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

by Henry William Herbert

Early Metrical Romaunts. Guy of Warwick.

In the latter part of the twelfth century—when, in the reign of Henry II., fourth successor of the Conqueror, and grandson of the first prince of that name, known as Beauclerc, the condition of the vanquished Saxons had begun in some sort to amend, though no fusion of the races had as yet commenced, and tranquillity was partially restored to England—the greater part of the northern counties, from the Trent to the mouths of Tyne and Solway, was little better than an unbroken chase or forest, with the exception of the fiefs of a few great barons, or the territories of a few cities and free borough towns; and thence, northward to the Scottish frontier, all was a rude and pathless desert of morasses, moors, and mountains, untrodden save by the foot of the persecuted Saxon outlaw.

In the West and North Ridings of the great and important Shire of York, there were, it is true, already a few towns of more than growing importance; several of which had been originally the sites, or had grown up in the vicinity and under the shelter of Roman Stative encampments; whereof not a few of them have retained the evidence in their common termination, caster, while others yet retain the more modern Saxon appellations. Of these two classes, Doncaster, Pontefract, Rotherham, Sheffield, Ripon, may be taken as examples, which were even then flourishing, and, for the times, even opulent manufacturing boroughs, while the vastly larger and more wealthy commercial places, which have since sprung up, mushroom-like, around them, had then neither hearths nor homes, names nor existence.

In addition to these, many great lords and powerful barons already possessed vast demesnes and manors, and had erected almost royal fortalices, the venerable ruins of which still bear evidence to the power and the martial spirit of the Norman lords of England; and even more majestic and more richly endowed institutions of the church, such as Fountains, Jorvaulx, and Bolton Abbayes, still the wonder and reproach of modern architecture, and the admiration of modern artists, had created around themselves garden-like oases among the green glades and grassy aisles of the immemorial British forests; while, emulating the example of their feudal or clerical superiors, many a military tenant, many a gray-frocked friar, had reared his tower of strength, or built his lonely cell, upon some moat-surrounded mount, or in some bosky dingle of the wood.

In the East Riding, all to the north of the ancient city of the Shire, even then famous for its minster and its castle, even then the see and palace of the second archbishop of the realm, was wilder yet, ruder and more uncivilized. Even to this day, it is, comparatively speaking, a bleak and barren region, overswept by the cold gusts from the German ocean, abounding more in dark and stormy wolds than in the cheerful green of copse or wildwood, rejoicing little in pasture, less in tillage, and boasting of nothing superior to the dull market towns of the interior, and the small fishing villages nested among the crags of its iron coast.

Most pitilessly had this district been ravaged by the Conqueror and his immediate successor, after its first desperate and protracted resistance to the arms of the Norman; after the Saxon hope of England fell, to arise no more, upon the bloody field of Hastings; and after each one of the fierce Northern risings.

The people were of the hard, old, stubborn, Danish stock, more pertinacious, even, and more stubborn, than the enduring Saxon, but with a dash of a hotter and more daring spirit than belonged to their slower and more sluggish brethren.

These men would not yield, could not be subdued by the iron-sheathed cavalry of the intrusive kings. They were destroyed by them, the lands were swept bare,[1] the buildings burned, the churches desecrated. Manors, which under the native rule of the Confessor had easily yielded sixty shillings of annual rent, without distress to their occupants, scarcely paid five to their foreign lords; and estates, which under the ancient rule opulently furnished forth a living to two[2] English gentlemen of rank with befitting households, now barely supported two miserable Saxon cultivators, slaves of the soil, paying their foreign lords, with the blood of their hands and the sweat of their brows, scarcely the twelfth part of the revenue drawn from them by the old proprietors.

When, in a subsequent insurrection, the Norman king again marched northward, in full resolve to carry his conquering arms to the frontiers of Scotland, and, sustained by his ferocious energy, did actually force his way through the misty moorlands and mountainous mid-regions of Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland, he had to traverse about sixty miles of country, once not the least fertile of his newly-conquered realm, in which his mail-clad men-at-arms saw neither green leaves on the trees, nor green crops in the field; for the ax and the torch had done their work, not negligently; passed neither standing roof nor burning hearth; encountered neither human being nor cattle of the field; only the wolves, which had become so numerous from desuetude to the sight of man, that they scarce cared to fly before the clash and clang of the marching squadrons.

To the northward and north-westward, yet, of Yorkshire, including what are now Lancashire, Westmoreland, Northumberland, and Cumberland, though the Conqueror, in his first irresistible prosecution of red-handed victory, had marched and countermarched across them, there was, even at the time of my narrative, when nearly a century had fled, little if any thing of permanent progress or civilization, beyond the establishment of a few feudal holds and border fortresses, each with its petty hamlet clustered beneath its shelter. The marches, indeed, of Lancashire, toward its southern extremity, were in some degree permanently settled by military colonists, in not a few instances composed of Flemings, as were the Welch frontiers of the neighboring province of Cheshire, planted there to check the inroads of the still unconquered Cymri, to the protection of whose mountains, and late-preserved independence, their whilom enemies, the now persecuted Saxons, had fled in their extremity.