Ivanhoe: A Romance Page 3

  IVANHOE.

  CHAPTER I

  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 theriver Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, coveringthe greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie betweenSheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of thisextensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, ofWarncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulousDragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battlesduring the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancienttimes those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered sopopular in English song.

  Such being our chief scene, the date of our story refers to a periodtowards the end of the reign of Richard I., when his return from hislong captivity had become an event rather wished than hoped for by hisdespairing subjects, who were in the meantime subjected to every speciesof subordinate oppression. The nobles, whose power had become exorbitantduring the reign of Stephen, and whom the prudence of Henry the Secondhad scarce reduced to some degree of subjection to the crown, had nowresumed their ancient license in its utmost extent; despising the feebleinterference of the English Council of State, fortifying their castles,increasing the number of their dependants, reducing all around them to astate of vassalage, and striving by every means in their power, to placethemselves each at the head of such forces as might enable him to make afigure 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 entitledto hold themselves independent of feudal tyranny, became now unusuallyprecarious. If, as was most generally the case, they placed themselvesunder the protection of any of the petty kings in their vicinity,accepted of feudal offices in his household, or bound themselves bymutual treaties of alliance and protection, to support him in hisenterprises, they might indeed purchase temporary repose; but it mustbe with the sacrifice of that independence which was so dear to everyEnglish bosom, and at the certain hazard of being involved as a party inwhatever rash expedition the ambition of their protector might lead himto undertake. On the other hand, such and so multiplied were the meansof vexation and oppression possessed by the great Barons, that theynever wanted the pretext, and seldom the will, to harass and pursue,even to the very edge of destruction, any of their less powerfulneighbours, who attempted to separate themselves from their authority,and to trust for their protection, during the dangers of the times, totheir own inoffensive conduct, and to the laws of the land.

  A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny of thenobility, and the sufferings of the inferior classes, arose fromthe consequences of the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Fourgenerations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normansand Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests,two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, whilethe other groaned under all the consequences of defeat. The power hadbeen completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility, by the eventof the battle of Hastings, and it had been used, as our histories assureus, with no moderate hand. The whole race of Saxon princes and nobleshad been extirpated or disinherited, with few or no exceptions; nor werethe numbers great who possessed land in the country of their fathers,even as proprietors of the second, or of yet inferior classes. The royalpolicy had long been to weaken, by every means, legal or illegal, thestrength of a part of the population which was justly considered asnourishing the most inveterate antipathy to their victor. All themonarchs of the Norman race had shown the most marked predilection fortheir Norman subjects; the laws of the chase, and many others equallyunknown to the milder and more free spirit of the Saxon constitution,had been fixed upon the necks of the subjugated inhabitants, to addweight, as it were, to the feudal chains with which they were loaded. Atcourt, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and stateof a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed;in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the sametongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, andeven of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxonwas 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 betwixtthe French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselvesmutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose bydegrees the structure of our present English language, in which thespeech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blendedtogether; and which has since been so richly improved by importationsfrom the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southernnations of Europe.

  This state of things I have thought it necessary to premise for theinformation of the general reader, who might be apt to forget, that,although no great historical events, such as war or insurrection, markthe existence of the Anglo-Saxons as a separate people subsequent to thereign of William the Second; yet the great national distinctions betwixtthem and their conquerors, the recollection of what they had formerlybeen, and to what they were now reduced, continued down to the reignof Edward the Third, to keep open the wounds which the Conquest hadinflicted, and to maintain a line of separation betwixt the descendantsof 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 ofbroad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessedperhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarledarms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in someplaces they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood ofvarious descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beamsof the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, formingthose long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delightsto lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yetwilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot abroken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shatteredboughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they illuminated inbrilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way. Aconsiderable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly tohave been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition; for, onthe summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there stillremained 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, someprostrate 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 stoppingthe course of a small brook, which glided smoothly round the foot ofthe eminence, gave, by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to theplacid and elsewhere silent streamlet.

