Wager of Battle: A Tale of Saxon Slavery in Sherwood Forest

by Henry William Herbert

  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 HenryII., fourth successor of the Conqueror, and grandson of the firstprince of that name, known as Beauclerc, the condition of thevanquished Saxons had begun in some sort to amend, though no fusion ofthe races had as yet commenced, and tranquillity was partiallyrestored to England--the greater part of the northern counties, fromthe Trent to the mouths of Tyne and Solway, was little better than anunbroken chase or forest, with the exception of the fiefs of a fewgreat barons, or the territories of a few cities and free boroughtowns; and thence, northward to the Scottish frontier, all was a rudeand pathless desert of morasses, moors, and mountains, untrodden saveby the foot of the persecuted Saxon outlaw.

  In the West and North Ridings of the great and important Shire ofYork, there were, it is true, already a few towns of more than growingimportance; several of which had been originally the sites, or hadgrown up in the vicinity and under the shelter of Roman Stativeencampments; whereof not a few of them have retained the evidence intheir common termination, _caster_, while others yet retain themore 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 opulentmanufacturing boroughs, while the vastly larger and more wealthycommercial places, which have since sprung up, mushroom-like, aroundthem, had then neither hearths nor homes, names nor existence.

  In addition to these, many great lords and powerful barons alreadypossessed vast demesnes and manors, and had erected almost royalfortalices, the venerable ruins of which still bear evidence to thepower and the martial spirit of the Norman lords of England; and evenmore majestic and more richly endowed institutions of the church, suchas Fountains, Jorvaulx, and Bolton Abbayes, still the wonder andreproach of modern architecture, and the admiration of modern artists,had created around themselves garden-like oases among the green gladesand grassy aisles of the immemorial British forests; while, emulatingthe example of their feudal or clerical superiors, many a militarytenant, many a gray-frocked friar, had reared his tower of strength,or built his lonely cell, upon some moat-surrounded mount, or in somebosky 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 andpalace of the second archbishop of the realm, was wilder yet, ruderand more uncivilized. Even to this day, it is, comparatively speaking,a bleak and barren region, overswept by the cold gusts from the Germanocean, abounding more in dark and stormy wolds than in the cheerfulgreen of copse or wildwood, rejoicing little in pasture, less intillage, and boasting of nothing superior to the dull market towns ofthe interior, and the small fishing villages nested among the crags ofits iron coast.

  Most pitilessly had this district been ravaged by the Conqueror andhis immediate successor, after its first desperate and protractedresistance to the arms of the Norman; after the Saxon hope of Englandfell, to arise no more, upon the bloody field of Hastings; and aftereach one of the fierce Northern risings.

  The people were of the hard, old, stubborn, Danish stock, morepertinacious, even, and more stubborn, than the enduring Saxon, butwith a dash of a hotter and more daring spirit than belonged to theirslower and more sluggish brethren.

  These men would not yield, could not be subdued by the iron-sheathedcavalry of the intrusive kings. They were destroyed by them, the landswere swept bare,[1] the buildings burned, the churches desecrated.Manors, which under the native rule of the Confessor had easilyyielded sixty shillings of annual rent, without distress to theiroccupants, scarcely paid five to their foreign lords; and estates,which under the ancient rule opulently furnished forth a living totwo[2] English gentlemen of rank with befitting households, now barelysupported two miserable Saxon cultivators, slaves of the soil, payingtheir foreign lords, with the blood of their hands and the sweat oftheir brows, scarcely the twelfth part of the revenue drawn from themby 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 marchednorthward, in full resolve to carry his conquering arms to thefrontiers of Scotland, and, sustained by his ferocious energy, didactually force his way through the misty moorlands and mountainousmid-regions of Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland, he had totraverse about sixty miles of country, once not the least fertile ofhis newly-conquered realm, in which his mail-clad men-at-arms sawneither green leaves on the trees, nor green crops in the field; forthe ax and the torch had done their work, not negligently; passedneither standing roof nor burning hearth; encountered neither humanbeing nor cattle of the field; only the wolves, which had become sonumerous from desuetude to the sight of man, that they scarce cared tofly before the clash and clang of the marching squadrons.

  To the northward and north-westward, yet, of Yorkshire, including whatare now Lancashire, Westmoreland, Northumberland, and Cumberland,though the Conqueror, in his first irresistible prosecution ofred-handed victory, had marched and countermarched across them, therewas, even at the time of my narrative, when nearly a century had fled,little if any thing of permanent progress or civilization, beyond theestablishment of a few feudal holds and border fortresses, each withits petty hamlet clustered beneath its shelter. The marches, indeed,of Lancashire, toward its southern extremity, were in some degreepermanently settled by military colonists, in not a few instancescomposed of Flemings, as were the Welch frontiers of the neighboringprovince of Cheshire, planted there to check the inroads of the stillunconquered Cymri, to the protection of whose mountains, andlate-preserved independence, their whilom enemies, the now persecutedSaxons, had fled in their extremity.

