And so, perchance, in some sort it was now. For, after pausing and
looking reverently on the sad picture, until it was evident that they
were entirely overlooked, if not unseen, Sir Philip de Morville took a
step or two forward into the cottage, his sounding tread at once
calling all eyes toward his person, in a sort of half-stupid mixture
of alarm and astonishment.
For in those days, the steps of a Norman baron rarely descended to the
serf's quarters, unless they were echoed by the clanking strides of
armed subordinates, and too often followed by the clash of shackles or
the sound of the hated scourge. Sir Philip was indeed, as it has been
observed, an even-tempered and just master, as things went in those
times; that is to say, he was neither personally cruel nor exacting of
labor; nor was he niggardly in providing for his people; nor did he,
when it came before his eyes, tolerate oppression, or permit useless
severity on the part of subordinates, who were often worse tyrants and
tormentors than the lords. Still, his kindliest mood amounted to
little more than bare indifference; and he certainly knew and studied
less concerning any thing beyond the mere physical wants and condition
of his thralls and bondsmen, than he did of the nurture of his hawks
or hounds.
All the inmates, therefore, looked up in wonder, not altogether
unmixed with fear, as, certainly for the first time in his life, the
castellan entered the humble tenement of the serf of the soil.
But all idea of fear passed away on the instant; for the knight's face
was open and calm, though grave, and his voice was gentle, and even
subdued, as he spoke.
"Soh!" he said, "what is this, Kenric, which causes us, in coming down
to see if we might not heal up thy heart and cheer thy spirits by good
tidings, to find worse sorrow, for which we looked not, nor can
reverse it by any mortal doing. Who is the boy?"
"Pardon that I rise not, beausire, to reply to you," answered the
serf, "but this right leg of mine will not bear me; and when the hand
of sickness hold us down, good will must make shift in lieu of good
service. It is my nephew Adhemar, Sir Philip, the only son of my
youngest brother Edgar, who was drowned a year since in the great
flood of the Idle."
"In striving to rescue my old blind destrier Sir Roland, ah! I
remember him; a stout and willing lad! But I knew not, or forgot, that
he was thy brother. And so this is his son," he added, striding up to
the side of the rude bier, and laying his broad hand upon his brow.
"He is young," he said, musingly, "very young to die. But we must all
die one day, Kenric; and who knows but it is best to die young?"
"At least, the ancient Greeks and Romans said so," interposed Yvo de
Taillebois, speaking for the first time. "They have a proverb, that,
whomsoever the gods love, dies young."
"I think it _is_ best, beausire," answered the serf; "it is never
cold in the grave, in the dreariest storms; nor sultry in the
scorching August. And they are never hungry there, nor sorefooted, nor
weary unto death. I think it is best to die young, before one has
tasted overmuch sorrow here on earth to burden his heart and make him
stubborn and malicious. It was this I was saying to old Bertha, as
your noblenesses entered; but she has never held her head up since my
brother, Edgar, died; he was her favorite, since she always held that
he had most favor of our grandfather."
"She is very old?" said Sir Philip, half questioning, half musing.
"She is very old?"
"Above ninety years, Sir Philip, I have heard Father Eadbald say, who
died twenty years since, at the abbey, come next Michaelmas. It should
have been he who married her. Her mother was the last free woman of
our race. We had three hydes of land, I've heard her tell, in those
days, down by the banks of Idle, held of old Waltheof, who gave his
name to this your noble castle. But they are all gone before us, and
we must follow them when our day comes. And then, as I tell Bertha, we
shall be free, all, if not equal; for the most virtuous must be
_first_ there, as Father Engelram tells us. May Mary and the saints
be about us!"
"Come, Kenric," said De Morville, cheeringly, "thou talkest now more
like to a gray brother, than to the stout woodman who struckest yon
brave blow but a while since, and saved Sir Yvo's fair lady,
Guendolen. Faith! it was bravely done, and well; and well shall come
of it to you, believe me. It is to speak of that to thee that we came
hither, but this boy's death hath put it from our minds. But, hark ye,
boy! I will send down some wenches hither from the castle, with ale
and mead for his lykewake, and linen for a shroud; and Father Engelram
shall see to the church-service; and there shall be a double dole to
the poor at the abbey; and I myself will pay ten marks, in masses for
his soul. If he died a serf, he shall be buried as though he were a
freeman, and a franklin's son; and all for thy sake, and for the good
blow thou struckest but three hours agone."
Kenric's brow flushed high, whether it was with gratification, or
gratitude, or from wounded pride; but he stuttered confusedly, as he
attempted to thank his lord, and only found his tongue as he related
to his grandmother, in his native language, the promises and goodly
proffers of the castellan; and she, for a moment, spoke eagerly in
reply, but then seemed to forget, and was silent. A word or two passed
in French between the nobles, Yvo de Taillebois urging that the time
was inopportune for speaking of the matter on which they had come
down; for that it was not well to mingle great joys with great
sorrows; but Sir Philip insisted, declaring that there was no so good
way to cure a past grief as by the news of a coming joy.
"So, hark you, Kenric," he said; "the cure we came to bring you for
your bruised bones, and the guerdon for your gallant deed, in two
words, is this--I may not, as you may have heard tell, liberate my
serfs, under condition, but I may _sell_; and I have sold thee to
mine ancient friend and brother in arms, Yvo de Taillebois."
"Not to hold in thrall," exclaimed Yvo de Taillebois, eagerly, as he
saw the face of the wounded man flush fiery red, and then grow pale as
ashes. "Not to hold in thrall, but to liberate; but to make thee as
free as the birds of the wildest wing--a freeman; and, if thou wilt
follow me, a freeholder on my lands beyond the lakes, in the fair
shire of Westmoreland."
"I am a serf of the soil, Beausire de Morville, and I may not be sold
from the soil, unless legally convicted of felony. I know no felony
that I have done, Sir Philip."
"Felony, man!" exclaimed Sir Philip; "art thou mad? We would reward
thee for thy good faith and valor. We would set thee free. Of course,
thou canst not be sold, but with thine own consent. But thou hast only
to consent, and be free as thy master."
"Sir Philip," replied the man, turning even paler than before, and
trembling, as if he had a fit of palsy, "would I could rise to bless
you, on my bended knee! May the great God of all things bless you! but
I can not consent--think me not ungrateful--but I can not be free!"
"Not free!" exclaimed both nobles in a breath; and Sir Yvo gazed on
him wistfully, as if he but partially understood; but Philip de
Morville turned on his heel, superciliously. "Come, Sir Yvo," he said;
"it skills not wasting time, or breath, on these abjects. Why, by the
light of heaven! had I been fettered in a dungeon, with a ton of iron
at my heels, I had leaped head-high to know myself once more a
freeman; and here this slave, By 'r lady! I can not brook to speak his
name! can not consent, forsooth! can not consent to be free! Heaven's
mercy! Let him rot a slave, then! unless, perchance, thou wouldst
crave him for thy sake, and the Virgin Mother's sake, to take good
counsel and be free. Out on it! out on it! I am sick to the soul at
such baseness!"
And he left the cottage abruptly, in scorn and anger. But Sir Yvo de
Taillebois stood still, gazing compassionately and inquiringly on the
man, over whose face there had fallen a dark, gray, death-like shadow,
as he lay with his teeth and hands clinched like vices.
"Can this be? I thought not that on earth there lived a man who might
be free, and would not. Dost not love liberty, Kenric?"
"Ask the wild eagle in his place of pride! Ask the wild goat on
Pennigant or Ingleborough's head; and when they come down to the cage
and chain, believe, then, that I love it not. Freedom! freedom! To be
free but five minutes, I would die fifty deaths of direst torture. And
yet it can not be--it can not be! Peace, tempter, peace; you can not
stir my soul. Slave I was born, slave I must die, and only in the
grave shall be a slave no longer. Leave me, beausire; but think me not
ungrateful. I never looked to owe so much to living man, and least of
all to living man of your proud race, as I owe you to-day. But leave
me, noble sir; you can not aid us. So go your way, and leave us to our
sorrow, and may the God of serfs and seigneurs be about you with his
blessing."
"Passing strange! This is passing strange!" said De Taillebois, as he
turned to go likewise; "I never saw a beast that would not leave his
cage when the door was open."
"But I have!" answered Kenric; "when the beast's brood were within,
and might not follow him. But I am _not_ a beast, Sir Knight; but
though a serf, a man--a Saxon, not a Norman, it is true; but a man,
yet, _a man_! There may be collar on my neck, and gyves on wrist
and ankle, but my soul wears no shackles. It is as free as thine, and
shall stand face to face with thine, one day, before the judgment
seat. I am a man, I say, Sir Yvo de Taillebois; there sits old Bertha,
surnamed the Good, a serf herself, mother of serfs, and grandmother;
there lies my serf-brother's boy, himself a serf no longer; there
sprawl unconscious on the hearth his baby brethren, serfs from the
cradle to the grave; and here comes," he added, in a deeper, sterner,
lower tone, as the beautiful Saxon slave-girl entered, whom they had
seen near the drawbridge, washing in the stream--"here comes--look
upon her, noble knight and Norman!--here comes my plighted bride, my
Edith the fair-haired! I am a man, Norman! Should I be man, or beast,
if, leaving these in bondage, I were to fare forth hence, alone, into
dishonored freedom?"
CHAPTER VII.
THE SLAVE GIRL'S SELF-DEVOTION.
