Only in the south-western corner of Westmoreland, the lovely land of lakes and mountains and green pastoral glens, beyond Morecambe Bay and the treacherous sands of Lancaster, had the Norman nobles, as the entering tide swept upward through the romantic glens and ghylls of Netherdale and Wharfedale, past the dim peaks of Pennigant and Ingleborough, established their lines in those pleasant places, and reared their castellated towers, and laid out their noble chases, where they had little interruption to apprehend from the tyrannic forest laws of the Norman kings, which, wherever their authority extended, bore not more harshly on the Saxon serf than on the Norman noble. To return, however, toward the midland counties, and the rich regions with which this brief survey of Northern England in the early years of the twelfth century commenced--a vast tract of country, including much of the northern portions of Nottingham and Derbyshire, and all the south of the West Riding of York, between the rivers Trent and Eyre, was occupied almost exclusively by that most beautiful and famous of all British forests, the immemorial and time-honored Sherwood--theme of the oldest and most popular of English ballads--scene of the most stirring of the old Romaunts--scene of the most magnificent of modern novels, incomparable Ivanhoe--home of that half historic personage, King of the Saxon greenwoods, Robin Hood, with all his northern merry-men, Scathelock, and Friar Tuck, and Little John, Allen-a-Dale, wild forest minstrel, and the blythe woodland queen, Maid Marion--last leafy fortalice, wherein, throughout all England proper, lingered the sole remains of Saxon hardihood and independence--red battle-field of the unsparing conflicts of the rival Roses. There stand they still, those proud, majestic kings of bygone ages; there stand they still, the "Hallowed oaks, Who, British-born, the last of British race, Hold their primeval rights by nature's charter, Not at the nod of Cæsar;" there stand they still, erect, earth-fast, and massive, grasping the green-sward with their gnarled and knotty roots, waving "their free heads in the liberal air," full of dark, leafy umbrage clothing their lower limbs; but far aloft, towering with bare, stag-horned, and splintered branches toward the unchanged sky from which so many centuries of sunshine have smiled down, of tempest frowned upon their "secular life of ages." There stand they, still, I say; alone, or scattered here and there, or in dark, stately groups, adorning many a noble park of modern days, or looming up in solemn melancholy upon some "one-tree hill," throughout the fertile region which lies along the line of that great ancient road, known in the Saxon days as Ermine-street, but now, in common parlance, called "the Dukeries," from seven contiguous domains, through which it sweeps, of England's long-lined nobles.