University of Virginia Library

14. CHAPTER XIV.
THE NEW HOME.

On the following morning they entered Westmoreland;
and as they approached the term of their journey, advancing
the more rapidly as they entered the wilder and more sparsely-populated
regions toward the lakes and fells, where the castellated
dwellings of the knightly nobles and the cloisters of
the ecclesiastical lords became few and far between, they
reached Kendal, then a small hamlet, with a noble castle
and small priory, before noon; and, making no stay, pressed
onward to the shores of Windermere, which they struck,
not far from the scattered cottages and small chapel of ease,
tended by two aged brothers from Kendal, known then, as it
is now, not having grown much since that day, as the village
of Bowness.

On the lake, moored at a rude pier, lay a small but gayly-decorated
yacht, or galley, with the arms of Sir Yvo de Taillebois
emblazoned on its foresail, and a gay streamer flaunting
from its topmast, awaiting the arrival of the party, which had

been announced to their vassals by a harbinger sent forward
from Bolton Abbey.

And here the nobles, with their immediate train, separated
from the bulk of the party, the former going on board the
galley, and crossing the pellucid waters of the beautiful lake
to Sir Yvo's noble castle, which lay not a mile from the strand,
embosomed in a noble chase, richly-wooded with superb oak
and ash forests, midway of the gentle and green valley between
the lake and the western mountains, over which his
demesnes extended, while the escort, with the horse-boys,
grooms, and servitors, took the longer and more difficult way
around the head of the lake—a circuit of some twenty miles—
over the sites of the modern towns of Ambleside and Hawkshead,
the castle lying in Cumberland, although the large
estates of De Taillebois extended for many miles on both sides
the water, and in both counties, being the last grand feudal
demesne on the south side of the mountains.

Further to the north, again, where the country spread out
into plains beyond Keswick, toward Penrith and Carlisle, and
the untamed Scottish borders, there were again found vast
feudal demesnes, the property of the Lords of the Marches,
the Howards, the Percys, the Umfravilles, and others, whose
prowess defended the rich lowlands of York and Lancaster
from the incursions of the Border Riders.

To the north, the nearest neighbor of De Taillebois was the
Threlkeld, of Threlkeld Castle, on the skirts of Keswick, at
thirty miles or more of distance across the pathless mountains
of Sea-fell, Hellvellyn, Saddleback, and Skiddaw. Nigher to
him, on the south, and adjoining his lands, lay the estates of
the Abbots of Furness; and to the westward, beyond the

wide range of moor and mountain, which it took his party
two days to traverse, and in which, from Bolton till they
reached Kendal, they had seen, according to the words of the
motto prefixed to this chapter,
lay the lands of the Cliffords and the mighty Nevilles. All
the inner country, among those glorious peaks, those deep
glens, encumbered with old unshorn woods, those blue waters,
undisturbed by the presence of a foreigner, since the eagles
of the ubiquitous Roman glittered above his camps on the
stern hill-sides, over that most unprofitable of his conquests,
was virgin ground, uninhabited, save by fugitive serfs, criminal
refugees from justice, and some wild families of liberty-loving
Saxons, who had fled to the mountains, living by the strong
hand and the bended bow, and content to sacrifice all else for
the priceless boon of freedom.

It was, perhaps, the very wildness and solitude of the locality,
as much as the exquisite charm of the loveliest scenery in
England, to which, strange to say, he was fully alive—enhanced
by the certainty that in those remote regions, where there
were no royal forests, nor any territorial magnates who could
in any way rival himself, his forest rights, of which every Norman
was constitutionally jealous, were perfectly intangible and
unassailable—which had so much attached Sir Yvo de Taillebois
to his Cumbrian castle of High Furness, in preference to
all his fair estates and castles in the softer and more cultivated
portions of the realm.

Certain it is, that he did love it better than all his other

lands united; and hither he resorted, whenever he could escape
from the duties of camps and the restraint of courts, to
live a life among his vassals, his feudal tenants, and his humbler
villagers, more like that of an Oriental patriarch than of
a Norman warrior, but for the feudal pomp which graced his
castle halls, and swelled his mountain hunts into a mimicry
of warfare.

At about ten miles distant across the lake, up toward the
lower spurs of the north-eastern mountains, lies the small lake
of Kentmere, the head-waters and almost the spring of the
river Kent; which, flowing down southward through the vale
of Kendal, falls into the western head of Morecambe Bay,
having its embouchure guarded by the terrible sands of Lancaster,
so fatal to foot-passengers, owing to the terrific influx
of the entering tides.

