The foresters, skirmishing up near to the castle, and taking advantage of every inequality in the ground, of every bush and tuft of high grass, worked up close to the moat, and then opened a heavy fire with their bows against the men-at-arms on the battlements, and prevented their using the machines against the main force now advancing to the attack upon the outwork.

This was stoutly defended.  But the impetuosity of the earl, backed as it was by the gallantry of the knights serving under him, carried all obstacles.

The narrow moat which encircled this work was speedily filled with great bundles of brushwood, which had been prepared the previous night.  Across these the assailants rushed.

Some thundered at the gate with their battle-axes, while others placed ladders by which, although several times hurled backward by the defenders, they finally succeeded in getting a footing on the wall.

Once there, the combat was virtually over.

The defenders were either cut down or taken prisoners, and in two hours after the assault began the outwork of Wortham Castle was taken.

This, however, was but the commencement of the undertaking, and it had cost more than twenty lives to the assailants.

They were now, indeed, little nearer to capturing the castle than they had been before.

The moat was wide and deep.  The drawbridge had been lifted at the instant that the first of the assailants gained a footing upon the wall.  And now that the outwork was captured, a storm of arrows, stones, and other missiles was poured into it from the castle walls, and rendered it impossible for any of its new masters to show themselves above it.

Seeing that any sudden attack was impossible, the earl now directed a strong body to cut down trees, and prepare a moveable bridge to throw across the moat.

This would be a work of fully two days; and in the meantime Cuthbert returned to the farm.

CHAPTER III.

The capture of Wortham hold.

Upon his return home, after relating to his mother the events of the morning’s conflict, Cuthbert took his way to the cottage inhabited by an old man who had in his youth been a mason.

“Have I not heard, Gurth,” he said, “that you helped to build the Castle of Wortham?”

“No, no, young sir,” he said; “old as I am, I was a child when the castle was built.  My father worked at it, and it cost him, and many others, his life.”

“And how was that, prithee?” asked Cuthbert.

“He was, with several others, killed by the baron, the grandfather of the present man, when the work was finished.”

“But why was that, Gurth?”

“We were but Saxon swine,” said Gurth bitterly, “and a few of us more or less mattered not.  We were then serfs of the baron.  But my mother fled with me on the news of my father’s death.  For years we remained far away with some friends in a forest near Oxford.  Then she pined for her native air, and came back and entered the service of the franklin.”