Then with no more words, led by Heraud, they left the boat and stole silently up the hill in the dark.
An archer remained in the boat to guard it and to help them to find it again.
Hyla retired into his hut about half-past eight. He had been working all day, cleaning out pig-styes and carting the manure to the ditch which ran north of the village, and which served as a slight defence, and also as a storing place for fertilizing material to spread upon the fields. A strange occupation, perhaps, for a man who had but lately done a deed of such moment, and who was more than half a hero! But he had been set to this work purposely by the monks, who knew human nature, and thought it best for the man. The monks were the only psychologists in the twelfth century.
With some men this would have been wise, no doubt, but to Hyla's credit it should be said that he thought very little about himself. His rather heavy, sullen manner may easily have conveyed a false impression as to his own estimate of himself, but he was humble enough in reality.
In fact, Hyla was too humble, and more so than befitted his strong nature. He cleaned the filth from the styes with never a thought that he might be better or more profitably employed. And in this fact we have another vivid expression of the psychology of serfdom.
The only certain way in which it is possible to get at the inner meaning of a period in history, is by the comparison of the attitude of an individual brain towards his time, and the attitude of a general type of brain. The individual with the point of view must, of course, be a known quantity.
Historians, I am certain, have not yet entirely realised this simple and beautiful method. Properly understood, it is as mathematically exact as any comparative method can possibly be. It is the way in which history will be written in the future when the modern Headmaster-Historian will no longer be allowed to write an "epoch" and dispose of the two first editions entirely among the boys of his own school.
Of its extreme fascination as a pursuit the cultured cannot speak too highly. It combines the pleasures of the laboratory with the pleasures of psychology, and never was Science so happily wedded to Art.
Here is a trifling case in point. Friend Hyla—whose temperament we know something of—felt no degradation in cleaning out the pig-stye, although he had just done a great and noble thing. We know Hyla as a man very far from perfect. We know him subject to the ordinary failings of mankind. Why, then, was Hyla content? The answer supplies us with a luminous exposition of serfdom as a social state, how stern a thing it was, how bitter. Pages of rhetoric could give no better explanation of that hard fact.
So Hyla had been quite content, and as the sun was setting he sat down outside his hut with his wife on one side and his daughter on the other, as happy as a man could be. Bread and meat lay upon the ground by his side. A cow's horn full of Welsh ale was stuck into the turf by him. He was now working for kind masters who would not beat him or ill-treat his womankind. His hut was weather-proof, his food was excellent, and the peace of the holy life near by was stealing over him, and he was at last at rest. The peace of it all was like a cup of cold water to a poor man dying of thirst.