p585-086 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.

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

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

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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

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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.

p585-096 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.

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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

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

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;

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

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,* 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.

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

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

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.

p585-105 CHAPTER IX. GUENDOLEN.

“The sweetest lady of the time,—
Well worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.”
Alfred Tennyson.

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

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 almshouses;
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 dependants,
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,

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

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,”

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

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,

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

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.”

p585-115 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.

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

“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

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

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 land-holders
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

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

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 adventures 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,

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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

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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 dewdrop
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

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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

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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

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

“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.

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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!”

p585-131 CHAPTER XI. THE LADY'S GAME.

“And if she will, she will! you may depend on 't.”

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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, our daughters!—and by my hopes of
Heaven, I believe the last plague is the sorest!”

“My funeral expenses, with the dole and alms and masses,
would scarcely have cost you so much, Sir Yvo. Pity he did
not let the stag work his will on me! Don't you think so,
sir?”

“Leave off your pouting, silly child. You have your own
way, and that is all you care for; I don't believe you care the
waving of a feather for the Saxons, so you may gratify your
love of ruling, and force your father, who should show more
sense and firmness, to yield to every one of your small caprices.
So smooth that bent brow, and let us see a smile on
those rosy lips again, and you may tell your Edith, if that 's
her name, that she shall be a free woman before sunset.”

“So you confess, after all this flurry, that it was but a
small caprice, concerning which you have so thwarted me.
Well, I forgive you, sir, by this token,”—and, as she spoke,

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she threw her white arms about his neck, and kissed him on
the forehead tenderly, before she added, “and now, to punish
you, the next caprice I take shall be a great one, and you
shall grant it to me without wincing. Hark you, there are
the trumpets sounding for dinner, and you not point-device
for the banquet-hall! but never heed to-day. There are no
ladies to the feast, since I am not so well at ease as to descend
the stair. Send me some ortolans and beccaficos from the
table, sir; and above all, be sure, with the comfits and the
Hypocras, you send me the deeds of manumission for Kenric
and Edith, all in due form, else I will never hold you true
knight any more, or gentle father.”

“Fare you well, my child, and be content. And if you
rule your husband, when you get one, as you now rule your
father, Heaven in its mercy help him, for he will have less of
liberty to boast than the hardest-worked serf of them all.
Fare you well, little wicked Guendolen.”

And she laughed a light laugh as the affectionate father,
who used so little of the father's authority, left the Bower, and
cried joyously, “Free, free! all free! I might have been sure
that I should succeed with him. Dear, gentle father! and
yet once, once for a time, I was afraid. Yet I was right, I
was right; and the right must ever win the day. Edith!
Edith!” she cried, as she heard her light foot without. “You
are free. I have conquered!”

It is needless, perhaps it were impossible, to describe the
mingled feelings of delight, gratitude, and wonder, coupled to
something akin to incredulity, which were aroused in the
simple breast of the Saxon maiden, by the tidings of her certain
manumission, and, perhaps even gladder yet, of her

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transference, in company with all those whom she loved, to a new
home among scenes which, if not more lovely than those in
which her joyless childhood and unregretted youth had
elapsed, were at least free from recollections of degradation and
disgrace.

The news circulated speedily through the castle, how the
gratitude of the Lady Guendolen had won the liberty of the
whole family of her preserver, with the sole exception of the
gross thrall Eadwulf; and it was easily granted to Edith, that she
should be the bearer of the happy tidings to the Saxon quarter.

Sweet ever to the captive's, to the slave's, ear must be the
sound of liberty, and hard the task, mighty the sacrifice, to
reject it, on any terms, however hard or painful; but if ever
that delightful sound was rendered doubly dear to the hearer,
it was when the sweetest voice of the best beloved—even of
her for whom the blessed boon had been refused, as without
her nothing worth—conveyed it to the ears of the brave and
constant lover, enhanced by the certainty that she, too, who
announced the happiness, had no small share in procuring it, as
she would have a large share of enjoying it, and in rendering
happy the life which she had crowned with the inestimable gift
of freedom.

That was a happy hearth, a blessed home, on that calm
summer evening, though death had been that very day borne
from its darkened doors, though pain and suffering still
dwelt within its walls. But when the heart is glad, and the
soul contented and at peace, the pains of the body are easily
endured, if they are felt at all; and happier hearts, save one
alone, which was discontent and bitter, perhaps bitterer from
the contemplation of the unparticipated bliss of the others,

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were never bowed in prayer, or filled with gratitude to the
Giver of all good.

Eadwulf sat, gloomy, sullen, and hard of heart, beside the
cheerful group, though not one of it, refusing to join in prayer,
answering harshly that he had nothing for which to praise
God, or be thankful to him; and that to pray for any thing to
him would be useless, for that he had never enjoyed his favor
or protection.

His feelings were not those of natural regret at the continuance
of his own unfortunate condition, so much as of unnatural
spite at the alteration in the circumstances of his
mother, his brother, and that brother's beautiful betrothed;
and it was but too clear that, whether he should himself remain
free or no, he had been better satisfied that they should
continue in their original condition, rather than that they
should be elevated above himself by any better fortune.

Kenric had in vain striven to soothe his morose and selfish
mood, to cheer his desponding and angry, rather than sorrowful,
anticipations—he had pointed out to him that his own
liberation from slavery, and elevation to the rank and position
of a freeman and military tenant of a fief of land, did not
merely render it probable, but actually make it certain, that
Eadwulf also would be a freeman, and at liberty to join his
kindred in a short time in their new home; “for it must be
little, indeed, that you know of my heart,” said the brave and
manly peasant, “or of that of Edith, either, if you believe that
either of us could enjoy our own liberty, or feel our own happiness
other than unfinished and incomplete, so long as you,
our own and only brother, remain in slavery and sorrow.
Your price is not rated so high, brother Eadwulf, but that we

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may easily save enough from our earnings, when once free to
labor for ourselves, within two years at the farthest, to purchase
your freedom too from Sir Philip; and think how easy
will be the labor, and how grateful the earnings, when every
day's toil finished, and every zecchin saved, will bring us a day
nearer to a brother's happy manumission.”

