The Conquering Family (29 page)

The village is a huddle of small houses, quite small, in fact, with no more than two rooms, a door, two windows, a chimney seldom. The plastered walls are in two colors which blend picturesquely. Each house has, of course, its garden or
toft
, and these are filled with fruit trees. The church stands in the center, a solid little edifice with a square tower as stoutly proportioned as the men’s legs, a bell with a clear high note which can be heard in the farthest spinney on the horizon; built of coarse grit stone which, like the worshipers, turns gray early, the door framed in long-and-short masonry, the windows with well-turned baluster pillars. Next to the church is a tavern which essays a note of hospitality with benches on each side of the door but cannot escape a hint of slyness in such company; not that the priest is likely to protest its proximity because he is thus enabled to keep an eye on his flock. There is a cross on the widening of the road, standing perhaps ten feet high, which is used as a shrine by passers-by, and beside it, as though offering a choice, the stocks. At the nearest pond, but not in sight, is the cucking stool for women offenders, the wantons, the walking morts, the scolds.

But seldom are there passers-by to bend a knee at the weather-beaten cross. The road ends here, and what business could bring strangers? When strangers do come they are eyed with dread, for always they are bearers of bad news, of wars, of approaching pestilence, of taxes. The world does not come here, and the peasants do not go to the world. The law binds them to the land; they cannot go away without the consent of the lord of the manor; they are transferred with the land and the livestock when there is a change of ownership; their children are equally bound. Few of these sturdy men and women have ever been more than five miles away from the village. Is it any wonder that their eyes have a shut-in look, that often they pause to gaze at the wooded horizon, wondering what lies beyond, what the great world is like? There is little difference between a cell and a few miles of walking space when it is known that bars stand just beyond the dip of the land. Yes, they are in reality a sad lot, these men who own nothing but their bellies, whose children are spoken of as litters, whose feet move at the command of a master.

Someday they would go, when leaders arose to tell them this was not God’s divinely appointed rule of life. But this was still two centuries off, and freedom would not be won even then, not all at once.

Immediately around the village are the commons, the Lammas lands, now closed in to keep the stock from the fields where the crops are standing.
The leaders among the men gather in a group and study the grain, which is so high that the twisting road can be seen for no more than a few perch at most. The harvesting is a community affair, even though the land is divided into individual strips, and there are decisions to be reached. It can be read in the eyes of these more or less self-appointed
secutors
that they see promise of plenty—
if
the lord of the manor does not demand too much of their time for his land—some
love-boons
as well as the three days out of each week. Uneasy speculation remains in every eye on this day of rest. In the midst of talk they turn continuously to study the sky and then to look at those long strips of ripening grain, running as straight as an arrow, in the first stage of flight, to the green shaws in the distance, each third strip lying fallow, each man’s share marked with a balk of unplowed ground. A miracle of husbandry, this. If only they could consider their own needs first and get the crops in and threshed before the wet weather came!

The one subject which always came up when villeins got together was the possibility of paying rent in money instead of labor. How could any man hope to save twenty shillings, which was the equivalent of the labor he was assessed at the leet in case he worked as much as a hide of land? Of course there was always a chance of making something extra with assart land. The ambitious villein could venture out to the edge of the ever-encroaching forest and break in as much as he cared to, on which there would be no rent to pay. He might make enough on assart land to become in course of time a free man, even perhaps a socman or thane.

The amount of money in circulation was, of course, very small. A cow was worth no more than four shillings, a sow one, a sheep tenpence (if the wool was of the best variety); a horse might bring as much as a cow.

