In truth, Maurice Champrèst was not only the richest farmer, but the highest military vassal under the fief of Raoul de Canillac, the marquis of Roche d’or, his ancestor having been banner-bearer to the first lord of the name, and his people having held and cultivated the same farm for many a century, bound only to homage and free man-service in the field under the banner of his lord, to which in war he was held to bring five spearsmen and as many archers in full bodynge, as it was then technically termed, and effeyre-of-war. He was, in short, though not noble, nor what could be exactly termed a gentleman, of the very highest of feudal territorial vassals, not far removed from the class which were in England designated as franklins, although with fewer privileges and smaller real freedom, France having always been more rigidly feudal than the neighboring island, owing to the absence of the large admixture of Saxon blood and Saxon liberty, the latter of which soon began to preponderate in the white-rocked isle of ocean. His beautiful bride Marguerite, though not his equal in birth--for her grandfather and grandmother, nay, her father himself, in his early youth, had been serfs--was a free-born and a gently-nurtured woman; the old people having been manumitted and presented with a few acres of land, in consequence of the gallantry with which he had rescued the then seigneur of Roche d’or, when unhorsed and at the mercy of the German communes at the bloody battle of Bovines, stricken between Philip the August and his rebellious barons. This event had taken place years before the birth of Marguerite, and in fact when her father was a mere stripling; and, as her mother was a woman of free lineage, neither serf nor villeyn, she was, of course, beyond the reach of cavil. Nay, more than this, the unusual courage of the old man on that dreadful day, and the consideration always manifested toward him by the then marquis and his immediate successor, had won for him a far higher standing than was usually accorded to manumitted serfs by the class next above them. Her family, moreover, in both the last generations, had prospered in worldly wealth, for the old serf was shrewd and wary, had hoarded money, and increased the extent of his rural demesne, till Marguerite, who was an only daughter, was not only a beauty but an heiress; and probably, with the exception of her husband, would be, on the death of her parents, the richest person in the hamlet. She had received, moreover, advantages at that period very unusual indeed; for having, when a mere child, attracted the attention of the late marchioness de Canillac by her grace, her beauty, and the artless _naïveté_ of her manners, she had been selected to attend, rather as a companion than a servant, on Mademoiselle de Roche d’or, a girl a few years her senior.