He had been a monk's boy in all these later years of peace, since his father, the poor saddler, fell in his Nevill livery on Hedgely Moor, away in the farthest north. The great kindly Abbey had been much more his home than the dark, squalid little house in the village below, where his widowed mother lived: here he had learned to write so that even the Abbot, John Strensham, lofty magnate and companion of princes though he was, had nodded smilingly over his work; here he had helped to serve the Mass in the grand Abbey church, with censer and bell, and felt his young mind enriched and uplifted by pious longings; here, too, he had dreamed into the likeness of veritable and detailed history his vision of the time when he should compose some wonderful chronicle, and win thanks from the great ones of the earth, and be known to all men as Hugh of Tewkesbury, whose book was to be prized above every other. But now, after seven years wherein peaceful desires possessed plain men--lo! here was fighting in the land. And now of a sudden it seemed to Hugh that the writing of books, the quiet cloistral life, even the favor of the Abbot himself, were paltry things. An unaccustomed heat tingled in his veins at thought of what existence outside these thick walls might now once more signify. Who would be a stoop-shouldered scribe, a monk, or even a mass-priest when there were war harnesses to wear, horses to mount, yew bows to bend till the shaft trembled in the strain? Hugh could almost believe that he heard the tramp and distant confused murmuring of an armed host, as his musing dream took form. The very pages lying before him spoke of this new outburst of war, and linked him to it. The book was one of heraldry, and it had been begun for the great Earl of Warwick. Both the fame and the person of this mighty captain were well-known to the lad, for the King-maker was lord of Tewkesbury, and the overshadowing patron of village and abbey alike. But when scarcely the first sheets had been written this puissant lord had fled the kingdom, and the cautious monks had laid the work aside. Later came strange rumors and tales: how Warwick had returned and driven the King away, and put up his whilom Red-rose foes to rule in London--and then pens and brushes were set busily at the book once more. But now the King had in turn come back and seized his own again, and slain Warwick on bloody Barnet field--and the frightened monks had bethought them to finish the book, with sundry emblazonings of the royal arms now ingeniously married to those of the Nevills, and make it a peace offering to Duke George of Clarence, who had wedded Warwick's daughter, and would be lord of Tewkesbury in his shoes.