“Words!” he replied, doggedly—“mighty fine words, in
truth. I marvel how eloquent we have become, all on the
sudden. Your labor will be free, as you say, and your earnings
your own; and wondrous little shall I profit by them.
I should think now, since you are so mighty and powerful with
the pretty Lady Guendolen, all for a mere chance which might
have befallen me, or any one, all as well as yourself, you
might have stipulated for my freedom—I had done so I am
sure, though I do not pretend to your fine sympathies and
heaven-reaching notions—”

“And so have lost their freedom!” replied Kenric, shaking
his head, as he waved his hand toward the women; “for that
would have been the end of it. For the rest, I made no stipulations;
I only refused freedom, if it were procurable only by
leaving my aged mother and my bethrothed bride in slavery.
As it was, I had lost my own liberty, and not gained theirs,
if it had not been for Edith, who won for us all, what I had
lost for one.”

“And no one thought of me, or my liberty! I was not
worth thinking of, nor worthy, I trow, to be free.”

“You say well, Eadwulf—you say right well,” cried Edith,
her fair face flushing fiery red, and her frame quivering with
excitement. “You are not worthy to be free. There is no
freedom, or truth, or love, or honor, in your heart. Your

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spirit, like your body, is a serf's, and one would do dishonor
to the soul of a dog, if she likened it to yours. Had you been
offered freedom, you had left all, mother, brother, and betrothed—
had any maiden been so ill-advised as betroth herself
to so heartless a churl—to slavery, and misery, and infamy,
or death, to win your own coveted liberty. Nay! I believe,
if they had been free, and you a serf, you would have
betrayed them into slavery, so that you might be alone free.
A man who can not feel and comprehend such a sacrifice as
Kenric made for all of us, is capable of no sacrifice himself, and
is not worthy to be called a man, or to be a freeman.”

Thus passed away that evening, and with the morrow came
full confirmation; and the bold Saxon stood upon his native
soil, as free as the air he breathed; the son, too, of a free
mother, and with a free, fair maiden by his side, soon to be
the free wife of a free Englishman. And none envied them,
not one of their fellow-serfs, who remained still condemned to
toil wearily and woefully, until their life should be over—not
one, save Eadwulf, the morose, selfish, slave-souled brother.

p585-141 CHAPTER XII. THE DEPARTURE.

“He mounted himself on a steed so talle,
And her on a pale palfraye,
And slung his bugle about his necke,
And roundly they rode awaye.”
The Childe of Elle.

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

The glad days rapidly passed over, and the morning of the
tenth day, as it broke fair and full of promise in the unclouded
eastern sky, looked on a gay and happy cavalcade, in all the
gorgeous and glittering attire of the twelfth century, setting
forth in proud array, half martial and half civil, from the gates
of Waltheofstow.

First rode an old esquire, with three pages in bright half
armor, hauberks of chain mail covering their bodies, and bacinets
of steel on their heads, but with their arms and lower
limbs undefended, except by the sleeves of their buff jerkins
and their close-fitting hose of dressed buckskin. Behind
these, a stout man-at-arms carried the guidon with the emblazoned
bearings of his leader, followed by twenty mounted
archers, in doublets of Kendal green, with yew bows in their
hands, woodknives, and four-and-twenty peacock-feathered
cloth-yard arrows in their girdles, and battle-axes at their
saddle-bows.

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

In the midst rode Sir Yvo de Taillebois, all armed save his
head, which was covered with a velvet mortier with a long
drooping feather, and wearing a splendid surcoat; and, by his
side, on a fleet Andalusian jennet, in a rich purple habit, furred
at the cape and cuffs, and round the waist, with snow-white
swansdown, the fair and gentle Guendolen, followed by three
or four gay girls of Norman birth, and, happier and fairer
than the happiest and fairest, the charming Saxon beauty,
pure-minded and honest Edith. Behind these followed a train
of baggage vans, cumbrous and lumbering concerns, groaning
along heavily on their ill-constructed wheels, and a horse-litter,
intended for the use of the lady, if weary or ill at ease, but
at the present conveying the aged freed-woman, who was departing,
now in well-nigh her ninetieth summer, from the
home of her youth, and the graves of her husband and five
goodly sons, departing from the house of bondage, to a free
new home in the far north-west.

The procession was closed by another body of twenty more
horse-archers, led by two armed esquires; and with these
rode Kenric, close shaven, and his short, cropped locks curling
beneath a jaunty blue bonnet, with a heron's feather, wearing
doublet and hose of forest green, with russet doeskin buskins,
the silver badge of Sir Yvo de Taillebois on his arm, and
in his hand the freeman's trusty weapon, the puissant English
bow, which did such mighty deeds, and won such los thereafter,
at those immortal fields of Cressy and Poictiers, and
famous Agincourt.

As the procession wound down the long slope of the castle
hill, and through the Saxon quarter, the serfs, who had collected
to look on the show, set up a loud hurrah, the ancient

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

Saxon cry of mirth, of greeting, or defiance. It was the cry
of caste, rejoicing at the elevation of a brother to the true station
of a man. But there was one voice which swelled not
the cry; one man, who turned sullenly away, unable to bear
the sight of another's joy, turned away, muttering vengeance—
Eadwulf the Red—the only soul so base, even among the
fallen and degraded children of servitude and sorrow, as to refuse
to be glad at the happiness which it was not granted him
to share, though that happiness were a mother's and a brother's
escape from misery and degradation.

