THE NEW HOME.
"Sweetly blows the haw and the rowan-tree,
Wild roses speck our thickets sae briery;
Still, still will our walk in the green-wood be--
Oh, Jeanie! there's nothing to fear ye."
HOGG'S BALLADS.
On the following morning they entered Westmoreland; and as they
approached the term of their journey, advancing the more rapidly as
they entered the wilder and more sparsely-populated regions toward the
lakes and fells, where the castellated dwellings of the knightly
nobles and the cloisters of the ecclesiastical lords became few and
far between, they reached Kendal, then a small hamlet, with a noble
castle and small priory, before noon; and, making no stay, pressed
onward to the shores of Windermere, which they struck, not far from
the scattered cottages and small chapel of ease, tended by two aged
brothers from Kendal, known then, as it is now, not having grown much
since that day, as the village of Bowness.
On the lake, moored at a rude pier, lay a small but gayly-decorated
yacht, or galley, with the arms of Sir Yvo de Taillebois emblazoned on
its foresail, and a gay streamer flaunting from its topmast, awaiting
the arrival of the party, which had been announced to their vassals by
a harbinger sent forward from Bolton Abbey.
And here the nobles, with their immediate train, separated from the
bulk of the party, the former going on board the galley, and crossing
the pellucid waters of the beautiful lake to Sir Yvo's noble castle,
which lay not a mile from the strand, embosomed in a noble chase,
richly-wooded with superb oak and ash forests, midway of the gentle
and green valley between the lake and the western mountains, over
which his demesnes extended, while the escort, with the horse-boys,
grooms, and servitors, took the longer and more difficult way around
the head of the lake--a circuit of some twenty miles--over the sites
of the modern towns of Ambleside and Hawkshead, the castle lying in
Cumberland, although the large estates of De Taillebois extended for
many miles on both sides of the water, and in both counties, being the
last grand feudal demesne on the south side of the mountains.
Further to the north, again, where the country spread out into plains
beyond Keswick, toward Penrith and Carlisle, and the untamed Scottish
borders, there were again found vast feudal demesnes, the property of
the Lords of the Marches, the Howards, the Percys, the Umfravilles,
and others, whose prowess defended the rich lowlands of York and
Lancaster from the incursions of the Border Riders.
To the north, the nearest neighbor of De Taillebois was the Threlkeld,
of Threlkeld Castle, on the skirts of Keswick, at thirty miles or more
of distance across the pathless mountains of Scafell, Helvellyn,
Saddleback, and Skiddaw. Nigher to him, on the south, and adjoining
his lands, lay the estates of the Abbots of Furness; and to the
westward, beyond the wide range of moor and mountain, which it took
his party-two days to traverse, and in which, from Bolton till they
reached Kendal, they had seen, according to the words of the motto
prefixed to this chapter,
----------- "neither rich, nor poor,
But moss, and ling, and bare wild moor,"
lay the lands of the Cliffords and the mighty Nevilles. All the inner
country, among those glorious peaks, those deep glens, encumbered
with old unshorn woods, those blue waters, undisturbed by the presence
of a foreigner, since the eagles of the ubiquitous Roman glittered
above his camps on the stern hill-sides, over that most unprofitable
of his conquests, was virgin ground, uninhabited, save by fugitive
serfs, criminal refugees from justice, and some wild families of
liberty-loving Saxons, who had fled to the mountains, living by the
strong hand and the bended bow, and content to sacrifice all else for
the priceless boon of freedom.
It was, perhaps, the very wildness and solitude of the locality, as
much as the exquisite charm of the loveliest scenery in England, to
which, strange to say, he was fully alive--enhanced by the certainty
that in those remote regions, where there were no royal forests, nor
any territorial magnates who could in any way rival himself, his
forest rights, of which every Norman was constitutionally jealous,
were perfectly intangible and unassailable--which had so much attached
Sir Yvo de Taillebois to his Cumbrian castle of High Furness, in
preference to all his fair estates and castles in the softer and more
cultivated portions of the realm.
Certain it is, that he did love it better than all his other lands
united; and hither he resorted, whenever he could escape from the
duties of camps and the restraint of courts, to live a life among his
vassals, his feudal tenants, and his humbler villagers, more like that
of an Oriental patriarch than of a Norman warrior, but for the feudal
pomp which graced his castle halls, and swelled his mountain hunts
into a mimicry of warfare.