"I say not nay, but that all day,
It is both writ and said,
That woman's faith is, as who sayeth,
All utterly decayed;
But neverthelesse, right good witnesse
In this case might be laid,
That they love true and continue--
Recorde the Not-browne mayde;
Which, when her love came her to prove,
To her to make his mone,
Wolde have him part--for in her hart
She loved him but alone."
THE NOT-BROWNE MAYDE.
How true a thing is it of the human heart, and alas! how pitiful a
thing, that use has such wondrous power over it, whether for good or
for evil; but mostly--perhaps because such is its original
nature--unto evil. Custom will harden the softest spirit to the
ice-brook's temper, and blind the clearest philosophic eye to all
discrimination, that things the most horrible to behold shall be
beheld with pleasure, and things the most unjust regarded as simple
justice, or, at least, as the inevitable course and pervading law of
nature. True as this is, in all respects, in none is it more clearly
or fatally discoverable than in every thing connected with what may be
called slavery, in the largest sense--including the subjugation, by
whatever means, not only of man to man, but even of animals to the
human race. In all such cases, it would appear that the hardening and
deteriorating influence of habit, and perhaps the unavoidable tendency
to believe every thing subordinate as in itself inferior, soon brings
the mind to regard the power to enforce and the capacity to perform,
as the rule of justice between the worker and the master.
The generally good and kind-hearted man, who has all his life been
used to see his beasts of burden dragging a few pounds' weight above
their proper and merciful load, soon comes to regard the extraordinary
measure as the proper burden, and to look upon the hapless brute,
which is pining away by inches, in imperceptible and insensible decay,
as merely performing the work, and filling the station, to perform and
fill which it was created. And so, and yet more fatally, as regards
the subjugation of man, or a class of men, to man. We commence by
degrading, and end by thinking of him as of one naturally degraded. We
reduce him to the standard and condition of a brute, then assume that
he is but a brute in feelings, intellect, capacity to acquire, and
thence argue--in the narrowest of circles--that being but a brute, it
is but right and natural to deal with him as what he is. Nor is this
tendency of the human mind limited in its operation to actual slavery;
but prevails, more or less, in relation to all servitude and
inferiority, voluntary or involuntary; so that many of the best, all
indeed but the very best, among us, come in the end to look upon all,
placed by circumstances and society in inferior positions, as
inferiors in very deed, and as naturally unequal to themselves in
every capacity, even that of enjoyment, and to regard them, in fact,
as a subordinate class of animals and beings of a lower range of
creation.
This again, still working in a circle, tends really to lower the
inferior person; and, by the tendency of association, the inferior
class; until degenerating still, as must occur, from sire to son,
through centuries, the race itself sinks from social into natural
degradation.
This had already occurred in a very great degree in the Saxon serfs of
England, who had been slaves of Saxons, for many centuries, before the
arrival of the Norman conquerors. The latter made but small
distinction, in general, between the free-born and the slave of the
conquered race, but reduced them all to one common state of misery and
real or quasi-servitude--for many, who had once been land-holders and
masters, sunk into a state of want and suffering so pitiable and so
abject, that, generation succeeding generation with neither the means
nor the ambition to rise, they became almost undistinguishable from
the original serfs, and in many instances either sold themselves into
slavery to avoid actual starvation, or were seized and enslaved, in
defiance of all law, in the dark and troublous time which followed the
Norman conquest.
There being then two classes of serfs existing on British soil, though
not recognized as different by law, or in any wise differing in
condition, Kenric, himself descended in the third degree from a
freeman and landholder, exhibited a fair specimen at the first;
although it by no means followed of course that men in his relative
position were actually superior to the progeny of those, who could
designate no point before which their ancestors were free. And this
became evident, at once, to those who looked at the characters of
Kenric the Dark, and Eadwulf the Red, of whom the former was in all
respects a man of sterling qualities, frank, bold demeanor, and all
the finer characteristics of independent, hardy, English manhood;
while the second, though his own brother, was a rude, sullen,
thankless, spiritless, obstinate churl, with nothing of the man,
except his sordid, sensual appetites, and every thing of the beast,
except his tameless pride and indomitable freedom.
It was, therefore, even with one of the better class of these
unfortunate men, a matter of personal character and temper, whether he
retained something of the relative superiority he bore to his yet more
unfortunate companions in slavery, or whether he sank self-lowered to
their level. Nothing, it is true, had either to which he might aspire;
no hope of bettering his condition; no chance of rising in the scale
of humanity. Acts of emancipation, as rewards of personal service, had
been rare even among the Saxons, since, the utmost personal service
being due by the thrall to his lord, no act of personal service,
unless in most extreme cases, could be esteemed a merit; and such
serfs as owed their freedom to the voluntary commiseration of their
owners, owed it, in the great majority of cases, to their superstition
rather than to their mercy, and were liberated on the deathbed, when
they could serve their masters in no otherwise, than in becoming an
atonement for their sins, and smoothing their path through purgatory
to paradise.
With the Normans, the chance of liberation was diminished an
hundred-fold; for the degraded race, held in utter abhorrence and
contempt, and looked upon as scarce superior to the abject Jew, was
excluded from all personal contact with their haughty lords, who
rarely so much as knew them by sight or by name--was incapable of
serving them directly, in the most menial capacity--and, therefore,
could hardly, by the wildest good fortune, hope for a chance of
attracting even observation, much less such praise as would be like to
induce the high boon of liberty.
Again, on the deathbed, the Norman knight or noble, scarce
condescending to think of his serf as a human being, could never have
entertained so preposterous an idea, as that the better or worse
usage, nay! even the life or death of hundreds of these despised
wretches could weigh either for him or against him, before the throne
of grace. So that the deathbed emancipations, which had been so
frequent before the conquest, and which were recommended and
inculcated by abbots and prelates, while abbots and prelates were of
Saxon blood, as acts acceptable on high, now that the high clergy,
like the high barons of the realm, were strangers to the children of
the soil, had fallen into almost absolute disuse.
In fact, in the twelfth century, the Saxon serf-born man had little
more chance of acquiring his freedom, than an English peasant of the
present day has of becoming a temporal or spiritual peer of the realm;
and, lacking all object for emulation or exertion, these men too often
justified the total indifference with which they were looked upon by
the owners of the soil. This fact, or rather this condition of things
in their physical and moral aspect, has been dwelt upon, somewhat at
length, in order to show how it is possible that a gentleman of the
highest birth, of intellects, acquirements, ideas of justice and
right, vastly more correct than those entertained by the majority of
his caste--a gentleman, sensitive, courteous, kindly, the very mirror
of faith and honor--should have distorted devotion so noble, faith so
disinterested, a sense of honor so high, a piety so pure, as that
displayed by Kenric the Dark, in his refusal of the bright jewel
liberty, in his eloquent assertion of his rights, his sympathies, his
spiritual essence as a man, into an act of _outrecuidance_, almost
into a personal affront to his own dignity. Yet, so it was, and alas!
naturally so--for so little was he, or any of his fellows, used to
consider his serf in the light of an arguing, thinking, responsible
being, that probably Balaam was but little more astonished when his
ass turned round on him and spoke, than was Yvo de Taillebois, when
the serf of the soil stood up in his simple dignity as a man, and
refused to be free, unless those he loved, whom it was his duty to
support, cherish, shield, and comfort, might be free together with
him. Certain it is, that he left the cottage which he had entered
full of gratitude, and eager to be the bearer of good tidings,
disappointed, exasperated against Kenric, vexed that his endeavors to
prove his gratitude had been frustrated, and equally uncertain how he
should disclose the unwelcome tidings to his daughter, and how
reconcile to his host the conduct of the Saxon, which he had remained
in the hope of fathoming, and explaining to his satisfaction.
In truth, he felt himself indignant and wounded at the unreasonable
perduracy of the man, in refusing an inestimable boon, for what he
chose to consider a cause so trivial; and this, too, though had he
himself been in the donjon of the infidel, expecting momentary death
by the faggot or the rack, and been offered liberty, life, empire,
immortality, on condition of leaving the least-valued Christian woman
to the harem of the Mussulman, he would have spurned the offer with
his most arrogant defiance.
This seemed to him much as it would seem to the butcher, if the bull,
with the knife at his throat, were to speak up and refuse to live,
unless his favorite heifer might be allowed to share his fortunes. It
appeared to him wondrous, indeed, but wondrously annoying, and almost
absurd. In no respect did it strike him as one of the noblest and most
generous deeds of self-abandonment of which the human soul is capable;
though, had the self-same offer been spurned, as the slave spurned it,
and in the very words which he had found in the rude eloquence of
indignation, by belted knight or crowned king, he had unhesitatingly
styled it an action of the highest glory, and worthy of immortal
record in herald's tale or minstrel's story. Such is the weight of
circumstance upon the noblest minds of men.
With his brow bent, and his arms folded on his breast, moodily, almost
sorrowfully, did the good knight of Taillebois wend his way back
toward the towers of Waltheofstow, making no effort to overtake his
brother-in-arms and entertainer, whom he could clearly see stalking
along before him, in no more placable mood than himself, but burying
himself on his return in his own chamber, whence he made his
appearance no more that evening; though he might hear Sir Philip
storming through the castle, till the vaulted halls and passages
resounded from barbican to battlement.
Meantime, in the lowly cottage of the serf--for the lord, though angry
and indignant, had not failed of his plighted word--the lykewake of
the dead boy went on--for that was a Saxon no less than a Celtic
custom, though celebrated by the former with a sort of stolid decorum,
as different as night is from day from the loud and barbarous orgies
of their wilder neighbors.
