University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
THE FOREST.

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.

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 merrymen,
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

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
doye, 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 brimfull 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.