fearsome yellow horse of Crooksbury.

IV. HOW THE SUMMONER CAME TO THE MANOR HOUSE OF TILFORD

By the date of this chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman
castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the
nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable
as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for
peace than for war. He who compares the savage bareness of Pevensey or
Guildford with the piled grandeur of Bodmin or Windsor cannot fail to
understand the change in manners which they represent.

The earlier castles had a set purpose, for they were built that the
invaders might hold down the country; but when the Conquest was once
firmly established a castle had lost its meaning save as a refuge from
justice or as a center for civil strife. On the marches of Wales and of
Scotland the castle might continue to be a bulwark to the kingdom,
and there still grew and flourished; but in all other places they were
rather a menace to the King's majesty, and as such were discouraged and
destroyed. By the reign of the third Edward the greater part of the old
fighting castles had been converted into dwelling-houses or had been
ruined in the civil wars, and left where their grim gray bones are still
littered upon the brows of our hills. The new buildings were either
great country-houses, capable of defense, but mainly residential, or
they were manor-houses with no military significance at all.

Such was the Tilford Manor-house where the last survivors of the old and
magnificent house of Loring still struggled hard to keep a footing and
to hold off the monks and the lawyers from the few acres which were left
to them. The mansion was a two-storied one, framed in heavy beams of
wood, the interstices filled with rude blocks of stone. An outside
staircase led up to several sleeping-rooms above. Below there were only
two apartments, the smaller of which was the bower of the aged Lady
Ermyntrude. The other was the hall, a very large room, which served
as the living room of the family and as the common dining-room of
themselves and of their little group of servants and retainers. The
dwellings of these servants, the kitchens, the offices and the stables
were all represented by a row of penthouses and sheds behind the main
building. Here lived Charles the page, Peter the old falconer, Red Swire
who had followed Nigel's grandfather to the Scottish wars, Weathe