The consecrated tapers blazed around the swathed and shrouded corpse,
and sent long streams of light through the open door and lattices of
the humble dwelling, as though it had been illuminated for a high
rejoicing. The death hymn was chanted, and the masses sung by the gray
brothers from the near Saxon cloister. The dole to the poor had been
given, largely, out of the lord's abundance; and the voices of the
rioting slaves, emancipated from all servitude and sorrow, for the
nonce, by the humming ale and strong metheglin, were loud in praises
of their bounteous master, until, drenched and stupefied with liquor,
and drunk with maudlin sorrow, they staggered off to their respective
dens, to snore away the fumes of their unusual debauch, until aroused
at dawn by the harsh cry of the task-master.
By degrees the quiet of the calm summer night sank down over the
dwelling and garden of Kenric, as guest after guest departed, until no
one remained save one old Saxon brother, who sat by the simple coffin,
telling his beads in silence, or muttering masses for the soul of the
dead, apparently unconscious of any thing passing around him.
The aged woman had been removed, half by persuasion, half by gentle
force, from the dwelling-room, and had soon sunk into the heavy and
lethargic slumber which oftentimes succeeds to overwhelming sorrow.
The peaceful moonlight streamed in through the open door of the
cheerless home, like the grace of heaven into a disturbed and sinful
heart, as one by one the tapers flickered in their sockets and
expired. The shrill cry of the cricket, and the peculiar jarring note
of the night-hawk, replaced the droning of the monkish chants, and the
suppressed tumult of vulgar revelry; but, though there was solitude
and silence without, there was neither peace nor heart-repose within.
Sorely shaken, and cruelly gored by the stag in trunk and limbs, and
yet more sorely shaken in his mind by the agitation and excitement of
the angry scene with his master, and by the internal conflict of
natural selfishness with strong conscientious will, Kenric lay, with
his eyes wide open, gazing on his dead nephew, although his mind was
far away, with his head throbbing, and his every nerve jerking and
tense with the hot fever.
But by his side, soothing his restless hand with her caressing touch,
bathing his burning temples with cold lotions, holding the soft
medicaments to his parched lips, beguiling his wild, wandering
thoughts with gentle lover's chidings, and whispering of better days
to come, sat the fair slave girl, Edith, his promised wife, for whose
dear sake he had cast liberty to the four winds, and braved the deadly
terrors of the unforgiving Norman frown.
She had heard enough, as she entered the house at that decisive
moment, to comprehend the whole; and, if the proud and high-born
knights were at a loss to understand, much less appreciate, the noble
virtue of the serf, the poor uneducated slave girl had seen and felt
it all--felt it thrill to her heart's core, and inspire her weakness
with equal strength, equal devotion.
She had argued, she had prayed, she had implored, clinging to his
knees, that for the love of Heaven, for the love of herself, he would
accept the boon of freedom, and leave her to her fate, which would be
sweeter far to her, she swore, from the knowledge of his prosperity,
than it could be rendered by the fruition of the greatest worldly
bliss. And then, when she found prayer and supplication fruitless,
she, too, waxed strong and glorious. She lifted her hand to heaven,
and swore before the blessed Virgin and her ever-living Son, that,
would he yield to her entreaties and be free, she would be true to
him, and to him alone, forever; but should he still persist in his
wicked and mad refusal of God's own most especial gift of freedom, she
would at least deprive him of the purpose of his impious resolution,
place an impenetrable barrier between them two, and profess herself
the bride of Heaven.
At length, as he only chafed and resisted more and more, till
resistance and fever were working almost delirium--any thing but
conviction and repentance--like a true woman, she betook herself from
argument, and tears, and supplication, to comforting, consoling, and
caressing; and, had the rage and fever of his body, or the terrible
excitement of his tortured mind, been less powerful, she could not but
have won the day, in the noblest of all strifes--the strife of mutual
disinterestedness and devotion.
"O woman! in our hours of ease,
Inconstant, coy, and hard to please;
When pain and anguish rend the brow,
A ministering angel thou!"
CHAPTER VIII.
GUENDOLEN'S BOWER.
"Four gray walls, and four square towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers,
The Lady of Shalott."
TENNYSON.
High up in the gray square tower, which constituted the keep of the
castle of Waltheofstow, there was a suite of apartments, the remains
of which are discoverable to this day, known as the Lady's Bower;
which had, it is probable, from the construction of the edifice, been
set apart, not only as the private chambers of the chatelaine and
ladies of the family, her casual guests and their attendants, but as
what we should now call the drawing-rooms, wherein the more social
hours of those rude days were passed, when the sexes intermingled,
whether for the enjoyment of domestic leisure, or for gayety and
pleasure.
The keep of Waltheofstow consisted, as did indeed all the smaller
fortalices of that date, when private dwellings, even of the great and
powerful, were constructed with a view to defense above all beside, of
one large massive building of an oblong square form, with a solid
circular buttress at each angle, which, above the basement floor, was
hollowed into a lozenge-shaped turret, extending above the esplanade
of the highest battlements, and terminating at a giddy height in a
crenellated and machicolated lookout, affording a shelter to the
sentries, and a flanking defense to the _corps de logis_.
For its whole height, from the guard-room, which occupied the whole
ground-floor, to the battlements, one of these turrets contained the
great winding stone staircase of the castle, lighted at the base by
mere shot-holes and loops, but, as it rose higher and higher above the
danger of escalade, by mullioned windows of increasing magnitude,
until, at the very summit, it was surmounted by a beautifully-wrought
lanthorn of Gothic stone-work. The other three, lighted in the same
manner, better and better as they ascended, formed each a series of
small pleasant rooms, opening upon the several stories, and for the
most part were fitted as the sleeping-rooms of the various officers.
The whole floor, first above the guard-room, was divided into the
kitchen, butteries, and household offices; while the next in order,
being the third in elevation above the court-yard, was reserved in one
superb parallelogram of ninety feet by sixty, well lighted by narrow
lanceolated windows, and adorned with armors of plate and mail,
scutcheons rich with heraldic bearings, antlers of deer and elk, horns
of the bull, yet surviving, of the great Caledonian forests, skulls of
the grizzly boars grinning with their ivory tusks, and banners
dependent from the lofty groinings of the arched roof, trophies of
many a glorious day. This was the knight's hall, the grand
banqueting-saloon of the keep; while of its three turrets, one was the
castle chapel, a second a smaller dining-hall, and the last the
private cabinet and armory of the castellan. Above this, again, on the
fourth plat, were bed-chambers of state, the larger armory, and the
dormitories of the warders, esquires, pages, and seneschal, who alone
dwelt within the keep, the rest of the garrison occupying the various
out-buildings and towers upon the flanking walls and ramparts.
The fifth story, at least a hundred feet in air above the inner court,
and nearly thrice that elevation above the base of the scarped mount
on which the castle stood, contained the Lady's bower; and its whole
area of ninety feet by sixty was divided, in the first instance,
laterally by three partitions, into three apartments, each sixty feet
in length by thirty wide. Of these, however, the first and last were
subdivided equally in two squares of thirty feet. The whole of the
bower, thus, contained a handsome ante-chamber, opening from the great
staircase, with a large room for the waiting-women to the right,
communicating with the turret chamber corresponding to the stairway.
Beyond the vestibule, by which access was had to it, lay the grand
ladies' hall, furnished with all the superabundance of splendor and
magnificence, and all the lack of real convenience, which was the
characteristic of the time; divans, and deep settles, and ponderous
arm-chairs covered with gold and velvet; embroideries and emblazoned
foot-cloths on the floor; mirrors of polished steel, emulating
Venetian crystals, on the walls; mighty candelabra of silver gilt;
tables of many kinds, some made for the convenience of long-forgotten
games, some covered with cups and vessels of gold, silver, and
richly-colored glass, and one or two, smaller, and set away in quiet
nooks, with easy seats beside them, showing the feminine character of
the occupants, by a lute, a gittern, and two or three other musical
implements long since fallen into disuse; pages of music written in
the old musical notation of the age; some splendidly-bound and
illuminated missals and romances, in priceless manuscript, each
actually worth its weight in gold; silks and embroideries; a
working-stand, with a gorgeous surcoat of arms half finished, the
needle sticking in the superb material where the fairy fingers had
left it, when last called from their gentle task; and great vases full
of the finest flowers of the season.
Such was the aspect of the room, beheld by the declining rays of the
sun, which had already sunk so low that his stray beams, instead of
falling downward through the gorgeous hues of the tinted-windows,
streamed upward into that lofty place, playing on the richly-carved
and gilded ceilings, catching here on a mirror, there on a vase of
gold or silver, and sending hundreds of burning specks of light
dancing through the motley haze of gold and purple, which formed the
atmosphere of that almost royal bower.
From this rich withdrawing-room, strangely out of place in appearance,
though not so in reality, in the old gray Norman fortress, among the
din of arms and flash of harness, opened two bed-rooms, equal in
costliness of decoration to the saloon without, each having its
massive four-post bedstead in a recess, accessible by three or four
broad steps, as if it were a throne of honor, each with its mirror and
toilet, its appurtenances for the bath, its easy couches, and its
chair of state; its _prie dieu_ and kneeling-hassock, in a niche,
with a perfumed lamp burning before a rudely-painted picture of the
Madonna, each having communication with a pretty turret-chamber,
fitted with couch and reading-desk, and opening on a bartizan or
balcony, which, though they were intended in times of war or danger
for posts of vantage to the defense, whence to shower missiles or pour
seething pitch or oil on the heads of assailants, were filled in the
pleasant days of peace with shrubs and flowers, planted in large tubs
and troughs, waving green and joyous, and filling the air with sweet
smells two hundred feet above their dewy birth-place.
