INTRODUCTION
Dame History is so austere a lady that if one, has been so
ill-advised as to take a liberty with her, one should hasten to
make amends by repentance and confession. Events have been
transposed to the extent of some few months in this narrative in
order to preserve the continuity and evenness of the story. I
hope so small a divergence may seem a venial error after so many
centuries. For the rest, it is as accurate as a good deal of
research and hard work could make it.
The matter of diction is always a question of taste and discretion
in a historical reproduction. In the year 1350 the upper classes
still spoke Norman-French, though they were just beginning to
condescend to English. The lower classes spoke the English of the
original Piers Plowman text, which would be considerably more
obscure than their superiors' French if the two were now
reproduced or imitated. The most which the chronicles can do is
to catch the cadence and style of their talk, and to infuse here
and there such a dash of the archaic as may indicate their fashion
of speech.
I am aware that there are incidents which may strike the modern
reader as brutal and repellent. It is useless, however, to draw
the Twentieth Century and label it the Fourteenth. It was a
sterner age, and men's code of morality, especially in matters of
cruelty, was very different. There is no incident in the text for
which very good warrant may not be given. The fantastic graces of
Chivalry lay upon the surface of life, but beneath it was a
half-savage population, fierce and animal, with little ruth or
mercy. It was a raw, rude England, full of elemental passions,
and redeemed only by elemental virtues. Such I have tried to draw it.
For good or bad, many books have gone to the building of this one.
I look round my study table and I survey those which lie with me
at the moment, before I happily disperse them forever. I see La
Croix's "Middle Ages," Oman's "Art of War," Rietstap's "Armorial
General," De la Borderie's "Histoire de Bretagne," Dame Berner's
"Boke of St. Albans," "The Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brokeland,"
"The Old Road," Hewitt's "Ancient Armour," Coussan's "Heraldry,"
Boutell's "Arms," Browne's "Chaucer's "England," Cust's "Scenes of
the Middle Ages," Husserand's "Wayfaring Life," Ward's "Canterbury
Pilgrims;" Cornish's "Chivalry," Hastings' "British Archer,"
Strutt's "Sports," Johnes Froissart, Hargrove's "Archery,"
Longman's "Edward III," Wright's "Domestic Manners." With these
and many others I have lived for months. If I have been unable to
combine and transfer their effect, the fault is mine.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.
"UNDERSHAW," November 30, 1905.
I. THE HOUSE OF LORING
In the month of July of the year 1348, between the feasts of St.
Benedict and of St. Swithin, a strange thing came upon England,
for out of the east there drifted a monstrous cloud, purple and
piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushed heaven. In
the shadow of that strange cloud the leaves drooped in the trees,
the birds ceased their calling, and the cattle and the sheep
gathered cowering under the hedges. A gloom fell upon all the
land, and men stood with their eyes upon the strange cloud and a
heaviness upon their hearts. They crept into the churches where
the trembling people were blessed and shriven by the trembling
priests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling from
the woods, nor any of the homely sounds of Nature. All was still,
and nothing moved, save only the great cloud which rolled up and
onward, with fold on fold from the black horizon. To the west was
the light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud-bank,
creeping ever slowly across, until the last thin blue gleam faded
away and the whole vast sweep of the heavens was one great leaden
arch.
Then the rain began to fall. All day it rained, and all the night
and all the week and all the month, until folk had forgotten the
blue heavens and the gleam of the sunshine. It was not heavy, but
it was steady and cold and unceasing, so that the people were
weary of its hissing and its splashing, with the slow drip from
the eaves. Always the same thick evil cloud flowed from east to
west with the rain beneath it. None could see for more than a
bow-shot from their dwellings for the drifting veil of the
rain-storms. Every morning the folk looked upward for a break,
but their eyes rested always upon the same endless cloud, until at
last they ceased to look up, and their hearts despaired of ever
seeing the change. It was raining at Lammas-tide and raining at
the Feast of the Assumption and still raining at Michaelmas. The
crops and the hay, sodden and black, had rotted in the fields, for
they were not worth the garnering. The sheep had died, and the
calves also, so there was little to kill when Martinmas came and
it was time to salt the meat for the winter. They feared a
famine, but it was worse than famine which was in store for them.
For the rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone
upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. Wet and
rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foul haze which rose
from the woods. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a
size and color never matched before - scarlet and mauve and liver
and black. It was as though the sick earth had burst into foul
pustules; mildew and lichen mottled the walls, and with that
filthy crop Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth. Men
died, and women and children, the baron of the castle, the
franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the villein in his
wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek and
all died the same death of corruption. Of those who were stricken
none recovered, and the illness was ever the same - gross boils,
raving, and the black blotches which gave its name to the disease.
All through the winter the dead rotted by the wayside for want of
some one to bury them. In many a village no single man was left
alive. Then at last the spring came with sunshine and health and
lightness and laughter - the greenest, sweetest, tenderest spring
that England had ever known - but only half of England could know
it. The other half had passed away with the great purple cloud.
Yet it was there in that stream of death, in that reek of
corruption, that the brighter and freer England was born. There
in that dark hour the first streak of the new dawn was seen. For
in no way save by a great upheaval and change could the nation
break away from that iron feudal system which held her limbs. But
now it was a new country which came out from that year of death.
The barons were dead in swaths. No high turret nor cunning moat
could keep out that black commoner who struck them down.
Oppressive laws slackened for want of those who could enforce
them, and once slackened could never be enforced again. The
laborer would be a slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his
shackles. There was much to do and few left to do it. Therefore
the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where
and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the
way for that great rising thirty years later which left the
English peasant the freest of his class in Europe.
But there were few so far-sighted that they could see that here,
as ever, good was coming out of evil. At the moment misery and
ruin were brought into every family. The dead cattle, the
ungarnered crops, the untilled lands - every spring of wealth had
dried up at the same moment. Those who were rich became poor; but
those who were poor already, and especially those who were poor
with the burden of gentility upon their shoulders, found
themselves in a perilous state. All through England the smaller
gentry were ruined, for they had no trade save war, and they drew
their living from the work of others. On many a manor-house there
came evil times, and on none more than on the Manor of Tilford,
where for many generations the noble family of the Lorings had
held their home.
There was a time when the Lorings had held the country from the
North Downs to the Lakes of Frensham, and when their grim
castle-keep rising above the green meadows which border the River
Wey had been the strongest fortalice betwixt Guildford Castle in
the east and Winchester in the west. But there came that Barons'
War, in which the King used his Saxon subjects as a whip with
which to scourge his Norman barons, and Castle Loring, like so
many other great strongholds, was swept from the face of the land.
>From that time the Lorings, with estates sadly curtailed, lived in
what had been the dower-house, with enough for splendor.
And then came their lawsuit with Waverley Abbey, and the
Cistercians laid claim to their richest land, with peccary,
turbary and feudal rights over the remainder. It lingered on for
years, this great lawsuit, and when it was finished the men of the
Church and the men of the Law had divided all that was richest of
the estate between them. There was still left the old manor-house
from which with each generation there came a soldier to uphold the
credit of the name and to show the five scarlet roses on the
silver shield where it had always been shown - in the van. There
were twelve bronzes in the little chapel where Matthew the priest
said mass every morning, all of men of the house of Loring. Two
lay with their legs crossed, as being from the Crusades. Six
others rested their feet upon lions, as having died in war. Four
only lay with the effigy of their hounds to show that they had
passed in peace.
Of this famous but impoverished family, doubly impoverished by law
and by pestilence, two members were living in the year of grace
1349 - Lady Ermyntrude Loring and her grandson Nigel. Lady
Ermyntrude's husband had fallen before the Scottish spearsmen at
Stirling, and her son Eustace, Nigel's father, had found a
glorious death nine years before this chronicle opens upon the
poop of a Norman galley at the sea-fight of Sluys. The lonely old
woman, fierce and brooding like the falcon mewed in her chamber,
was soft only toward the lad whom she had brought up. All the
tenderness and love of her nature, so hidden from others that they
could not imagine their existence, were lavished upon him. She
could not bear him away from her, and he, with that respect for
authority which the age demanded, would not go without her
blessing and consent.
So it came about that Nigel, with his lion heart and with the
blood of a hundred soldiers thrilling in his veins, still at the
age of two and twenty, wasted the weary days reclaiming his hawks
with leash and lure or training the alans and spaniels who shared
with the family the big earthen-floored hall of the manor-house.
Day by day the aged Lady Ermyntrude had seen him wax in strength
and in manhood, small of stature, it is true, but with muscles of
steel - and a soul of fire. From all parts, from the warden of
Guildford Castle, from the tilt-yard of Farnham, tales of his
prowess were brought back to her, of his daring as a rider, of his
debonair courage, of his skill with all weapons; but still she,
who had both husband and son torn from her by a bloody death,
could not bear that this, the last of the Lorings, the final bud
of so famous an old tree, should share the same fate. With a
weary heart, but with a smiling face, he bore with his uneventful
days, while she would ever put off the evil time until the harvest
was better, until the monks of Waverley should give up what they
had taken, until his uncle should die and leave money for his
outfit, or any other excuse with which she could hold him to her
side.
And indeed, there was need for a man at Tilford, for the strife
betwixt the Abbey and the manor-house had never been appeased, and
still on one pretext or another the monks would clip off yet one
more slice of their neighbor's land. Over the winding river,
across the green meadows, rose the short square tower and the high
gray walls of the grim Abbey, with its bell tolling by day and
night, a voice of menace and of dread to the little household.
It is in the heart of the great Cistercian monastery that this
chronicle of old days must take its start, as we trace the feud
betwixt the monks and the house of Loring, with those events to
which it gave birth, ending with the coming of Chandos, the
strange spear-running of Tilford Bridge and the deeds with which
Nigel won fame in the wars. Elsewhere, in the chronicle of the
White Company, it has been set forth what manner of man was Nigel
Loring. Those who love him may read herein those things which
went to his making. Let us go back together and gaze upon this
green stage of England, the scenery, hill, plain and river even as
now, the actors in much our very selves, in much also so changed
in thought and act that they might be dwellers in another world to
ours.
