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

by Henry William Herbert

Ah! no. But it is the very converse of these—the very point insisted on so complacently, proclaimed so triumphantly, by the advocates of this accursed thing—it is that, in spite of the chain, in spite of the lash, in spite of the enforced labor, in spite of the absence or disruption of family ties and affections, the slave is sleek, satisfied, self-content; that he waxes fat among the flesh-pots; that he comes fawning to the smooth words, and frolics, delighted, fresh from the lash of his master, in no wise superior to the spaniel, either in aspiration or in instinct. It is in that he envies not the free man his freedom, but, in his hideous lack of all self-knowledge, self-reliance, self-respect, is content to be a slave, content to eat, and grow fat and die, without a present concern beyond the avoidance of corporeal pain and the enjoyment of sensual pleasure, without an aspiration for the future, beyond those of the beasts, which graze and perish.

It is in this that lies the mortal sin, the never-dying reproach, of him who would foster, would preserve, would propagate, the curse of slavery; not that he is a tyrant over the body, but that he is a destroyer of the soul—that he would continue a state of things which reduces a human being, a fellow-man, whether of an inferior race or no—for, as of congenerous cattle there are many distinct tribes, so of men, and of Caucasian men too, there be many races, distinct in physical, in moral, in animal, in intellectual qualities, as well as in color and conformation, if not distinct in origin—to the level of the beast which knoweth not whence he cometh or whither he goeth, nor what is to him for good, or what for evil, which hopes not to rise or to advance, either here or hereafter, but toils day after day, contented with his daily food, and lies down to sleep, and rises up to labor and to feed, as if God had created man with no higher purpose than to sleep and eat alternately, until the night cometh from which, on earth, there shall be no awakening.

But of this misery the Saxon serf was exempt: and, to do him justice, of this reproach was the Norman conqueror exempt also. Of the use of arms, and the knowledge of warfare, he indeed deprived his serfs, for as they outnumbered him by thousands in the field, equalled him in resolution, perhaps excelled him in physical strength, to grant such knowledge would have been to commit immediate suicide—but of no other knowledge, least of all of the knowledge that leads to immortality, did he strive to debar him. Admittance to holy orders was patent to the lowest Saxon, and in those days the cloister was the gate to all knowledge sacred or profane, to all arts, all letters, all refinements, and above all to that knowledge which is the greatest power—the knowledge of dealing with the human heart, to govern it—the knowledge, which so often set the hempen sandal of the Saxon monk upon the mailed neck of the Norman king, and which, in the very reign of which I write, had raised a low-born man of the common Saxon race to be Archbishop of Canterbury, the keeper of the conscience of the king, the primate, and for a time the very ruler of the realm.

Often, indeed, did the superior knowledge of the cowled Saxon avenge on his masters the wrongs of his enslaved brethren; and while the learned priesthood of the realm were the brethren of its most abject slaves, no danger that those slaves should ever become wholly ignorant, hopeless, or degraded—and so it was seen in the end; for that very knowledge which it was permitted to the servile race to gain, while it taught them to cherish and fitted them to deserve freedom, in the end won it for them; at the expense of no floods of noble blood, through the sordure and soil of no savage Saturnalia, such as marked the emancipation alike of the white serfs of revolutionized France, and the black slaves of disenthralled St. Domingo.

And so it was seen in the deportment of Kenric the serf, and of the slave girl Edith, even in these first days of their newly-acquired freedom.

Self-respect they had never lost altogether; and their increased sense of it was shown in the increased gravity and calmness and becomingness of their deportment.

Slaves may be merry, or they may be sullen. But they can not be thoughtful, or calm, or careworn. The French, while they were feudal slaves, before the Revolution, were the blithest, the most thoughtless, the merriest, and most frolicsome, of mortals; they had no morrows for which to take care, no liberties which to study, no rights which to guard. The English peasant was then, as the French is fast becoming now, grave rather than frivolous, a thinker more than a fiddler, a doer very much more than a dancer. Was he, is he, the less happy, the less respectable, the lower in the scale of intellect, that he is the farther from the monkey, and the nearer to the man?

The merriment, the riotous glee, the absolute abandonment of the plantation African to the humor, the glee of the moment, is unapproached by any thing known of human mirthfulness.

The gravity, the concentrated thought, the stern abstractedness, the careworn aspect of the free American is proverbial—the first thing observable in him by foreigners. He has more to guard, more at which to aspire, more on which he prides himself, at times almost boastfully, more for which to respect himself, at times almost to the contempt of others, than any mortal man, his co-equal, under any other form of government, on any other soil. Is he the less happy for his cares, or would he change them for the recklessness of the well-clad, well-fed slave—for the thoughtlessness of the first subject in a despotic kingdom?

Kenric had been always a thinker, though a serf; his elder brother had been a monk, a man of strong sense and some attainment; his mother had been the daughter of one who had known, if he had lost, freedom. With his mother's milk he had imbibed the love of freedom; from his brother's love and teachings he had learned what a freeman should be; by his own passionate and energetic will he had determined to become free. He would have become so ere long, had not accident anticipated his resolve; for he had laid by, already, from the earnings of his leisure hours, above one half of the price whereby to purchase liberty. He was now even more thoughtful and calmer; but his step was freer, his carriage bolder, his head was erect. He was neither afraid to look a freeman in the eye, nor to render meet deference to his superior. For the freeman ever knows, nor is ashamed to acknowledge, that while the equality of man in certain rights, which may be called, for lack of a better title, natural and political, is co-existent with himself, inalienable, indefeasible, immutable, and eternal, there is no such thing whatever, nor can ever be, as the equality of man in things social, more than there can be in personal strength, grace, or beauty, in the natural gifts of intellect, or in the development of wisdom. Of him who boasts that he has no superior, it may almost be said that he has few inferiors.