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 son Eustace,
Nigel's father, had found a glorious death nine years before this
chronicle opens upon the poop of a Norman galley at the sea-fight of
Sluys. The lonely old woman, fierce and brooding like the falcon mewed
in her chamber, was soft only toward the lad whom she had brought up.
All the tenderness and love of her nature, so hidden from others t