Sir Nigel | Page 5

also from the
water-soaked earth. Men died, and women and children, the baron of
the castle, the franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the
villein in his wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted
reek and all died the same death of corruption. Of those who were
stricken none recovered, and the illness was ever the same - gross boils,
raving, and the black blotches which gave its name to the disease. All
through the winter the dead rotted by the wayside for want of some one
to bury them. In many a village no single man was left alive. Then at

last the spring came with sunshine and health and lightness and
laughter - the greenest, sweetest, tenderest spring that England had ever
known - but only half of England could know it. The other half had
passed away with the great purple cloud.
Yet it was there in that stream of death, in that reek of corruption, that
the brighter and freer England was born. There in that dark hour the
first streak of the new dawn was seen. For in no way save by a great
upheaval and change could the nation break away from that iron feudal
system which held her limbs. But now it was a new country which
came out from that year of death. The barons were dead in swaths. No
high turret nor cunning moat could keep out that black commoner who
struck them down.
Oppressive laws slackened for want of those who could enforce them,
and once slackened could never be enforced again. The laborer would
be a slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his shackles. There was
much to do and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen,
name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It
was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty
years later which left the English peasant the freest of his class in
Europe.
But there were few so far-sighted that they could see that here, as ever,
good was coming out of evil. At the moment misery and ruin were
brought into every family. The dead cattle, the ungarnered crops, the
untilled lands - every spring of wealth had dried up at the same moment.
Those who were rich became poor; but those who were poor already,
and especially those who were poor with the burden of gentility upon
their shoulders, found themselves in a perilous state. All through
England the smaller gentry were ruined, for they had no trade save war,
and they drew their living from the work of others. On many a
manor-house there came evil times, and on none more than on the
Manor of Tilford, where for many generations the noble family of the
Lorings had held their home.
There was a time when the Lorings had held the country from the North
Downs to the Lakes of Frensham, and when their grim castle-keep
rising above the green meadows which border the River Wey had been
the strongest fortalice betwixt Guildford Castle in the east and
Winchester in the west. But there came that Barons' War, in which the

King used his Saxon subjects as a whip with which to scourge his
Norman barons, and Castle Loring, like so many other great
strongholds, was swept from the face of the land. >From that time the
Lorings, with estates sadly curtailed, lived in what had been the
dower-house, with enough for splendor.
And then came their lawsuit with Waverley Abbey, and the Cistercians
laid claim to their richest land, with peccary, turbary and feudal rights
over the remainder. It lingered on for years, this great lawsuit, and
when it was finished the men of the Church and the men of the Law
had divided all that was richest of the estate between them. There was
still left the old manor-house from which with each generation there
came a soldier to uphold the credit of the name and to show the five
scarlet roses on the silver shield where it had always been shown - in
the van. There were twelve bronzes in the little chapel where Matthew
the priest said mass every morning, all of men of the house of Loring.
Two lay with their legs crossed, as being from the Crusades. Six others
rested their feet upon lions, as having died in war. Four only lay with
the effigy of their hounds to show that they had passed in peace.
Of this famous but impoverished family, doubly impoverished by law
and by pestilence, two members were living in the year of grace 1349 -
Lady Ermyntrude Loring and her grandson Nigel. Lady Ermyntrude's
husband had fallen before the Scottish spearsmen at Stirling, and her