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MAID MARIAN

have made him so bitter and pointed in his attack on Lucy.

Shakespeare's love for his native county was as remarkable as the hatred which he kept warm for the manor lord of Charlecote; and in As You Like It we see how he set himself to vie with the Robin Hood ballads and traditions, so that Arden might have its own company of greenwood adventurers, Maid Marian being translated into Rosalind, a new queen of a new romance. Shakespeare, I believe, was influenced all his life by what his mother told him in his boyhood concerning the people's favourite woman, Maid Marian, chaste as Diana, patient as Griselda, and brave as Bradamante. In any case, he loved the Robin Hood stories, and was stimulated by their genial courage and kindness. "Where will the old Duke live?" asks Oliver, in As You Like It; and Charles, wrestler though he is, replies in a vein of poetry:

"They say, he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say, many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world."

The golden world! Long may Englishmen visit that home of their good genius, and there taste with delight the anodyne of dreams. To fall in love with Rosalind, to be merry with Puck and Titania, to be archers with Robin Hood and friars with jolly Tuck—what more can a sane reader ask for,

except a repetition of the pleasure, and a ripe friendship with all the happy dwellers in the romance of the "grene wode"?

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CHAPTER IX

THE LORD OF THE MANOR

NGLAND may be likened to her national emblem of the Middle Ages, the yew tree, the longest lived of all trees, the slowest in growth, and the bravest in bad weather. Other nations have undergone sudden and violent changes, turning the movement of their life from one channel into another; while England, after a great upheaval, after many a national tragedy, has taken up her growth and continued it, just as yew trees do when they have been thrashed by storms and singed by lightning. lightning. There are yew trees in England as old as the Norman Conquest, and therefore younger than the English manor, which goes back in direct descent to the Teutonic settlement of the sixth century.

From 1258-59 A.D., the forty-third year of Henry III.'s reign, farm accounts or manor rolls become plentiful in England's social history, and they give a clear and detailed picture of the mediæval manor, with its court of justice, and its farm industries, its people, its communal rights, with the whole intricate network of its government and traditions; and from that time to the days of

Henry VIII. the material for a close study of English rustic life remains continuously abundant, and shows that, so far as labourers are concerned, there is little change in rural economy and method, though the serf of the thirteenth century becomes the copyholder of the fourteenth. Growth there is of a slow and steady kind, yew-tree progress, almost imperceptible year by year; followed by those arresting gales which Henry VIII. let loose over the land when he debased the currency, shut up the monasteries and redistributed their estates, and made away with those national agencies of self-help, the guilds, whose revenues he grabbed.

Travelling onward to our own time, we come to at least three other disturbing crises that stayed the growth of English husbandry. The first one is the new feudalism which the people, with Cromwell's help, introduced in their war against Charles I.; the second is the time of danger beginning with the revolt of the American colonies and ending with Napoleon's downfall at Waterloo-a time that drained country districts of men and money; while the third is the guillotine of Free Trade, which has done so much to sever villages and farms from their natural mainstay, the purchasing needs of townspeople. The ideal of a nation's life is that farms should support towns and be themselves supported by towns, without any such competition from outside as the two cannot share with equal and balancing advantages. When foreign competition benefits any one class to the injury of another, a nation is maimed, just as

PLATE LXXI

HADDON HALL

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