  It is from these industrious artisans, then the scorn of the high-bornmen-at-arms, that the trade had its origin, which has filled the bleakmoors, and every torrent gorge of Lancaster and Western York, with ateeming 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 thedin of their trip-hammers, resounded by the side of many a lonelyCheshire stream; but all to the north and westward, where the wildesthillsides and most forbidding glens are now more populous and richerthan the greatest cities of those days, all was desolate as the aspectof the scenery, and inhospitable as the climate that lowers over it inconstant mist and darkness.

  Only in the south-western corner of Westmoreland, the lovely land oflakes and mountains and green pastoral glens, beyond Morecambe Bay andthe treacherous sands of Lancaster, had the Norman nobles, as theentering tide swept upward through the romantic glens and ghylls ofNetherdale and Wharfedale, past the dim peaks of Pennigant andIngleborough, established their lines in those pleasant places, andreared their castellated towers, and laid out their noble chases,where they had little interruption to apprehend from the tyrannicforest laws of the Norman kings, which, wherever their authorityextended, bore not more harshly on the Saxon serf than on the Normannoble.

  To return, however, toward the midland counties, and the rich regionswith which this brief survey of Northern England in the early years ofthe twelfth century commenced--a vast tract of country, including muchof the northern portions of Nottingham and Derbyshire, and all thesouth of the West Riding of York, between the rivers Trent and Eyre,was occupied almost exclusively by that most beautiful and famous ofall British forests, the immemorial and time-honored Sherwood--themeof the oldest and
most popular of English ballads--scene of the moststirring of the old Romaunts--scene of the most magnificent of modernnovels, incomparable Ivanhoe--home of that half historic personage,King of the Saxon greenwoods, Robin Hood, with all his northernmerry-men, Scathelock, and Friar Tuck, and Little John, Allen-a-Dale,wild forest minstrel, and the blythe woodland queen, Maid Marion--lastleafy fortalice, wherein, throughout all England proper, lingered thesole remains of Saxon hardihood and independence--red battle-field ofthe 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 Caesar;"

  there stand they still, erect, earth-fast, and massive, grasping thegreen-sward with their gnarled and knotty roots, waving "their freeheads in the liberal air," full of dark, leafy umbrage clothing theirlower limbs; but far aloft, towering with bare, stag-horned, andsplintered branches toward the unchanged sky from which so manycenturies 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, orin dark, stately groups, adorning many a noble park of modern days, orlooming up in solemn melancholy upon some "one-tree hill," throughoutthe fertile region which lies along the line of that great ancientroad, known in the Saxon days as Ermine-street, but now, in commonparlance, 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 ofcultivated lands, with a few borough-towns, and a few feudal keeps, orhierarchal abbayes, but itself severed into divers and far-distantparcels, embosomed in broad stretches of the deepest meadows, the mostteeming pastures, or girded on its swelling, insulated knolls by themost fertile corn-lands, survives the ancient Sherwood.

  Watered by the noblest and most beautiful of northern rivers, the calmand meadowy Trent, the sweet sylvan Idle, the angler's favorite,fairy-haunted Dee, the silver Eyre, mountainous Wharfe, and pastoralUre and Swale; if I were called upon to name the very garden-gem ofEngland, I know none that compares with this seat of the old-timeSaxon forest.

  You can not now travel a mile through that midland region of plentyand prosperity without hearing the merry chime of village bells frommany a country spire, without passing the happy doors of hundreds oflow cottage homes, hundreds of pleasant hamlets courting the mellowsunshine from some laughing knoll, or nestling in the shrubberies ofsome orchard-mantled hollow.

  Nor are large, prosperous, and thriving towns, rich marts ofagricultural produce, or manufactures of wealth richer than gold of ElDorado, so far apart but that a good pedestrian may travel through thestreets of a half a dozen in a day's journey, and yet stand twentytimes agaze between their busy precincts in admiration--to borrow thewords of the great northern Romancer, with the scene and period ofwhose most splendid effort my humble tale unfortunately coincides--inadmiration of the "hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed,wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed, perhaps, the stately march ofthe Roman soldiers."

  And here, let none imagine these to be mere exaggerations, sprung fromthe overflowing brain of the Romancer, for, not fifty miles distantfrom the scene described above, there is yet to be seen a venerablepatriarch of Sherwood, which boasted still, within a few short years,some garlands of surviving green--the oak of Cowthorpe--probably thelargest in the island; which is to this day the boundary corner oftwo marching properties, and has been such since it was constitutedso in Doomsday Book, wherein it was styled _quercum ingentem_, thegigantic oak.

