Wager of Battle: A Tale of Saxon Slavery in Sherwood Forest — Edition Insights

THE GUERDON OF GOOD SERVICE 39

THE SERF'S QUARTER 58

THE SAXON'S CONSTANCY 69

THE SLAVE-GIRL'S SELF-DEVOTION 81

THE LADY AND THE SLAVE 110

THE LADY AND HER LOVER 230

THE FALSE CHARGE AND THE TRUE 300

"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.