Set like a gem of purest water in a rough frame of savage
mountains, their lower sides mantled with rich deciduous
woods, their purple heathery brows dotted with huge Scotch
firs, single, or in romantic groups, their scalps bald and
broken, of gray and schistous rock, Kentmere fills up the
whole basin of the dell it occupies, with the exception of a
verge of smooth, green meadow-land, never above a hundred
or two of yards in width, margined with a silvery stripe of
snow-white sand, and studded by a few noble oaks.

At the head of the lake, half encircled by the dancing brook
which formed its only inlet, rose a soft swell of ground, smooth
and round-headed, neither hill nor hillock; its southern face,
toward the lake, cleared of wood, and covered with short,
close greensward, its flanks and brow overgrown with luxuriant
oak-wood of the second growth, interspersed with varnished

hollies, silver-stemmed birches, and a score or two of
gigantic fir-trees, overtopping the pale green foliage of the
coppice, and contrasting its lightsome tints by their almost
sable hue.

Behind this fairy knoll the hill rose in rifted perpendicular
faces of rock, garlanded and crowned with hanging coppices,
for two or three hundred feet in height; the nesting-place of
noble falcons, peregrines, gosshawks, haggards of the rock,
and of a single pair of golden eagles, the terror of the dale
from time immemorial.

In all lake land, there is no lovelier spot than Kentmere.
The deep meadows by its side in early spring are one glowing
garden of many-colored crocuses, golden, white, purple lady-smocks,
yellow king-cups, and all sweet and gay-garbed flowers
that love the water-side; the rounded knoll and all the
oak-wood sides are alive with saffron primroses, cowslips, and
meadow-sweets; and the air is rife with the perfume of unnumbered
violets, and vocal with the song of countless
warblers.

And on the mid slope of that rounded, bosomlike swell of
land, there stood, at the period of my tale, a low stone building
of one story, long for its height, narrow, and massively
built of blocks of the native gray stone of the hills, with a
projecting roof of heavy flags, forming a porch over the door,
and two chimneys, one at either end, of a form peculiar, to
this day, to that district, each covered with a flat stone slab
supported on four columns, to prevent the smoke from driving
down into the chambers, under the influence of the whirling
gusts from the mountain tops.

Glass windows were unknown in those days, save to the

castellated mansions of the great, or the noble minsters and
cathedrals of the great cities—the art having been first introduced,
after the commencement of the dark ages, in the reign
of Edward the Confessor, although it must have been well
known and of common occurrence in England during its occupation
by the Romans, who used glass for windows as well
as implements so early as the time of Cicero, and who would
seem to have brought its manufacture to a perfection unattainable
by us moderns, since it is credibly asserted that they
had the art to render it malleable. Horn and tale, or oiled
parchment, were used by the middle classes, but this was a
luxury confined to the dwellers in towns; and the square
mullioned apertures, which here served for windows, were
closed by day and in fine weather by slender lattices, and
during storms or at night by wooden shutters. The want of
these luxuries, however, being unknown, was unregarded;
and the verdurer's house at Kentmere was regarded in those
days as a fine specimen of rural architecture, and stood as high
by comparison as many an esquire's hall of the present day.

For the rest, it was partly overrun with ivy and woodbine,
and was overhung at the western end by a noble mountain-ash,
from under the roots of which welled out a small crystal
spring, and sheltered to the east by a group of picturesque
Scotch firs. An out-building or two, a stone barn, a cowhouse,
and what, by the baying and din of hounds, was
clearly a dog-kennel, stood a little way aloof, under the skirts
of the coppice, and completed the appurtenances of what was
then deemed a very perfect dwelling for a small rural proprietor,
and would be held now a very tolerable mountain farm-house
for a tenant cotter.

This was the new home of Kenric and Edith, now by the
good offices of the old curate of Bowness made man and wife;
and here, with the good old mother nodding and knitting by
the hearth, and two stout boys, Kenric's varlets, to tend the
hounds and hawks, and to do the offices of the small hill farm,
they dwelt as happy as the day; he occupying the responsible
position of head-forester of upper Kentdale, and warder of the
cotters, shepherds, and verdurers, whose cottages were scattered
in the woods and over the hill-sides, and both secure in
the favor of their lovely lady, and proud of the confidence of
their lord.