The Woodman. G. P. R. James

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CHAPTER VII.

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      It was a dark night; and the appearance of the cottage or hut was, in the inside at least, gloomy enough. The large wooden boards, which shut out wind and storm, covered the apertures that served for windows; and neither lamp nor taper, nor even a common resin candle, gave light within. Yet it was only a sort of half darkness that reigned in the first chamber, as one entered from the forest; for a large fire was burning on the hearth, and a log weighing some hundredweight had just been put on. The dry unlopped shoots, and withered leaves which still hung around the trunk of the decayed tree, had caught fire first, and the flame they produced went flashing round the walls with a sort of fitful glare, displaying all that they contained.

      The room was a large one, larger indeed than many, in buildings with far greater pretensions; for the chief woodman had upon particular occasions to assemble a great number of his foresters under that roof. Whole deer were often brought in to be broken and flayed, as the terms were, and prepared for cooking, before they were sent down to the more delicate hands of the abbey. Besides, the woodman's house was usually in those days a place of general hospitality; and, indeed, the good ladies of the abbey always passed right willingly the charges which he sometimes had to make for the entertainment of strangers and wayfarers on their lands.

      As compared with a poor man's cottage of the present day, that of the woodman was a large but very wretched abode; but as compared with the huts of the ordinary peasantry of the time, it was a splendid mansion. The walls were formed of large beams of wood, crossing and supporting each other in various strange directions, forming a sort of pattern or figure inside and out, not unpleasant to look upon. The interstices were filled up with mud, mingled with small gravel stones and thick loam; and the floor was of mud, well battened down and hardened, though, in spite of all care, it presented various inequalities to the foot. Ceiling, as may well be supposed, the chamber had none. Large, heavy, roughly hewn rafters appeared above, with the inside of the thatch visible between the beams. A partition wall, with a rude door in it, crossed the building at about one third of its length, but this wall was raised no higher than those which formed the enclosure, that is to say, about seven or at most eight feet; and thus, though the lower part of the building was divided into several chambers, a clear passage for air, or sound, or rats, or mice, existed immediately under the roof, from one end of the building to the other. The most solid or massive piece of architecture in the whole structure was the chimney, with its enormously wide hearth and projecting wings. These were all built of hewn stone, the same as that of which the abbey was composed; and before the cottage was raised around it--for the chimney was built first--the mass must have looked like an obelisk in the midst of the forest.

      Although we have greatly abandoned that sort of building at present, and doubtless our houses are more warm and air-tight than those of that day; yet the plan of these large wooden frame-works, with the beams shown on the inside and the out, was not without its convenience. Thus nails and hooks, and shelves and cupboards, were easily fixed in, or against the walls, without any danger of knocking down the plaster, or injuring the painting. Indeed, I do not know what the woodman would have done without this convenience, for the whole walls, on three sides at least, were studded with hooks and pegs, from which were suspended all sorts of implements belonging to his craft, and a variety of other goods and chattels. There were axes, knives, saws, bills, wedges, mallets, hammers, picks; long bows, cross bows, sheaves of arrows, bags of quarrels, boar-spears, nets, and two or three pronged forks, some serrated at the edges like Neptune's trident, and evidently intended to bring up unwilling eels out of their native mud. Then again there were various garments, such as a woodman might be supposed to use, leathern coats, large boots, a cloth jerkin, apparently for days of ceremony, gloves made of the thickest parts of a buck's hide, and a cap almost shaped like a morion, of double-jacked leather, which would have required a sharp sword and strong arm to cut it through. But, besides this defensive piece of clothing, which was probably intended rather for the forest than the field, was the ordinary steel cap, back and breastplate of a feudal archer of the period; for each woodman was bound to serve the abbey in arms for a certain period, in case of need.

      Hanging from the beams above, was a very comfortable store of winter provision, several fat sides of bacon, half a side of a fallow deer salted and dried, and several strings of large sausages smoked in the most approved manner. Bunches of dried herbs too were there, and a salt fish or two, to eke out the lentil soup and eggs upon a fast day.

      Within the wings of the large chimney, on a coarse wooden settle, and with his foot resting upon the end of one of the iron dogs or andirons, sat the woodman himself. His arms were crossed upon his chest. His back rested against the wall of the chimney; and his eyes were fixed upon the blazing fire, as if one of those musing fits had seized him, in which eye and fancy are at work, seeing castles, and towers, and landscapes, and faces in the mouldering embers, while the mind, abstracted from the outward scene, is busy in the quiet secrecy of the heart with things of more deep and personal interest. By his side sat a large wolf dog, of a kind not often seen in England, in form like a gigantic greyhound, covered with shaggy slate-coloured hair, thickly grizzled with grey, especially about the head and paws.

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