It may be added, that so thick and massive were the walls at this
almost inaccessible height, that galleries had been, as it were,
scooped out of them, offering easy communication from one room to
another, and even private staircases from story to story, with secret
closets large enough for the accommodation of a favorite page or
waiting-damsel, where nothing of the sort would be expected, or could
indeed exist, within a modern dwelling.
Thus, the inconveniences of such an abode, all except the height to
which it was necessary for the female inmates to climb, were more
imaginary than real; and it was perfectly easy, and indeed usual, for
the ladies of such a castle to pass to and fro from the rooms of their
husbands, fathers, or brothers, and even from the knights' hall to
their own bower, without meeting any of the retainers of the place,
except what may be called the peaceful and familiar servants of the
household.
Through the thick-vaulted roofs of stone, which rendered every story
of the keep a separate fortress, no sound of arms, of revelry or riot,
could ascend to the region of the ladies; and if their comforts were
inferior to those of our modern beauties, their magnificence, their
splendor of costume, of equipage, of followings, their power at home,
and their influence abroad, where they shone as "Queens of Love and
Beauty," were held the arbiters of fame and dispensers of honor, where
their smiles were held sufficient guerdon for all wildest feats of
bravery, their tears expiable by blood only, their importance in the
outer world of arms, of romance, of empire, were at the least as far
superior; and it may be doubted, whether some, even the most spoiled
of our modern fair ones, would not sigh to exchange, with the dames
and demoiselles of the twelfth century, their own soft empire of the
ball-room for the right to hold Courts of Love, as absolute
unquestioned sovereigns, to preside at tilt and tournament, and send
the noblest and the most superb of champions into mortal combat, or
yet more desperate adventure, by the mere promise of a sleeve, a
kerchief, or a glove.
She, however, who now occupied alone the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow
was none of your proud and court-hardened ladies, who could look with
no emotion beyond a blush of gratified vanity on the blood of an
admirer or a lover. Though for her, young as she was, steeds had been
spurred to the shock, and her name shouted among the splintering of
lances and the crash of mortal conflict, she was still but a simple,
amiable, and joyous child, who knew more of the pleasant fields and
waving woodlands of her fair lake-country, than of the tilt-yard, the
court pageant, or the carousal, and who better loved to see the
heather-blossom and the blue-bell dance in the free air of the breezy
fells, than plumes and banners flaunt and flutter to the blare of
trumpets.
The only child of Sir Yvo de Taillebois, a knight and noble of the
unmixed Norman blood, a lineal descendant of one of those hardy barons
who, landing with Duke William on his almost desperate emprise, had
won "the bloody hand" at Hastings, and gained rich lands in the
northern counties during the protracted struggle which ensued, the
Lady Guendolen had early lost her mother, a daughter of the noble
house of Morville, and not a very distant relative of the good knight,
Sir Philip, whose hospitality she was now partaking with her father.
To a girl, for the most part, the loss of a mother, before she has
reached the years of discretion, is one never to be repaired, more
especially where the surviving parent is so much occupied with duties,
martial or civil, as to render his supervision of her bringing-up
impossible. It is true that, in the age of which I write, the
accomplishments possessed by the most delicate and refined of ladies
were few and slight, as compared to those now so sedulously inculcated
to our maidens, so regularly abandoned by our matrons; and that, at a
period later by several centuries, he who has been styled, by an
elegant writer,[3] the last of the Norman barons, great Warwick the
Kingmaker, held it a boast that his daughters possessed no arts, no
knowledge, more than to spin and to be chaste.
[3] Sir E. Lytton Bulwer.
Yet even this small list of feminine attainments was far beyond the
teaching of the illiterate and warlike barons, who knew nought of the
pen, save when it winged the gray-goose shaft from the trusty yew, and
whose appropriate and ordinary signatures were the impress of their
sword-hilts on the parchments, which they did not so much as pretend
to read; and, in truth, the Kingmaker's statement must either be
regarded as an exaggeration, or the standard of female accomplishment
had degenerated, as is not unlikely to have been actually the case,
during the cruel and devastating wars of the Roses, which, how little
soever they may have affected the moral, political, or agricultural
condition of the English people at large, had unquestionably dealt a
blow to the refinement, the courtesy, the mental culture, and personal
polish of the English aristocracy, from which they began only to
recover in the reigns of the later Tudors.
But in the case of the fair Guendolen, neither did the loss of her
mother deprive her of the advantages of her birth, nor would the
incapacity of her father, had the occasion been allowed him of
superintending the culture of his child, have done so; for he was--at
that day rarer in England than was a wolf, though literary culture had
received some impulse from the present monarch, and his yet more
accomplished father, Beauclerc--a man of intellectual ability, and not
a little cultivation.
He had been largely employed by both princes on the continent, in
diplomatic as well as military capacities; had visited Provence, the
court of poetry and minstrelsy, and the _gai science_; had dwelt
in the Norman courts of Italy, and even in Rome herself, then the seat
of all the rising schools of literature, art, and science; and while
acquiring, almost of necessity, the tongues of southern Europe, had
both softened and enlarged his mind by not a few of their acquirements.
Of this advantage, however, it was only of late years, when she was
bursting into the fairest dawn of adolescence, that she had been
permitted to profit; for, between her fifth and her fifteenth years,
she had seen but little of her father, who, constantly employed, either
as a statesman at home, an embassador abroad, or a conquering invader
of the wild Welsh marches, or the wilder and more barbarous shores of
Ireland, had rarely been permitted to call a day his own, much less to
devote himself to those home duties and pleasures for which he was,
beyond doubt, more than ordinarily qualified.
Yet, however unfortunate she might have been in this particular, she
had been as happy in other respects, and had been brought up under
circumstances which had produced no better consequences on her head
than on her heart, on the graces of her mind and body, than on the
formation of her feminine and gentle character.
CHAPTER IX.
GUENDOLEN.
"The sweetest lady of the time,--
Well worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid."
ALFRED TENNYSON.
A sister of Guendolen's departed mother, Abbess of St. Hilda, a woman
of unusual intellect, and judgment, character and feelings, in no
degree inferior to her talents, had taken charge of her orphan niece
immediately after the mother's death, and had brought her up, a flower
literally untouched by the sun as by the storms of the world, in the
serene and tranquil life of the cloister, when the cloister was indeed
the seat of piety, and purity, and peace; in some cases the only
refuge from the violence and savage lusts of those rugged days; never
then the abode, at least in England, of morose bigotry or fierce
fanaticism, but the home of quiet contemplation, of meek virtue, and
peaceful cheerfulness.
The monasteries and priories of those days were not the sullen gaols
of the soul, the hives of drones, or the schools of ignorance and
bitter sectarian persecution which they have become in these latter
days, nor were their inmates then immured as the tenants of the
dungeon cell.
The abbey lands were ever the best tilled; the abbey tenants ever the
happiest, the best clad, the richest, and the freest of the peasantry
of England. The monks, those of Saxon race especially, were the
country curates of the twelfth century; it was they who fed the
hungry, who medicined the sick, who consoled the sad at heart, who
supported the widow and the fatherless, who supported the oppressed,
and smoothed the passage through the dark portals to the dying
Christian. There were no poor laws in those days, nor alms-houses; the
open gates and liberal doles of the old English abbeys bestowed
unstinted and ungrudging charity on all who claimed it. The abbot on
his soft-paced palfrey, or the prioress on her well-trained jennet, as
they made their progresses through the green fields and humble hamlets
of their dependents, were hailed ever with deferential joy and
affectionate reverence; and the serf, who would lout sullenly before
the haughty brow of his military chief, and scowl savagely with hand
on the dudgeon hilt after he had ridden past, would run a mile to
remove a fallen trunk from the path of the jolly prior, or three, to
guide the jennet of the mild-eyed lady abbess through the difficult
ford, or over the bad bit of the road, and think himself richly paid
by a benediction.
In such a tranquil tenor had been passed the early years of the
beautiful young Guendolen; and while she learned every accomplishment
of the day--for in those days the nunneries were the schools of all
that was delicate, and refined, and gentle, the schools of the softer
arts, especially of music and illumination, as were the monasteries
the shrines which alone kept alive the fire of science, and nursed the
lamp of letters, undying through those dark and dreary ages--she
learned also to be humble-minded, no less than holy-hearted, to be
compassionate, and kind, and sentient of others' sorrows; she learned,
above all things, that meekness and modesty, and a gentle bearing
toward the lowliest of her fellow-beings, were the choicest ornaments
to a maiden of the loftiest birth.
Herself a Norman of the purest Norman strain, descended from those of
whom, if not kings themselves, kings were descended, who claimed to be
the peers of the monarchs to whom their own good swords gave royalty,
she had never imbibed one idea of scorn for the conquered, the
debased, the downfallen Saxon.
The kindest, the gentlest, the sagest, and at the same time the most
refined and polished of all her preceptors, her spiritual pastor also,
and confessor, was an old Saxon monk, originally from the convent of
Burton on the Trent, who had migrated northward, and pitched the tent
of his declining years in a hermitage situate in the glade of a deep
Northumbrian wood, not far removed from the priory over which her aunt
presided with so much dignity and grace.
