Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/68

44, heedless voice, which showed that such bickerings were nightly things among her guests. 'No brawling or brabbling, gentles! Take heed to the good name of the house.'

'Besides, if it comes to the cropping of ears, there are other folk who may say their say,' quoth the third labourer. 'We are all freemen, and I trow that a yeoman's cudgel is as good as a forester's knife. By St. Anselm! it would be an evil day if we had to bend to our masters' servants as well as to our masters.'

'No man is my master save the king,' the woodman answered. 'Who is there, save a false traitor, who would refuse to serve the English king?'

'I know not about the English king,' said the man Jenkin. 'What sort of English king is it who cannot lay his tongue to a word of English? You mind last year when he came down to Malwood, with his inner marshal and his outer marshal, bis justiciar, his seneschal, and his four-and-twenty guardsmen. One noontide I was by Franklin Swinton's gate, when up he rides with a yeoman-pricker at his heels. "Ouvre," he cried, "ouvre," or some such word, making sign for me to open the gate; and then "Merci," as though he were adrad of me. And you talk of an English king!'

'I do not marvel at it,' cried the Cambrig scholar, speaking in the high drawling voice which was common among his class. 'It is not a tongue for men of sweet birth and delicate upbringing. It is a foul, snorting, snarling manner of speech. For myself, I swear by the learned Polycarp that I have most ease with Hebrew, and after that perchance with Arabian.'

'I will not hear a word said against old King Ned,' cried Hordle John in a voice like a bull. 'What if he is fond of a bright eye and a saucy face? I know one of his subjects who could match him at that. If he cannot speak like an Englishman, I trow that he can fight like an Englishman; and he was hammering at the gates of Paris while alehouse topers were grutching and grumbling at home.'