Many days, many weeks, passed away, while that gay cavalcade
were engaged in their long progress to the north-westward,
through the whole length of the beautiful West Riding
of Yorkshire, from its southern frontier, where it abuts on
Nottinghamshire and the wild county of Derby, to its western
border, where its wide moors and towering crag-crested peaks
are blended with the vast treeless fells of Westmoreland.

And during all that lengthened but not weary progress, it
was but rarely, and then only at short intervals, that they
were out of the sight of the umbrageous and continuous forest.

Here and there, in the neighborhood of some ancient borough,
such as Doncaster, Pontefract, or Ripon, through which
lay their route, they came upon broad oases of cultivated lands,
with smiling farms and pleasant corn-fields and free English
homesteads, stretching along the fertile valley of some blue
brimful river; again, and that more frequently, they found
small forest-hamlets, wood-embosomed, with their little garths
and gardens, clustering about the tower of some inferior feudal
chief, literally set in a frame of verdure.

Sometimes vast tracks of rich and thriftily-cultured

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

meadow-lands, ever situate in the loveliest places of the shire,
pastured by abundant flocks, and dotted with sleek herds of
the already celebrated short-horns, told where the monks held
their peaceful sway, enjoying the fat of the land; and proclaimed
how, in those days at least, the priesthood of Rome
were not the sensual, bigot drones, the ignorant, oppressive
tyrants, whose whereabout can be now easily detected by the
squalid and neglected state of lands and animals and men,
whenever they possess the soil and control the people. Such
were the famous Abbey-stedes of Fountain's and Jorvaulx,
then, as now, both for fertility and beauty, the boast of the
West Riding.

Still, notwithstanding these pleasant interchanges of rural
with forest scenery, occuring so often as to destroy all
monotony, and to keep up a delightful anticipation in the
mind of the voyager, as to what sort of view would meet his
eye on crossing you hill-top, or turning that curvature of the
wood-road, by far the greater portion of their way led them
over sandy tracks, meandering like ribbons through wide
glades of greensward, under the broad protecting arms of
giant oaks and elms and beeches, the soft sod no less refreshing
to the tread of the quadrupeds, than was the cool shadow
of the twilight trees delicious to the riders.

Those forests of the olden day were rarely tangled or
thicketlike, unless in marshy levels, where the alder, the
willow, and other water-loving shrubs replaced the monarchs
of the wild; or where, in craggy gullies, down which brawled
impetuous the bright hill-streams, the yew, the holly,
and the juniper, mixed with the silvery stems and quivering
verdure of the birches, or the deeper hues of the

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

broad-leaved witch-elms and hazels, formed dingles fit for fairy
bowers.

For the most part, the huge bolls of the forest-trees stood
far apart, in long sweeping aisles, as regular as if planted by
the hand of man, allowing the grass to grow luxuriantly
in the shade, nibbled, by the vast herds of red and fallow
deer and roes, into the softest and most even sward that ever
tempted the foot of high-born beauty.

And no more lovely sight can be imagined than those
deep, verdant solitudes, at early morn, when the luxuriant
feathery ferns, the broom and gorse blazing with their clusters
of golden blossoms, the crimson-capped foxgloves, the sky-blue
campanulas by the roadside, the clustering honeysuckles
overrunning the stunt hawthorns, and vagrant briars and
waving grasses were glittering far and near in their morning
garniture of diamond dewdrops, with the long level rays of
the new-risen sun streaming in yellow lustre down the glades,
and casting great blue lines of shadow from every mossy
trunk—no sight more lovely than the same scenes in the
waning twilight, when the red western sky tinged the gnarled
bolls with lurid crimson, and carpeted the earth with sheets
of copper-colored light, while the skies above were darkened
with the cerulean robes of night.

Nor was there lack of living sounds and sights to take
away the sense of loneliness from the mind of the voyager in
the green wilderness—the incessant songs of the thrush and
blackbird, and whistle of the wood-robin, the mellow notes of
the linnets, the willow warblers and the sedge birds in the
watery brake, the harsh laugh of the green-headed woodpecker,
and the hoarse cooing of the innumerable stock-doves,

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

kept the air vocal during all the morning and evening hours;
while the woods all resounded far and wide with the loud
belling of the great stags, now in their lusty prime, calling
their shy mates, or defying their lusty rivals, from morn to
dewy eve.

And ever and anon, the wild cadences of the forest bugles,
clearly winded in the distance, and the tuneful clamor of the
deep-mouthed talbots, would tell of some jovial hunts-up.

Now it would be some gray-frocked hedge priest plodding
his way alone on foot, or on his patient ass, who would return
the passenger's benedicite with his smooth pax vobiscum; now
it would be some green-kirtled forest lass who would drop her
demure curtesy to the fair Norman lady, and shoot a sly
glance from her hazel eyes at the handsome Norman pages.
Here it would be a lord-abbot, or proud prior with his
lay brothers, his refectioners and sumptners, his baggagemules,
and led Andalusian jennets, and as the poet sung,


“With many a cross-bearer before,
And many a spear behind,”
who would greet them fairly in some shady nook beside the
sparkling brook or crystal well-head, and pray them of their
courtesy to alight and share his poor convent fare, no less
than the fattest haunch, the tenderest peacock, and the
purest wine of Gascony, on the soft green sward.

