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

by Henry William Herbert

The vizor of the knight's square-topped helmet was lowered, and the mail-hood drawn closely over it. His habergeon of glittering steel-rings, his mail-hose, fortified on the shoulders and at the knees by plates of polished steel, called poldrons and splents, shone like silver through the twilight; his triangular shield hung about his neck, his great two-handed broad-sword from his left shoulder to his heel, and his long steel-headed lance was grasped in his right hand; none could doubt that he was riding forth to do battle, but it was strange that he wore no surcoat of arms over his plain mail, that no trumpet preceded, no banner was borne behind him, no retainers, save that one unarmed man, in his garb of peace, followed the bridle of their lord.

He rode away slowly down the hill, through the serf's quarter, into the wood; the warder from the turret saw him turn and gaze back wistfully toward his hereditary towers, perhaps half prescient that he should see them no more. He turned, and was lost to view; nor did any eye of his faithful vassals look on him in life again.

Noon came, and the dinner hour, but the knight came not to the banquet hall—evening fell, and there were no tidings; but, at nightfall, Eadwulf came in, pale, ghastly, and terrified, and announced that the knight and the esquire both lay dead with their horses in a glade of the wood, not far from the scene of the quarrel of the preceding day, on the banks of the river Idle. No time was lost. With torch and cresset, bow and spear, the household hurried, under their appointed officers, to the fatal spot, and soon found the tidings of the serf to be but too true.

The knight and his horse lay together, as they had fallen, both stricken down at the same instant, in full career as it would seem, by a sudden and instantaneous death-stroke. The warrior, though prostrate, still sat the horse as if in life; he was not unhelmed; his shield was still about his neck; his lance was yet in the rest, the shaft unbroken, and the point unbloodied—the animal lay with its legs extended, as if it had been at full speed when the fatal stroke overtook it. A barbed cloth-yard arrow had been shot directly into its breast, piercing the heart through and through, by some one in full front of the animal; and a lance point had entered the throat of the rider, above the edge of the shield which hung about his neck, coming out between the shoulders behind, and inflicting a wound which must have been instantaneously mortal.

Investigation of the ground showed that many horses had been concealed or ambushed in a neighboring dingle, within easy arrow-shot of the murdered baron; that two horsemen had encountered him in the glade, one of whom, he by whose lance he had fallen, had charged him in full career.

It was evident to the men-at-arms, that Sir Philip's charger had been treacherously shot dead in full career, by an archer ambushed in the brake, at the very moment when he was encountering his enemy at the lance's point; and that, as the horse was in the act of falling, he had been bored through from above, before his own lance had touched the other rider.

The esquire had been cut down and hacked with many wounds of axes and two-handed swords, one of his arms being completely severed from the trunk, and his skull cleft asunder by a ghastly blow. His horse's brains had been dashed out with a mace, probably after the slaughter of the rider; and that this part of the deed of horror had been accomplished by many armed men, dismounted, and not by the slayer of De Morville, was evident, from the number of mailed and booted footsteps deeply imprinted in the turf around the carcasses of the murdered men and butchered animals.

Efforts were made immediately to track the assassins by the slot, several, both of the men-at-arms and of the Yorkshire foresters, being expert at the art; but their skill was at fault, as well as the scent of the slow-hounds, which were laid on the trail; for, within a few hundred yards of the spot, the party had entered the channel of the river Idle, and probably followed its course upward, to a place where it flowed over a sheet of hard, slaty, rock; and where the land farther back consisted of a dry, sun-burned, upland waste, of short, summer-parched turf, which took no impression of the horses' hoofs.

There was no proof, nor any distinct circumstantial evidence; yet none doubted any more than if they had beheld the doing of the dastardly deed, that the good Lord de Morville had fallen by the hand of Sir Foulke d'Oilly and of his associates in blood-shedding.

For the rest, the good knight lay dead, leaving no child, wife, brother, nor any near relation, who should inherit either his honors or his lands. He had left neither testament nor next of kin. Literally, he had died, and made no sign.