acant dukedom. England had
taken the part of Montfort, France that of Blois. Neither faction was
strong enough to destroy the other, and so after ten years of continual
fighting, history recorded a long ineffectual list of surprises and
ambushes, of raids and skirmishes, of towns taken and retaken, of
alternate victory and defeat, in which neither party could claim
a supremacy. It mattered nothing that Montfort and Blois had both
disappeared from the scene, the one dead and the other taken by the
English. Their wives caught up the swords which had dropped from the
hands of their lords, and the long struggle went on even more savagely
than before.

In the south and east the Blois faction held the country, and Nantes
the capital was garrisoned and occupied by a strong French army. In the
north and west the Montfort party prevailed, for the island kingdom was
at their back and always fresh sails broke the northern sky-line bearing
adventurers from over the channel.

Between these two there lay a broad zone comprising all the center
of the country which was a land of blood and violence, where no law
prevailed save that of the sword. From end to end it was dotted with
castles, some held for one side, some for the other, and many mere
robber strongholds, the scenes of gross and monstrous deeds, whose brute
owners, knowing that they could never be called to account, made war
upon all mankind, and wrung with rack and with flame the last shilling
from all who fell into their savage hands. The fields had long been
untilled. Commerce was dead. From Rennes in the east to Hennebon in the
west, and from Dinan in the north to Nantes in the south, there was no
spot where a man's life or a woman's honor was safe. Such was the land,
full of darkness and blood, the saddest, blackest spot in Christendom,
into which Knolles and his men were now advancing.

But there was no sadness in the young heart of Nigel, as he rode by the
side of Knolles at the head of a clump of spears, nor did it seem to him
that Fate had led him into an unduly arduous path. On the contrary,
he blessed the good fortune which had sent him into so delightful a
country, and it seemed to him as he listened to dreadful stories of
robber barons, and looked round at the black scars of war which lay
branded upon the fair faces of the hills, that no hero of romances or
trouveur had ever journeyed through such a land of promise, with so fair
a chance of knightly venture and