On a day of idleness the muscles are at rest but the mind never. It was not until the time came for a test at the archery butts that the villagers were able to relax. One of the sons of the manorial lord came by on horseback and paused to watch the activity in the vacant strip of land behind the churchyard. He was an arrogant young fellow, with a demanding eye and a scornful manner. If they thought he had stopped to watch the archery—which was well worth a pause, for there were men in the village who could lodge an arrow in the clout every shot—they were mistaken. He had taken off his perfumed gloves and was fanning himself with them, and all the while kept an eye on the girls, some of whom were as well worth observing as the play. If his real reason for pausing had been noted, there would have been some uneasiness. There was not in England, however, the French custom known as
droit du seigneur
(which compelled a bride of common birth to spend the first night in the bed of the lord of the manor), and a girl could defend her virtue if she so desired.

As the idle day wore on, there would perhaps be a game of football on the common from which the men and boys would emerge with plenty
of bruises and some rips in tunics and hose. There would probably be a community supper cooked in large pots on the square (practically all meat was boiled, that being the easiest method with their meager facilities), and that would mean special food, chickens and perhaps a chine of pork. Ordinarily the evening meal consisted of soup and bread and ale, with a bit of cheese. There would be a service at compline in the little church. Then, as the sun sank below the trees on the western horizon, the men would gather about the cross, sitting close together; and they would talk of this and that, of the news which came faintly to them from the world outside, of wars and of kings and queens and of bringings to bed, of death and treachery and the sweep of diseases, and always speculation as to how soon the world would end and what they, poor sinners, could do about getting themselves ready. In spite of the collars around their necks, they were of a sturdy spirit, quick to resent an injustice or to repair a wrong. There would be nothing obsequious in their talk.

This was not the kind of life men of the land would bear for long. Already there were the first signs of a stirring. Itinerant monks sometimes preached strange things on the open space in front of churches. Men would meet at night in forest glades to whisper of this new gospel of equality. It would come to a head in course of time, and there would be much bloodshed and the oak trees would blossom out with a sinister crop of hanged men. Gradually the demands of the common people would be heard and these wrongs would be done away with, in part, at least; and the kind of exactions which Richard had laid on his kingdom of England would no longer be recognized as the right of a king.

On the land the common man had certain rights and privileges, but in the forests he had none. The cruel forest laws were unbearable because nearly three quarters of the people lived on the land and so were in close contact with the woods. To know that in the cover of the trees were beasts of chase and warren was a temptation which few of the bold English, with their skill at archery, could resist. It was no wonder that the branding iron and the hangman’s rope were in such constant use, and that the woods were full of outlaws.

There has been a general belief that the Norman kings had set aside only the New Forest as a royal preserve, and on that account to exaggerate the extent of the wooded land known by that name. The New Forest covered a little less than one hundred thousand acres of land (and still less than that today), running north from the Solent to the Avon. There had been fewer ejections of residents than the records suggest. The tract
had, in fact, been a hunting preserve of the West Saxon kings and so had been a logical choice for William the Conqueror. However, the Norman kings, in their great greed, had expropriated all forest land on principle, thus making it a criminal offense to hunt or trap. The punishments they established were severe in the extreme, ranging from long terms of imprisonment to the loss of eyes or death on the gallows. The verderers, who had been put in charge of the forests as far back as the reign of Canute and had held their swain-motes ever since, had become under the Normans the instruments of a cruel oppression.

But all the laws and prohibitions which could be conceived in the minds of callous kings and written down by court clerks could not keep the natives from venturing into the woods to shoot a buck or snare a rabbit. Forest life came natural to them; they loved the high, arching trees, the calm of a shaded glade, the wild flowers and the animals. It was men of the villages lying close to the New Forest who discovered that the waters of a pond close to the spot where William Rufus fell turned a vermilion shade at certain times, as a hint that Wat Tyrrell had washed his hands there before riding away for the coast and safety. Men in green were to be found at all hours of the night in Mark Ash and Vinney Ridge and the Badger’s Wood, keeping the woodwards and the agisters on the watch and providing plenty of work for the justice in Eyre, on whose shoulders fell the responsibility of protecting the King’s deer. They sometimes entered this forbidden territory to enjoy the lovely green shades of the forest, and the purples and golds, and perhaps even to collect the many unusual flowers to be found—the oblong sundew, the bog pimpernel, the rampion-bell, the skullcap, the small teasel, and the gold samphire. Most often, however, it was a fondness for venison and for succulent stews of rabbit and squirrel. Sometimes they risked their liberty and their lives for the thrill of demonstrating their skill with that mighty weapon which was coming into its own in England, at last, the longbow.

