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

by Henry William Herbert

Not now, as then, embracing in its green bosom sparse tracts of cultivated lands, with a few borough-towns, and a few feudal keeps, or hierarchal abbayes, but itself severed into divers and far-distant parcels, embosomed in broad stretches of the deepest meadows, the most teeming pastures, or girded on its swelling, insulated knolls by the most fertile corn-lands, survives the ancient Sherwood.

Watered by the noblest and most beautiful of northern rivers, the calm and meadowy Trent, the sweet sylvan Idle, the angler's favorite, fairy-haunted Dee, the silver Eyre, mountainous Wharfe, and pastoral Ure and Swale; if I were called upon to name the very garden-gem of England, I know none that compares with this seat of the old-time Saxon forest.

You can not now travel a mile through that midland region of plenty and prosperity without hearing the merry chime of village bells from many a country spire, without passing the happy doors of hundreds of low cottage homes, hundreds of pleasant hamlets courting the mellow sunshine from some laughing knoll, or nestling in the shrubberies of some orchard-mantled hollow.

Nor are large, prosperous, and thriving towns, rich marts of agricultural produce, or manufactures of wealth richer than gold of El Dorado, so far apart but that a good pedestrian may travel through the streets of a half a dozen in a day's journey, and yet stand twenty times agaze between their busy precincts in admiration—to borrow the words of the great northern Romancer, with the scene and period of whose most splendid effort my humble tale unfortunately coincides—in admiration of the "hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed, perhaps, the stately march of the Roman soldiers."

And here, let none imagine these to be mere exaggerations, sprung from the overflowing brain of the Romancer, for, not fifty miles distant from the scene described above, there is yet to be seen a venerable patriarch of Sherwood, which boasted still, within a few short years, some garlands of surviving green—the oak of Cowthorpe—probably the largest in the island; which is to this day the boundary corner of two marching properties, and has been such since it was constituted so in Doomsday Book, wherein it was styled quercum ingentem, the gigantic oak.

Since the writing of those words eight centuries have passed, and there are many reasons for believing that those centuries have added not an inch to its circumference, but rather detracted from its vigor and its growth; and, to me, it seems far more probable that it was a full-grown tree, with all its leafy honors rife upon it, when the first Cæsar plunged, waist-deep, into the surges of the British Channel from the first Roman prow, than that it should have sprung up, like the gourd of a Jonah, in a single night, to endure a thousand years' decay without entirely perishing.

In those days, however, a man might ride from "eve to morn, from morn to dewy eve," and hear no sound more human than the deep "belling" of the red deer, if it chanced to be in the balmy month of June; the angry grunt of the tusky boar, startled from his mud-bath in some black morass; or, it may be, the tremendous rush of the snow-white, black-maned bull, crashing his way through shivered saplings and rent under-brush, mixed with the hoarse cooings of the cushat dove, the rich song-gushes of the merle and mavis, or the laughing scream of the green woodpecker.

Happy, if in riding all day in the green leafy twilight, which never, at high noon, admitted one clear ray of daylight, and, long before the sun was down, degenerated into murky gloom, he saw no sights more fearful than the rabbits glancing across the path, and disappearing in the thickets; or the slim doe, daintily picking her way among the heather, with her speckled fawns frolicking around her. Thrice happy, if, as night was falling, cold and gray, the tinkling of some lonely chapel bell might give him note where some true anchorite would share his bed of fern, and meal of pulse and water, or jolly clerk of Copmanhurst would broach the pipe of Malvoisie, bring pasties of the doe, to greet the belated wayfarer.

Such was the period, such the region, when, on a glorious July morning, so early that the sun had not yet risen high enough to throw one sweeping yellow ray over the carpet of thick greensward between the long aisles of the forest, or checker it with one cool shadow—while the dew still hung in diamonds on every blade of grass, on every leaf of bush or brackens; while the light blue mists were still rising, thinner and thinner as they soared into the clear air, from many a woodland pool or sleepy streamlet—two men, of the ancient Saxon race, sat watching, as if with some eager expectation, on a low, rounded, grassy slope, the outpost, as it seemed, of a chain of gentle hills, running down eastward to the beautiful brimful Idle.

Around the knoll on which they sat, covered by the short mossy turf, and over-canopied by a dozen oaks, such as they have been described, most of them leafy and in their prime, but two or three showing above their foliage the gray stag-horns of age, the river, clear as glass, and bright as silver, swept in a semicircle, fringed with a belt of deep green rushes and broad-leaved water-lilies, among which two or three noble swans—so quietly sat the watchers on the hill—were leading forth their little dark-gray black-legged cygnets, to feed on the aquatic flies and insects, which dimpled the tranquil river like a falling shower. Across the stream was thrown a two-arched freestone bridge, high-backed and narrow, and half covered with dense ivy, the work, evidently, of the Roman conquerors of the island, from which a yellow, sandy road wound deviously upward, skirting the foot of the rounded hill, and showing itself in two or three ascending curves, at long intervals, above the tree-tops, till it was lost in the distant forest; while, far away to the eastward, the topmost turret of what seemed a tall Norman keep, with a square banner drooping from its staff in the breezeless air, towering above the dim-wood distance, indicated whither it led so indirectly.