He rose, not very much hurt in body, but sadly out of temper, and, unable to bear the jeers of his companions, and their sarcastic compliments on his “graceful horsemanship,” he left the yard.

He was trying very hard to learn such feats, and yet could not gain the dexterity for these novel exercises; and, poor boy, he was quite weary of being laughed at, so he went and wandered pensively about in the forest.

He had, indeed, to chew the cud of bitter reflection, for his position was not at all a happy one.  Few lads could have more to bear—­cutting sarcasm, biting contempt, not openly or coarsely expressed, but always implied plainly enough—­constant abuse of his nation, and even of his own immediate ancestors, on whose fair domains these Norman intruders were fattening.

“Oh! it is too hard to bear,” thought the poor lad.

And then he saw the unfortunate thralls of his father, ground down by the tyranny of these Norman lords and their soldiery, forced to draw stone and timber, like beasts of burden, for the purpose of building towers and dungeons for their oppressors, urged on with the lash if they faltered.

Since the death of their good lady, all this had been, of course, much worse.

And then, those forest laws, so vilely cruel.  Wilfred saw men blind with one eye, or wanting a hand; and why?  Because they had killed a hare or wounded a deer; for it would have been a hanging matter to kill the red hart.

Meanwhile he was growing in mind and body; he had now passed his seventeenth birthday, and was beginning to think himself a man; but where were the vassals whose leader and chieftain he was born to be?—­where?

The people of Aescendune were diminishing daily—­the English people thereof, we should say, for the places of those who fled their homes, and went no one knew whither, were filled by Normans, French, Bretons, or other like “cattle,” as Wilfred called them in his wrath.

Everywhere he heard the same “jabbering” tongue, that Norman French—­French with a Danish accent, and he liked it little enough.  Good old English was becoming rare; the strangers compared it to the grunting of swine or the lowing of cattle, in their utter scorn of the aborigines.

Were the descendants of Hengist, Horsa, Ella, Cerdic, Ercenwin, Ida, Uffa, and Cridda to bear this? and more especially was he, Wilfred, the grandson of the heroic Alfgar, whose praises as the companion in arms of the Ironside had been sung by a hundred minstrels, and told again and again at the winter’s fire in the castle hall—­was he to bear this contumely?  He could not much longer.

And then that scowling, dark, frowning, old Baron—­there was a world of deadly mischief in his dark eye, which looked like light twinkling at the bottom of a black well.  Once when Etienne was uttering some polished sarcasm at Wilfred’s expense, the English lad caught the father’s look, and there was something in it which puzzled him for a day or two.