He had been a pilgrim, a prisoner in the Holy Land, had visited the
wild monasteries of Lebanon and Athos; he had seen the pyramids
"piercing the deep Egyptian sky," had mused under the broken arches of
the Coliseum, and listened, like the great historian of Rome, to the
bare-footed friars chanting their hymns among the ruins of Jupiter
Capitoline.
Like Ulysses, he had seen the lands, he had studied the manners, and
learned to speak the tongues, of many men and nations; nor, while he
had learned in the east strange mysteries of science, though he had
solved the secrets of chemistry, and learned, long before the birth of
"starry Galileo," to know the stars with their uprisings and their
settings; though he knew the nature, the properties, the secret
virtues, and the name of every floweret of the forest, of every ore of
the swart mine, he had not neglected the gentler culture, which
wreathes so graciously the wrinkled brow of wisdom. Not a poet
himself, so far as the weaving the mysterious chains of rhythm, he was
a genuine poet of the heart. Not a blush, not a smile, not a tear, not
a frown on the lovely face of nature, but awakened a response in his
large and sympathetic soul; not an emotion of the human heart, from
the best to the basest, but struck within him some chord of deep and
hidden feeling; to read an act of self-devoted courage, of charity, of
generosity, of self-denial, would make his flesh quiver, his hair
rise, his cheek burn. To hear of great deeds would stir him as with
the blast of a war trumpet. He was one, in fact, of those gifted
beings who could discern
"Music in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing;"
and as he felt himself, so had he taught her to feel; and of what he
knew himself, much he had taught her to know likewise.
Seeing, hearing, knowing him to be what he was, and, as is the wont
ever with young and ingenuous minds, imagining him to be something far
wiser, greater, and better than he really was, she was content at
first, while other men were yet unknown to her, to hold him something
almost supernaturally, ineffably beneficent and wise; and this
incomparable being she knew also to be a Saxon. She saw her aunt, who,
gentle as she was, and gracious, had yet a touch of the old Norse
pride of blood, untutored by the teachings of religion, and untamed by
the discipline of the church, bow submissively to his advice, defer
respectfully to his opinion, hang persuaded on his eloquence--and yet
he was a Saxon.
When she burst from girlhood into womanhood--when her father, returned
from the honors and the toils of foreign service, introduced her into
the grand scenes of gorgeous chivalry and royal courtesy, preparatory
to placing her at the head of his house--though she mingled with the
paladins and peers of Normandy and Norman England, she saw not one who
could compare in wisdom, in eloquence, in all that is highest and most
heaven-reaching in the human mind, with the old Saxon, Father Basil.
How then could she look upon the race from which he sprang as
inferior--as low and degraded by the hand of nature--when not the
sagest statesman, the most royal prince, the proudest chevalier, the
gentlest troubadour, could vie with him in one point of intellect or
of refinement--with him, the Saxon priest, son himself, as he himself
had told her, of a Saxon serf.
These were the antecedents, this the character of the beautiful girl,
who, on the morning following her adventure in the forest, lay,
supported by a pile of cushions, on one of the broad couches in the
Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow, inhaling the fresh perfumed breath of
the western air, as it swept in, over the shrubs and flowers in the
bartizan, through the window of the turret chamber. She was beautiful
as ever, but very pale, and still suffering, as it would seem, from
the effects of her fall and the injuries she had received in the
struggle with the terrible wild beast; for, whenever she attempted to
move or to turn her body, an expression of pain passed for a moment
across the pure, fair face, and once a slight murmur escaped from her
closed lips.
One or two waiting-maids, of Norman race, attended by the side of her
couch, one of them cooling her brow with a fan of peacock's feathers,
the other sprinkling perfumes through the chamber, and now and again
striving to amuse her by reading aloud from a ponderous illuminated
tome, larger than a modern cyclopedia, the interminable adventures and
sufferings of that true love, whose "course never did run smooth," and
feats of knightly prowess, recorded in one of the interminable
romances of the time. But to none of these did the Lady Guendolen
seriously incline her ear; and the faces of the attendant girls began
to wear an expression, not of weariness only, but of discontent, and,
perhaps, even of a deeper and bitterer feeling.
The Lady Guendolen was ill at ease; she was, most rare occurrence for
one of her soft though impulsive disposition, impatient, perhaps
querulous.
She could not be amused by any of their efforts. Her mind was far
away; she craved something which they could not give, and was restless
at their inability. Three times since her awakening, though the hour
was still early, she had inquired for Sir Yvo, and had sent to desire
his presence. The first time, her messengers brought her back word
that he had not yet arisen; the second, that he was breakfasting, but
now, in the knight's hall with Sir Philip, and the Sieurs of
Maltravers, De Vesey, and Mauleverer, who had ridden over to
Waltheofstow to fly their hawks, and that he would be with her ere
long; and the third, that the good knight must have forgotten, for
that he had taken horse and ridden away with the rest of the company
into the meadows by the banks of brimful Idle, to enjoy the "Mystery
of Rivers," as it was the fashion to term the sport of falconry, in
the high-flown language of the chase.
For a moment her pale face flushed, her eye flashed, and she bit her
lip, and drummed impatiently with her little fingers on the
velvet-pillows which supported her aching head; then, smiling at her
own momentary ill-humor, she bade her girl Marguerite go seek the
Saxon maiden, Edith, if she were in the castle, and if not, to see
that a message should be sent down for her to the serfs' quarter.
With many a toss of her pretty head, and many a wayward feminine
expression of annoyance, which from ruder lips would probably have
taken the shape of an imprecation, the injured damsel betook herself,
through winding passages and stairways in the thickness of the wall,
to the pages' waiting-chamber on the next floor below. Then tripping,
with a demure look, into the square vaulted room, in which were
lounging three gayly-dressed, long-haired boys, one twanging a guitar
in the embrasure of the window, and the other two playing at tables on
a board covered with a scarlet cloth--
"Here, Damian," she said, somewhat sharply, for the temper of the
mistress is sure to be reflected in that of the maid, losing nothing
by the transmission, "for what are you loitering there, with that old
tuneless gittern, when the Lady Guendolen has been calling for you
this hour past?"
"And how, in the name of St. Hubert," replied the boy, who had rather
been out with the falconers on the breezy leas, than mewed in the hall
to await a lady's pleasure--"how, in the name of St. Hubert! should I
know that the Lady Guendolen had called for me, when no one has been
near this old den since Sir Yvo rode forth on brown Roncesval, with
Diamond on his fist? And as for my gittern being tuneless, I've heard
you tell a different tale, pretty Mistress Marguerite. But let us have
your message, if you've got one; for I see you're as fidgety as a
thorough-bred sorrel filly, and as hot-tempered, too."
"Sorrel filly, indeed!" said the girl, half-laughing, half-indignant.
"I wish you could see my lady, Damian, if you call me fidgety and
hot-tempered. I wish you could see my lady, that's just all, this
morning."
"The message, the message, Marguerite, if there be one, or if you have
aught in your head but to make mischief."
"Why, I do believe my lady's bewitched since her fall; for nothing
will go down with her now-a-days but that pink-and-white,
flaxen-haired doll, Edith. I can't think what she sees in her, that
she must needs ever have the clumsy Saxon wench about her. I should
think gentle Norman blood might serve her turn."
"I don't know, Marguerite," answered the boy, wishing to tease her;
"Edith is a very pretty girl, indeed; I don't know but she's the very
prettiest I ever saw. Dark-haired and dark-eyed people always admire
their opposites, they say; and for my part, I think her blue eyes
glance as if they reflected heaven's own light in them; and her
flaxen-hair looks like a cloud high up in heaven, that has just caught
the first golden glitter of the morning sunbeams. And clumsy! how can
you call her clumsy, Marguerite? I am sure, when she came flitting
down the hill, with her long locks flowing in the breeze, and her thin
garments streaming back from her shapely figure, she looked liker to a
creature of the air, than to a mere mortal girl, running down a sandy
road. I should like to see you run like her, Mistress Marguerite."
"Me run!" exclaimed the Norman damsel, indignantly; "when ever did you
see a Norman lady _run_? But you're just like the rest of them;
caught ever by the first fresh face. Well, sir, since you're so
bewitched, like my pretty lady above stairs, with your Saxon angel,
the message I have brought you will just meet your humor. You will
see, sir, if this Saxon angel be in the castle, sir; and if she be
not, sir, your magnificence will proceed to the Saxon quarter, and
request her angelship to come forthwith to my lady's chamber, and to
come quickly, too. And you can escort her, Sir Page, and lend her your
hand up the hill; and steal a kiss, if you can, Sir Page, on the way!"
"Just so, Mistress Marguerite," returned the boy, "just so. Your
commands shall be obeyed to the letter. And as to the kiss, I'll try,
if I can get a chance; but I'm afraid she's too modest to kiss young
men."
And, taking up his dirk and bonnet from the board, he darted out of
the room, without awaiting her reply, having succeeded, to his heart's
content, in chafing her to somewhat higher than blood-heat; so that
she returned to her lady's bower even more discomposed than when she
left it; but Guendolen was too much occupied with other thoughts to
notice the girl's ill-temper, and within half an hour a light foot was
heard at the door, and the Saxon slave girl entered.
"How can I serve you, dear lady?" she said, coming up, and kneeling at
the couch side. "You are very pale. I trust you be not the worse this
morning."
