The White Company
need his help! He is here to-night for herbergage, as are the others
except the foresters. His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his
girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant
that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work
and a trifle dim in the eye. The lusty man next him with the red head
I have not seen before. The four on this side are all workers, three
of them in the service of the bailiff of Sir Baldwin Redvers, and the
other, he with the sheepskin, is, as I hear, a villein from the midlands
who hath run from his master. His year and day are well-nigh up, when he
will be a free man.”
“And the other?” asked Alleyne in a whisper. “He is surely some very
great man, for he looks as though he scorned those who were about him.”
The landlady looked at him in a motherly way and shook her head. “You
have had no great truck with the world,” she said, “or you would have
learned that it is the small men and not the great who hold their noses
in the air. Look at those shields upon my wall and under my eaves. Each
of them is the device of some noble lord or gallant knight who hath
slept under my roof at one time or another. Yet milder men or easier to
please I have never seen: eating my bacon and drinking my wine with a
merry face, and paying my score with some courteous word or jest which
was dearer to me than my profit. Those are the true gentles. But your
chapman or your bearward will swear that there is a lime in the wine,
and water in the ale, and fling off at the last with a curse instead of
a blessing. This youth is a scholar from Cambrig, where men are wont to
be blown out by a little knowledge, and lose the use of their hands in
learning the laws of the Romans. But I must away to lay down the beds.
So may the saints keep you and prosper you in your undertaking!”
Thus left to himself, Alleyne drew his panel of wood where the light of
one of the torches would strike full upon it, and worked away with all
the pleasure of the trained craftsman, listening the while to the talk
which went on round the fire. The peasant in the sheepskins, who had
sat glum and silent all evening, had been so heated by his flagon of ale
that he was talking loudly and angrily with clenched hands and flashing
eyes.
“Sir Humphrey Tennant of Ashby may till his own fields for me,” he
cried. “The castle has thrown its shadow upon the cottage over long.
For three hundred years my folk have swinked and sweated, day in and day
out, to keep the wine on the lord's table and the harness on the lord's
back. Let him take off his plates and delve himself, if delving must be
done.”
“A proper spirit, my fair son!” said one of the free laborers. “I would
that all men were of thy way of thinking.”
“He would have sold me with his acres,” the other cried, in a
voice which was hoarse with passion. “'The man, the woman and their
litter'--so ran the words of the dotard bailiff. Never a bullock on the
farm was sold more lightly. Ha! he may wake some black night to find
the flames licking about his ears--for fire is a good friend to the
poor man, and I have seen a smoking heap of ashes where over night there
stood just such another castlewick as Ashby.”
“This is a lad of mettle!” shouted another of the laborers. “He dares to
give tongue to what all men think. Are we not all from Adam's loins, all
with flesh and blood, and with the same mouth that must needs have food
and drink? Where all this difference then between the ermine cloak and
the leathern tunic, if what they cover is the same?”
“Aye, Jenkin,” said another, “our foeman is under the stole and the
vestment as much as under the helmet and plate of proof. We have as much
to fear from the tonsure as from the hauberk. Strike at the noble and
the priest shrieks, strike at priest and the noble lays his hand upon
glaive. They are twin thieves who live upon our labor.”
“It would take a clever man to live upon thy labor, Hugh,” remarked one
of the foresters, “seeing that the half of thy time is spent in swilling
mead at the 'Pied Merlin.'”
“Better that than stealing the deer that thou art placed to guard, like
some folk I know.”
“If you dare open that swine's mouth against me,” shouted the woodman,
“I'll crop your ears for you before the hangman has the doing of it,
thou long-jawed lackbrain.”
“Nay, gentles, gentles!” cried Dame Eliza, in a singsong heedless voice,
which showed that such bickerings were nightly things among her guests.
“No brawling or brabbling, gentles! Take heed to the good name of the
house.”
“Besides, if it comes to the cropping of ears, there are other folk who
may say their say,” quoth the third laborer. “We are all freemen, and
I trow that a yeoman's cudgel is as good as a forester's knife. By
St. Anselm! it would be an evil day if we had to bend to our master's
servants as well as to our masters.”
“No man is my master save the King,” the woodman answered. “Who is
there, save a false traitor, who would refuse to serve the English
king?”
“I know not about the English king,” said the man Jenkin. “What sort of
English king is it who cannot lay his tongue to a word of English? You
mind last year when he came down to Malwood, with his inner marshal and
his outer marshal, his justiciar, his seneschal, and his four and twenty
guardsmen. One noontide I was by Franklin Swinton's gate, when up he
rides with a yeoman pricker at his heels. 'Ouvre,' he cried, 'ouvre,' or
some such word, making signs for me to open the gate; and then 'Merci,'
as though he were adrad of me. And you talk of an English king?”
“I do not marvel at it,” cried the Cambrig scholar, speaking in the high
drawling voice which was common among his class. “It is not a tongue
for men of sweet birth and delicate upbringing. It is a foul, snorting,
snarling manner of speech. For myself, I swear by the learned Polycarp
that I have most ease with Hebrew, and after that perchance with
Arabian.”
“I will not hear a word said against old King Ned,” cried Hordle John
in a voice like a bull. “What if he is fond of a bright eye and a saucy
face. I know one of his subjects who could match him at that. If
he cannot speak like an Englishman I trow that he can fight like an
Englishman, and he was hammering at the gates of Paris while ale-house
topers were grutching and grumbling at home.”
This loud speech, coming from a man of so formidable an appearance,
somewhat daunted the disloyal party, and they fell into a sullen
silence, which enabled Alleyne to hear something of the talk which was
going on in the further corner between the physician, the tooth-drawer
and the gleeman.
“A raw rat,” the man of drugs was saying, “that is what it is ever my
use to order for the plague--a raw rat with its paunch cut open.”
“Might it not be broiled, most learned sir?” asked the tooth-drawer. “A
raw rat sounds a most sorry and cheerless dish.”
“Not to be eaten,” cried the physician, in high disdain. “Why should any
man eat such a thing?”
“Why indeed?” asked the gleeman, taking a long drain at his tankard.
“It is to be placed on the sore or swelling. For the rat, mark you,
being a foul-living creature, hath a natural drawing or affinity for
all foul things, so that the noxious humors pass from the man into the
unclean beast.”
“Would that cure the black death, master?” asked Jenkin.
“Aye, truly would it, my fair son.”
“Then I am right glad that there were none who knew of it. The black
death is the best friend that ever the common folk had in England.”
“How that then?” asked Hordle John.
“Why, friend, it is easy to see that you have not worked with your hands
or you would not need to ask. When half the folk in the country were
dead it was then that the other half could pick and choose who they
would work for, and for what wage. That is why I say that the murrain
was the best friend that the borel folk ever had.”
“True, Jenkin,” said another workman; “but it is not all good that is
brought by it either. We well know that through it corn-land has been
turned into pasture, so that flocks of sheep with perchance a single
shepherd wander now where once a hundred men had work and wage.”
“There is no great harm in that,” remarked the tooth-drawer, “for the
sheep give many folk their living. There is not only the herd, but the
shearer and brander, and then the dresser, the curer, the dyer, the
fuller, the webster, the merchant, and a score of others.”
“If it come to that.” said one of the foresters, “the tough meat of them
will wear folks teeth out, and there is a trade for the man who can draw
them.”
A general laugh followed this sally at the dentist's expense, in the
midst of which the gleeman placed his battered harp upon his knee, and
began to pick out a melody upon the frayed strings.
“Elbow room for Floyting Will!” cried the woodmen. “Twang us a merry
lilt.”
“Aye, aye, the 'Lasses of Lancaster,'” one suggested.
“Or 'St. Simeon and the Devil.'”
“Or the 'Jest of Hendy Tobias.'”
To all these suggestions the jongleur made no response, but sat with his
eye fixed abstractedly upon the ceiling, as one who calls words to his
mind. Then, with a sudden sweep across the strings, he broke out into
a song so gross and so foul that ere he had finished a verse the
pure-minded lad sprang to his feet with the blood tingling in his face.
“How can you sing such things?” he cried. “You, too, an old man who
should be an example to others.”
The wayfarers all gazed in the utmost astonishment at the interruption.
“By the holy Dicon of Hampole! our silent clerk has found his tongue,”
said one of the woodmen. “What is amiss with the song then? How has it
offended your babyship?”
“A milder and better mannered song hath never been heard within these
walls,” cried another. “What sort of talk is this for a public inn?”
“Shall it be a litany, my good clerk?” shouted a third; “or would a hymn
be good enough to serve?”
The jongleur had put down his harp in high dudgeon. “Am I to be preached
to by a child?” he cried, staring across at Alleyne with an inflamed and
angry countenance. “Is a hairless infant to raise his tongue against me,
when I have sung in every fair from Tweed to Trent, and have twice been
named aloud by the High Court of the Minstrels at Beverley? I shall sing
no more to-night.”
“Nay, but you will so,” said one of the laborers. “Hi, Dame Eliza, bring
a stoup of your best to Will to clear his throat. Go forward with thy
song, and if our girl-faced clerk does not love it he can take to the
road and go whence he came.”
“Nay, but not too fast,” broke in Hordle John. “There are two words in
this matter. It may be that my little comrade has been over quick in
reproof, he having gone early into the cloisters and seen little of the
rough ways and words of the world. Yet there is truth in what he says,
for, as you know well, the song was not of the cleanest. I shall stand
by him, therefore, and he shall neither be put out on the road, nor
shall his ears be offended indoors.”
“Indeed, your high and mighty grace,” sneered one of the yeomen, “have
you in sooth so ordained?”
“By the Virgin!” said a second, “I think that you may both chance to
find yourselves upon the road before long.”
“And so belabored as to be scarce able to crawl along it,” cried a
third.
“Nay, I shall go! I shall go!” said Alleyne hurriedly, as Hordle John
began to slowly roll up his sleeve, and bare an arm like a leg of
mutton. “I would not have you brawl about me.”
“Hush! lad,” he whispered, “I count them not a fly. They may find they
have more tow on their distaff than they know how to spin. Stand thou
clear and give me space.”
Both the foresters and the laborers had risen from their bench, and Dame