There, it would be a knot of sun-burned Saxon woodmen,
in their green frocks and buckram hose, with long bows in
their hands, short swords and quivers at their sides, and
bucklers of a span-breadth on their shoulders, men who had

[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]

never acknowledged Norman king, nor bowed to Norman
yoke, who would stand at gaze, marking the party, from the
jaws of some bosky dingle, too proud to yield a foot, yet too
few to attack; proving that to be well accompanied, in those
days, in Sherwood, was a matter less of pomp than of sound
policy. Anon, receiving notice of their approach from the
repeated bugle-blasts of his verdurers, as they passed each
successive mere or forest-station, a Norman knight or noble,
in his garb of peace, would gallop down some winding wood-path,
with his slender train scattering far behind him, to greet
his brother in arms, and pray him to grace his tower by refreshing
his company and resting his fair and gentle daughter
for a few days or hours, within its precincts.

In short, whether in the forest or in the open country,
scarcely an hour, never a day, was passed, without their encountering
some pleasant sight, some amusing incident, some
interesting adventure. There was a vast fund of romance in
the daily life of those olden days, an untold abundance of the
picturesque, not a little, indeed, of what we should call stage-effect,
in the ordinary habits and every-day affairs of men,
which we have now, in our busy, headlong race for affluence,
ambition, priority, in every thing good or evil, overlooked, if
not forgotten.

Life was in England then, as it was in France up to the
days of the Revolution, as it never has been at any time in
America, as it is nowhere now, and probably never will be
any where again, unless we return to the primitive, social
equality, and manful independence of patriarchal times; when
truth was held truth, and manhood manhood, the world over;
and some higher purpose in mortality was acknowledged than

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

the mere acquiring, some larger nobleness in man than the
mere possessing, of unprofitable wealth.

Much of life, then, was spent out of doors; the mid-day
meal, the mid-day slumber, the evening dance, were enjoyed,
alike by prince and peasant, under the shadowy forest-tree, or
the verdure of the trellised bower. The use of flowers was
universal; in every rustic festival, of the smallest rural hamlets,
the streets would be arched and garlanded with wreaths
of wild flowers; in every village hostelry, the chimney would
be filled with fresh greens, the board decked with eglantine
and hawthorn, the beakers crowned with violets and cowslips,
just as in our days the richest ball-rooms, the grandest banquet-halls,
are adorned with brighter, if not sweeter or more
beautiful, exotics.

The great in those days had not lost “that touch of nature”
which “makes the whole world kin” so completely, as to see
no grace in simplicity, to find no beauty in what is beautiful
alike to all, to enjoy nothing which can be enjoyed by others
than the great and wealthy.

The humble had not been, then, bowed so low that the
necessities had precluded all thought, all care, for the graces
of the existence of man.

If the division between the noble and the common of the
human race, as established by birth, by hereditary rank, by
unalterable caste, were stronger and deeper and less eradicable
than at this day, the real division, as visible in his nature,
between man and man, of the noble and the common, the
difference in his tastes, his enjoyments, his pleasures, his capacity
no less than his power of enjoying, was a mere nothing
then, to what it is to-day.

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

The servants, the very serfs, of aristocracy, in those days,
when aristocracy was the rule of blood and bravery, were not,
by a hundredth part, so far removed below the proudest of
their lords, in every thing that renders humanity graceful and
even glorious, in every thing that renders life enjoyable, as
are, at this day, the workers fallen below the employers, when
nobility has ceased to be, and aristocracy is the sway of capital,
untinctured with intelligence, and ignorant of gentleness
or grace.

It is not that the capitalist is richer, and the operative
poorer—though this is true to the letter—than was the prince,
than was the serf of those days. It is not only that the aristocrat
of capital, the noble by the grace of gold, is ten times
more arrogant, more insulting, more soulless, cold-hearted,
and calmly cruel, than the aristocrat of the sword, the noble
by the grace of God; and that the worker is worked more
hardly, clad more humbly, fed more sparely, than the villain
of the middle ages—though this, also, is true to the letter—
but it is, that the very tastes, the enjoyments, and the capacities
for enjoyment, in a word, almost the nature of the two
classes are altered, estranged, unalterably divided.

The rich and great have, with a few rare exceptions that
serve only to prove the rule, lost all taste for the simple, for
the natural, for the beautiful, unless it be the beautiful of art
and artifice; the poor and lowly have, for the most part, lost
all taste, all perception of the beautiful, of the graceful, in
any shape, all enjoyment of any thing beyond the tangible,
the sensual, the real.

Hence a division, which never can be reconciled. Both
classes have receded from the true nature of humanity, in the

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

two opposite directions, that they no longer even comprehend
the one the tastes of the other, and scarce have a desire or
a hope in common; for what the poor man most desires, a
sufficiency for his mere wants, physical and moral, the rich
man can not comprehend, never having known to be without
it; while the artificial nothings, for which the capitalist strives
and wrestles to the last, would be to his workman mere syllabub
and flummery to the tired and hungry hunter.

In those days the enjoyments, and, in a great measure, the
tastes, of all men were alike, from the highest to the lowest—
the same sports pleased them, the same viands, for the most
part, nourished, the same liquors enlivened them. Fresh meat
was an unusual luxury to the noble, yet not an impossible indulgence
to the lowest vassal; wine and beer were the daily,
the sole, beverages of all, differing only, and that not very
widely, in degree. The same love of flowers, processions, out-of-door
amusements, dances on the greensward, suppers in the
shade, were common to all, constantly enjoyed by all.

Now, it is certain, the enjoyments, the luxuries of the one
class—nay, the very delicacy of their tables, if attainable,
would be utterly distasteful to the other; and the rich soups,
the delicate-made dishes, the savor of the game, and the
purity of the light French and Rhenish wines, which are the
ne plus ultra of the rich man's splendid board, would be
even more distasteful to the man of the million, than would
be his beans and bacon and fire-fraught whisky to the palate
of the gaudy millionaire.

