The Icknield Way

by Edward Thomas

A noble brave sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name.

White Horse Hill.

Many have heard it and thought it just one of the best, perhaps the princeliest, of hunting songs. With a little change it might have been a battle song; for it was martial and high-tempered, and would launch cavalry as well as huntsmen. It was a little too nervously quick and dancing for a battle song; such pace, such height of spirit could not endure. Yet the trumpets before a charge have often brought the song into the hearts of young soldiers, and their chargers and they have done extravagant things for the gay tune’s sake. It suggested the haughtiness and celerity of youth, audacious and fantastic pleasures, voices of command and laughter, many-coloured and all splendid dresses, neighing and prancing horses, hounds lazily quarrelling in the sun, gallant March weather. The gates of a castle stood all wide open for the first time since the beginning of winter, and arrowy winds and humid fragrance were invading the stale shadows. As the first flowers break out of the old, dark earth, so the youths and maidens with their purple and gold, green and white, broke out of this old, dark castle upon the Welsh moorland. The sharp horseshoes trampled the first green of spring and the first yellow blossoms, even as the riders would trample the hearts of men and women, and as freely upon their own hearts, their own strength and health and happiness. The sunlight played like a thousand sprites, on rippling waters, on the gold and silver ornaments of riders and horses, on horns of gold. Bright as the sun, clear as the west wind, joyous as the heart of man and hound and horse sounded the horns.

There was nothing more in the three verses, there seemed little more in the melody. After a little talk and much laughter and shouting with deep and shrill voices, blowing of horns, cheering, and chiding of steeds, summoning and urging of hounds, they rode away. They climbed the wild hills and saw an angry sea of yet wilder hills in the distance. They descended into the rich vales. They scattered joyfully. They gathered together as joyfully. They feasted until better than any wit or beauty or adventure seemed sleep. Then they slept.

Other listeners to the song might think rather of a later hunt assembling before a cheerful Georgian mansion with many windows, and behind one of them a lady playing “Caradoc’s Hunt” on a spinet, and warbling it in Saxon. I thought of such a one as I heard the invisible lady playing at Sparsholt.

Others, again, would be content with nothing later than the age of chivalry and the Mabinogion. The hunters would all be auburn or yellow-haired young men. They are clad in yellow tunics, green hose, and shoes of parti-coloured leather clasped at the instep with gold. Some carry bows of ivory strung with deer sinews, the shafts of whalebone headed with gold and winged with peacock’s feathers. Others have silver-headed spears of ash-wood coloured azure. All wear whalebone-hafted and gold-hilted daggers and horns of ivory. Their hunting is earnest, though elaborated with much decoration of custom, style, and ceremony. They are men who must go hungry but for the chase. They run or ride to hunt the stag or the boar, and nobly beautiful and blithe look they as they begin to move away from the castle, and their tall, brindled white-breasted greyhounds, wearing collars of rubies, are sporting like sea-swallows from side to side of them. But they may encounter foes instead of quarry; they may kill or be killed by young braves from other borders. So with all the gallantry of dress and harping there is something grim in their going forth; nor is it idle bombast for one among them to ride out carrying only what he calls the mightiest of all weapons—the harp—on which he plays “Caradoc’s Hunt” at the starting.

