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The message I had brought should have been to me as a king's thane, and I myself should have sent one to Matelgar to bid him come to the levy, even as he would now send to the other lesser thanes and the franklins round about, in my place.
The Washingtons were more aristocratic than the Franklins, and possessed more of the world's wealth and honors. Had they been near neighbors they would not have associated with the Franklins, as they belonged to a different guild. Such were the customs of those times.
'By Satan! cried the Dead Man 'those Franklins are ladies after my own heart; lecherous, murderous and abandoned, they are meet companions for me. What a splendid contrivance! It needs but the additions of myself and the superb Josephine, to render it complete! He left the room, and entered an elegant bed-chamber which adjoined it.
Even then those who engaged in it were chiefly Norman knights and their vassals, and not the Saxon franklins and population, who no doubt thought, in their sorrow, as many wise men have thought since, that charity should begin at home.
There was a second verse, but it was rude stuff, and the Queen had forbidden the maids to sing it. As he grew older he was allowed to sit with the men in the hall, when bows were being stretched and bowstrings knotted and spear-hafts fitted. He would sit mum in a corner, listening with both ears to the talk of the old franklins, with their endless grumbles about lost cattle and ill neighbours.
Mark had been sinking deeper and deeper in the mire; he was scarcely ever sober except when visiting the Franklins, on which occasions he was always on his guard, though his excited manner, and the eagerness with which he tossed down the few glasses of wine to which he, evidently with difficulty, restricted himself, made a most painful impression not only on Mrs Franklin, but also on her daughter.
We have trouble with their men, who raid our homesteads now and then." At that a big man with a yellow moustache and long curling hair rose from among the franklins and said loudly, in a voice which was neither like that of a Briton nor a Saxon at all: "Let me get a nearer look at him, and I will soon tell you if he is what he claimed to be."
All the lower end of the hall was filled with the people, and I saw my two serfs there, and many Reedham folk. Then the court was set, and with the earl were many men whom I knew by sight, honest thanes and franklins enough, and of that I was glad.
I shall seek out the Franklins, and inform them of the discovery which places them completely in my power. Farewell, parson ; I leave you to your agreeable meditations, and to the enjoyment of a long, sound sleep!
He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were relatively late comers to New England. They sprang from a long line of blacksmiths at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the Washingtons was not far away, and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pink-coated huntsmen of the Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to have their horses shod at the Franklin smithy.
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