Throughout their progress, therefore, a thousand picturesque
adventures befell our party, a thousand romantic scenes were
presented by their halts for the noon-day repose, the coming

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

meal, or the nightly hour of rest, which never could now
occur, unless to some pleasure-party, purposely masquerading,
and aping the romance of other days.

Sometimes, when no convent, castle, hostelry, or hermitage,
lay on the day's route, the harbingers would select some picturesque
glen and sparkling fountain; and, when the party
halted at the spot, an extempore pavilion would be found
pitched, of flags and pennoncelles, outspread on a lattice-work
of lances, with war-cloaks spread for cushions, and flasks and
bottiaus cooling in the spring, and pasties and boar's meat,
venison and game, plates of silver and goblets of gold, spread
on the grass, amid pewter-platters and drinking-cups of horn,
a common feast for man and master, partaken with the same
appetite, hallowed by the same grace, enlivened by the same
minstrelsy and music, and enjoyed no less by the late-enfranchised
serfs, than by the high-born nobles to whom they owed
their freedom.

Sometimes, when it was known beforehand that they must
encamp for the night in the greenwood, the pages and waiting-women
would ride forward, in advance of the rest, with
the foragers, the baggage, and a portion of the light-armed
archery; and, when the shades of evening were falling, the
welcome watch-setting of the mellow-winded bugles would
bid the voyagers hail; and, as they opened some moon-lit
grassy glade, they would behold green bowers of leafy branches,
garlanded with wild roses and eglantine, and strewn with
dry, soft moss, and fires sparkling bright amid the shadows,
and spits turning before the blaze, and pots seething over it,
suspended from the immemorial gipsy tripods. And then
the horses would be unbridled, unladen, groomed, and

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

picketed, to feed on the rich forest herbage; and the evening meal
would be spread, and the enlivening wine-cup would go round,
and the forest chorus would be trolled, rendered doubly sweet
by the soft notes of the girls, until the bugles breathed a soft
good-night, and, the females of the party withdrawing to their
bowers of verdure, meet tiring rooms for Oberon and his wild
Titania, the men, from the haughty baron to the humblest
groom, would fold them in their cloaks, and sleep, with their
feet to the watch-fires, and their untented brows toward
heaven, until the woodlark, and the merle and mavis, earlier
even than the village chanticleer, sounded their forest reveillé.

p585-153 CHAPTER XIII. THE PROGRESS.

“Great mountains on his right hand,
Both does and roes, dun and red,
And harts aye casting up the head.
Bucks that brays and harts that hailes,
And hindes running into the fields,
And he saw neither rich nor poor,
But moss and ling and bare wild moor.”
Sir Eger, Sir Greysted, and Sir Gryme.

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

In this life there was much of that peculiar charm which
seems to pervade all mankind, of whatever class or country,
and in whatever hemisphere; which irresistibly impels him to
return to his, perhaps, original and primitive state, as a nomadic
being, a rover of the forest and the plain; which, while
it often seduces the refined and civilized man of cities to reject
all the conveniences and luxuries of polite life, for the excitement
and freshness, the inartificial liberty and self-confiding
independence of semi-barbarism, has never been known to allow
the native savage to renounce his freeborn instincts, or to
abandon his natural and truant disposition, for all the advantage,
all the powers, conferred by civilization.

And if, even to the freeborn and lofty-minded noble, the
careless, unconventional, equalizing life of the forest was felt
as giving a stronger pulsation to the free heart, a wider

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

expansion to the lungs, a deeper sense of freedom and power, how
must not the same influences have been enjoyed by those, who
now, for the first time since they were born, tasted that mysterious
thing, liberty—of which they had so often dreamed,
for which they had longed so wistfully, and of which they had
formed, indeed, so indefinite an idea—for it is one of the particulars
in the very essence of liberty, as it is, perhaps, of that
kindred gift of God, health, that although all men talk of it as
thing well understood and perfectly appreciated, not one man
in ten understands or appreciates it in the least, unless he has
once enjoyed it, and then been deprived of its possession.

It is true that, personally, neither Kenric nor Edith had
ever known what it is to be free; but they came of a free,
nay! even of an educated stock, and, being children of that
Northern blood, which never has long brooked even the suspicion
of slavery, and, in some sort, of the same race with
their conquerors and masters, they had never ceased to feel
the consciousness of inalienable rights; the galling sense of
injustice done them, of humiliating degradation inflicted on
them, by their unnatural position among, but not of, their fellows;
had never ceased to hope, to pray, and to labor for a
restitution to those self-existing and immutable rights—the
rights, I mean, of living for himself, laboring for himself, acquiring
for himself, holding for himself, thinking, judging,
acting for himself, pleasing and governing himself, so long as
he trench not on the self-same right of others—to which the
meanest man that is born of a woman is entitled, from the
instant when he is born into the world, as the heir of God and
nature.

The Saxon serf was, it is true, a being fallen, debased,

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

partially brutalized, deprived of half the natural qualities of manhood,
by the state of slavery, ignorance, and imbecility, into
which he had been deforced, and in which he was willfully detained
by his masters; but he had not yet become so utterly
degraded, so far depressed below the lowest attributes of humanity,
as to acquiesce in his own debasement, much less to
rejoice in his bondage for the sake of the flesh-pots of Egypt,
or to glory in his chains, and honor the name of master.

From this misery, from this last perversion and profanation
of the human intellect divine—the being content to be a slave—
the Saxon serf had escaped thus far; and, thanks to the
great God of nature, of revelation, that last curse, that last
profanation, he escaped forever. His body the task-master
had enslaved; his intellect he had emasculated, debased,
shaken, but he had not killed it; for there, there, amid the
dust and ashes of the all-but-extinguished fire, there lurked
alive, ready to be enkindled by a passing breath into a devouring
flame, the sacred spark of liberty.