"Very weak, Edith, and sore all over. I feel as if every limb were
broken; and I want you, with your gentle hand and gentle voice, to
soothe me."
"Ah! dearest lady, our Holy Mother send that your spirit never may be
so sore as to take no heed of the body's aching, nor your heart so
broken as to know not whether your limbs were torn asunder."
CHAPTER X.
THE LADY AND THE SLAVE.
"Weep not for him that dieth,
For his struggling soul is free,
And the world from which it flieth
Is a world of misery;
But weep for him that weareth
The collar and the chain;
To the agony he beareth,
Death were but little pain."
CAROLINE NORTON.
"What mean you, Edith?" inquired the girl, raising herself from her
pillow, as her attention was called to the unusually subdued tones of
the Saxon maiden, who was, in her ordinary mood, so gay and joyous,
and who appeared to be the general favorite of all around her; "what
mean you, Edith?" she repeated; "you can not be speaking of yourself;
you, who are ever blithesome and light-hearted as the bee on the
blossom, or the bird on the bough. You can have no sorrows of the
heart, I think, so penetrating as to make all outward bodily pains
forgotten, and yet--you are pale, you are weeping? Tell me, girl--tell
me, dear Edith, and let me be your friend."
"Friend! lady," said the girl, looking at her wistfully, yet
doubtfully withal; "you _my_ friend, noble lady! That were indeed
impossible. I will not say, that to the poor, to the Saxon, to the
_slave_, there can be _no_ friend, under heaven; but that you--you,
a noble and a Norman! Alas! alas! that were indeed impossible!"
"Impossible!" cried Guendolen, eagerly, forgetting her ailments in her
fine and feeling excitement. "Wherefore, how should it be impossible?
One God made us both, Edith; and made us both out of one clay, with
one life here on earth, and one hereafter; both children of one fallen
race, and heirs of one promise; both daughters of one fair, free land;
both Englishwomen--then why not friends, Edith, and sisters?"
"Of one land, lady, it is true," said the girl, gently. "Yes!
daughters of one _fair_ land, for even to the slave England is
very beautiful and dear, even as to you she is _free_. But for
us, who were once her first-born and her favorites, that magic word
has passed away, that charm has ceased, forever. For us, in free
England's wide-rejoicing acres, there is no spot free, save the six
feet of earth that shall receive our bodies, when the soul shall be a
slave's no longer. Lady, lady, alas! noble lady, if one God made us
both of one clay, that shall go downward to mingle with the common
sod, and of one spirit that shall mount upward, when the weariness and
woe shall be at an end forever, man has set a great gulf between us,
that we can not pass over it at all, to come the one unto the other.
Our wants may be the same, while we are here below, and our hopes may
be the same heavenward; but there all sameness ends between us. My
joys can not be your joys, and God forbid that my sorrows should be
yours, either. Our hearts may not feel, our heads may not think, in
unison, even if our flesh be of one texture, and our souls of one
spirit. You are good, and gentle, and kind, lady, but you may never
understand what it is to be such as I."
She ceased, but she ceased weeping also, and seemed lost in deep
thought, and almost forgetful of herself and her surroundings, as she
remained on her knees by the bedside of Guendolen, with her head
drooping from her fair bended neck, and her embrowned but shapely
hands folded in her lap.
The lady looked at her silently for a few moments, partly in sympathy,
partly, it must be said, in wonder. New ideas were beginning to be
awakened in her mind, and a perception of something, which had never
before dawned upon her, became palpable and strong.
That which we behold, and have beheld daily perhaps for years,
naturally becomes so usual and customary in our eyes, that we cease to
regard it as any thing but as a fact, of which we have never seen and
scarcely can conceive any thing to the contrary--that we look at it as
a part of that system which we call nature, and of which we never
question the right or the wrong, the injustice or the justice, but,
knowing that it _is_, never think of inquiring wherefore it is,
and whether it ought to be.
Thus it was with Guendolen de Taillebois. She had been accustomed,
during all her life, to see Saxons as serfs, and rarely in any other
capacity; for the franklins and thanes who had retained their
independence, their freedom, and a portion of their ancestral acres,
were few in numbers, and held but little intercourse with their Norman
neighbors, being regarded by them as rude and semi-barbarous
inferiors, while they, in turn, regarded them as cruel and insolent
usurpers and oppressors.
She had seen these serfs, rudely attired indeed, and employed in
rugged, laborious, and menial occupations; but, then, it was clear
that their boorish demeanor, stolid expression, and apparent lack of
capacity or intelligence for any superior employment, seemed to
indicate them as persons filling the station in society for which
nature had adapted them. Well-clad, sufficiently clothed, warmly
lodged--in all outward things perhaps equal, if not superior, to the
peasantry of most European countries in the present day--never, except
in extreme and exceptional cases, cruelly or severely treated, since
it was ever the owner's interest to regard the well-doing of his
serfs, it had never occurred to her that the whole race was in itself,
from innate circumstances, and apart from extraordinary sorrows or
sufferings, hopeless, miserable, and conscious of unmerited but
irretrievable degradation.
Had she considered the subject, she would of course have perceived and
admitted that sick or in health, sorrowful or at ease, to be compelled
to toil on, toil on, day after day, wearily, at the bidding and for
the benefit of another, deriving no benefit from that toil beyond a
mere subsistence, was an unhappy and forlorn condition. Yet, how many
did she not see of her own conquering countrymen of the lower orders,
small landholders in the country, small artisans and mechanics in the
boroughs, reduced to the same labors, and nearly to the same
necessity.
With the personal condition or habits of the serfs, the ladies and
even the lords of the great Norman families had little acquaintance,
little means even of becoming acquainted. The services of their
fortalices, all but those menial and sordid offices of which those
exalted persons had no cognizance, were discharged by domestics,
higher or lower in grade, the highest being of gentle blood, and, in
very noble houses, even of noble blood, of their own proud race; and
the Saxons, whether bond-servants of the soil, or, what was of rare
occurrence at that time, free tenants on man service, were employed in
the fields or in the forest, under the bailiff or overseer, who ruled
them at his own discretion, and punished them, if punishment were
needed, with the stocks, the gyves, or the scourge, without consulting
the lord, and of course without so much as the knowledge of the lady.
Even if, by hazard, it did reach the dainty ears of some fair
chatelaine, that Osrick or Edmund had undergone the lash for some
misdoing or short-coming, she heard of it much as a modern lady would
read of the committal of a pickpocket or drunkard to the treadmill, or
of a vagrant hussy to pick hemp; wondering why those low creatures
would do such wicked things, and sorrowfully musing why such
punishments should be necessary--never suspecting the injustice of the
law, or doubting the necessity of the punishment.
And eminently thus it was with Guendolen. While in her good aunt's
priory, she had ever seen the serfs of the church well looked after,
well doing, not overworked, not oppressed, cared for if sick,
comforted if sorrowing, well tended in age, a contented if not a happy
race, so far as externals only were regarded, and nothing hitherto had
led her to look farther than to externals. On her father's princely
barony she saw even less of them than she had been accustomed to do at
the priory, passing them casually only when in the fields at
hay-making or harvest work, or pausing perhaps to observe a
rosy-cheeked child in the Saxon quarter, or to notice a cherry-lipped
maiden by the village well. But here, too, so far as she did see, she
saw them neither squalid nor starved, neither miserable nor
maltreated. No acts of tyranny or cruelty reached her ears, perhaps
none happened which should reach them; and of the rigorous,
oppressive, insolent, and cruel laws which regulated their condition,
controlled their progress, prevented their rise in the social scale,
fettered and cramped their domestic relations, she knew nothing.
Since her sojourn at Waltheofstow, she had gained more personal
acquaintance with her down-trodden Saxon countrymen and countrywomen,
and more especially since her accident in the forest, than in all her
previous life.
For, in the first place, Sir Philip de Morville, being unmarried and
without female relations in his family, had no women of Norman blood
employed as attendants or domestics in the castle, the whole work of
which was performed by serf girls of various degrees, under the
superintendence of an emancipated Saxon dame, who presided over what
we should now call the housekeeper's department. Of these girls,
Edith, and one or two others, Elgythas, Berthas, and the like,
ministered to the Lady's Bower, and having perhaps contracted
something of unusual refinement and expression from a nearer
attendance on the more courtly race, and especially on the Norman
ladies who at times visited the castle, presented, it is certain,
unusually favorable specimens of the Saxon peasantry, and had
attracted the attention of Guendolen in a greater degree than any
Saxons she had previously encountered.
Up to that time, she had regarded them, certainly, on the whole, as a
slow, as a somewhat stolid, impassive, and unimpassioned race, less
mercurial than her own impetuous, impulsive kindred, and far less
liable to strong emotions or keen perceptions, whether of pain or
pleasure. The girlish liveliness and gentleness, and even the untaught
graces of Edith had, at the first, attracted her; and, as she was
thrown a good deal into contact with her, from the fact of her
constant attendance on the chambers she occupied, she had become much
interested in her, regarding her as one of the happiest, most artless,
and innocent little girls she had ever met--one, she imagined, on whom
no shadow of grief had ever fallen, and whose humble lot was one of
actual contentment, if not of positive enjoyment.
