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

by Henry William Herbert

It was, perhaps, the very wildness and solitude of the locality, as much as the exquisite charm of the loveliest scenery in England, to which, strange to say, he was fully alive—enhanced by the certainty that in those remote regions, where there were no royal forests, nor any territorial magnates who could in any way rival himself, his forest rights, of which every Norman was constitutionally jealous, were perfectly intangible and unassailable—which had so much attached Sir Yvo de Taillebois to his Cumbrian castle of High Furness, in preference to all his fair estates and castles in the softer and more cultivated portions of the realm.

Certain it is, that he did love it better than all his other lands united; and hither he resorted, whenever he could escape from the duties of camps and the restraint of courts, to live a life among his vassals, his feudal tenants, and his humbler villagers, more like that of an Oriental patriarch than of a Norman warrior, but for the feudal pomp which graced his castle halls, and swelled his mountain hunts into a mimicry of warfare.

At about ten miles distant across the lake, up toward the lower spurs of the north-eastern mountains, lies the small lake of Kentmere, the head-waters and almost the spring of the river Kent; which, flowing down southward through the vale of Kendal, falls into the western head of Morecambe Bay, having its embouchure guarded by the terrible sands of Lancaster, so fatal to foot-passengers, owing to the terrific influx of the entering tides.

Set like a gem of purest water in a rough frame of savage mountains, their lower sides mantled with rich deciduous woods, their purple heathery brows dotted with huge Scotch firs, single, or in romantic groups, their scalps bald and broken, of gray and schistous rock, Kentmere fills up the whole basin of the dell it occupies, with the exception of a verge of smooth, green meadow-land, never above a hundred or two of yards in width, margined with a silvery stripe of snow-white sand, and studded by a few noble oaks.

At the head of the lake, half encircled by the dancing brook which formed its only inlet, rose a soft swell of ground, smooth and round-headed, neither hill nor hillock; its southern face, toward the lake, cleared of wood, and covered with short, close greensward, its flanks and brow overgrown with luxuriant oak-wood of the second growth, interspersed with varnished hollies, silver-stemmed birches, and a score or two of gigantic fir-trees, overtopping the pale green foliage of the coppice, and contrasting its lightsome tints by their almost sable hue.

Behind this fairy knoll the hill rose in rifted perpendicular faces of rock, garlanded and crowned with hanging coppices, for two or three hundred feet in height; the nesting-place of noble falcons, peregrines, gosshawks, haggards of the rock, and of a single pair of golden eagles, the terror of the dale from time immemorial.

In all lake land, there is no lovelier spot than Kentmere. The deep meadows by its side in early spring are one glowing garden of many-colored crocuses, golden, white, purple lady-smocks, yellow king-cups, and all sweet and gay-garbed flowers that love the water-side; the rounded knoll and all the oak-wood sides are alive with saffron primroses, cowslips, and meadow-sweets; and the air is rife with the perfume of unnumbered violets, and vocal with the song of countless warblers.

And on the mid slope of that rounded, bosom-like swell of land, there stood, at the period of my tale, a low stone building of one story, long for its height, narrow, and massively built of blocks of the native gray stone of the hills, with a projecting roof of heavy flags, forming a porch over the door, and two chimneys, one at either end, of a form peculiar, to this day, to that district, each covered with a flat stone slab supported on four columns, to prevent the smoke from driving down into the chambers, under the influence of the whirling gusts from the mountain tops.

Glass windows were unknown in those days, save to the castellated mansions of the great, or the noble minsters and cathedrals of the great cities—the art having been first introduced, after the commencement of the dark ages, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, although it must have been well known and of common occurrence in England during its occupation by the Romans, who used glass for windows as well as implements so early as the time of Cicero, and who would seem to have brought its manufacture to a perfection unattainable by us moderns, since it is credibly asserted that they had the art to render it malleable. Horn and talc, or oiled parchment, were used by the middle classes, but this was a luxury confined to the dwellers in towns; and the square mullioned apertures, which here served for windows, were closed by day and in fine weather by slender lattices, and during storms or at night by wooden shutters. The want of these luxuries, however, being unknown, was unregarded; and the verdurer's house at Kentmere was regarded in those days as a fine specimen of rural architecture, and stood as high by comparison as many an esquire's hall of the present day.

For the rest, it was partly overrun with ivy and woodbine, and was overhung at the western end by a noble mountain-ash, from under the roots of which welled out a small crystal spring, and sheltered to the east by a group of picturesque Scotch firs. An out-building or two, a stone barn, a cow-house, and what, by the baying and din of hounds, was clearly a dog-kennel, stood a little way aloof, under the skirts of the coppice, and completed the appurtenances of what was then deemed a very perfect dwelling for a small rural proprietor, and would be held now a very tolerable mountain farm-house for a tenant cotter.