In the days of which I write it was very much the fashion for great families to indulge in the luxury of hereditary foes, and a feud of long standing between this and that ancient house was such a customary thing that a nobleman who lived peaceably with all his neighbours was regarded as a slow kind of fellow, whose acquaintance was hardly worth having. There were generally wars of greater or less magnitude going on either within England herself or with some foreign enemy, which, one would have imagined, might have furnished sufficient employment to the fighting nobility of the day. This, however, was by no means the case; and though private feuds were sometimes left in abeyance for a time, when something more attractive in the way of battle and bloodshed happened to offer, yet they were never allowed to slumber too {105}long, and were invariably revived as soon as more peaceful times permitted their proprietors to indulge their private feelings and natural love of quarrelling. The hereditary enemy of Simon de Guerre-à-mort was the house of St. Aunay, which, like his own, had been first known in England after the Battle of Hastings had flooded the country with Norman nobility, and which was at the moment of which we speak represented by Count Horace as the head of its race. It is difficult to say why or wherefore these two families should have been at variance, since there was no apparent reason for such a state of things. Their castles were upon opposite sides of my dear old river, at no great distance, though neither of them within sight of it. Their lands stretched down to my waters, which formed a reasonable and proper boundary, and there was consequently none of that intermingling of field with field or farm with farm which has in all ages proved a fertile source of unpleasantness between neighbouring landed proprietors. Moreover, the two noblemen had never brushed against each other or differed materially upon any public matters. In fact there was no probability of their doing so; for Baron Simon was at this time the wrong side of sixty by several years, whilst Count Horace had not lived half the years which constitute that respectable age. No: it was a good, respectable old family feud, and I verily believe that it was more from family feeling than for any other reason that it was still cherished by both houses.