The White Company
crops and few beeves in the borderland, where a man must reap his grain
with sickle in one fist and brown bill in the other. On the other hand,
they are the sorriest archers that I have ever seen, and cannot so much
as aim with the arbalest, to say nought of the long-bow. Again, they are
mostly poor folk, even the nobles among them, so that there are few who
can buy as good a brigandine of chain-mail as that which I am wearing,
and it is ill for them to stand up against our own knights, who carry
the price of five Scotch farms upon their chest and shoulders. Man for
man, with equal weapons, they are as worthy and valiant men as could be
found in the whole of Christendom.”
“And the French?” asked Alleyne, to whom the archer's light gossip had
all the relish that the words of the man of action have for the recluse.
“The French are also very worthy men. We have had great good fortune in
France, and it hath led to much bobance and camp-fire talk, but I have
ever noticed that those who know the most have the least to say about
it. I have seen Frenchmen fight both in open field, in the intaking and
the defending of towns or castlewicks, in escalados, camisades, night
forays, bushments, sallies, outfalls, and knightly spear-runnings. Their
knights and squires, lad, are every whit as good as ours, and I could
pick out a score of those who ride behind Du Guesclin who would hold the
lists with sharpened lances against the best men in the army of England.
On the other hand, their common folk are so crushed down with gabelle,
and poll-tax, and every manner of cursed tallage, that the spirit has
passed right out of them. It is a fool's plan to teach a man to be a
cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war. Fleece them like
sheep and sheep they will remain. If the nobles had not conquered
the poor folk it is like enough that we should not have conquered the
nobles.”
“But they must be sorry folk to bow down to the rich in such a fashion,”
said big John. “I am but a poor commoner of England myself, and yet I
know something of charters, liberties, franchises, usages, privileges,
customs, and the like. If these be broken, then all men know that it is
time to buy arrow-heads.”
“Aye, but the men of the law are strong in France as well as the men
of war. By my hilt! I hold that a man has more to fear there from the
ink-pot of the one than from the iron of the other. There is ever some
cursed sheepskin in their strong boxes to prove that the rich man should
be richer and the poor man poorer. It would scarce pass in England, but
they are quiet folk over the water.”
“And what other nations have you seen in your travels, good sir?” asked
Alleyne Edricson. His young mind hungered for plain facts of life, after
the long course of speculation and of mysticism on which he had been
trained.
“I have seen the low countryman in arms, and I have nought to say
against him. Heavy and slow is he by nature, and is not to be brought
into battle for the sake of a lady's eyelash or the twang of a
minstrel's string, like the hotter blood of the south. But ma foi! lay
hand on his wool-bales, or trifle with his velvet of Bruges, and out
buzzes every stout burgher, like bees from the tee-hole, ready to lay on
as though it were his one business in life. By our lady! they have shown
the French at Courtrai and elsewhere that they are as deft in wielding
steel as in welding it.”
“And the men of Spain?”
“They too are very hardy soldiers, the more so as for many hundred years
they have had to fight hard against the cursed followers of the black
Mahound, who have pressed upon them from the south, and still, as I
understand, hold the fairer half of the country. I had a turn with them
upon the sea when they came over to Winchelsea and the good queen with
her ladies sat upon the cliffs looking down at us, as if it had been
joust or tourney. By my hilt! it was a sight that was worth the seeing,
for all that was best in England was out on the water that day. We went
forth in little ships and came back in great galleys--for of fifty tall
ships of Spain, over two score flew the Cross of St. George ere the sun
had set. But now, youngster, I have answered you freely, and I trow it
is time that you answered me. Let things be plat and plain between us. I
am a man who shoots straight at his mark. You saw the things I had
with me at yonder hostel: name which you will, save only the box of
rose-colored sugar which I take to the Lady Loring, and you shall have
it if you will but come with me to France.”
“Nay,” said Alleyne, “I would gladly come with ye to France or where
else ye will, just to list to your talk, and because ye are the only two
friends that I have in the whole wide world outside of the cloisters;
but, indeed, it may not be, for my duty is towards my brother, seeing
that father and mother are dead, and he my elder. Besides, when ye talk
of taking me to France, ye do not conceive how useless I should be to
you, seeing that neither by training nor by nature am I fitted for the
wars, and there seems to be nought but strife in those parts.”
“That comes from my fool's talk,” cried the archer; “for being a man of
no learning myself, my tongue turns to blades and targets, even as
my hand does. Know then that for every parchment in England there are
twenty in France. For every statue, cut gem, shrine, carven screen,
or what else might please the eye of a learned clerk, there are a good
hundred to our one. At the spoiling of Carcasonne I have seen chambers
stored with writing, though not one man in our Company could read them.
Again, in Arles and Nimes, and other towns that I could name, there are
the great arches and fortalices still standing which were built of old
by giant men who came from the south. Can I not see by your brightened
eye how you would love to look upon these things? Come then with me,
and, by these ten finger-bones! there is not one of them which you shall
not see.”
