BY THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY

CHAPTER IV

A HUNTING PARTY—­AN ADVENTURE—­A DELIVERANCE

The next morning the bugles were sounded by daybreak in the court of Lord Boteler’s mansion, to call the inhabitants from their slumbers to assist in a splendid chase with which the Baron had resolved to entertain his neighbour Fitzallen and his noble visitor St. Clare.  Peter Lanaret, the falconer, was in attendance, with falcons for the knights and teircelets for the ladies, if they should choose to vary their sport from hunting to hawking.  Five stout yeomen keepers, with their attendants, called Ragged Robins, all meetly arrayed in Kendal green, with bugles and short hangers by their sides, and quarter-staffs in their hands, led the slow-hounds or brachets by which the deer were to be put up.  Ten brace of gallant greyhounds, each of which was fit to pluck down, singly, the tallest red deer, were led in leashes, by as many of Lord Boteler’s foresters.  The pages, squires, and other attendants of feudal splendour well attired, in their best hunting-gear, upon horseback or foot, according to their rank, with their boar-spears, long bows, and cross-bows, were in seemly waiting.

A numerous train of yeomen, called in the language of the times retainers, who yearly received a livery coat and a small pension for their attendance on such solemn occasions, appeared in cassocks of blue, bearing upon their arms the cognisance of the house of Boteler, as a badge of their adherence.  They were the tallest men of their hands that the neighbouring villages could supply, with every man his good buckler on his shoulder, and a bright burnished broadsword dangling from his leathern belt.  On this occasion they acted as rangers for beating up the thickets and rousing the game.  These attendants filled up the court of the castle, spacious as it was.

On the green without you might have seen the motley assemblage of peasantry convened by report of the splendid hunting, including most of our old acquaintances from Tewin, as well as the jolly partakers of good cheer at Hob Filcher’s.  Gregory the jester, it may well be guessed, had no great mind to exhibit himself in public after his recent disaster; but Oswald the steward, a great formalist in whatever concerned the public exhibition of his master’s household state, had positively enjoined his attendance.  ‘What,’ quoth he,’shall the house of the brave Lord Boteler, on such a brave day as this, be without a fool?  Certes, the good Lord Saint Clere and his fair lady sister might think our housekeeping as niggardly as that of their churlish kinsman at Gay Bowers, who sent his father’s jester to the hospital, sold the poor sot’s bells for hawk-jesses, and made a nightcap of his long-eared bonnet.  And, sirrah, let me see thee fool handsomely—­speak squibs and crackers, instead of that dry, barren, musty gibing which thou hast used of late; or, by the bones! the porter shall have thee to his lodge, and cob thee with thine own wooden sword till thy skin is as motley as thy doublet.’