I am aware that there are incidents which may strike the modern reader as brutal and repellent. It is useless, however, to draw the Twentieth Century and label it the Fourteenth. It was a sterner age, and men’s code of morality, especially in matters of cruelty, was very different. There is no incident in the text for which very good warrant may not be given. The fantastic graces of Chivalry lay upon the surface of life, but beneath it was a half-savage population, fierce and animal, with little ruth or mercy. It was a raw, rude England, full of elemental passions, and redeemed only by elemental virtues. Such I have tried to draw it. For good or bad, many books have gone to the building of this one. I look round my study table and I survey those which lie with me at the moment, before I happily disperse them forever. I see La Croix’s “Middle Ages,” Oman’s “Art of War,” Rietstap’s “Armorial General,” De la Borderie’s “Histoire de Bretagne,” Dame Berner’s “Boke of St. Albans,” “The Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brokeland,” “The Old Road,” Hewitt’s “Ancient Armour,” Coussan’s “Heraldry,” Boutell’s “Arms,” Browne’s “Chaucer’s England,” Cust’s “Scenes of the Middle Ages,” Husserand’s “Wayfaring Life,” Ward’s “Canterbury Pilgrims;” Cornish’s “Chivalry,” Hastings’ “British Archer,” Strutt’s “Sports,” Johnes Froissart, Hargrove’s “Archery,” Longman’s “Edward III,” Wright’s “Domestic Manners.” With these and many others I have lived for months. If I have been unable to combine and transfer their effect, the fault is mine. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. “UNDERSHAW,” November 30, 1905. I. THE HOUSE OF LORING In the month of July of the year 1348, between the feasts of St. Benedict and of St. Swithin, a strange thing came upon England, for out of the east there drifted a monstrous cloud, purple and piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushed heaven. In the shadow of that strange cloud the leaves drooped in the trees, the birds ceased their calling, and the cattle and the sheep gathered cowering under the hedges. A gloom fell upon all the land, and men stood with their eyes upon the strange cloud and a heaviness upon their hearts. They crept into the churches where the trembling people were blessed and shriven by the trembling priests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling from the woods, nor any of the homely sounds of Nature. All was still, and nothing moved, save only the great cloud which rolled up and onward, with fold on fold from the black horizon. To the west was the light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud-bank, creeping ever slowly across, until the last thin blue gleam faded away and the whole vast sweep of the heavens was one great leaden arch.