“I should indeed love to look upon them,” Alleyne answered; “but I have
come from Beaulieu for a purpose, and I must be true to my service, even
as thou art true to thine.”
“Bethink you again, mon ami,” quoth Aylward, “that you might do much
good yonder, since there are three hundred men in the Company, and none
who has ever a word of grace for them, and yet the Virgin knows that
there was never a set of men who were in more need of it. Sickerly the
one duty may balance the other. Your brother hath done without you this
many a year, and, as I gather, he hath never walked as far as Beaulieu
to see you during all that time, so he cannot be in any great need of
you.”
“Besides,” said John, “the Socman of Minstead is a by-word through the
forest, from Bramshaw Hill to Holmesley Walk. He is a drunken, brawling,
perilous churl, as you may find to your cost.”
“The more reason that I should strive to mend him,” quoth Alleyne.
“There is no need to urge me, friends, for my own wishes would draw
me to France, and it would be a joy to me if I could go with you. But
indeed and indeed it cannot be, so here I take my leave of you, for
yonder square tower amongst the trees upon the right must surely be the
church of Minstead, and I may reach it by this path through the woods.”
“Well, God be with thee, lad!” cried the archer, pressing Alleyne to his
heart. “I am quick to love, and quick to hate and 'fore God I am loth to
part.”
“Would it not be well,” said John, “that we should wait here, and see
what manner of greeting you have from your brother. You may prove to be
as welcome as the king's purveyor to the village dame.”
“Nay, nay,” he answered; “ye must not bide for me, for where I go I
stay.”
“Yet it may be as well that you should know whither we go,” said the
archer. “We shall now journey south through the woods until we come out
upon the Christchurch road, and so onwards, hoping to-night to reach the
castle of Sir William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, of which Sir Nigel
Loring is constable. There we shall bide, and it is like enough that for
a month or more you may find us there, ere we are ready for our viage
back to France.”
It was hard indeed for Alleyne to break away from these two new but
hearty friends, and so strong was the combat between his conscience
and his inclinations that he dared not look round, lest his resolution
should slip away from him. It was not until he was deep among the tree
trunks that he cast a glance backwards, when he found that he could
still see them through the branches on the road above him. The archer
was standing with folded arms, his bow jutting from over his shoulder,
and the sun gleaming brightly upon his head-piece and the links of
his chain-mail. Beside him stood his giant recruit, still clad in the
home-spun and ill-fitting garments of the fuller of Lymington, with arms
and legs shooting out of his scanty garb. Even as Alleyne watched them
they turned upon their heels and plodded off together upon their way.
CHAPTER IX. HOW STRANGE THINGS BEFELL IN MINSTEAD WOOD.
The path which the young clerk had now to follow lay through a
magnificent forest of the very heaviest timber, where the giant bowls
of oak and of beech formed long aisles in every direction, shooting
up their huge branches to build the majestic arches of Nature's own
cathedral. Beneath lay a broad carpet of the softest and greenest moss,
flecked over with fallen leaves, but yielding pleasantly to the foot of
the traveller. The track which guided him was one so seldom used that in
places it lost itself entirely among the grass, to reappear as a reddish
rut between the distant tree trunks. It was very still here in the heart
of the woodlands. The gentle rustle of the branches and the distant
cooing of pigeons were the only sounds which broke in upon the silence,
save that once Alleyne heard afar off a merry call upon a hunting bugle
and the shrill yapping of the hounds.
It was not without some emotion that he looked upon the scene around
him, for, in spite of his secluded life, he knew enough of the ancient
greatness of his own family to be aware that the time had been when they
had held undisputed and paramount sway over all that tract of country.
His father could trace his pure Saxon lineage back to that Godfrey Malf
who had held the manors of Bisterne and of Minstead at the time when the
Norman first set mailed foot upon English soil. The afforestation of the
district, however, and its conversion into a royal demesne had
clipped off a large section of his estate, while other parts had been
confiscated as a punishment for his supposed complicity in an abortive
Saxon rising. The fate of the ancestor had been typical of that of his
descendants. During three hundred years their domains had gradually
contracted, sometimes through royal or feudal encroachment, and
sometimes through such gifts to the Church as that with which Alleyne's
father had opened the doors of Beaulieu Abbey to his younger son. The
importance of the family had thus dwindled, but they still retained the
old Saxon manor-house, with a couple of farms and a grove large enough
to afford pannage to a hundred pigs--“sylva de centum porcis,” as the
old family parchments describe it. Above all, the owner of the soil
could still hold his head high as the veritable Socman of Minstead--that
is, as holding the land in free socage, with no feudal superior, and
answerable to no man lower than the king. Knowing this, Alleyne felt
some little glow of worldly pride as he looked for the first time
upon the land with which so many generations of his ancestors had been
associated. He pushed on the quicker, twirling his staff merrily, and
looking out at every turn of the path for some sign of the old Saxon
residence. He was suddenly arrested, however, by the appearance of a