  The human figures which completed this landscape, were in number two,partaking, in their dress and appearance, of that wild and rusticcharacter, which belonged to the woodlands of the West-Riding ofYorkshire at that early period. The eldest of these men had astern, savage, and wild aspect. His garment was of the simplest formimaginable, being a close jacket with sleeves, composed of the tannedskin of some animal, on which the hair had been originally left, butwhich had been worn off in so many places, that it would have beendifficult to distinguish from the patches that remained, to whatcreature the fur had belonged. This primeval vestment reached fromthe throat to the knees, and served at once all the usual purposesof body-clothing; there was no wider opening at the collar, thanwas necessary to admit the passage of the head, from which it may beinferred, that it was put on by slipping it over the head an
d shoulders,in the manner of a modern shirt, or ancient hauberk. Sandals, boundwith thongs made of boars' hide, protected the feet, and a roll of thinleather was twined artificially round the legs, and, ascending above thecalf, left the knees bare, like those of a Scottish Highlander. To makethe jacket sit yet more close to the body, it was gathered at the middleby a broad leathern belt, secured by a brass buckle; to one side ofwhich was attached a sort of scrip, and to the other a ram's horn,accoutred with a mouthpiece, for the purpose of blowing. In the samebelt was stuck one of those long, broad, sharp-pointed, and two-edgedknives, with a buck's-horn handle, which were fabricated in theneighbourhood, and bore even at this early period the name of aSheffield whittle. The man had no covering upon his head, which wasonly defended by his own thick hair, matted and twisted together, andscorched by the influence of the sun into a rusty dark-red colour,forming a contrast with the overgrown beard upon his cheeks, which wasrather of a yellow or amber hue. One part of his dress only remains, butit is too remarkable to be suppressed; it was a brass ring, resembling adog's collar, but without any opening, and soldered fast round his neck,so loose as to form no impediment to his breathing, yet so tight as tobe incapable of being removed, excepting by the use of the file. On thissingular gorget was engraved, in Saxon characters, an inscription of thefollowing purport:--"Gurth, the son of Beowulph, is the born thrall ofCedric of Rotherwood."

  Beside the swine-herd, for such was Gurth's occupation, was seated, uponone of the fallen Druidical monuments, a person about ten years youngerin appearance, and whose dress, though resembling his companion's inform, was of better materials, and of a more fantastic appearance. Hisjacket had been stained of a bright purple hue, upon which there hadbeen some attempt to paint grotesque ornaments in different colours. Tothe jacket he added a short cloak, which scarcely reached half way downhis thigh; it was of crimson cloth, though a good deal soiled, linedwith bright yellow; and as he could transfer it from one shoulder to theother, or at his pleasure draw it all around him, its width, contrastedwith its want of longitude, formed a fantastic piece of drapery. He hadthin silver bracelets upon his arms, and on his neck a collar of thesame metal bearing the inscription, "Wamba, the son of Witless, is thethrall of Cedric of Rotherwood." This personage had the same sort ofsandals with his companion, but instead of the roll of leather thong,his legs were cased in a sort of gaiters, of which one was red and theother yellow. He was provided also with a cap, having around it morethan one bell, about the size of those attached to hawks, which jingledas he turned his head to one side or other; and as he seldom remained aminute in the same posture, the sound might be considered as incessant.Around the edge of this cap was a stiff bandeau of leather, cut at thetop into open work, resembling a coronet, while a prolonged bag arosefrom within it, and fell down on one shoulder like an old-fashionednightcap, or a jelly-bag, or the head-gear of a modern hussar. It was tothis part of the cap that the bells were attached; which circumstance,as well as the shape of his head-dress, and his own half-crazed,half-cunning expression of countenance, sufficiently pointed him out asbelonging to the race of domestic clowns or jesters, maintained in thehouses of the wealthy, to help away the tedium of those lingeringhours which they were obliged to spend within doors. He bore, likehis companion, a scrip, attached to his belt, but had neither horn norknife, being probably considered as belonging to a class whom it isesteemed dangerous to intrust with edge-tools. In place of these, hewas equipped with a sword of lath, resembling that with which Harlequinoperates his wonders upon the modern stage.

  The outward appearance of these two men formed scarce a strongercontrast than their look and demeanour. That of the serf, or bondsman,was sad and sullen; his aspect was bent on the ground with an appearanceof deep dejection, which might be almost construed into apathy, hadnot the fire which occasionally sparkled in his red eye manifested thatthere slumbered, under the appearance of sullen despondency, a sense ofoppression, and a disposition to resistance. The looks of Wamba, onthe other hand, indicated, as usual with his class, a sort of vacantcuriosity, and fidgetty impatience of any posture of repose, togetherwith the utmost self-satisfaction respecting his own situation, and theappearance which he made. The dialogue which they maintained betweenthem, was carried on in Anglo-Saxon, which, as we said before, wasuniversally spoken by the inferior classes, excepting the Normansoldiers, and the immediate personal dependants of the great feudalnobles. But to give their conversation in the original would convey butlittle information to the modern reader, for whose benefit we beg tooffer the following translation:

  "The curse of St Withold upon these infernal porkers!" said theswine-herd, after blowing his horn obstreperously, to collect togetherthe scattered herd of swine, which, answering his call with notesequally melodious, made, however, no haste to remove themselves from theluxurious banquet of beech-mast and acorns on which they had fattened,or to forsake the marshy banks of the rivulet, where several of them,half plunged in mud, lay stretched at their ease, altogether regardlessof the voice of their keeper. "The curse of St Withold upon them andupon me!" said Gurth; "if the two-legged wolf snap not up some of themere nightfall, I am no true man. Here, Fangs! Fangs!" he ejaculated atthe top of his voice to a ragged wolfish-looking dog, a sort of lurcher,half mastiff, half greyhound, which ran limping about as if with thepurpose of seconding his master in collecting the refractory grunters;but which, in fact, from misapprehension of the swine-herd's signals,ignorance of his own duty, or malice prepense, only drove them hitherand thither, and increased the evil which he seemed to design to remedy."A devil draw the teeth of him," said Gurth, "and the mother of mischiefconfound the Ranger of the forest, that cuts the foreclaws off our dogs,and makes them unfit for their trade! [8] Wamba, up and help me an thoube'st a man; take a turn round the back o' the hill to gain the windon them; and when thous't got the weather-gage, thou mayst drive thembefore thee as gently as so many innocent lambs."

  "Truly," said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, "I have consultedmy legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of opinion, thatto carry my gay garments through these sloughs, would be an act ofunfriendship to my sovereign person and royal wardrobe; wherefore,Gurth, I advise thee to call off Fangs, and leave the herd to theirdestiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers,or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than tobe converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease andcomfort."

  "The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth; "expound thatto me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to readriddles."

  "Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their fourlegs?" demanded Wamba.

  "Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."

  "And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sowwhen she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels,like a traitor?"

  "Pork," answered the swine-herd.

  "I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, Ithink, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is inthe charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes aNorman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall tofeast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"

  "It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thyfool's pate."

  "Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is oldAlderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under thecharge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fieryFrench gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that aredestined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veauin the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes aNorman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."

  "By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; littleis left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have beenreserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us toendure the tasks th
ey lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattestis for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best andbravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distantlands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or thepower to protect the unfortunate Saxon. God's blessing on our masterCedric, he hath done the work of a man in standing in the gap; butReginald Front-de-Boeuf is coming down to this country in person, and weshall soon see how little Cedric's trouble will avail him.--Here, here,"he exclaimed again, raising his voice, "So ho! so ho! well done, Fangs!thou hast them all before thee now, and bring'st them on bravely, lad."

  "Gurth," said the Jester, "I know thou thinkest me a fool, or thouwouldst not be so rash in putting thy head into my mouth. One word toReginald Front-de-Boeuf, or Philip de Malvoisin, that thou hastspoken treason against the Norman,--and thou art but a cast-awayswineherd,--thou wouldst waver on one of these trees as a terror to allevil speakers against dignities."

  "Dog, thou wouldst not betray me," said Gurth, "after having led me onto speak so much at disadvantage?"

  "Betray thee!" answered the Jester; "no, that were the trick of a wiseman; a fool cannot half so well help himself--but soft, whom have wehere?" he said, listening to the trampling of several horses whichbecame then audible.

  "Never mind whom," answered Gurth, who had now got his herd before him,and, with the aid of Fangs, was driving them down one of the long dimvistas which we have endeavoured to describe.

  "Nay, but I must see the riders," answered Wamba; "perhaps they are comefrom Fairy-land with a message from King Oberon."

  "A murrain take thee," rejoined the swine-herd; "wilt thou talk of suchthings, while a terrible storm of thunder and lightning is raging withina few miles of us? Hark, how the thunder rumbles! and for summer rain,I never saw such broad downright flat drops fall out of the clouds; theoaks, too, notwithstanding the calm weather, sob and creak with theirgreat boughs as if announcing a tempest. Thou canst play the rational ifthou wilt; credit me for once, and let us home ere the storm begins torage, for the night will be fearful."

  Wamba seemed to feel the force of this appeal, and accompanied hiscompanion, who began his journey after catching up a long quarter-staffwhich lay upon the grass beside him. This second Eumaeus strode hastilydown the forest glade, driving before him, with the assistance of Fangs,the whole herd of his inharmonious charge.