These things and others, according to the singer and the hearer, the song readily suggested. But they are mistaken who are contented by these suggestions, sufficient as they are for a warm summer’s morning in a green lane. They are deceived by the qualities which “Caradoc’s Hunt” has in common with other hunting songs, especially by the galloping rhythm and the notes like a challenge of horns. Even when that boastful riding harper played it the tune was old. He was a bard, and though he played it for the young hunters for the flashes of gaiety and mettle upon its surface, it intrigued his own heart with a rich mystery of antiquity. Already legend as well as the bards and harpers had begun to play with the melody. It was said, for example, to have been the favourite hunting song of the “Lady of the Night” in her earthly days, and even that she sang it, or had it sung and harped to her, now that she was an inhabitant of night and the underworld. Solitary, benighted peasants or travellers saw her black hair streaming over her green vest and crimson mantle as she galloped fiercely over the mountains or in the heavens. Her horse was white. She hallooed as she rode in a wild voice, at times harsh and abrupt like a heron’s, at others clear and laughing like a wood-owl’s. The hounds streamed after her, howling in tumultuous chorus, and the sound grew louder as the pack raced farther and farther away. They were the hounds of the underworld. They followed her in a stream or fan as closely as if the foremost held the tip of her mantle. In some packs the hounds were small, and were white all over except the shells of their ears, which were rose-coloured; and they had eyes like lighted pearls. Some were black with red spots, others red with black spots. There were also hounds all blood-red, with eyes of flame. They hunted the spirits of men destined to die soon, or of the dead who were unfit either for heaven or for hell. They prophesied deaths and calamity. However fierce, they were always even frantically joyous, but some thought the hallooing of the lady was often close to lamentation. Only when the sound of “Caradoc’s Hunt” was heard was she as joyous as her hounds. Her sadness made it believed in places that she was no huntress at all, but the quarry, or at least that she hunted for a punishment, that she was doomed by god or devil thus to flee all night through cloudland or the most desert regions of earth. Hunting or hunted, it was certain that she was powerless to change her fate. Hunting was what she most loved on earth. Perhaps she still loved it, or she was being punished for the crime of pride or immoderate love of the chase. One story was that she had been very beautiful and vain of her beauty, and on her death-bed had exacted a promise to bury her in her most radiant apparel. Another story, more venerable, was that she had so loved hunting as to cry out once in a strong passion: “I care nothing for heaven if I cannot hunt there.” When she died, therefore, her spirit was cursed with an everlasting compulsion to slake this most dear desire. She had to hunt eternally with the hounds of the underworld. When she heard “Caradoc’s Hunt” she could not but start or follow the chase. “If I forget ‘Caradoc’s Hunt,’ then I shall be dead indeed,” she said. “I shall be quiet and sleepy as anyone else among the ghosts.” When men saw her dark eyes flashing at thought of the song they could not believe that if anything of this beautiful creature was to survive the immortal remnant would not take with it “Caradoc’s Hunt.” She heard it at many different and some monstrous times. People thought that the tune was in her head, but she averred that she heard it outside—in the clouds or the trees or the hallooing woods—and her immediate attendants knew this to be true. She would break away from marriage or funeral to ride. She would suddenly rise up from mass to mount. She would dress at dead of night, uncouple the hounds, and hunt alone. Love, wine, sleep, religion were impotent against the melody. Everyone admitted that it was a beautiful melody; they called it gay, or spirited, or said that it was perfectly suitable to a knightly company of riders. This lady heard it and rode away. Hers was not the fate of the lord of Radnor Castle. He and his hounds impiously passed the night in the church of Llan-Avan, near Builth, to be near the day’s coverts early; but when he rose at the dawn he found himself blinded and his hounds mad, so that he escaped only with difficulty, to earn pardon by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The lady’s life was charmed. She rode anywhere without fear. She died young, but it was in bed. On horseback she could defy man or God.

Such was the Lady of the Night, and her legend was at least not unworthy of “Caradoc’s Hunt.” But as the belief in the hounds of the underworld is earlier than the Middle Ages and the ghostly hunter in darkness more venerable than the Norman lady, so is the tune. The legend might have grown to explain the tune, and it does help to illuminate the depths of which the surviving words, the mere cheerful chivalry, are no more than the glancing surface. But the tune has depth under depth, and when it is heard the plummet of the soul sinks to a profound far below the region of the lady who rides by night. What darkness the plummet fathoms, what “bottom of the monstrous world” it touches, is not to be understood. Perhaps the mystery is only that which at once haloes and enshrouds common things when we no longer feel them as common. But if at the sounding of the melody the mind’s eye still sees a cavalcade of antique hunters, it is not stag or boar or questing beast that they are to follow; the castle that sends them out of its gates and may receive them at nightfall is no feudal or faery stronghold, but an image, perhaps, of the great world itself.