"Forbear! Here comes the Sheriff!"
"Run for it, Master Hardy--they are the lords Greenly talked of!"
"Away--away, good yeomen!" all uttered at once, gave notice to the gentlemen in green that some formidable enemy was in the rear.
In a moment after, two or three gentlemen of distinguished port, riding slowly at the head of some fifty horsemen, came down the road upon the green; and Hardy, as he was called, seeing that the day was no longer his own, was passing across to join his companions on the other side, when Richard de Ashby cast himself in his way, and aimed a blow at him with his sword. The stout yeoman parried it easily with his staff, and struck his opponent on the chest with the sharp end of the pole, thus clearing a path by which he soon placed himself at the head of the foresters.
"Come with us, Harland," he cried, "you will be safer away."
Richard de Ashby, however, shouting aloud, and waving his hand to the party of gentlemen who were advancing, soon brought some of them to his side. "Stop them! stop them!" he cried, pointing to the men in green. "I have been grossly ill used, and well-nigh murdered!--Let your men go round, my lord, and cut them off."
A word, a sign, from an elderly man at the head of the party, instantly set some twenty of the horsemen into a gallop, to cut off the foresters from the road to the church. They, on their part, took the matter very calmly, however, unslinging their bows, bending them, and laying an arrow on the string of each, with a degree of deliberation which shewed that they were not unaccustomed to such encounters.
The villagers however, scattered like a flock of sheep at these intimations of an approaching fray; the girls and the women, screaming, and running, and tumbling down, took refuge in the neighbouring houses, or ran away up the road. The greater part of the men decamped more slowly, looking back from time to time to see what was going on; while some six or seven stout peasants and the yeomen stood gathered together under one of the trees, armed, in some instances, with swords and bows, and one or two displaying a quarter-staff, but all seeming very well disposed to take part in the fray, on one side or the other.
Things were in this state, and that hesitating pause had intervened which usually precedes the first blow in a strife of any kind, when the priest, who had been seen before to quit his house, now hurried forward to the group of gentlemen who, without dismounting from their horses, had gathered round Richard de Ashby. His errand was, of course, to preach peace and forbearance; and although his face was round and rosy, his body stout, and indicating strongly a life of ease and a fondness for good things, it is but justice to say, that he not only urged the necessity of quiet and tranquillity with eagerness and authority, but he rated Richard de Ashby boldly for his conduct in the village, and showed that ho knew a great deal more of his proceedings than was at all pleasant to that personage.
"Sir, you are one of those," he said, "who are ever ready to play the fool with a poor village coquette, who, if in riding through a place they see a poor girl proud of a neat ankle or a jimp waist, are ever ready to take advantage of her vanity to work her ruin; and if such men put themselves in danger, and get a broken head, they must take the consequences, without running on to bloodshed and murder."