Sir Nigel Chapter 1 - The House of Loring

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:23)
CHAPTER I. THE HOUSE OF LAWRING In the month of July of the year 1348, between the feasts of St. Benedict and of St. Swithin, a strange thing came upon England. For out of the east there drifted a monstrous cloud, purple and piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushed heaven. In the shadow of that strange cloud, the leaves drooped in the trees, the birds ceased their calling, and the cattle and the sheep gathered cowering under the hedges. A gloom fell upon all the land, and men stood with their eyes upon the strange cloud, and a heaviness upon their hearts. They crept into the churches, where the trembling people were blessed and driven by the trembling priests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling from the woods, nor any of the homely sound of nature. All was still, and nothing moved save only the great cloud, which rolled up and onward, with fold on fold from the black horizon.
To the west was the light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud bank, creeping ever slowly across, until the last thin blue gleam faded away, and the whole vast sweep of the heavens was one great leaden arch. Then the rain began to fall. All day it rained, and all the night, and all the week, and all the month, until folk had forgotten the blue heavens and the gleam of the sunshine. It was not heavy, but it was steady and cold and unceasing, so that the people were weary of its hissing and its splashing, with a slow drip from the eaves. Always the same thick, evil cloud flowed from east to west, and with the rain beneath it.
None could see for more than a bow-shot from their dwellings for the drifting veil of the rainstorms.
Every morning the folk looked upward for a break, but their eyes rested always upon the same endless cloud, until at last they ceased to look up, and their hearts despaired of ever seeing a change. It was raining at Lamastide, and raining at the Feast of the Assumption, and still raining at Mickelmas. The crops and the hay, sodden and black, had rotted in the fields, for they were not worth the garnering. The sheep had died, and the calves also, so there was little to kill when Martinmas came, and it was time to salt the meat for the winter.
They feared a famine, but it was worse than famine which was in store for them.
For the rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foul haze which rose from the woods. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before. Scarlet and mauve and liver and black. It was as though the sick earth had burst forth into foul pustules. Mildew and lichen mottled the walls, and with that filthy crop death sprang also from the water-soaked earth. Men died, and women and children, the baron of the castle, the Franklin of the farm, the monk in the abbey, and the villain in his wattle and daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek, and all died the same death of corruption.
Of those who were stricken, none recovered, and the illness was ever the same. Gross boils, raving, and the black blotches which gave its name to the disease.
All through the winter the dead rotted by the wayside for want of someone to bury them. In many a village no single man was left alive. Then, at last, the spring came, with sunshine and health and lightness and laughter, the greenest, sweetest, tenderest spring that England had ever known. But only half of England could know it. The other half had passed away with a great purple cloud.
Yet it was there, in that stream of death, in that reek of corruption, that the brighter and freer England was born. There, in that dark hour, the first streak of the new dawn was seen. For in no way, save by a great upheaval and change, could the nation break away from that iron feudal system which held her limbs. But now it was a new country which came out from that year of death. The barons were dead in swathes. No high turret nor cunning moat could keep out that black commoner who struck them down. Oppressive laws slackened for want of those who could enforce them, and once slackened could never be enforced again. The labourer would be a slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his shackles. There was much to do, and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later, which left the English peasant the freest of his class in Europe. But there were few so far sighted that they could see that here as ever good was coming out of evil. At the moment misery and ruin were brought into every family. The dead cattle, the ungarned crops, the untilled lands, every spring of wealth had dried up at the same moment. Those who were rich became poor, but those who were poor already, and especially those who were poor with the burden of gentility upon their shoulders, found themselves in a perilous state. All through England the smaller gentry were ruined, for they had no trade save war, and they drew their living from the work of others. On many a manor house there came evil times, and on none more than on the manor of Tilford, where for many generations the noble family of the Loring's had held their home. There was a time when the Loring's had held the country from the North Downs to the Lakes of Frunsham, and when their grim castle keep rising above the green meadows which bordered the river way, had been the strongest fortalece betwixt Guildford Castle in the east and Winchester in the west. But there came that baron's war, in which the king used his Saxon subjects as a whip with which to scourge his Norman barons, and Castle Loring, like so many other great strongholds, was swept from the face of the land. From that time the Loring's, with estates sadly curtailed, lived in what had been the dower house, with enough for splendor.