Ever hoping, ever struggling to be free, when the day
dawned of freedom, the Saxon slave was fit to be free, and became
free, with no fierce outbreak of servile rage and vengeance,
consequent on servile emancipation, but with the calm
although enthusiastical gladness which fitted him to become a
freeman, a citizen, and, as he is, the master of one half of the
round world. It is not, ah! it is not the chain, it is not the
lash, it is not the daily toil, it is not the disruption of domestic
ties and affections, that prove, that constitute the sin, the
sorrow, and the shameful reproach of slavery.

Ah! no. But it is the very converse of these—the very
point insisted on so complacently, proclaimed so triumphantly,

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

by the advocates of this accursed thing—it is that, in spite of
the chain, in spite of the lash, in spite of the enforced labor,
in spite of the absence or disruption of family ties and affections,
the slave is sleek, satisfied, self-content; that he waxes
fat among the flesh-pots; that he comes fawning to the smooth
words, and frolies, delighted, fresh from the lash of his master,
in no wise superior to the spaniel, either in aspiration or in
instinct. It is in that he envies not the free man his freedom,
but, in his hideous lack of all self-knowledge, self-reliance,
self-respect, is content to be a slave, content to eat, and grow
fat and die, without a present concern beyond the avoidance
of corporeal pain and the enjoyment of sensual pleasure, without
an aspiration for the future, beyond those of the beasts,
which graze and perish.

It is in this that lies the mortal sin, the never-dying reproach,
of him who would foster, would preserve, would propagate,
the curse of slavery; not that he is a tyrant over the
body, but that he is a destroyer of the soul—that he would
continue a state of things which reduces a human being, a fellow-man,
whether of an inferior race or no—for, as of congenerous
cattle there are many distinct tribes, so of men, and
of Caucasian men too, there be many races, distinct in physical,
in moral, in animal, in intellectual qualities, as well as
in color and conformation, if not distinct in origin—to the
level of the beast which knoweth not whence he cometh or
whither he goeth, nor what is to him for good, or what for
evil, which hopes not to rise or to advance, either here or
hereafter, but toils day after day, contented with his daily
food, and lies down to sleep, and rises up to labor and to feed,
as if God had created man with no higher purpose than to

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

sleep and eat alternately, until the night cometh from which,
on earth, there shall be no awakening.

But of this misery the Saxon serf was exempt: and, to do
him justice, of this reproach was the Norman conqueror exempt
also. Of the use of arms, and the knowledge of warfare,
he indeed deprived his serfs, for as they outnumbered him by
thousands in the field, equalled him in resolution, perhaps excelled
him in physical strength, to grant such knowledge
would have been to commit immediate suicide—but of no
other knowledge, least of all of the knowledge that leads to
immortality, did he strive to debar him. Admittance to holy
orders was patent to the lowest Saxon, and in those days the
cloister was the gate to all knowledge sacred or profane, to all
arts, all letters, all refinements, and above all to that knowledge
which is the greatest power—the knowledge of dealing
with the human heart, to govern it—the knowledge, which so
often set the hempen sandal of the Saxon monk upon the
mailed neck of the Norman king, and which, in the very
reign of which I write, had raised a low-born man of the
common Saxon race to be Archbishop of Canterbury, the
keeper of the conscience of the king, the primate, and for a
time the very ruler of the realm.

Often, indeed, did the superior knowledge of the cowled
Saxon avenge on his masters the wrongs of his enslaved
brethren; and while the learned priesthood of the realm were
the brethren of its most abject slaves, no danger that those
slaves should ever become wholly ignorant, hopeless, or degraded—
and so it was seen in the end; for that very knowledge
which it was permitted to the servile race to gain, while
it taught them to cherish and fitted them to deserve freedom,

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

in the end won it for them; at the expense of no floods of
noble blood, through the sordure and soil of no savage Saturnalia,
such as marked the emancipation alike of the white
serfs of revolutionized France, and the black slaves of disenthralled
St. Domingo.

And so it was seen in the deportment of Kenric the serf,
and of the slave girl Edith, even in these first days of their
newly-acquired freedom.

Self-respect they had never lost altogether; and their increased
sense of it was shown in the increased gravity and
calmness and becomingness of their deportment.

Slaves may be merry, or they may be sullen. But they
can not be thoughtful, or calm, or careworn. The French,
while they were feudal slaves, before the Revolution, were the
blithest, the most thoughtless, the merriest, and most frolic-some,
of mortals; they had no morrows for which to take
care, no liberties which to study, no rights which to guard.
The English peasant was then, as the French is fast becoming
now, grave rather than frivolous, a thinker more than a
fiddler, a doer very much more than a dancer. Was he, is
he, the less happy, the less respectable, the lower in the scale
of intellect, that he is the farther from the monkey, and the
nearer to the man?

The merriment, the riotous glee, the absolute abandonment
of the plantation African to the humor, the glee of the moment,
is unapproached by any thing known of human mirthfulness.

The gravity, the concentrated thought, the stern abstractedness,
the careworn aspect of the free American is proverbial—
the first thing observable in him by foreigners. He has

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

more to guard, more at which to aspire, more on which he
prides himself, at times almost boastfully, more for which to
respect himself, at times almost to the contempt of others,
than any mortal man, his co-equal, under any other form of
government, on any other soil. Is he the less happy for his
cares, or would he change them for the recklessness of the
well-clad, well-fed slave—for the thoughtlessness of the first
subject in a despotic kingdom?

