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

by Henry William Herbert

She loved him but alone."

The Not-Browne Mayde.

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 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 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 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 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.