Harold | Page 8

entering London about sunrise, doors and windows were duly
wreathed with garlands; and every village in the suburbs had its May-
pole, which stood in its place all the year. On that happy day labour
rested; ceorl and theowe had alike a holiday to dance, and tumble round
the May-pole; and thus, on the first of May--Youth, and Mirth, and
Music, "brought the summer home."
The next day you might still see where the buxom bands had been; you
might track their way by fallen flowers, and green leaves, and the deep
ruts made by oxen (yoked often in teams from twenty to forty, in the
wains that carried home the poles); and fair and frequent throughout the
land, from any eminence, you might behold the hamlet swards still

crowned with the May trees, and air still seemed fragrant with their
garlands.
It is on that second day of May, 1052, that my story opens, at the House
of Hilda, the reputed Morthwyrtha. It stood upon a gentle and verdant
height; and, even through all the barbarous mutilation it had undergone
from barbarian hands, enough was left strikingly to contrast the
ordinary abodes of the Saxon.
The remains of Roman art were indeed still numerous throughout
England, but it happened rarely that the Saxon had chosen his home
amidst the villas of those noble and primal conquerors. Our first
forefathers were more inclined to destroy than to adapt.
By what chance this building became an exception to the ordinary rule,
it is now impossible to conjecture, but from a very remote period it had
sheltered successive races of Teuton lords.
The changes wrought in the edifice were mournful and grotesque. What
was now the Hall, had evidently been the atrium; the round shield, with
its pointed boss, the spear, sword, and small curved saex of the early
Teuton, were suspended from the columns on which once had been
wreathed the flowers; in the centre of the floor, where fragments of the
old mosaic still glistened from the hard-pressed paving of clay and lime,
what now was the fire-place had been the impluvium, and the smoke
went sullenly through the aperture in the roof, made of old to receive
the rains of heaven. Around the Hall were still left the old cubicula or
dormitories, (small, high, and lighted but from the doors,) which now
served for the sleeping-rooms of the humbler guest or the household
servant; while at the farther end of the Hall, the wide space between the
columns, which had once given ample vista from graceful awnings into
tablinum and viridarium, was filled up with rude rubble and Roman
bricks, leaving but a low, round, arched door, that still led into the
tablinum. But that tablinum, formerly the gayest state-room of the
Roman lord, was now filled with various lumber, piles of faggots, and
farming utensils. On either side of this desecrated apartment, stretched,
to the right, the old lararium, stripped of its ancient images of ancestor
and god; to the left, what had been the gynoecium (women's

apartment).
One side of the ancient peristyle, which was of vast extent, was now
converted into stabling, sties for swine, and stalls for oxen. On the
other side was constructed a Christian chapel, made of rough oak
planks, fastened by plates at the top, and with a roof of thatched reeds.
The columns and wall at the extreme end of the peristyle were a mass
of ruins, through the gigantic rents of which loomed a grassy hillock,
its sides partially covered with clumps of furze. On this hillock were
the mutilated remains of an ancient Druidical crommel, in the centre of
which (near a funeral mound, or barrow, with the bautastean, or
gravestone, of some early Saxon chief at one end) had been
sacrilegiously placed an altar to Thor, as was apparent both from the
shape, from a rude, half-obliterated, sculptured relief of the god, with
his lifted hammer, and a few Runic letters. Amidst the temple of the
Briton the Saxon had reared the shrine of his triumphant war-god.
Now still, amidst the ruins of that extreme side of the peristyle which
opened to this hillock were left, first, an ancient Roman fountain, that
now served to water the swine, and next, a small sacellum, or fane to
Bacchus (as relief and frieze, yet spared, betokened): thus the eye, at
one survey, beheld the shrines of four creeds: the Druid, mystical and
symbolical; the Roman, sensual, but humane; the Teutonic, ruthless and
destroying; and, latest riser and surviving all, though as yet with but
little of its gentler influence over the deeds of men, the edifice of the
Faith of Peace.
Across the peristyle, theowes and swineherds passed to and fro:--in the
atrium, men of a higher class, half-armed, were, some drinking,