Thus communed these; while to their lowly dome,
The full-fed swine return’d with evening home;
Compell’d, reluctant, to the several sties,
With din obstreperous, and ungrateful cries.
POPE’S ODYSSEY
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the
river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the
greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between
Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this
extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of
Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the
fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate
battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in
ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been
rendered so popular in English song.
Such being our chief scene, the date of our story refers to a period
towards the end of the reign of Richard I., when his return from his
long captivity had become an event rather wished than hoped for by his
despairing subjects, who were in the meantime subjected to every
species of subordinate oppression. The nobles, whose power had become
exorbitant during the reign of Stephen, and whom the prudence of Henry
the Second had scarce reduced to some degree of subjection to the
crown, had now resumed their ancient license in its utmost extent;
despising the feeble interference of the English Council of State,
fortifying their castles, increasing the number of their dependants,
reducing all around them to a state of vassalage, and striving by every
means in their power, to place themselves each at the head of such
forces as might enable him to make a figure in the national convulsions
which appeared to be impending.
The situation of the inferior gentry, or Franklins, as they were
called, who, by the law and spirit of the English constitution, were
entitled to hold themselves independent of feudal tyranny, became now
unusually precarious. If, as was most generally the case, they placed
themselves under the protection of any of the petty kings in their
vicinity, accepted of feudal offices in his household, or bound
themselves by mutual treaties of alliance and protection, to support
him in his enterprises, they might indeed purchase temporary repose;
but it must be with the sacrifice of that independence which was so
dear to every English bosom, and at the certain hazard of being
involved as a party in whatever rash expedition the ambition of their
protector might lead him to undertake. On the other hand, such and so
multiplied were the means of vexation and oppression possessed by the
great Barons, that they never wanted the pretext, and seldom the will,
to harass and pursue, even to the very edge of destruction, any of
their less powerful neighbours, who attempted to separate themselves
from their authority, and to trust for their protection, during the
dangers of the times, to their own inoffensive conduct, and to the laws
of the land.
A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny of the
nobility, and the sufferings of the inferior classes, arose from the
consequences of the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Four
generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans
and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests,
two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph,
while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat. The power
had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility, by the
event of the battle of Hastings, and it had been used, as our histories
assure us, with no moderate hand. The whole race of Saxon princes and
nobles had been extirpated or disinherited, with few or no exceptions;
nor were the numbers great who possessed land in the country of their
fathers, even as proprietors of the second, or of yet inferior classes.
The royal policy had long been to weaken, by every means, legal or
illegal, the strength of a part of the population which was justly
considered as nourishing the most inveterate antipathy to their victor.
All the monarchs of the Norman race had shown the most marked
predilection for their Norman subjects; the laws of the chase, and many
others equally unknown to the milder and more free spirit of the Saxon
constitution, had been fixed upon the necks of the subjugated
inhabitants, to add weight, as it were, to the feudal chains with which
they were loaded. At court, and in the castles of the great nobles,
where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the
only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments
were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of
honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and
expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds,
who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between
the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that
soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect,
compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could
render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this
necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English
language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have
been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly
improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those
spoken by the southern nations of Europe.
This state of things I have thought it necessary to premise for the
information of the general reader, who might be apt to forget, that,
although no great historical events, such as war or insurrection, mark
the existence of the Anglo-Saxons as a separate people subsequent to
the reign of William the Second; yet the great national distinctions
betwixt them and their conquerors, the recollection of what they had
formerly been, and to what they were now reduced, continued down to the
reign of Edward the Third, to keep open the wounds which the Conquest
had inflicted, and to maintain a line of separation betwixt the
descendants of the victor Normans and the vanquished Saxons.
The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that forest,
which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of
broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed
perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled
arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some
places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of
various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level
beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other,
forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye
delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths
to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun
shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the
shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they
illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they
made their way. A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade,
seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical
superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem
artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn
stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood upright; the rest had been
dislodged from their places, probably by the zeal of some convert to
Christianity, and lay, some prostrate near their former site, and
others on the side of the hill. One large stone only had found its way
to the bottom, and in stopping the course of a small brook, which
glided smoothly round the foot of the eminence, gave, by its
opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to the placid and elsewhere silent
streamlet.
The human figures which completed