“By these Itinerants, as experienced men, Counsel is given; contention they appease With gentle language; in remotest wilds, Tears wipe away, and pleasant tidings bring; Could the proud quest of chivalry do more?”[343] Less aspiring most of them, not unsatisfied with their lot, careless of robbers, having few wants, pedlars of the past plodded the miry roads of Plantagenet England, as they did in the time of Shakespeare, merrily singing some “Winter Tale” ditty: “Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way, And merrily hent the stile-a: A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a.” {254} [Illustration 48. FOREST LIFE. WOOD-CUTTERS. (_From the MS. 10 E. IV._)] CHAPTER III OUTLAWS, WANDERING WORKMEN, AND PEASANTS OUT OF BOND The mountebanks, the musicians, and their fellows have stayed us at the street corners, in the castle halls and courtyards; the pedlars have led us to the peasants’ cots, the fairs and markets. With the outlaws we must leave the highroad for the pathless woods, fens and solitudes. England at that time was not the immense meadow, furrowed by railways, of the present day; there still remained much of those forests spoken of by Cæsar in his Commentaries, and where the Plantagenet kings and their predecessors had so jealously maintained their rights of the chase. The woods were not so well policed as they are now; they offered to bandits and men fleeing from justice a more extensive asylum than any six-circled sanctuary. In the popular mind the idea of the great rustling forest, and the idea of the free life {255} that the outlaws led there, were often mingled in one and the same sentiment of sympathy. Besides, therefore, the praise of the Arthurian heroes, is found in the poetry of the time that of the trees and bushes, that of the valiant men who, dwelling in the copse, were supposed to have struggled for the public liberties, Hereward, Fulk Fitz-Warin, Robin Hood. Were a man pursued, if the sanctuary was too far or not to his taste, he took to the forest; it was easier to get there, he remained nearer to his kin, and was about as safe as if he had crossed over to the continent.