  Since the writing of those words eight centuries have passed, andthere are many reasons for believing that those centuries have addednot an inch to its circumference, but rather detracted from its vigorand its growth; and, to me, it seems far more probable that it was afull-grown tree, with all its leafy honors rife upon it, when thefirst Caesar plunged, waist-deep, into the surges of the BritishChannel 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 thousandyears' decay without entirely perishing.

  In those days, however, a man might ride from "eve to morn, from mornto dewy eve," and hear no sound more human than the deep "belling" ofthe red deer, if it chanced to be in the balmy month of June; theangry grunt of the tusky boar, startled from his mud-bath in someblack morass; or, it may be, the tremendous rush of the snow-white,black-maned bull, crashing his way through shivered saplings and rentunder-brush, mixed with the hoarse cooings of the cushat dove, therich song-gushes of the merle and mavis, or the laughing scream of thegreen 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 thesun was down, degenerated into murky gloom, he saw no sights morefearful than the rabbits glancing across the path, and disappearing inthe thickets; or the slim doe, daintily picking her way among theheather, with her speckled fawns frolicking around her. Thrice happy,if, as night was falling, cold and gray, the tinkling of some lonelychapel bell might give him note where some true anchorite would sharehis bed of fern, and meal of pulse and water, or jolly clerk ofCopmanhurst would broach the pipe of Malvoisie, bring pasties of thedoe, to greet the belated wayfarer.

  Such was the period, such the region, when, on a glorious Julymorning, so early that the sun had not yet risen high enough to throwone sweeping yellow ray over the carpet of thick greensward betweenthe long aisles of the forest, or checker it with one coolshadow--while the dew still hung in diamonds on every blade of grass,on every leaf of bush or brackens; while the light blue mists werestill rising, thinner and thinner as they soared into the clear air,from many a woodland pool or sleepy streamlet--two men, of the ancientSaxon race, sat watching, as if with some eager expectation, on a low,rounded, grassy slope, the outpost, as it seemed, of a chain of gentlehills, 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 abovetheir foliage the gray stag-horns of age, the river, clear as glass,and bright as silver, swept in a semicircle, fringed with a belt ofdeep green rushes and broad-leaved water-lilies, among which two orthree noble swans--so quietly sat the watchers on the hill--wereleading forth their little dark-gray black-legged cygnets, to feed onthe aquatic flies and insects, which dimpled the tranquil river like afalling shower. Across the stream was thrown a two-arched freestonebridge, high-backed and narrow, and half covered with dense ivy, thework, evidently, of the Roman conquerors of the island, from which ayellow, sandy road wound deviously upward, skirting the foot of therounded hill, and showing itself in two or three ascending curves, atlong intervals, above the tree-tops, till it was lost in the distantforest; while, far away to the eastward, the topmost turret of whatseemed a tall Norman keep, with a square banner drooping from itsstaff 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 deeptangled dell, or dingle, filled with a thickset growth of holly,birch, and alder, with here a feathery juniper, and there a gracefulfern bush; and behind this arose a higher ridge, clothed with tall,thrifty oaks and beeches, of the second growth, and cutting off inthat direction all view beyond its own near horizon.

  It was not in this direction, however, nor up the road toward theremote castle, nor down across the bridge over the silver Idle, thatthe watchers turned their eager eyes, expecting the more eagerly, as,at times, the distant woods before them--lying beyond a long stretchof native savanna, made probably by the beaver, while that industriousanimal yet figured in the British fauna--seemed to mourn and laborwith a deep, indefinite murmuring sound, half musical, half solemn,but
liker to an echo than to any known utterance of any living humanbeing. It was too varied for the noise of falling waters, toomodulated for the wind harp of the west, which was sighing fitfullyamong the branches. Eagerly they watched, with a wild look of almostpainful expectation in their keen, light-blue eyes, resembling in norespect the lively glance with which the jovial hunter awaits hisgallant quarry; there was something that spoke of apprehension in thehaggard 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 firstsight, to be of that most wretched, if not most abject class, theSaxon serfs of England. They were both clad alike, in short, close-cutfrocks, or tunics, of tanned leather, gathered about their waists withbroad buff belts, fastened with brazen buckles, in each of which stucka long buckhorn-hafted two-edged Sheffield whittle; both werebare-headed, both shod with heavy-clouted shoes, and both wore,soldered about their necks, broad brazen dog-collars, having the brandof their condition, with their own names and qualities, and that andthe 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 alsosomewhat the darker haired and finer featured, wore a species of rudeleather gauntlets, with buskins of the same material, reaching as highas the binding of the frock, the other man was bare-armed andbare-legged also, with the exception of an inartificial covering ofthongs of boar-hide, plaited from the ankle to the knee upward. Thelatter also carried no weapon but a long quarter-staff, though he helda brace of noble snow-white alans--the wire-haired grayhounds of theday--in a leash of twisted buckskin; while his brother--for so strongwas their personal resemblance, that their kinship could scarcely bedoubted--carried a short, steel-headed javelin in his hand, and hadbeside him, unrestrained, a large coarser hound, of a deep brindledgray color, with clear, hazel eyes; and what was strange to say, inview of the condition of this man, unmaimed, according to the cruelforest 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 betterarmed, might perhaps be explained by a glance at the engraving on therespective collars. For while that of the one, and he the better cladand better looking, bore that he was "Kenric the Dark, thral of theland to Philip de Morville," that of the other stamped him "Eadwulfthe Red, gros thral" of the same Norman lord.