Nor, hitherto, insomuch as actual realities were concerned, was
Guendolen much in error. Sir Philip de Morville, as has been stated
already, was, according to the times and their tenor, a good and
considerate lord. His bailiff was a well-intentioned, strict man,
intent on having his master's work done to the last straw, but beyond
that neither an oppressor nor a tyrant. Kenric, her distant kinsman
and betrothed, was confessedly the best man and most favored servant
in the quarter; and his mother, who had grown old in the service of
Sir Philip's father, whom she had nursed with simple skill through the
effects of many a mimic battle in the lists, or real though scarce
more dangerous fray, now superannuated, reigned as much the mistress
of her son's hearth as though she had been a free woman, and the cot
in which she dwelt her freehold.
Edith herself was the first bower-maiden of the castle, and, safe
under the protecting wings of dame Ulrica, the housewife, defied the
impertinence of forward pages, the importunate gallantry of esquires,
and was cheerfully acknowledged as the best and prettiest lass of the
lot, by the old gray-haired seneschal, in his black velvet suit and
gold chain of office.
Really, therefore, none of her own immediate family had known any
actual wants, or suffered any material hardships or sorrows, through
their condition, up to the period at which my tale commences. Their
greatest care, perhaps, had arisen from the temper, surly, rude,
insolent, and provocative, of Eadwulf the Red, Kenric's brother, who
had already, by misconduct, and even actual crime, according to the
Norman code, subjected himself to severe penalties, and been reduced,
in default of harsher treatment, to the condition of a mere slave, a
chattel, saleable like an ox or ass, at the pleasure of their lord.
This, both in its actual sense, as keeping them in constant
apprehension of what further distress Eadwulf's future misconduct
might bring upon them, and in its moral bearing, as holding them
constantly reminded of their own servile condition, had been, thus
far, their prime grief and cause of complaint, had they been persons
given to complain.
Still, although well-nigh a century had elapsed since the Norman
Conquest, and the heir of the Conqueror in the fourth generation was
sitting on the throne which that great and politic prince won on the
fatal day of Hastings, their condition had not become habitual or easy
to those, at least, who had been reduced to slavery from freedom, by
the consequences of that disastrous battle. And such was the condition
of the family whence sprang Kenric and Edith. The Saxon thane,
Waltheof, whose name and that of his abode had descended to the Norman
fortalice which had arisen from the ashes of his less aspiring manor,
had resisted the Norman invaders so long, with such inveterate and
stubborn valor, and, through the devotion of his tenants and
followers, with such cost of life, that when he fell in fight, and his
possessions were granted to his slayer, all the dwellers on his lands
were involved in the common ruin.
To the serfs of the soil, who had been serfs before the conquest, it
mattered but little. The slave to the Saxon was but changed into the
slave of the Norman, and did not perhaps find in him a crueller,
though he might a haughtier and more overbearing master. But to the
freeman, the doom which consigned him to the fetters of the Norman,
which converted him from the owner into the serf of the soil, was
second only, if second, to the bitterness of death. And such had been
the doom of the grandfather of Kenric and Eadwulf.
Their mother herself had been born free, not far from the hovel in
which she still dwelt a slave, though she was but an infant when the
hurricane of war and ruin swept over the green oaks of Sherwood, and
had no memory of the time when she was not the thrall of a foreign
lord. Her father, Wulfred, was the largest tenant under Waltheof,
himself a franklin, or small landholder, and of blood as noble, and
station more elevated than that of one half the adventurers who had
flocked to the banner of William the invader. With his landlord and
friend, he had fought to the last, not at Hastings only, but in every
bloody ineffectual rising, until the last spark of Saxon liberty was
trampled out under the iron hoofs of the Norman war-horse; but, less
happy than Waltheof, he had survived to find himself a slave, and the
father of slaves, tilling for a cruel foreign conqueror the land which
had been his own and his father's, and his father's father's, but in
which he and his heirs should have no heritage for evermore, beyond
the six-foot measure which should be meted to them every one, for his
long home.
And the memory of these things had not yet passed away, nor the
bitterness of the iron departed from the children, which had then
entered into the soul of the parent.
An irrepressible desire came over the mind of Guendolen, to know and
comprehend something more fully the sentiments and sorrows of the girl
who had nursed and attended her so gently since her adventure with the
stag; and perceiving intuitively that the slave girl, who, strange as
it appeared to her, seemed to have a species of pride of her own,
would not reveal her inward self in the presence of the vain and
flippant Norman waiting girls, she hastened to dismiss them, without
wounding their self-esteem, on a pretext of which they would be
willing enough to avail themselves.
"Lilian and Marguerite," she said, "you must be weary my good girls,
with watching me through this long night and my peevish temper must
have made you yet more weary, for I feel that I am not myself, and
that I have tried your patience. Go, therefore, now, and get some
repose, that when I shall truly need your services again, you may be
well at ease to serve me. I feel as if I could sleep now; and while I
slumber, Edith, here, can watch beside me, and drive away the gnats
with her fan, as well as a more experienced bower-woman."
Whether the girls suspected or not that their mistress desired to be
rid of them, they were not sorry to be dismissed from attendance on
her couch; and whether they proposed to devote the opportunity to
repose, or to gay flirtation with the pages of their own lord's or of
Sir Philip's household, they withdrew at once, leaving the lady gazing
fixedly on the motionless and hardly conscious figure of the slave
girl.
By a sudden impulse she passed her small white hand caressingly over
the soft and abundant tresses of Edith's fair hair; and so unusual was
the sensation to the daughter of the downfallen race, that she
started, as if a blow had been dealt her, and blushed crimson, between
surprise and wonder, as she raised her great blue eyes wide open to
the face of the young lady.
"And is it so hard?" she asked, in reference more to what she
understood Edith to mean, than to any thing she had spoken, or even
hinted--"is it so hard, my poor child? I had thought that your lot sat
as lightly on you as the dew-drop in the chalice of the bluebell. I
had fancied you as happy as any one of us here below. Will you not
tell me what is this sorrow which weighs on you so heavily? It may be
I can do something to relieve it."
"Lady, I am, as you know, a Saxon, and a slave, the daughter of a
slave, and, should it ever be my lot to wed, the wife, to be, of a
serf, a bondman of the soil, and the mother of things doomed, or ere
they see the blessed light of Heaven, to the collar and the chain from
the cradle to the grave. Think you a woman, with such thoughts as
these at her heart, can be very gay or joyous?"
"And yet, you were both gay and joyous yesterday, Edith; and all last
week, since I have been at the castle, I have heard no sounds so gay
or so pleasant to my ear as your merry ballads. And you are no more a
serf this morn than you were yestrene, and the good God alone knows
what any of us all may be on the morrow, Edith. Something, I know,
must have happened, girl, to make you wear a face so altered on this
beautiful summer day, and carry so sad a heart, when all the world is
so happy."
"All the world, lady!" replied Edith; "all the world happy! Alas! not
one tenth of it, unless you mean the beasts and the birds, which,
knowing nothing, are blithe in their happy innocence. Of the human
world around us, lady, one half knows not, and more by far than one
half cares not, how miserable or how hopeless are their fellows--nor,
if all knew and cared for all, could they either comprehend or
console, much less relieve, the miserable."
"But if I be one of those, Edith, who know not, I am at least not one
of those who care not. Therefore, I come back to the place whence I
started. Something has happened, which makes you dwell so much more
dolefully to-day, upon that which weighed not on you, yestrene,
heavier than a feather."
"Something _has_ happened, lady. But it is all one; for it resolves
itself in all but into this; I am a slave--a slave, until life is
over."
"This is strange," said Guendolen, thoughtfully. "I do not
understand--_may_ not understand this. It does not seem to me
that your duties are so very hard, your life so very painful, or your
rule so very strict, that you should suddenly thus give way to utter
gloom and despondency, for no cause but what you have known for years,
and found endurable until this moment."
"But henceforth unendurable. Oh! talk not, lady, talk not. You may
console the dying, for to him there is a hope, a present hope of a
quick-coming future. But comfort not the slave; for to him the
bitterest and most cruel past is happier than the hopeless present, if
only for that it is past; and the present, hopeless as it is, is yet
less desperate than the future; for to the slave, in the future, every
thing except happiness is possible. I may seem to speak enigmas to
you, lady, and I am sure that you do not understand me--how should
you? None but a slave can know or imagine what it is to be a slave;
none can conceive what a slave feels, thinks, suffers. And yet a slave
is a man, after all; and a lord is no more than a man, while
living--and yet, what a gulf between them!"
"And you will not tell me, Edith," persisted the Lady Guendolen, "you
will not tell me what it is that has happened to you of late, which
makes you grieve so despondently, thus on a sudden, over your
late-endured condition? Then you must let me divine it. You have
learned your own heart of late. You have discovered that you love,
Edith."
"And if it were so, lady," replied the girl, darkly, "were not that
enough to make a woman, who is at once a Christian and a slave, both
despond and despair? First to love a slave--for to love other than a
slave, being herself a slave were the same, as for a mortal to be
enamored of a star in heaven--and then, even if license were granted
to wed him she loved, which is not certain or even of usual
occurrence, to be the mother of babes, to whom but one reality is
secured, beyond a peradventure, the reality that they too must be
slaves and wretched. But you are wrong, lady. I have not learned my
own heart of late--I have known it long. I have not discovered but now
that I love, nor has he whom I love. We have been betrothed this year
and better."
"What then? what then?" cried Guendolen, eagerly. "Will not Sir Philip
consent? If that be all, dry your tears, Edith; so small a boon as
that I can command by a single word."
"Sir Philip heeds not such matters, lady. His bailiff _has_ consented,
if that were all."
