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

by Henry William Herbert

In short, whether in the forest or in the open country, scarcely an hour, never a day, was passed, without their encountering some pleasant sight, some amusing incident, some interesting adventure. There was a vast fund of romance in the daily life of those olden days, an untold abundance of the picturesque, not a little, indeed, of what we should call stage-effect, in the ordinary habits and every-day affairs of men, which we have now, in our busy, headlong race for affluence, ambition, priority, in every thing good or evil, overlooked, if not forgotten.

Life was in England then, as it was in France up to the days of the Revolution, as it never has been at any time in America, as it is nowhere now, and probably never will be any where again, unless we return to the primitive, social equality, and manful independence of patriarchal times; when truth was held truth, and manhood manhood, the world over; and some higher purpose in mortality was acknowledged than the mere acquiring, some larger nobleness in man than the mere possessing, of unprofitable wealth.

Much of life, then, was spent out of doors; the mid-day meal, the mid-day slumber, the evening dance, were enjoyed, alike by prince and peasant, under the shadowy forest-tree, or the verdure of the trellised bower. The use of flowers was universal; in every rustic festival, of the smallest rural hamlets, the streets would be arched and garlanded with wreaths of wild flowers; in every village hostelry, the chimney would be filled with fresh greens, the board decked with eglantine and hawthorn, the beakers crowned with violets and cowslips, just as in our days the richest ball-rooms, the grandest banquet-halls, are adorned with brighter, if not sweeter or more beautiful, exotics.

The great in those days had not lost "that touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin" so completely, as to see no grace in simplicity, to find no beauty in what is beautiful alike to all, to enjoy nothing which can be enjoyed by others than the great and wealthy.

The humble had not been, then, bowed so low that the necessities had precluded all thought, all care, for the graces of the existence of man.

If the division between the noble and the common of the human race, as established by birth, by hereditary rank, by unalterable caste, were stronger and deeper and less eradicable than at this day, the real division, as visible in his nature, between man and man, of the noble and the common, the difference in his tastes, his enjoyments, his pleasures, his capacity no less than his power of enjoying, was a mere nothing then, to what it is to-day.

The servants, the very serfs, of aristocracy, in those days, when aristocracy was the rule of blood and bravery, were not, by a hundredth part, so far removed below the proudest of their lords, in every thing that renders humanity graceful and even glorious, in every thing that renders life enjoyable, as are, at this day, the workers fallen below the employers, when nobility has ceased to be, and aristocracy is the sway of capital, untinctured with intelligence, and ignorant of gentleness or grace.

It is not that the capitalist is richer, and the operative poorer—though this is true to the letter—than was the prince, than was the serf of those days. It is not only that the aristocrat of capital, the noble by the grace of gold, is ten times more arrogant, more insulting, more soulless, cold-hearted, and calmly cruel, than the aristocrat of the sword, the noble by the grace of God; and that the worker is worked more hardly, clad more humbly, fed more sparely, than the villain of the middle ages—though this, also, is true to the letter—but it is, that the very tastes, the enjoyments, and the capacities for enjoyment, in a word, almost the nature of the two classes are altered, estranged, unalterably divided.

The rich and great have, with a few rare exceptions that serve only to prove the rule, lost all taste for the simple, for the natural, for the beautiful, unless it be the beautiful of art and artifice; the poor and lowly have, for the most part, lost all taste, all perception of the beautiful, of the graceful, in any shape, all enjoyment of any thing beyond the tangible, the sensual, the real.

Hence a division, which never can be reconciled. Both classes have receded from the true nature of humanity, in the two opposite directions, that they no longer even comprehend the one the tastes of the other, and scarce have a desire or a hope in common; for what the poor man most desires, a sufficiency for his mere wants, physical and moral, the rich man can not comprehend, never having known to be without it; while the artificial nothings, for which the capitalist strives and wrestles to the last, would be to his workman mere syllabub and flummery to the tired and hungry hunter.