There was no one who knew Thomas very well, for he came seldom to the village except on Court days or Market, and he was by nature a silent man. He was tall above usual and stoutly made, with heavy shoulders, hands large as hoofs, and legged like a stork. He walked and moved like an ox, slowly and clumsily. But he was powerful of his body, and I have seen him lift a horse as lightly as an infant at the breast. (That was on the day when Sir John’s wain and horses were in the Great Bog.) Yet for all that, he was a mild mannered man, slow of reproach, sparing of oaths, honest in his dealings, punctual in paying his dues and in his charity to the poor, no haunter of taverns, nor gamester or ribald. Yet he seemed to hold himself aloof from folks, and in the days of which I speak, reckoned little of religion or his immortal soul, though, as to that, you shall hear later how the Lord in His infinite mercy afterwards touched his eyes, so that he should see, and seeing, walk into the way of peace. He lived in his house in the valley to himself and his wife and his children. He rose early and worked long and laboriously in the good light, and when his day’s labour was done he would return from his fields to sit by the great fire and dandle his babies. I have heard that even in the long winter evenings, when he sat at home with his family around him, he had little to say. He would sit with his little girl on his knee, singing old women’s songs of the countryside--‘Hey, northern wind, how dost thou blow?’ or ‘Janikin came to dress our well’--as though he had been a tender, nursing-mother himself instead of a mighty figure of a man, the measure of two bowshafts long. Then he would say to Katherine, his wife, ‘Lo, Kat, how the young one grows; he can nearly walk,’ and she would answer, ‘Yea, he groweth out of knowledge. But all our family made fine babies.’ Then there would be a long silence of about an hour or thereabouts between them, while the children would play and laugh at their feet and the goodwife would get on with her spinning. Perhaps Thomas would show Thomas and Robert how to build a great castle, like that of Earl Ranulf, out of the wooden fire-blocks, or would amuse them smilingly at the game which is called ‘Cat’s Cradle.’ Then, as they grew sleepy one by one, he would take and lay them gently on the soft straw in the warm corner. ‘Kat,’ he would say, or some such matter, ‘methinks I will take little Thomas with me to the Longacre in the morning and let him aim at the crows with his sling.’ ‘Do, good husband,’ she would answer, ‘the boy dearly loves the sport.’ Then they would to bed themselves.