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

by Henry William Herbert

It may be added, that so thick and massive were the walls at this almost inaccessible height, that galleries had been, as it were, scooped out of them, offering easy communication from one room to another, and even private staircases from story to story, with secret closets large enough for the accommodation of a favorite page or waiting-damsel, where nothing of the sort would be expected, or could indeed exist, within a modern dwelling.

Thus, the inconveniences of such an abode, all except the height to which it was necessary for the female inmates to climb, were more imaginary than real; and it was perfectly easy, and indeed usual, for the ladies of such a castle to pass to and fro from the rooms of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, and even from the knights' hall to their own bower, without meeting any of the retainers of the place, except what may be called the peaceful and familiar servants of the household.

Through the thick-vaulted roofs of stone, which rendered every story of the keep a separate fortress, no sound of arms, of revelry or riot, could ascend to the region of the ladies; and if their comforts were inferior to those of our modern beauties, their magnificence, their splendor of costume, of equipage, of followings, their power at home, and their influence abroad, where they shone as "Queens of Love and Beauty," were held the arbiters of fame and dispensers of honor, where their smiles were held sufficient guerdon for all wildest feats of bravery, their tears expiable by blood only, their importance in the outer world of arms, of romance, of empire, were at the least as far superior; and it may be doubted, whether some, even the most spoiled of our modern fair ones, would not sigh to exchange, with the dames and demoiselles of the twelfth century, their own soft empire of the ball-room for the right to hold Courts of Love, as absolute unquestioned sovereigns, to preside at tilt and tournament, and send the noblest and the most superb of champions into mortal combat, or yet more desperate adventure, by the mere promise of a sleeve, a kerchief, or a glove.

She, however, who now occupied alone the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow was none of your proud and court-hardened ladies, who could look with no emotion beyond a blush of gratified vanity on the blood of an admirer or a lover. Though for her, young as she was, steeds had been spurred to the shock, and her name shouted among the splintering of lances and the crash of mortal conflict, she was still but a simple, amiable, and joyous child, who knew more of the pleasant fields and waving woodlands of her fair lake-country, than of the tilt-yard, the court pageant, or the carousal, and who better loved to see the heather-blossom and the blue-bell dance in the free air of the breezy fells, than plumes and banners flaunt and flutter to the blare of trumpets.

The only child of Sir Yvo de Taillebois, a knight and noble of the unmixed Norman blood, a lineal descendant of one of those hardy barons who, landing with Duke William on his almost desperate emprise, had won "the bloody hand" at Hastings, and gained rich lands in the northern counties during the protracted struggle which ensued, the Lady Guendolen had early lost her mother, a daughter of the noble house of Morville, and not a very distant relative of the good knight, Sir Philip, whose hospitality she was now partaking with her father.

To a girl, for the most part, the loss of a mother, before she has reached the years of discretion, is one never to be repaired, more especially where the surviving parent is so much occupied with duties, martial or civil, as to render his supervision of her bringing-up impossible. It is true that, in the age of which I write, the accomplishments possessed by the most delicate and refined of ladies were few and slight, as compared to those now so sedulously inculcated to our maidens, so regularly abandoned by our matrons; and that, at a period later by several centuries, he who has been styled, by an elegant writer,[3] the last of the Norman barons, great Warwick the Kingmaker, held it a boast that his daughters possessed no arts, no knowledge, more than to spin and to be chaste.

Yet even this small list of feminine attainments was far beyond the teaching of the illiterate and warlike barons, who knew nought of the pen, save when it winged the gray-goose shaft from the trusty yew, and whose appropriate and ordinary signatures were the impress of their sword-hilts on the parchments, which they did not so much as pretend to read; and, in truth, the Kingmaker's statement must either be regarded as an exaggeration, or the standard of female accomplishment had degenerated, as is not unlikely to have been actually the case, during the cruel and devastating wars of the Roses, which, how little soever they may have affected the moral, political, or agricultural condition of the English people at large, had unquestionably dealt a blow to the refinement, the courtesy, the mental culture, and personal polish of the English aristocracy, from which they began only to recover in the reigns of the later Tudors.

But in the case of the fair Guendolen, neither did the loss of her mother deprive her of the advantages of her birth, nor would the incapacity of her father, had the occasion been allowed him of superintending the culture of his child, have done so; for he was—at that day rarer in England than was a wolf, though literary culture had received some impulse from the present monarch, and his yet more accomplished father, Beauclerc—a man of intellectual ability, and not a little cultivation.

He had been largely employed by both princes on the continent, in diplomatic as well as military capacities; had visited Provence, the court of poetry and minstrelsy, and the gai science; had dwelt in the Norman courts of Italy, and even in Rome herself, then the seat of all the rising schools of literature, art, and science; and while acquiring, almost of necessity, the tongues of southern Europe, had both softened and enlarged his mind by not a few of their acquirements. Of this advantage, however, it was only of late years, when she was bursting into the fairest dawn of adolescence, that she had been permitted to profit; for, between her fifth and her fifteenth years, she had seen but little of her father, who, constantly employed, either as a statesman at home, an embassador abroad, or a conquering invader of the wild Welsh marches, or the wilder and more barbarous shores of Ireland, had rarely been permitted to call a day his own, much less to devote himself to those home duties and pleasures for which he was, beyond doubt, more than ordinarily qualified.

Yet, however unfortunate she might have been in this particular, she had been as happy in other respects, and had been brought up under circumstances which had produced no better consequences on her head than on her heart, on the graces of her mind and body, than on the formation of her feminine and gentle character.