-Saxon Chronicle make manifest--"Englishmen." Nor did their
Norman conquerors affect to call them by any other title, although
in their mouths the honoured appellation was, as we have said, but
a term of reproach {iv}.

The author has chosen his two heroes, Wilfred and Etienne, if
heroes they can be called, as types of the English and Norman youth
of the period, alike in their merits and in their vices. The
effects of adversity on the one, and of success and dominant pride
on the other--happily finally subdued in each case beneath the
Cross on Calvary--form the chief attempt at "character painting" in
the tale.

It is not without a feeling of regret that he sends forth from his
hands the last of these "Chronicles," and bids farewell to the real
and imaginary characters who have seemed to form a part of his
world, almost as if he could grasp their hands or look into their
faces.

They are interwoven, too, with many treasured remembrances of past
days, of the listening crowd of boys, now scattered through the
world, and lost to the sight of the narrator, but who once by their
eager interest encouraged the speaker, and at whose request the
earliest of these tales was written. Happy indeed would he be,
could he hope the written page would arouse the same interest,
which the spoken narrative undoubtedly created, or the tales had
never been published.

And now the writer must leave his tale to speak for itself, only
taking this opportunity of assuring old friends, whose remembrances
of a vanished past may be quickened by the story, how dear the
memory of those days is to him; and to show this, however feebly,
he begs leave to dedicate this tale to those who first heard it, on
successive Sunday evenings, in the old schoolroom of All Saints'
School, Bloxham.

A. D. C.

CHAPTER I. THE ANGLO-SAXON HALL.

It was the evening of Thursday, the fifth of October, in year of
grace one thousand and sixty and six.

The setting sun was slowly sinking towards a dense bank of clouds,
but as yet he gladdened the woods and hills around the old hall of
Aescendune with his departing light.

The watchman on the tower gazed upon a fair scene outspread before
him; at his feet rolled the river, broad and deep, spanned by a
rude wooden bridge; behind him rose the hills, crowned with forest;
on his right hand lay the lowly habitations of the tenantry, the
farmhouses of the churls, the yet humbler dwellings of the thralls
or tiller