It was not only in the New Forest or in Sherwood, which witnessed the feats of Robin Hood, that the men in green hose and jerkin poached on the King’s land. They haunted the woods in all parts of the kingdom, and everywhere could be heard the twang of the string as it left the nock, the sound of running game.

In the previous reign legends had grown up around three men whose names were William of Cloudesley, Adam Bell, and Clym o’ the Clough. They lived somewhere in the wild counties north of York and had broken the law because of their love of venison meat. They had taken shelter in the woods and had behaved with such audacity that the people of England made heroes of them. A ballad was written which continued to be sung, with much revision and addition, for many centuries afterward. It makes them out to have been supermen in the fullest sense of the word,

They were credited in this earliest of forest ballads with many a daring trick which later would be added to the Robin Hood saga. They even paid a visit to the King and demanded a chance to become law-abiding citizens again. The King looked over their records and found them very black indeed. He saw no reason to pardon them unless they could prove themselves capable of extraordinary things in his service. This sounds much more like Richard Coeur de Lion than that hardheaded man, Henry II, but it is Henry who belongs in the ballad. To give the King the proof he needed, William of Cloudesley proceeded to shoot an apple off the head of his own young son! As William Tell was not born until after the date assigned to the ballad of the three English outlaws, a question arises as to the origin of that famous story.

There have always been doubts about Robin Hood. Did he actually live? Or was he a myth, growing out of the many legends of the greenwood? If he lived and became an outlaw, how many of the exploits credited to him did he actually perform?

There seems every reason to believe that a man named Robin Hood existed and that he was forced into outlawry by his political activities. He did not, however, live in the time of Richard (despite his appearance under the name of Locksley in Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
) but appears first in the reign of Edward II, more than a century later. He was an outlaw for a relatively short time, too short to make possible all the adventures in which he is supposed to have taken a leading part. He had few associates, and none of them would bear any resemblance to Little John, Friar Tuck, or Maid Marian, most particularly the last.

The name Robin Hood seems to have been an adaptation from Robert Fitz-ooth, the ballad singers having changed it into the more euphonious form in which it has reached modern readers. This means that he was of Norman extraction. If Fitz-ooth was his real name, a valuable part of the saga is lost, for he has been depicted generally as an Anglo-Saxon gentleman fighting against the oppressive laws of the invaders. That he was of Norman stock and still became an outlaw is, however, interesting evidence of the close mingling of the two races which was manifesting itself in many ways.

Robin Hood was born between the years 1285 and 1295 in the neighborhood of Wakefield and belonged to a good family. He was not, however, the Earl of Huntingdon, as some versions have it, nor does he seem to have been connected with the higher nobility. When Edward II put so much power into the hands of his favorite, Piers Gaveston, that the
people rose in protest under the Earl of Leicester, Robin Hood was bold enough to join the forces of dissent. The insurgents were defeated, and so the famous archer (skill with the bow is the one sure point of identification with the hero of the legends) had to take to Sherwood Forest. He remained an outlaw from April 1322 until December 1323, at which time he was captured. The King was well impressed with the daring young man and not only pardoned him but took him into the royal household as a
vadelet
. Now a
vadelet
was something in the nature of a servant of the royal bedchamber—the word might even be a variant of varlet—and that kind of life became most irksome to the high-spirited ex-outlaw. He disappeared within a year and is supposed to have gone back to forest life, although this cannot be stated with any surety. It is said that he died in the convent of Kirklees, where he went for surgical help when wounded, the prioress being a relative. Out of this version grew a belief that the prioress, knowing him to have a price on his head, allowed him to bleed to death.