"What is it, then? This scruple about babes," said Guendolen,
thoughtfully. "It is sad--it is sad, indeed. Yet if you love
_him_, as you say, and your life in its actual reality be not so
bitter----"
"No, lady, no; it is not even that. If I had scruples on that head,
they have vanished; Kenric has convinced me----"
"Kenric!" exclaimed Guendolen, starting erect into a sitting attitude,
forgetful of her pains and bruises. "What, the brave man who saved me
from the stag at the risk of his own life, who was half slain in
serving me--is he--is he _your_ Kenric?"
"The same," answered Edith, with the quiet accent of fixed sorrow.
"And the same for whom you procured the priceless boon of liberty."
An idea flashed, like the electric fluid, across the mind of
Guendolen, who up to that moment had suspected nothing of the
connection between her preserver and the beautiful girl before her,
and who knew nothing of his grand refusal to accept even liberty
itself, most inestimable of all gifts, which could not be shared by
those whom he loved beyond liberty or life; and she imagined that she
read the secret, and had pierced the maiden's mystery.
"Can it be?" she said, sorrowfully, and seeming rather to be communing
with herself, than inquiring of her companion. "Can it be that one so
brave, so generous, and seemingly so noble, should be so base and
abject? Oh! but these men, these men, if tale and history speak true,
they are the same all and ever--false, selfish, and deceivers!"
"Kenric, lady?"
"And because he is free--the freeman but of the hour--he has despised
thee, Edith, the slave girl? But hold thy head high, sweet one, and
thy heart higher. Thou shalt be free to-morrow, girl, and the mate of
his betters; it shall be thou, to-morrow, who shall repay scorn with
scorn, and----"
"No, lady, no," cried the girl, who had been hitherto silenced and
overpowered by the impulsive vehemence of Guendolen. "You misapprehend
me altogether. It is not I whom he rejected, for that _he_ was free;
but liberty that he cast from him, as a toy not worth the having,
because I might not be free with him--I, and his aged mother, of whom
he is, alone, the only stay and comfort."
"Noble! noble!" cried the Norman girl, joyously clapping her hands
together. "Noble and glorious, gentle and great! This, this, indeed,
is true nobility! Why do we Normans boast ourselves, as if we alone
could think great thoughts, or do great deeds? and here we are
outdone, beyond all question or comparison, in the true gentleness of
perfect chivalry; and that, by a Saxon slave. But be of good cheer,
Edith, my sister and my friend; be of good cheer. The sun shall not go
down looking upon you still a slave, nor upon your Kenric, nor yet
upon his mother. You shall be free, all free, free as the blessed
winds of heaven, before the sun set in the sea. And you shall be the
wife of no serf, but of a freeman, and a freeholder, in my own manor
lands of Kendal upon Kent; and you shall be, God willing, the mother
of free Englishmen, to do their lady as leal service as their stout
father did before them. Fear nothing, and doubt nothing, Edith; for
this shall be, so surely as I am Guendolen of Taillebois. So small a
thing as this I can right readily do with my good father, and he as
readily with our true friend, noble Sir Philip de Morville. But hark!
I hear their horses' hoofs and the whimpering of their hounds in the
court-yard. To the bartizan, girl, to the bartizan! Is it they--is it
the chase returning?"
"It is they, dear lady--your noble sire and Sir Philip, and all the
knights who rode forth this morning--all laughing in high merriment
and glee! and now they mount the steps--they have entered."
"No better moment, then, to press a boon. Fly, girl, be your wishes
wings to your speech. I would see my father straightway!"
CHAPTER XI.
THE LADY'S GAME.
"And if she will, she will! you may depend on't."
OLD SAYING.
It did not prove, in truth, a matter altogether so easy of
accomplishment as Guendolen, in her warm enthusiasm and sympathy, had
boasted, to effect that small thing, as she had termed it in her
thoughtless eagerness, the liberation of three human beings, and the
posterity of two, through countless generations, from the curse and
degradation of hereditary bondage.
The value, in the first place, of the unhappy beings, to each of whom,
as to a beast of burden, or to a piece of furniture, a regular
money-price was attached, although they could not be sold away from
the land to which they appertained, unless by their own consent, was
by no means inconsiderable even to one so rich as Sir Yvo de
Taillebois; for in those days the wealth even of the greatest landed
proprietors lay rather in the sources of revenue, than in revenue
itself; and men, whose estates extended over many parishes, exceeding
far the limits of a modern German principality, whose forests
contained herds of deer to be numbered by the thousand head, whose
cattle pastured over leagues of hill and valley, who could raise
armies, at the lifting of their banners, larger than many a sovereign
prince of the nineteenth century, were often hard set to find the
smallest sums of ready money on emergency, unless by levying tax or
scutage on their vassals, or by applying to the Jews and Lombards.
In the second place, the scruples of Kenric, which justly appeared so
generous and noble to the fine, unsophisticated intellect of the young
girl, by no means appeared in the same light to the proud barons,
accustomed to regard the Saxon, and more especially the serf, as a
being so palpably and manifestly inferior, that he was scarcely deemed
to possess rights, much less sentiments or feelings, other than those
of the lower animals.
To them, therefore, the Saxon's refusal to consent to his own sale as
a step necessary to manumission, appeared an act of insolent
outrecuidance, or at the best a bold and impudent piece of chicanery,
whereby to extort from his generous patrons a recompense three times
greater than they had thought of conferring on him, in the first
instance.
It was with scorn, therefore, and almost with anger, that Sir Yvo
listened to the first solicitations of Guendolen in behalf of her
clients; and he laughed at her high-flown sentiments of admiration and
wonder at the self-devotion, the generosity, the immovable constancy,
of the noble Saxon.
"The _noble_ Saxon! By the glory of Heaven!" he exclaimed, "these
women would talk one out of all sense of reason, with their
sympathetic jargon! Why, here's a sturdy knave, who has done what, to
win all this mighty gratitude? Just stuck his whittle into a wild
stag's weasard, and saved a lady's life, more by good luck than by
good service--as any man, or boy, of Norman blood, would have done in
a trice, and thought no more of it; and then, when his freedom's
tendered him as a reward for doing that for which ten-pence had well
paid him, and for failing to do which he had deserved to be scourged
till his bones lay bare, he is too mighty to accept it--marry! he
names conditions, he makes terms, on which he will consent to oblige
his lords by becoming free; and you--you plead for him. The _noble_
Saxon! by the great gods, I marvel at you, Guendolen."
But she, with the woman's wily charm, replied not a word while he was
in the tide of indignation and invective; but when he paused,
exhausted for the moment by his own vehemence, she took up the word--
"Ten-pence would have well paid him! At least, I am well content to
know," she said, "the value of my life, and that, too, at my own
father's rating. The Saxons may be, as I have heard tell, but have not
seen that they are, sordid, degraded, brutal, devoid of chivalry and
courtesy and love of fame; but I would wager my life there is not a
free Saxon man--no, not the poorest Franklin, who would not rate the
life of his coarse-featured, sun-burned daughter at something higher
than the value of a heifer. But it is very well. I am rebuked. I will
trouble you no farther, valiant Sir Yvo de Taillebois. I have no
_right_ to trouble you, beausire, for I must sure be base-born,
though I dreamed not of it, that my blood should be dearly bought at
ten-pence. Were it of the pure current that mantled in the veins of
our high ancestors, it should fetch something more, I trow, in the
market."
"Nay! nay! thou art childish, Guendolen, peevish, and all
unreasonable. I spoke not of thy life, and thou knowest it right well,
but of the chance, the slight merit of his own, by which he saved it."
"Slight merit, father!"
"Pshaw! girl, thou hast gotten me on the mere play of words. But how
canst make it tally with the vast ideas of this churl's chivalry and
heaven-aspiring nobility of soul, that he so little values liberty,
the noblest, most divine of all things, not immortal, as to reject it
thus ignobly?"
"It skills not to argue with you, sir," she answered, sadly; "for I
see you are resolved to refuse me my boon, as wherefore should you
not, setting so little value on this poor life of mine. I know that I
am but a poor, weak child, that I was a disappointment to you in my
cradle, seeing that I neither can win fresh honors to your house amid
the spears and trumpets, nor transmit even the name, of which you are
so proud, to future generations; but I am, at least in pride, too much
a Taillebois to crave, as an importunate, unmannerly suitor, what is
denied to me as a free grace. Only this--were you and I in the hands
of the Mussulman, captives and slaves together, and you should accept
freedom as a gift, leaving your own blood in bondage, I think the
Normans would hold you dishonored noble, and false knight; I am sure
the Saxons would pronounce you _nidering_. I have done, sir. Let
the Saxon die a slave, if you think it comports with the dignity of De
Taillebois to be a slave's debtor. I thought, if you did not love me,
that you loved the memory of my mother better."
"There! there!" replied Sir Yvo, quite overpowered, and half amused by
the mixture of art and artlessness, of real passion and affected sense
of injury by which she had worked out her purpose. "There! there!
enough said, Guendolen. You will have it as you will, depend on't. I
might have known you would, from the beginning, and so have spared
myself the pains of arguing with you. It must be as you will have it,
and I will go buy the brood of Sir Philip at once; pray Heaven only
that they will condescend to be manumitted, without my praying them to
accept their liberty upon my knee. It will cost me a thousand zecchins
or more, I warrant me, at the first, and then I shall have to find
them lands of my lands, and to be security for their "were and mund,"
and I know not what. Alack-a-day! women ever! ever women! when we are
young it is our sisters, our mistresses, our wives; when we grow old,
ou
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