In the Saxon era it presented a somewhat different aspect from what it does now; more strikingly magnificent and grand in its wild, natural beauty. Instead of cornfields, pastures, hedgerows, churches, mills, and mansions, it was one expanse of forest, with towering oaks, elms, and poplars; and, beneath a tangled undergrowth of brushwood and briar, the home and haunts of the antlered stag, the wild boar, the wolf, and innumerable other wild creatures, four-footed, on the sward below, or pinion-borne amid the foliage above. It must not be supposed, however, that the vale was given up entirely to these denizens of woodland, and destitute of human inhabitants. The Lord of the valley was Earl Oswald, a Saxon, or, to speak more accurately, an Anglian nobleman--the greatest landed proprietor for many miles round. His mansion was seated on a gentle slope of the Hambleton Hills; a one-storied edifice, consisting of a large hall, where he, his retainers, and domestic servants, partook of their meals, and where the latter slept by night, on straw or rushes spread on the floor, with some smaller family sleeping and guest rooms, a kitchen, brewhouse, and other necessary appliances of a nobleman's household, including a chapel with open, round-headed doorway, draped with a pair of woollen portieres, generally looped back, and displaying in the interior some roughly carpentered benches, and a lamp pendant from the roof. Around the mansion was some arable land, with granaries and stacks; pasture land for horses, oxen, and sheep, protected by stockades from the incursions of wolves and other beasts of prey; an orchard and a vegetable garden. Scattered about in clearings of the forest were the homesteads of the class correspondent with the modern tenant-farmer, with their oxen, swine, wains, and rude implements of husbandry; and, nestling around the mansion, an aggregation of wattled and mud-built dwellings, the abodes of the villeins or serfs, hence denominated a village, in the centre of which stood the church, a very primitive structure of wood, consisting of nave and chancel only, without side aisles, transept, or tower.