At about ten miles distant across the lake, up toward the lower spurs
of the north-eastern mountains, lies the small lake of Kentmere, the
head-waters and almost the spring of the river Kent; which, flowing
down southward through the vale of Kendal, falls into the western head
of Morecambe Bay, having its embouchure guarded by the terrible sands
of Lancaster, so fatal to foot-passengers, owing to the terrific
influx of the entering tides.
Set like a gem of purest water in a rough frame of savage mountains,
their lower sides mantled with rich deciduous woods, their purple
heathery brows dotted with huge Scotch firs, single, or in romantic
groups, their scalps bald and broken, of gray and schistous rock,
Kentmere fills up the whole basin of the dell it occupies, with the
exception of a verge of smooth, green meadow-land, never above a
hundred or two of yards in width, margined with a silvery stripe of
snow-white sand, and studded by a few noble oaks.
At the head of the lake, half encircled by the dancing brook which
formed its only inlet, rose a soft swell of ground, smooth and
round-headed, neither hill nor hillock; its southern face, toward the
lake, cleared of wood, and covered with short, close greensward, its
flanks and brow overgrown with luxuriant oak-wood of the second
growth, interspersed with varnished hollies, silver-stemmed birches,
and a score or two of gigantic fir-trees, overtopping the pale green
foliage of the coppice, and contrasting its lightsome tints by their
almost sable hue.
Behind this fairy knoll the hill rose in rifted perpendicular faces of
rock, garlanded and crowned with hanging coppices, for two or three
hundred feet in height; the nesting-place of noble falcons,
peregrines, gosshawks, haggards of the rock, and of a single pair of
golden eagles, the terror of the dale from time immemorial.
In all lake land, there is no lovelier spot than Kentmere. The deep
meadows by its side in early spring are one glowing garden of
many-colored crocuses, golden, white, purple lady-smocks, yellow
king-cups, and all sweet and gay-garbed flowers that love the
water-side; the rounded knoll and all the oak-wood sides are alive
with saffron primroses, cowslips, and meadow-sweets; and the air is
rife with the perfume of unnumbered violets, and vocal with the song
of countless warblers.
And on the mid slope of that rounded, bosom-like swell of land, there
stood, at the period of my tale, a low stone building of one story,
long for its height, narrow, and massively built of blocks of the
native gray stone of the hills, with a projecting roof of heavy flags,
forming a porch over the door, and two chimneys, one at either end, of
a form peculiar, to this day, to that district, each covered with a
flat stone slab supported on four columns, to prevent the smoke from
driving down into the chambers, under the influence of the whirling
gusts from the mountain tops.
Glass windows were unknown in those days, save to the castellated
mansions of the great, or the noble minsters and cathedrals of the
great cities--the art having been first introduced, after the
commencement of the dark ages, in the reign of Edward the Confessor,
although it must have been well known and of common occurrence in
England during its occupation by the Romans, who used glass for
windows as well as implements so early as the time of Cicero, and who
would seem to have brought its manufacture to a perfection
unattainable by us moderns, since it is credibly asserted that they
had the art to render it malleable. Horn and talc, or oiled parchment,
were used by the middle classes, but this was a luxury confined to the
dwellers in towns; and the square mullioned apertures, which here
served for windows, were closed by day and in fine weather by slender
lattices, and during storms or at night by wooden shutters. The want
of these luxuries, however, being unknown, was unregarded; and the
verdurer's house at Kentmere was regarded in those days as a fine
specimen of rural architecture, and stood as high by comparison as
many an esquire's hall of the present day.
For the rest, it was partly overrun with ivy and woodbine, and was
overhung at the western end by a noble mountain-ash, from under the
roots of which welled out a small crystal spring, and sheltered to the
east by a group of picturesque Scotch firs. An out-building or two, a
stone barn, a cow-house, and what, by the baying and din of hounds,
was clearly a dog-kennel, stood a little way aloof, under the skirts
of the coppice, and completed the appurtenances of what was then
deemed a very perfect dwelling for a small rural proprietor, and would
be held now a very tolerable mountain farm-house for a tenant cotter.
This was the new home of Kenric and Edith, now by the good offices of
the old curate of Bowness made man and wife; and here, with the good
old mother nodding and knitting by the hearth, and two stout boys,
Kenric's varlets, to tend the hounds and hawks, and to do the offices
of the small hill farm, they dwelt as happy as the day; he occupying
the responsible position of head-forester of upper Kentdale, and
warder of the cotters, shepherds, and verdurers, whose cottages were
scattered in the woods and over the hill-sides, and both secure in the
favor of their lovely lady, and proud of the confidence of their lord.