Worse even, and the trial becomes harder; the young girl must cut off her lovely hair; life in the forest does not allow of that ornament. Lastly, to crown all: I have already in the forest another sweetheart, whom I love better, and who is more beautiful. But, as resigned as Griselda, the betrothed replies: I shall go none the less into the forest; I will be kind to your sweetheart, I will obey her, “for in my mynde, of all mankynde, I love but you alone.” Then the lover’s joy breaks out: “I wyl not too the grene wod goo, I am noo banysshyd man,” I am not an obscure squire, but the son of the Earl of Westmoreland, and the hour of our wedding is now come.[344]
All the fugitives whom the forest received into its depths were not romantic knights, followed by baronesses patient as Griselda and brave as Bradamante. To pass from poetry to real facts, they were for the greater part formidable rovers, the same against whom Edward I and Edward III had enacted the rigorous law for suspects[345] mentioned above. This caste was composed, first of the organized bands of brigands whom the statute calls Wastours, Roberdesmen, and Drawlatches, then of thieves, sharpers, and malefactors of all kinds, of outlaws of various sorts, suffering that civil death alluded to by the lover in the “Nut Brown Maid.”
The sentence of outlawry was usually the starting-point for a wandering life, which by necessity became a life of brigandage. To be declared an outlaw, a crime {257} or a misdemeanor must have been committed; a private suit of a purely civil character was not enough;[346] but to come within sight of the gallows, no great guilt was necessary; hence the large number of outlaws. In a criminal lawsuit of the time of Edward I[347] the judge explains from his bench that the law is this: if the thief has taken anything worth more than twelve pence, or if he has been condemned several times for little thefts, and the total may be worth twelve pence or more, he ought to be hanged: “The law wills that he shall be hanged by the neck.” Still, as the judge observes in the case of a woman who had stolen a carpet lying on a hedge, worth eightpence, the law is milder than in the days of Henry III, for then a theft of the value of fourpence would hang a man.[348]
49. FOREST LIFE—A SHOOTING CASUALTY.
(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)
The man became an outlaw, and the woman a weyve, that is, abandoned to the mercy of every one and unable to claim the protection of justice. The author of “Fleta” expresses with terrible force the condition of persons so punished; they have wolves heads which may be cut off with impunity: “For she is a weyve whom no one will own, and it is equivalent to outlawry so far as penal consequences go. An outlaw and a weyve bear wolves {258} heads, which may be cut off by any one with impunity, for deservedly ought they to perish without law who would refuse to live according to law.”[349] The outlaw lost all his property and rights; all the contracts to which he was a party fell void; he was no longer bound to any one nor anybody bound to him. His goods were forfeit: “the chattels of an outlaw shall belong to our lord the king”; if he had lands the king kept the usufruct for a year and a day, at the end of which he restored them to the chief lord (capitalis dominus).[350] There were also hard legal rules on this subject; a man accused of murder and acquitted suffered confiscation nevertheless, if he had fled, fearing justice. Listen to the magistrate: “If a man be acquitted of manslaughter and of assent and help, the justices shall thereupon ask the jury if the prisoner took to flight; if they say No, let him go quits, if Yes, the king shall have his chattels.”[351] It may be {259} readily believed that the draconian severity of such regulations was not calculated to lessen the audacity of those whom they concerned, and that the excessive rigour of these penalties would often transform the fugitive of a day, who had doubted the clear-sightedness of the judge, into a professional brigand and highway robber.
Besides people of this kind there were the rovers, who, without being threatened with outlawry, had fled the village or the farm to which they belonged. The villein who, without special licence, left his master’s domain, could resume his previous life and intercourse with his kin, only by placing himself at his lord’s mercy, or, which was less risky, after having passed a year and a day in a free town without leaving it and without the lord, often unaware of the place, having interrupted the prescription. In this latter case he became a free man, and the ties which bound him to the soil were broken. But if he confined himself to wandering from place to place he might be re-taken any day that he reappeared at his own door.
An example of this may be seen in a characteristic lawsuit of the time of Edward I, a report of which has come down to us:—A presents a writ of imprisonment against B. Heiham, counsel for B, says: It is not for us to defend ourselves, A is our villein, his writ cannot take effect against us. This is verified, it is found that A is the son of a villein of B, that he ran away, and several years afterwards returned home, “to his nest,” where he was taken as a villein. The judge declares that this seizure was legal; that a villein might wander about during six, seven years or more, but if at the end he were found “in his own nest and at his hearth,” he might be seized as continuing to be his lord’s lawful property; the fact of his return put him into the condition he was {260} in before his departure. On hearing this decision the delighted counsel appropriately cites the scripture, “He fell into the pit which he hath digged.”[352]
At that period a villein could still be sold as chattel, given away as a present, donated to a convent for the benefit of one’s soul: “I Hugo de Ringesdon . . . gave and conceded . . . to God and Blessed Mary and the Abbot and convent of Sulby, for the salvation of my soul and that of my ancestors and successors, in perpetual frank almoigne, Robert son of Juliana de Walton, with all his sequel and all his chattels, nothing remaining of any bond with me or my successors for ever.”[353]