Kenric had been always a thinker, though a serf; his elder
brother had been a monk, a man of strong sense and some
attainment; his mother had been the daughter of one who
had known, if he had lost, freedom. With his mother's milk
he had imbibed the love of freedom; from his brother's love
and teachings he had learned what a freeman should be; by
his own passionate and energetic will he had determined to
become free. He would have become so ere long, had not
accident anticipated his resolve; for he had laid by, already,
from the earnings of his leisure hours, above one half of the
price whereby to purchase liberty. He was now even more
thoughtful and calmer; but his step was freer, his carriage
bolder, his head was erect. He was neither afraid to look a
freeman in the eye, nor to render meet deference to his superior.
For the freeman ever knows, nor is ashamed to acknowledge,
that while the equality of man in certain rights,
which may be called, for lack of a better title, natural and
political, is co-existent with himself, inalienable, indefeasible,
immutable, and eternal, there is no such thing whatever, nor
can ever be, as the equality of man in things social, more than
there can be in personal strength, grace, or beauty, in the
natural gifts of intellect, or in the development of wisdom.

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

Of him who boasts that he has no superior, it may almost be
said that he has few inferiors.

Thereof Kenric—as he rode along with his harness on his
back, and his weapons in his hand, a freeman among freemen,
a feudal retainer among the retainers, some Norman, some
Saxon, of his noble lord—was neither louder, nor noisier,
nor more exultant, perhaps the reverse, than his wont,
though happier far than he had conceived it possible for him
to be.

And by his bearing, his comrades and fellows judged him,
and ruled their own bearing toward him. The Saxons of the
company naturally rejoiced to see their countryman free by
his own merit, and, seeing him in all things their equal, gladly
admitted him to be so. The haughtier Normans, seeing that
he bore his bettered fortunes as became a man, ready for
either fortune, admitted him as one who had won his freedom
bravely, and wore it as if it had been his from his birth—they
muttered beneath their thick mustaches, that he deserved to
be a Norman.

Edith, on the contrary, young yet, and unusually handsome,
who had been the pet of her own people, and the favorite of
her princely masters, who had never undergone any severe
labor, nor suffered any poignant sorrow, who knew nothing of
the physical hardships of slavery, more than she did of the
real and tangible blessings of liberty, had ever been as happy
and playful as a kitten, and as tuneful as a bird among the
branches.

But now her voice was silent of spontaneous song, subdued
in conversation, full fraught with a suppressed deeper feeling.
The very beauty of the fair face was changed, soberer, more

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

hopeful, farther seeing, full no longer of an earthly, but more
with something of an angel light.

The spirit had spoken within her, the statue had learned
that it had a soul.

And Guendolen had noted, yet not fully understood the
change or its nature. More than once she had called her to
her bridle-rein and conversed with her, and tried to draw her
out, in vain. At last, she put the question frankly—

“You are quieter, Edith, calmer, sadder, it seems to me,”
she said, “than I have ever seen you, since I first came to
Waltheofstow. I have done all that lies in me to make you
happy, and I should be sorry that you were sad or discontented.”

“Sad, discontented! Oh! no, lady, no!” she replied, smiling
among her tears. “Only too happy—too happy, to be
loud or joyous. All happiest things, I think, have a touch of
melancholy in them. Do you think, lady, yonder little
stream,” pointing to one which wound along by the roadside,
now dancing over shelvy rapids, now sleeping in silent eddies,
“is less happy where it lies calm and quiet, reflecting heaven's
face from its deep bosom, and smiling with its hundred
tranquil dimples, than where it frolics and sings among the
pebbles, or leaps over the rocks which toss it into noisy foam-wreaths?
No! lady, no. There it gathers its merriment and
its motion, from the mere force of outward causes; here it collects
itself from the depth of its own heart, and manifests its
joy and love, and thanks God in silence. It is so with me,
Lady Guendolen. My heart is too full for music, but not too
shallow to reflect boundless love and gratitude forever.”

The lady smiled, and made some slight reply, but she was

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

satisfied; for it was evident that the girl's poetry and gratitude
both came direct from her heart; and in the smile of
the noble demoiselle there was a touch of half-satiric triumph,
as she turned her quick glance to Sir Yvo, who had heard all
that passed, and asked him, slyly, “And do you, indeed,
think, gentle father, that these Saxons are so hopelessly
inferior, that they are fitting for nothing but mere toil; or is
this the mere inspiration that springs from the sense of freedom?”

“I think, indeed,” he replied, “that my little Guendolen is
but a spoiled child at the best; and, as to my thoughts in regard
to the Saxons, them I shall best consult my peace
of mind and pocket by keeping my own property; since, by
our Lady's Grace! you may take it into your head to have all
the serfs in the north emancipated; and that is a little beyond
my powers of purchase. But see, Guendolen, see how the
sunbeams glint and glitter yonder on the old tower of Barden,
and how redly it stands out from those purple clouds
which loom so dark and thunderous over the peaceful woods
of Bolton. Give your jennet her head, girl, and let her canter
over these fair meadows, that we may reach the abbey and
taste the noble prior's hospitality before the thunder gust is
upon us.”

And quickening its pace, the long train wound its way
upward, by the bright waters of the beautiful Wharfe, and
speedily obtained the shelter, and the welcome they expected
from the good and generous monks of Bolton, the noblest
abbaye in the loveliest dale of all the broad West Riding.

The next morning found them traversing the broken green
country that lies about the head of the romantic Eyre, and

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threading the wild passes of Ribbledale, beneath the shadow
of the misty peaks of Pennigant and Ingleborough, swathed
constantly in volumed vapor, whence the clanging cry of the
eagle, as he wheeled far beyond the ken of mortal eyes, came
to the ears of the voyagers, on whom he looked securely
down as he rode the storm.

That night, no castle or abbey, no village even, with its
humble hostelry, being, in those days, to be found among
those wild fells and deep valleys, bowers were built of the
materials with which the hillsides were plentifully feathered
throughout that sylvan and mountainous district, of which
the old proverbial distich holds good to this very day:


“O! the oak, the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish best at home in the north countree.”
Young sprouts of the juniper, soft ferns, and the delicious
purple heather, now in its most luxurious flush of summer
bloom and perfume, furnished agreeable and elastic couches;
and, as the stores carried by the sumpter mules had been
replenished by the large hospitality of the prior of Bolton,
heronshaw and egret, partridge and moorgame, wildfowl and
venison, furnished forth their board, with pasties of carp and
eels, and potted trout and char from the lakes whither they
were wending, and they fared most like crowned heads
within the precincts of a royal city, there, under the shadow
of the gray crags and bare storm-beaten brow of bleak
Whernside, there where, in this nineteenth century, the belated
wayfarer would deem himself thrice happy, if he secured
the rudest supper of oat-cakes and skim-milk cheese, with a
draught of thin ale, the luxuries of the hardy agricultural
population of the dales.

p585-164 CHAPTER XIV. THE NEW HOME.

“Sweetly blows the haw and the rowan-tree,
Wild roses speck our thickets sae briery;
Still, still will our walk in the green-wood be—
Oh, Jeanie! there 's nothing to fear ye.”
Hogg's Ballads.

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

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,


— “neither rich, nor poor,
But moss, and ling, and bare wild moor,”
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

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

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 mountainash,
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.

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

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.

p585-171 CHAPTER XV. THE OLD HOME.

“Your knight for his lady pricks forth in career,
And is brought home at even-song, pricked through with a spear.”
Ivanhoe.

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

That was a dark day for Eadwulf, on which the train of
Sir Yvo de Taillebois departed from the tower of Waltheofstow;
and thenceforth the discontented, dark-spirited man
became darker, more morose and gloomy, until his temper
had got to such a pass that he was shunned and avoided by
every one, even of his own fellows.

It is true, that in the condition of slavery, in the being one
of a despised and a detested caste, in being compelled to
labor for the benefit of others than himself, in the being liable
at any moment to be sold, together with the glebe to which he
is attached for life, like the ox or ass with which he toils as a
companion, there is not much to promote contentedness, to
foster a quiet, placable, and gentle disposition, to render any
man more just, or grateful, or forbearing to his fellows. Least
of all is it so, where there is in the slave just enough of
knowledge, of civilization, of higher nurture, to enable him to
desire freedom in the abstract, to pine for it as a right denied,
and to hate those by whom he is deprived of it, without

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

comprehending its real value, or in the least appreciating
either the privileges which it confers or the duties which it
imposes on the freeman—least of all, when the man has from
nature received a churlish, gloomy, sullen temperament, such
as would be likely to make to itself a fanciful adversity out
of actual prosperity, to resent all opposition to its slightest
wish as an injury, and to envy, almost to the length of hating,
every one more fortunate than himself.

It may, however, as all other conditions of inferiority, of
sorrow, or of suffering, be rendered lighter and more tolerable
by the mode of bearing it. Not that one would desire to see
any man, whether reduced by circumstances to that condition,
or held to it from his birth, so far reduced to a tame and
senseless submission as to accept it as his natural state, or to
endure it apathetically, without an effort at raising himself to
his proper position in the scale of humanity and nature.

It is perfectly consistent with the utmost abhorrence of the
condition, and the most thorough determination to escape
from it by any means lawful to a Christian, to endure what
is unavoidable, and to do that which must be done, bravely,
patiently, well, and therefore nobly.

But it was not in the nature of Eadwulf to take either part.
His rugged, stubborn, animal character, was as little capable
of forming any scheme for his own prospective liberation, to
which energy, and a firm, far-reaching will, should be the
agents, as it was either to endure patiently or to labor well.

Perpetually remiss, working reluctantly and badly, ever a
recusant, a recreant, a sullen and morose grumbler, while he
in no respect lightened, but, it is probable, rather enhanced
his difficulties, he detracted from what slight hope there

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

might exist of his future emancipation, by carefully, as it
would seem, conciliating the ill-opinion and ill-will of all
men, whether his equals or his superiors—while he entirely
neglected to earn or amass such small sums as might be within
his reach, and as might perhaps, in the end, suffice to purchase
his liberation.

So long as Kenric and his mother remained in the hamlet
of Waltheofstow, and he was permitted to associate with them
in their quarter, in consequence of the character for patience,
honesty, fidelity, and good conduct, which his brother had
acquired with his masters, Eadwulf's temper had been in some
sort restrained by the influence, unconfessed indeed, and only
half-endured with sullen reluctance, which that brother obtained
over him, through his clearer and stronger intellect.
But when they had departed, and when he found himself
ejected, as a single man in the first place, and yet more as one
marked for a bad servant and a dangerous character, from the
best cottage in the quarter, to which he had begun to fancy
himself of right entitled, he became worse and worse, until,
even in the sort of barrack or general lodging of the male
slaves of the lowest order, he was regarded by his fellows as
the bad spirit of the set, and was never sought by any, unless as
the ringleader in some act of villainy, wickedness, or rebellion.

It is probable, moreover, that the beauty and innocence of
Edith, who, however averse she might be to the temper and
disposition of the man, had been wont, since her betrothal to
his brother, to treat him with a certain friendship and familiarity,
might have had some influence in modifying his manner,
at least, and curbing the natural display of his passionate yet
sullen disposition.

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