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

by Henry William Herbert

To the serfs of the soil, who had been serfs before the conquest, it mattered but little. The slave to the Saxon was but changed into the slave of the Norman, and did not perhaps find in him a crueller, though he might a haughtier and more overbearing master. But to the freeman, the doom which consigned him to the fetters of the Norman, which converted him from the owner into the serf of the soil, was second only, if second, to the bitterness of death. And such had been the doom of the grandfather of Kenric and Eadwulf.

Their mother herself had been born free, not far from the hovel in which she still dwelt a slave, though she was but an infant when the hurricane of war and ruin swept over the green oaks of Sherwood, and had no memory of the time when she was not the thrall of a foreign lord. Her father, Wulfred, was the largest tenant under Waltheof, himself a franklin, or small landholder, and of blood as noble, and station more elevated than that of one half the adventurers who had flocked to the banner of William the invader. With his landlord and friend, he had fought to the last, not at Hastings only, but in every bloody ineffectual rising, until the last spark of Saxon liberty was trampled out under the iron hoofs of the Norman war-horse; but, less happy than Waltheof, he had survived to find himself a slave, and the father of slaves, tilling for a cruel foreign conqueror the land which had been his own and his father's, and his father's father's, but in which he and his heirs should have no heritage for evermore, beyond the six-foot measure which should be meted to them every one, for his long home.

And the memory of these things had not yet passed away, nor the bitterness of the iron departed from the children, which had then entered into the soul of the parent.

An irrepressible desire came over the mind of Guendolen, to know and comprehend something more fully the sentiments and sorrows of the girl who had nursed and attended her so gently since her adventure with the stag; and perceiving intuitively that the slave girl, who, strange as it appeared to her, seemed to have a species of pride of her own, would not reveal her inward self in the presence of the vain and flippant Norman waiting girls, she hastened to dismiss them, without wounding their self-esteem, on a pretext of which they would be willing enough to avail themselves.

"Lilian and Marguerite," she said, "you must be weary my good girls, with watching me through this long night and my peevish temper must have made you yet more weary, for I feel that I am not myself, and that I have tried your patience. Go, therefore, now, and get some repose, that when I shall truly need your services again, you may be well at ease to serve me. I feel as if I could sleep now; and while I slumber, Edith, here, can watch beside me, and drive away the gnats with her fan, as well as a more experienced bower-woman."

Whether the girls suspected or not that their mistress desired to be rid of them, they were not sorry to be dismissed from attendance on her couch; and whether they proposed to devote the opportunity to repose, or to gay flirtation with the pages of their own lord's or of Sir Philip's household, they withdrew at once, leaving the lady gazing fixedly on the motionless and hardly conscious figure of the slave girl.

By a sudden impulse she passed her small white hand caressingly over the soft and abundant tresses of Edith's fair hair; and so unusual was the sensation to the daughter of the downfallen race, that she started, as if a blow had been dealt her, and blushed crimson, between surprise and wonder, as she raised her great blue eyes wide open to the face of the young lady.

"And is it so hard?" she asked, in reference more to what she understood Edith to mean, than to any thing she had spoken, or even hinted—"is it so hard, my poor child? I had thought that your lot sat as lightly on you as the dew-drop in the chalice of the bluebell. I had fancied you as happy as any one of us here below. Will you not tell me what is this sorrow which weighs on you so heavily? It may be I can do something to relieve it."

"Lady, I am, as you know, a Saxon, and a slave, the daughter of a slave, and, should it ever be my lot to wed, the wife, to be, of a serf, a bondman of the soil, and the mother of things doomed, or ere they see the blessed light of Heaven, to the collar and the chain from the cradle to the grave. Think you a woman, with such thoughts as these at her heart, can be very gay or joyous?"

"And yet, you were both gay and joyous yesterday, Edith; and all last week, since I have been at the castle, I have heard no sounds so gay or so pleasant to my ear as your merry ballads. And you are no more a serf this morn than you were yestrene, and the good God alone knows what any of us all may be on the morrow, Edith. Something, I know, must have happened, girl, to make you wear a face so altered on this beautiful summer day, and carry so sad a heart, when all the world is so happy."