  Both Saxon serfs of the mixed Northern race, which, largely intermixedwith Danish blood, produced a nobler, larger-limbed, loftier, and moreathletic race than the pure Saxons of the southern counties--they hadfallen, with the properties of the Saxon thane, to whom they hadbelonged in common, into the hands of the foreign conqueror. YetKenric was of that higher class--for there were classes even amongthese miserable beings--which could not be sold, nor parted from thesoil on which they were born, but at their own option; while Eadwulf,although his own twin-brother, for some cause into which it wereneedless to inquire, could be sold at any time, or to any person, oreven swapped for an animal, or gambled away at the slightest capriceof his owner.

  To this may be added, that, probably from caprice, or perhaps fromsome predilection for his personal appearance and motions, which werecommanding, and even graceful, or for his bearing, which was evidentlyless churlish than that of his countrymen in general, his master haddistinguished him in some respects from the other serfs of the soil;and, without actually raising him to any of the higher officesreserved to the Normans, among whom the very servitors claimed to be,and indeed were, gentlemen, had employed him in subordinate stationsunder his huntsman, and intrusted him so far as occasionally to permithis carrying arms into the field.

  With him, as probably is the case in most things, the action producedreaction; and what had been the effect of causes, came in time to bethe cause of effects. Some real or supposed advantages procured forhim the exceeding small dignity of some poor half-conceded rights; andthose rights, the effect of perhaps an imaginary superiority, soonbecame the causes of something more real--of a sentiment of halfindependence, a desire of achieving perfect liberty.

  In this it was that he excelled his brother; but we must notanticipate. What were the characters of the men, and from theircharacters what events grew, and what fates followed, it is for thereader of these pages to decipher.

  After our men had tarried where we found them, waiting tillexpectation should grow into certainty for above half an hour, and themorning had become clear and sunny, the distant indescribable sound,heard indistinctly in the woods, ripened into that singularlymodulated, all sweet, but half-discordant crash, which the practicedear 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 thesharp, savage treble of some fleet brach, now the deep bass of somesouthron talbot, rising above or falling far below the diapason of thepack--and now, shrill and clear, the long, keen flourish of a Normanbugle.

  At the last signal, Kenric rose silently but quickly to his feet,while his dog, though evidently excited by the approaching rally ofthe chase, remained steady at his couchant position, expectant of hismaster's words. The snow-white alans, on the contrary, fretted, andstrained, and whimpered, fighting against their leashes, while Eadwulfsat still, stubborn or stupid, and animated by no ambition, by nohope, 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, toreach the four lane ends, where the relays must be, when the stagcrosses. Up, man, I say! Is this the newer spirit you spoke of butnow? 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 winnothing but the shackles, if not the thong. Away! lest my words provetroth."

  Eadwulf the Red arose with a scowl, but without a word, shook himselflike a water-spaniel, and set off at a dogged swinging trot, thebeautiful high-bred dogs bounding before his steps like wingedcreatures, and struggling with the leashes that debarred their perfectfreedom--the man degraded, by the consciousness of misery andservitude, into the type of a soulless brute--the brutes elevated, byhigh breeding, high cultivation, and high treatment, almost into thesimilitude of intellectual beings.

  Kenric looked after him, as he departed, with a troubled eye, andshook his head, as he lost sight of him among the trees in thefore-ground. "Alack!" he said, "for Eadwulf, my brother! He waxesworse, not better." But, as he spoke, a nearer crash of the hounds'music came pealing through the tree-tops, and with a stealthy step hecrossed over the summit to the rear of the hillock, where he concealedhimself behind the boll of a stupendous oak, making his grayhound liedown in tall fern beside him.

  The approaching hounds came to a sudden fault, and silence, deep asthat of haunted midnight, fell on the solitary place.