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

by Henry William Herbert

The glad days rapidly passed over, and the morning of the tenth day, as it broke fair and full of promise in the unclouded eastern sky, looked on a gay and happy cavalcade, in all the gorgeous and glittering attire of the twelfth century, setting forth in proud array, half martial and half civil, from the gates of Waltheofstow.

First rode an old esquire, with three pages in bright half armor, hauberks of chain mail covering their bodies, and baçinets of steel on their heads, but with their arms and lower limbs undefended, except by the sleeves of their buff jerkins and their close-fitting hose of dressed buckskin. Behind these, a stout man-at-arms carried the guidon with the emblazoned bearings of his leader, followed by twenty mounted archers, in doublets of Kendal green, with yew bows in their hands, wood-knives, and four-and-twenty peacock-feathered cloth-yard arrows in their girdles, and battle-axes at their saddle-bows.

In the midst rode Sir Yvo de Taillebois, all armed save his head, which was covered with a velvet mortier with a long drooping feather, and wearing a splendid surcoat; and, by his side, on a fleet Andalusian jennet, in a rich purple habit, furred at the cape and cuffs, and round the waist, with snow-white swansdown, the fair and gentle Guendolen, followed by three or four gay girls of Norman birth, and, happier and fairer than the happiest and fairest, the charming Saxon beauty, pure-minded and honest Edith. Behind these followed a train of baggage vans, cumbrous and lumbering concerns, groaning along heavily on their ill-constructed wheels, and a horse-litter, intended for the use of the lady, if weary or ill at ease, but at the present conveying the aged freed-woman, who was departing, now in well-nigh her ninetieth summer, from the home of her youth, and the graves of her husband and five goodly sons, departing from the house of bondage, to a free new home in the far north-west.

The procession was closed by another body of twenty more horse-archers, led by two armed esquires; and with these rode Kenric, close shaven, and his short, cropped locks curling beneath a jaunty blue bonnet, with a heron's feather, wearing doublet and hose of forest green, with russet doeskin buskins, the silver badge of Sir Yvo de Taillebois on his arm, and in his hand the freeman's trusty weapon, the puissant English bow, which did such mighty deeds, and won such los thereafter, at those immortal fields of Cressy and Poictiers, and famous Agincourt.

As the procession wound down the long slope of the castle hill, and through the Saxon quarter, the serfs, who had collected to look on the show, set up a loud hurrah, the ancient Saxon cry of mirth, of greeting, or defiance. It was the cry of caste, rejoicing at the elevation of a brother to the true station of a man. But there was one voice which swelled not the cry; one man, who turned sullenly away, unable to bear the sight of another's joy, turned away, muttering vengeance—Eadwulf the Red—the only soul so base, even among the fallen and degraded children of servitude and sorrow, as to refuse to be glad at the happiness which it was not granted him to share, though that happiness were a mother's and a brother's escape from misery and degradation.

Many days, many weeks, passed away, while that gay cavalcade were engaged in their long progress to the north-westward, through the whole length of the beautiful West Riding of Yorkshire, from its southern frontier, where it abuts on Nottinghamshire and the wild county of Derby, to its western border, where its wide moors and towering crag-crested peaks are blended with the vast treeless fells of Westmoreland.

And during all that lengthened but not weary progress, it was but rarely, and then only at short intervals, that they were out of the sight of the umbrageous and continuous forest.

Here and there, in the neighborhood of some ancient borough, such as Doncaster, Pontefract, or Ripon, through which lay their route, they came upon broad oases of cultivated lands, with smiling farms and pleasant corn-fields and free English homesteads, stretching along the fertile valley of some blue brimful river; again, and that more frequently, they found small forest-hamlets, wood-embosomed, with their little garths and gardens, clustering about the tower of some inferior feudal chief, literally set in a frame of verdure.

Sometimes vast tracks of rich and thriftily-cultured meadow-lands, ever situate in the loveliest places of the shire, pastured by abundant flocks, and dotted with sleek herds of the already celebrated short-horns, told where the monks held their peaceful sway, enjoying the fat of the land; and proclaimed how, in those days at least, the priesthood of Rome were not the sensual, bigot drones, the ignorant, oppressive tyrants, whose whereabout can be now easily detected by the squalid and neglected state of lands and animals and men, whenever they possess the soil and control the people. Such were the famous Abbey-stedes of Fountain's and Jorvaulx, then, as now, both for fertility and beauty, the boast of the West Riding.

Still, notwithstanding these pleasant interchanges of rural with forest scenery, occurring so often as to destroy all monotony, and to keep up a delightful anticipation in the mind of the voyager, as to what sort of view would meet his eye on crossing yon hill-top, or turning that curvature of the wood-road, by far the greater portion of their way led them over sandy tracks, meandering like ribbons through wide glades of greensward, under the broad protecting arms of giant oaks and elms and beeches, the soft sod no less refreshing to the tread of the quadrupeds, than was the cool shadow of the twilight trees delicious to the riders.