Wager of Battle: A Tale of Saxon Slavery in Sherwood Forest

by Henry William Herbert

So the lovers were obliged to decline into hopes of some indefinite future chance; and did decline into despondent and listless apathy, until, two days only before that appointed for the departure of the company into Lancashire, fortune or fate, which you will, thought fit to take the whole matter into its own hands, and to decide the much-vexed question of the championship by the misstep of a stumbling palfrey.

After having ridden all day long on a stout, sure-footed cob, which he had backed for ten years, without knowing him to make a solitary blunder, marking trees for felling, and laying out new plantations with his foresters, Sir Yvo was wending his way toward the castle gates, across the great home-park, when, a small blind ditch crossing his path, he put the pony at it in a canter.

Startled by some deer, which rose up suddenly out of the long fern, growing thick among the oak-trees, the pony shyed, set his forefeet in the middle of the drain, and came down on his head, throwing his heavy rider heavily on the hard frozen ground.

A dislocated shoulder was the consequence; and, though it was speedily reduced, and no ill consequences followed, the surgeons declared that it was impossible that the knight should support his armor, or wield a sword, within two months; and thus, perforce, Guendolen had her way; and it was decided that Aradas should be admitted to the perilous distinction of maintaining the charge, in the wager of battle.

Strange times! when to be permitted to engage in a conflict, in which there was no alternative but victory, or infamy and death, was esteemed a favor, and was sought for, as a boon, not by strong men and soldiers only, but by delicate and gentle girls, in behalf of their betrothed lovers, as a mode of winning los on earth, and glory everlasting in the heavens.

Yet so it was; and when it was told to Guendolen, that her lover was nominated to that dreadful enterprise, a blush, indeed, mantled to her cheek, and a thrill ran through all her quivering frame, and an unbidden tear trembled in her beautiful clear eye; but the blush, and the thrill, and the tear, were of pride and excitement, not of fear or compassion; and the lady never slept sounder or more sweetly than on that eventful night, when she learned that, beyond a peradventure, her true love would be sleeping, within ten little days, under a bloody and dishonorable sod, or living, the winner of those golden-spurs and of her own peerless beauties.

There was, however, a strange mixture of simple and fervent faith in those days, with an infinitely larger amount of coarse and open wickedness, violence, and vice, than, perhaps, ever prevailed in any other age. And while the moral restraint on men's conduct and actions, arising from a sense of future responsibility and retribution, was vastly inferior to what now exists, owing to the open sale of indulgences, absolutions, and dispensations, and the other abominable corruptions of the Romish church, the belief in temporal judgments, and the present interference of divine justice in the affairs of men, was almost universal.

Infidelity in those days was a madness utterly unknown; and an atheist, materialist, or any phase of what we now call a free-thinker, would have been regarded with greater wonder than the strangest physical monster. It is not too much to say, that there were not in that day twenty men in England, who did not believe in the real efficacy of the ordeals, whether by water, fire, or battle, in discovering the truth, or one in a thousand who would not be half-defeated, before entering the lists, by the belief that God was fighting against him, or strengthened unto victory by the confidence that his cause was just.

One of these one men in a thousand it was, however, about to be the fortune of Aradas de Ratcliffe to encounter, in the person of Sir Foulke d'Oilly; but this he neither knew, nor would have thought of twice, had he known it. However hardened the heart of his adversary might be by the petrifying effects of habitual vice, however dulled his conscience by impunity and arrogance and self-relying contumacy, his own was so strongly panoplied in conscious honesty, so bucklered by confidence in his own good cause, so puissant by faith in God, that he no more feared what the might of that bad man could do against him, than he doubted the creed of Christ and his holy apostles.

Nor less was the undoubting assurance of the lady of his love, in whom, to her faith in divine justice, to her absolute conviction of d'Oilly's damning guilt, was added that over-weening confidence in her lover's absolute superiority, not only to all other men in general, but to every other man individually, which was common to love-sick ladies in those days of romance and chivalry.