A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.”
48. FOREST LIFE. WOOD-CUTTERS.
(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)
CHAPTER III OUTLAWS, WANDERING WORKMEN, AND PEASANTS OUT OF BOND
The mountebanks, the musicians, and their fellows have stayed us at the street corners, in the castle halls and courtyards; the pedlars have led us to the peasants’ cots, the fairs and markets. With the outlaws we must leave the highroad for the pathless woods, fens and solitudes.
England at that time was not the immense meadow, furrowed by railways, of the present day; there still remained much of those forests spoken of by Cæsar in his Commentaries, and where the Plantagenet kings and their predecessors had so jealously maintained their rights of the chase. The woods were not so well policed as they are now; they offered to bandits and men fleeing from justice a more extensive asylum than any six-circled sanctuary. In the popular mind the idea of the great rustling forest, and the idea of the free life {255} that the outlaws led there, were often mingled in one and the same sentiment of sympathy. Besides, therefore, the praise of the Arthurian heroes, is found in the poetry of the time that of the trees and bushes, that of the valiant men who, dwelling in the copse, were supposed to have struggled for the public liberties, Hereward, Fulk Fitz-Warin, Robin Hood. Were a man pursued, if the sanctuary was too far or not to his taste, he took to the forest; it was easier to get there, he remained nearer to his kin, and was about as safe as if he had crossed over to the continent.
Robbers, bandits, poachers, knights in trouble might thus meet as comrades in the depths of the wood. The forest is the first thought of the proscribed squire in the “Nut Brown Maid,” the masterpiece of English poetry in the fifteenth century, a musical duet of love, full of the wild charm of the great forest, with a well-accented cadence, frequent rhymes and assonances charming the ear as the oft repeated rustling of the forest leaves. On the verge of capture, the poor squire is fain to choose between a shameful death and retreat into “the grene wode.” His betrothed, who is nothing less than a baron’s daughter, wishes to follow him; and then, in every couplet, her lover, in order to try her, pictures to her the terrors and dangers of the fugitive’s life; she may perhaps see him taken and die a robber’s death: