Читать книгу Malvern Chase - W. S. Symonds - Страница 4

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I am one of that race which was English before William the Norman conquered our country. One of my ancestors followed Robert of Normandy to the wars of Palestine, and from plain John Birts changed his name to John de Brute. The Roman poet called the great Saxon race from whom we sprang "sea wolves that live on the pillage of the world," and I fear that this was too true of their earlier history; but when the land was conquered, they soon settled down around the villages of the forest glades, or by the banks of the rivers, each settlement being independent of its fellow settlement.

The Birts who assisted in the Saxon conquest of England were landholders in a land of Birch trees, and land tillers, before they crossed the seas. Their first settlement in this country was on the banks of the Severn, below the site of the ancient town of Theocsbury, at a place called Deorhyst. At Deorhyst, the religion of the Cross succeeded the pagan worship of Woden, the War God, earlier than in many parts of Saxon England, and a priory was founded in Saxon times. Here, on the conversion of the Birts to Christianity, the sacred rite of baptism was performed by immersion in the waters of the Severn, and when they died, our Edwards, or Ealdwulfs, and their Ethelgifas were laid in the grave to the ringing of the passing bell. For many years the Priory of Deorhyst acquired great and deserved celebrity among the early Christian establishments. It was rich and flourishing when the fires of the Danish invasion wrapped in flames its great wooden structures. Church and Grange were alike destroyed, and the family of the Birts had, like the Prior of Deorhyst himself, to take refuge in the dense forest which then stretched from the Malvern Hills to the Severn, and from beyond Worcester to Gloucester, and which in after times became the "" of the haughty Norman conqueror.

From old traditions handed down through long generations of the Birts, it is well nigh certain that at the time of the burning of Deorhyst, a family of Saxons had settled in a glade in the forest near to the old Roman trackway which led from Gloucester across the Malverns to Saxon Hereford. Here, too, an ancient Christian church was built of forest oaks with nothing of stone save mayhap the font, and it was called Pendyke from very early times, the church being built at the head of a dyke or trench, which was once a boundary of British tribes before the Saxons landed in Britain or the Romans either.

The family who dwelt at Pendyke bore the name of Kite, and in Saxon times the Birts of Deorhyst, and the Kitels of Pendyke, were mighty hunters in the forest, and many a wolf and many a wild boar fell before their spears.

It was to the Kitels that the Birts fled for safety at the burning and sacking of Deorhyst by Sweyne, and it was by their aid that our family reclaimed some hides of forest land within a short distance of Pendyke and established a settlement, to which they gave the name of Birtsmereton, or the ton or village where the Birts settled close upon the borders of a great mere or moor-land swamp.

The time came when the Kitels and De Brutes were no longer contented with their wooden granges and barns in the forest glades; moreover, they were always in danger from the troublous Welsh; so they each built their keep or strong tower, round which the ton or village clustered, one at Pendyke, on Kitel Hill, and the other at Birtsmereton, while close by each was erected a little church, for our gallant ancestors were God-fearing men.

Birtsmereton Keep was small, but strong, surrounded by massive stone walls and a deep trench or moat. A little stream fed this moat and ran through a large upper fish-pool, which answered two purposes, it fed the moat with water and the occupiers of the Keep with fish on fast days. The only entrance to the Keep was by a drawbridge across the deep, dark moat, and a strong portcullis hung from the battlemented gateway, which was loopholed for archers, while from a niche looked down our patron saint, St. Gunhilda. It was a forest keep, and when the farmer became a knight among Normans he still followed in the footsteps of our Saxon forefathers. He kept large droves of swine to feed upon the acorns and the beech mast on the Swineyard Hill of the Malverns, which rose above the Norman chase and forest, but it never was a great stronghold in which a crowd could be banqueted or a numerous retinue summoned to arms.

My grandfather, Giles de Brute, pulled down the Keep, leaving only the basement, and erected the Manor House in which I was born. Instead of the tower-like Keep with its round lights for windows, we had a comfortable dwelling with hanging roofs and gables, and my dear mother always pointed with pride to our windows filled with glass. Indeed, neither at Kitel Keep or Castlemereton are there now such lattices which can be opened or shut at pleasure, neither are there such andirons for the burning logs in the winter time, or so fine a vent to carry off the smoke as in our Hall. Then our bedrooms are far larger and more lofty than the little cub-holes which our ancestor Sire Giles and his dame used to occupy up the winding stone staircase of the Norman Keep. The walls too are painted with the romance of George and the Dragon, and with Noah's Ark and the wild beasts which came out of it. Our tenants were thirteen in number, and they did service for the land they occupied, which was taken in from the forest, and the gift of the Red Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert de Clare. Besides this, there were two hundred acres of arable and pasturage for the stock of the home farm, which consisted of oxen and heifers, calves and sheep, geese and capons, cocks and hens. These, with the gardens, fish-ponds, rabbit-warren, and pigeon-house, kept us well provided, and right hospitable my father was to poor as well as rich. Then there was the chaplain, an old friend of my mother's family, and the steward who lived in the house, and the forester who lived in the woods, while the plough drivers and swineherds occupied mud cottages outside but near to the Manor for defence.

Our nearest neighbours of gentle blood were Sire John Carfax of Castlemereton, and the Kitels of Pendyke, the Calverleys of Branshill across the Malvern Hills, and the Berews of Berew, the descendants of a Saxon family as ancient as our own, but who had gone down in the world through fines and spoliations, and by offence given the De Clares by appropriations of land from the forest without saying with or by your leave. Then farther off were the Bromwichs of Broomsbarrow, and the Brydges of Longdune, who lived at an old grange--Eastington--once the homes of the Saxon Eastings. To all these places there were trackways through the Chase so broad that two or three might ride abreast, while there were many portways and paths, known only to those who lived in the neighbourhood, which led to different parts of the forest, sometimes to open glades where the deer would pasture, sometimes to dense thickets the lair of the wild boar, though boars were becoming scarce to find and difficult to kill.

The south Malverns, under which our Manor House is built, are very different in their character to the northern hills which rise above the Priory and little village of Malvern. They are far more wooded up their slopes, and although not so high, the thickets are more dense and the gullets more deeply riven. For ages the forests about Waum's well, on the flanks of the Herefordshire fire-beacon, have been refuges for those who, like Owen Glendower and Sire John Oldcastle, have had to seek shelter from the wrath of kings and ecclesiastics, or the poacher who had offended against the forest laws, and was liable to pains and penalties. The side of the Midsummer Hill, below the camp on its summit, is famous for its hollows and masses of stone, with which the Britons built rude huts and circles, and here we find ever the biggest stag, and sometimes the lair of a boar.

The Ragged Stone, or Rent Hill, with its valleys of the white-leaved oak and holly bush on either flank, and seamed with gullets both on the northern and southern slopes, is a sunny hill-top on a summer's day, where swallows skim and butterflies haunt the stunted flowers, but below are the densest thickets of our forest, and the little rill which runs through the hawthorn glades. Here grow the earliest primroses of spring and the sweet white violet; and here, in the summer, are the purple foxgloves, and the yellow mullein with its woollen leaves. Then the last hill of all is the Chase End, or the end of our , for at Murrell's End, beyond the groves of Hazeldine, begins the great Chase of Gloucester. At the base, towards the south, nestles the little Norman church of Broomsbarrow, and behind is the wilderness of the Howling Heath. But through all the forest, go where you will, the spring time is resonant with the songs of birds, the nightingale and mavis, the storm-cock and the blackbird; and among the hill-tops we listen to the trill of the stone-chat and the whistle of the whin-cock, or the piping of the white dappled wheat-ear.

I was born in the year of grace 1438, just eight years after the Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc, was burnt to death for witchcraft, and three years before Eleanor Cobham, who was a sort of relation of ours through the Oldcastles, did public penance in three places in London, being accused of the great sin of endeavouring to destroy the king, his majesty Henry VI., by divinations and enchantments. But my dear and learned father was more affected, as I have often heard him say in after years, by the death of his friend the learned astrologer Roger Bolingbroke, who was most falsely accused, with Margery Jourdain, of making a wax figure of his most sacred majesty the King, for Eleanor Cobham, and in necromancing it under the light of the stars, so that in proportion as it was sweated and melted before a fire it would, by magical sympathy, cause the flesh and substance of the King to wither and melt away and his marrow to be dried up in his bones. Roger Bolingbroke was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, and Margery Jourdain was burned alive in Smithfield. At this my father was most indignant, for he, like Bolingbroke, was much given to the sciences, and especially to the studies of astronomy and astrology, as indeed was my grandfather before him, he having learned much at the time when the celebrated Owen Glendower, who was himself reputed to be a magician, was accustomed to take refuge in our forest home, and to go to and fro to Kenderchurch, the home of his daughter, Jane Scudamore, where he passed by the name of Jack of Kent.

My dear mother and ever respected father did not agree on these subjects, she never liked my father star-gazing on the Malverns, or squaring the circle with Bolingbroke, or watching the moon night after night; while she knew well that her calves once died in the paddocks hard by when Moll Billings went away cursing and blaspheming from the drawbridge. She knew too that the butter would not churn, and the conserves got mouldy when Moll was seen squinting in at the dairy door after a moonlight night, so she kept Moll at a distance and wished my father would let the moon alone also.

My father was a Wycliffite, or as was now termed a Lollard, and our grandfather's dearest friend and cousin, Sire John Oldcastle, after he had been hunted and persecuted for six long years, during which he had often sheltered in our Manor House, had been hung in iron chains and roasted over a fire, because he had been found guilty of heresy, as Bolingbroke was of necromancy, and this only a little more than twenty years before I was born.

My father was a powerful man, with large brown eyes and strongly marked forehead, round which clustered thick brown hair. An air of resolute determination expressed somewhat of his character, and a just, true man was he. My sweet mother was of Norman blood, the daughter of Sire Giles and Dame Acton; a family which came originally from France in the time of Edward the Confessor. Mother was ever beautiful, at least to father and me, her only child. Her face was lighted by dark but kindly eyes, her thoughts were ever for others rather than for herself and she nursed Moll Billings when she was sick with fever well nigh unto death, after she believed the calves had died through her witchments.

My boyhood was passed entirely at home, and to my father I owe that excellent education which has been of such service to me during a somewhat long life. He was a scholar, and had written out with his own hand much of Wycliffe's Bible and the works of Master Chaucer and Boccaccio. While my mother was busy in the long winter nights with her needle or spindle, my father would be engaged with his parchments and grey goose quill, and often would she rise up from by the burning logs, and with beaming eyes look over the writing, and, putting her arms round his neck, ask what it betokened.

Above our Manor House, within a two miles' gallop, rises the south end of Malvern Hills, and many a time and oft have I clambered up the Beacon of Herefordshire, or the Swineyard Hill, where the swine do pasture, or the Hill of Midsummer, with its ancient camp, which my father said "was occupied, with Danesmoor, by the Danes, some of whom settled around this hill when they had harried all the Saxons they could find."

Then there is the "Dead Oaks" below the Gullet Pass, where many a poacher of deer has been hung in chains as a scare to others who would trespass on the rights of those Norman barons who claimed all animals of the chase and the falcons of the hills. Here, when a boy, I have passed in fear and trembling, as the bones of the dead clattered in the wind as it whistled down the Gullet or sighed and sobbed round the Swineyard above.

When I was about twenty years of age, John Hasting, our forester and woodman, became my frequent companion, and after the morning's studies with my father over scrip, parchment, and pen, it was my delight to persuade Hasting to accompany me to the mere of Longdune, where in autumn time we snared snipes and plover in numbers with horse-hair springes, while he would occasionally kill both wild ducks and wild geese with his cress-bow, or the grey goose shaft from the long-bow, in the use of which he had no compeer. In the summer time the mere was dry in large portions, though much covered by the bull-rush and the flag, and John could always find a heron for our falcons; while many a boomer have we brought home from the mere before the summer's sun had risen above the spire of Longdune.

In the summer days flags and rushes held wild ducks' eggs and plovers, with which mother loved to make a dainty dish, when our friends and neighbours came to dine or to pass the day fishing in the moat for the luce, or in the little stream for the silver trouts.

Under the auspices of Hasting I learned a good deal of the noble sport of falconry, and our tercels were taught to fly at herons, while we had hobbies and merlins which would pounce on wild pigeons, snipe, and partridges. I also learnt to reclaim the birds and direct their diet, while, in the spring time, we would search for the young on some rocky shelf among the Malverns, or in a crow's nest from which the owners had been driven, among the tops of the highest oaks. Hasting always made our bows, and he exercised the boys and serfs around us in archery on the great green between our churches of Birtsmereton and Berew. He knew every yew and ash tree in the forest for miles around, and no arrows were so tapered, or winged with such wild-goose feathers, as those we called the "Hasting's shaft." No wonder then that in such company I became a proficient with the "gallant grey goose shaft," and that before I was twenty I could have transfixed a man at three hundred paces or a pigeon at fifty.

One evening, in the mid-spring time, Hasting told me he had heard a bittern booming at the moon down among the reeds and willows in the mere; so we were up before the sun, the grey mist still hanging over the vale, I with my cross-bow, and Hasting with his long-bow and sheaf of arrows. The air was, as Hasting said, "filled with a charm of the songs of birds." We could hear the stormcock whistling on the tops of the elms and the blackbird trolling in every thicket; by and by, from a paddock, a lark would rise carolling his welcome to the sun, then a blackcap would whistle with a tune that made us think it was the nightingale until we heard the trill, trill of that songster himself, while the zoo zoo was cooing in every grove.

The sun rose as we neared the mere, and we heard the boom, boom of the bittern, the quack of the mallard, and the shrill cauk, cauk of the heron. The mere possessed a character of its own. It was, if possible, more lonely than the Chase with its scattered villages and granges, and silent as the grave, save the calls of its wild fowl and the croak of the frog. "Boom, boom," rang out the bittern, and we directed our course towards it, as we knew it would cease to call soon after sunrise, but it was not easy to reach the spot from which the sound emanated. There were mires, tall rushes and sedges, with here and there water lying in deep hollows filled by a spring-time flood, and boggy places which would engulf a man if he slipped in, and cover him up to the day of doom in black peaty slush. So it was agreed that I should try a creep with my cross-bow in order to get a sitting shot at the boomer, which I longed to obtain, for it was the birthday of our neighbour Rosamond Berew. I then half scrambled and half waded through the sedges to within some five hundred yards of the place where the coveted bird sat, offering, in his own way, his hymn to the rising sun. The boomer always feeds by night, not, like the heron, by day, and in the early morning it will often sit close, whereas the heron quickly takes flight on the slightest sound. This was in our favour, and while Hasting went a little to the right, I crawled straight for some thick reeds from which the loud call note seemed to come. Creeping and creeping, with as little noise as possible, I was at last rewarded by seeing the beautiful bird squatted on a little knoll among the bull-rushes, his head flung well back as it uttered its call, and the sun lighting up its beautiful buff brown and chestnut plumage, while down the breast was a tippet I fervently hoped would soon grace the neck of a turtle dove who nestled under the groves of Berew. But my nerves were unsteady, and though within fifty paces of the bittern I felt that I might miss. In after years, when my life depended on steadiness of aim, I never felt so unnerved as I did when watching that bittern on that spring morning. At last, placing the bolt of the cross-bow in readiness, and bending on one knee, I took careful aim, but my hand shook, and the bolt sped close above the head of the bird. One sharp boom, a toss, as it were, through the sedges, and the strong bird was high above me, winging its flight to less dangerous quarters. In my chagrin I threw my crossbow on the ground, when suddenly the bittern fell almost at my feet, an arrow having pierced its body from wing to wing. A pang of jealousy shot through me for a moment, as Hasting came splashing through the sedges.

"Never mind, Master Hildebrande," said he, "better luck next time; I have missed more boomers than ever I killed."

Soon recovering, I congratulated him on his success, but I said nothing about the feathers for the tippet, or the birth-day present.

By this time we had got well across the mere, and it was determined I should try my luck with the long-bow at a wild duck on the water, and that we would return by Kitel Hill and the trackway to our manor. We had just crossed the brook that ran by Pendyke through the mere, when we heard the whimper of a small dog in the sedges, and coming down the bank towards the brook we saw Bessie Kitel with her red tercel on her wrist, the very red tercel I gave her just a year before.

"Oh, Hildebrande de Brute," she said, "it is too bad of you and Hasting thus early disturbing every hern within a reach of Kitel. You naughty boy, I would fly the tercel at a hern, but you and Hasting never give a poor girl a chance, and we of Kitel must content ourselves with duck or partridge. However, it is your own loss, and you will not now have a hern's crest worked by my own fingers to wear in your cap and bring you the luck of falconry."

Hardly had she spoken when a hern rose from the sedges by the brook. In a moment Bessie released the hood, and the tercel made such a dash towards the hern as at once told us it was a bold bird.

"Right well trounced," said Hasting, as the noble bird made his first swoop, and "cauk, cauk," cried the hern, as the falcon missed his strike. Again the falcon trounced, again missed, and the hern rose circling in the air. Here the tercel appeared to change its tactics, as it rose higher in great sweeps above the quarry, until both seemed soaring to the clouds. At last down came the swoop with lightning force, and we could hear the air whistle as the tercel descended, when suddenly there seemed a struggle among the clouds and slowly the heron fell fluttering to the ground.

"Spiked! by all that's holy," shouted Hasting, as he rushed towards the mere in which the heron had fallen.

Among the rushes lay both birds, dead, the falcon transfixed by the heron's beak, and the neck of the heron so injured by the shock that it too was killed.

A tear stood in Bessie's eye as we brought back her dead tercel and the heron's plume. "Poor Hildebrande," she said, for thus had she named her falcon, "you shall lie under the yew tree on our hill of Kitel, a fitting grave for so bold a bird."

Bessie Kitel was about eighteen years of age, and with her long fair hair and sparkling grey eyes looked the picture of good health and good temper. I did not altogether like her appropriating the bittern which Hasting had slung over his shoulder, saying, "Well, Hildebrande, if I have lost my tercel in endeavouring to obtain a heron's plume for you, you have won the boomer's tippet for me." She then inquired into the circumstances of the capture, and I had the mortification of confessing my miss and the good aim of Hasting. I thought a shade of displeasure passed across her face as I told her I sought the bird for the birthday of Rosamond Berew, but she was far too kindly-hearted to bear enmity, and invited us to take some refreshment at Kitel Keep, which rose immediately above us on the hill-top.

The Keep of Kitel, in the parish of Pendyke, is one of the most curious relics of antiquity in this part of England. It is a single tower, standing on the edge of a plain, and overlooking the mere of Longdune, while in the distance rise the range of the Cotswolds and the hill of Bredon. To the north we see the hills and priory of Malvern, and below the green woodlands of ; while at a short distance to the southward is the little monastery and church of Pendyke. The Keep is said to have been built upon the site of a Saxon grange by a Kitel who turned soldier in the days of William Rufus. In later times the occupiers surrounded the tower with barns and pleasant cots, so that the stronghold became the residence of the descendants of the founder, who cultivated their land with the aid of their own labourers and cottars, who gathered the grain, sheared the sheep, made the cider, hewed the wood, and malted the barley. The entrance to Kitel Keep is by a flight of stone steps, and the chambers are somewhat small and confined, while the narrow window lights are not filled with glass, but with thin cow's horn, inasmuch as Master Kitel had a great objection to employing any of the modern novelties or new luxuries.

We were greeted by the deep baying of two deer-hounds, and John Kitel seeing us approaching up the hill, from the mere below, met us on the steps, followed by his bulldog "Holdfast," a brute that would have pinned a lion at his master's signal, but was singularly tractable to the sound of his voice. Kitel gave us a homely greeting and hearty welcome, bidding us to the table, where his serving men were already gathered awaiting the important hour of dinner, for it wanted only two hours of mid-day. I soon found myself seated between "the Master" and Bessie, above the massive silver salt cellar, while Hasting placed himself at the lower board with the grieve and hinds. Cups and trenchers of bread were soon supplied to us, and a great collop pasty with salt pork was already on the table. Flagons of cider were passed round, also a small double-handed cup with wine in honour of the guests, which was carried to myself and Hasting by the hands of the fair Bessie. Kitel congratulated me on my prowess with the bow and cross-bow, and expressed a fervent hope that I should never be immersed in parchments, or become a scholar, which was fit only for "priests and scriveners." He gave us an invitation to repeat our visit whenever sport took us in that direction, and concluded by an exhortation to "ware scholarship," "which took Sire John Oldcastle to the gallows, and never yet enabled a man to draw a good bow or wield a battle-axe."

We proceeded from Kitel Keep to the Berew, or home of the Berews, in order that I might present Rosamond Berew with the boomer's tippet.

"Underhill," as their new manor house is called, from its situation below the round hill of Berew, is a very different place from Kitel Keep, although its site was formerly occupied likewise by a small Saxon grange. Surrounded by a moat it is almost entirely constructed of timber from the forest, with stone foundations and "wattle and dab" for the walls. It is not nearly so large as our own manor house of Birtsmereton, but far more comfortable than are the ancient Keeps, for here there are windows with glass, and a parlour fitted up with beautiful tapestry, also a chimney, a very rare structure in common country houses. This parlour, too, boasted one luxury which we did not then possess, and which old Master Berew is said to have received from the far East. This was a carpet, an article much too valuable to tread upon, and which is only put down for show on rare occasions, the floor being usually occupied by clean rushes, of which the meres of Longdune or Eldersfield furnish abundance.

Indeed the parlour itself at Underhill is rarely occupied, the central hall being the chamber usually frequented by the household.

The first person we beheld on our arrival was the youth known to our neighbourhood as "Silent John," the only brother of Rosamond, who never spoke save when he was spoken to, and not always then. Clad in a hunting vest with woollen hose, he was engaged in making horse-hair springes for snipes and plover, while his eyes brightened as he beheld the bittern, and he vouchsafed a quiet nod to our salutations. John superintended the farming of the estate, and the ploughing and sowing of autumn and spring. Under him were half-a-dozen churls, and in his quiet way he managed to set an example of industry to the neighbourhood, while, owing to the careful cultivation bestowed on the land, the farming at Berew was conspicuous for its crops at harvest, and the breed of cattle on the pastures. John and his sister Rosamond were orphans, and lived with their grandfather at the grange of Underhill, having lost both their parents in early childhood.

The Berews were of Saxon origin, like ourselves, but, owing to various circumstances, they had yielded less to Norman influences, and therefore were subjected more to Norman despotism. For a long time therefore the family remained churls, under the bondage of Norman lords, until one of them paid forty marks for his manumission, which was obtained by the sub-prior of Little Malvern. This was about 100 years before I was born, but since that time the Berews had accumulated money, and the grandfather of Rosamond wasknown to possess many broad pieces in addition to certain hides of land. Master Berew had known Sire John Oldcastle personally, and, himself a Lollard, had witnessed some of the persecutions of that sect. Age did not diminish his hatred of the house of Lancaster, though for years he had lived a life of retirement, varied only by occasional visits from my father, with whom, as a scholar, he was ever delighted to converse. Master Berew had been tall in his younger days, and his face now a good deal resembled the profile of the tercel or the kite. His hair was long and almost white, and he looked at us as we entered with sharp grey eyes, which seemed to search for information before we were ready to give it. He had a sorrowful expression, and wore a somewhat stern demeanour, as he rose to give his salutations to myself and my companion. He requested us to be seated on the oaken bench opposite the great chair he occupied, and on which Rosamond sat when she was released from her household duties, and listened to the instructions of her grandfather, or when he related the events of his younger days. He heard my account of the morning's sport with some interest, but I said nothing about the destiny of the boomer's tippet, or the crest of the hern. Then he inquired what were my studies, and seemed to think more of scholarship than of the hawk or the hound.

Rosamond Berew would only be pronounced beautiful by those who knew and loved her, for her principal beauty lay in expression, and no face I ever beheld equalled hers in the smiles which lighted it when she was glad, or the look of deep sympathy when she sorrowed with the bereaved. She had a gentle voice, too, which contrasted not a little with the gruff tones of her grandfather or the shrill loud calls of the country wenches. Her long brown hair hung in clusters down her neck as she advanced with beaming eyes to welcome us as we crossed the drawbridge, a posie of spring violets in her bodice, and a white dove nestling on her shoulder.

In the chamber where Master Berew was sitting she had gathered a store of herbs, from the woods above the house, which are famous as medicaments and salves. There was the ground ivy and the roots of the daffodil, with maiden's fingers and lords and ladies, all of which awaited the arrival of the celebrated herbalist--Mary of Eldersfield--sometimes called "The Witch," when they were to be stewed and compressed for future use, and given, as need required, among the households of the labourer and the poor. Then there were large bunches of primroses and cowslips, and the white wind-flower, all fresh-gathered in the woods, and with these the nest of the blue Isaac, which John had brought in only to receive a scolding from his sister for robbing the poor bird of its bright blue eggs, and an entreaty to spare the nest of the water-hen which had built its sedgy cradle on the borders of the moat.

The wild flowers were a birthday gift from the children of the cottars, one of whom had brought a young furze pig and another a pair of quice or wood-pigeons, for "the Rose of Berew," as she was often called, was almost worshipped by the hinds and their children, as she had ever a kind word and friendly greeting for those who are too often regarded as of less consequence than the cattle on the land, and are rarely so well treated.

Hasting meanwhile learnt from John Berew that a wild boar had been seen in the thickets of the Holly Bush hill, and a large stag near the pass of the hill of the Swineyard. It was therefore agreed that we should consult my father and Kitel of Pendyke, and with our combined foresters and others should hold a chase some early day. Rosamond agreed to accompany us to Birtsmereton, only about a distance of a score of bow-shots, as she wished to convey some flowers from the woods of Berew for the acceptance of my mother. We said "good-bye" to the venerable Nigel, and set forth together. Hitherto I had said nothing of the bittern's tippet, but as Rosamond tripped along by my side, and John was deep about potions for sick kine with Hasting, I took the opportunity of requesting her to accept the feathers and wear them for the sake of old acquaintance since we were children, as it was her birthday and I had taken much trouble to obtain them. She turned away her face while I spoke and was engaged in pulling her violets to pieces; then turning cheerily, she said with a smile, "I thank you gratefully, Master Hildebrande." Still I did not like the "Master." We soon arrived in sight of the tower of our church and the gables of the Manor-house. The rooks were cawing from the big elms and the moor-hen and coot flitted across the great fish-pond, as we passed towards the drawbridge. My father and mother were seated on the parapet above the moat, in the evening's sunshine, and Rosamond Berew curtsied as she received my mother's kiss and blessing. John soon possessed himself of the big tankard of cider which was brought from the house, and said little save giving some directions as to the most probable place for finding the boar on the day of the proposed chase. My father willingly gave his consent to the boar hunt, but declined joining us, as he was engaged on business of a pressing nature. It was agreed that the Kitels of Pendyke should be invited, and that we should borrow two boar-hounds from Sire Hugh Calverley of Branshill, in addition to the deer-hounds which would be furnished by the Kitels and ourselves. Bessie Kitel and Rosamond Berew were to join our party, with any of the Calverleys who liked to ride from Branshill, and Sire John Carfax from Castlemereton. The meeting place was to be the summit of the pass between the Ragged Stone and Midsummer Hills on the trackway between Theocsbury and Ledbury. These arrangements settled, Rosamond and her brother departed, an early day being fixed for our hunt of the wild boar.