Summary

As Chapter 2 opens, the narrator reflects on the hamlet’s power structure and its attitude toward outsiders. An armed group has left for the woods to confront the newcomers about their alleged role in the stable fire, and the narrator says that their toting of weapons comes not from violent tendencies but from fierce feelings of propriety toward the land. He explains that Master Kent has inherited the fields by marriage and observes that the master would be incapable of working those fields without the villagers’ help. Members of the community, therefore, have a deep sense of entitlement – if not a legal right – when it comes to the fields, the narrator says, which fuels the hamlet’s intolerance for strangers. The narrator reveals that he arrived in the village a stranger himself, as Master Kent's manservant, but that the residents have gradually come to...