“Good yeoman,” said the knight, coming forward, “be not wroth with my merry host. He did but afford me the hospitality which I would have compelled from him if he had refused it.”
“Thou compel!” cried the friar. “Wait but till I have changed this gray gown for a green cassock, and if I make not a quarter-staff ring twelve upon thy pate, I am neither true clerk nor good woodsman.”
While he spoke thus he stript off his gown and appeared in a close buckram doublet and lower garment, over which he speedily did on a cassock of green and hose of the same color.
“I pray thee [v]truss my points,” he said to Wamba, “and thou shalt have a cup of sack for thy labor.”
“[v]Gramercy for thy sack,” returned Wamba; “but thinkest thou that it is lawful for me to aid you to transmew thyself from a holy hermit into a sinful forester?”
So saying, he accommodated the friar with his assistance in tying the endless number of points, as the laces which attached the hose to the doublet were then termed.
While they were thus employed, Locksley led the knight a little apart and addressed him thus: “Deny it not, sir knight, you are he who played so glorious a part at the tournament at Ashby.”
“And what follows, if you guess truly, good yeoman?”
“For my purpose,” said the yeoman, “thou shouldst be as well a good Englishman as a good knight; for that which I have to speak of concerns, indeed, the duty of every honest man, but is more especially that of a true-born native of England.”
“You can speak to no one,” replied the knight, “to whom England, and the life of every Englishman, can be dearer than to me.”