Chapter 12 - Page 2

of the
period, themselves in great poverty, were wont to harass their still
poorer tenants at will. They might be, on the whole, termed independent,
a circumstance peculiarly galling to Caleb, who had been wont to
exercise over them the same sweeping authority in levying contributions
which was exercised in former times in England, when "the royal
purveyors, sallying forth from under the Gothic portcullis to purchase
provisions with power and prerogative, instead of money, brought home
the plunder of an hundred markets, and all that could be seized from
a flying and hiding country, and deposited their spoil in an hundred
caverns."

Caleb loved the memory and resented the downfall of that authority,
which mimicked, on a petty scale, the grand contributions exacted by
the feudal sovereigns. And as he fondly flattered himself that the awful
rule and right supremacy, which assigned to the Barons of Ravenswood the
first and most effective interest in all productions of nature within
five miles of their castle, only slumbered, and was not departed
for ever, he used every now and then to give the recollection of the
inhabitants a little jog by some petty exaction. These were at first
submitted to, with more or less readiness, by the inhabitants of the
hamlet; for they had been so long used to consider the wants of the
Baron and his family as having a title to be preferred to their own,
that their actual independence did not convey to them an immediate sense
of freedom. They resembled a man that has been long fettered, who,
even at liberty, feels in imagination the grasp of the handcuffs still
binding his wrists. But the exercise of freedom is quickly followed with
the natural consciousness of its immunities, as the enlarged prisoner,
by the free use of his limbs, soon dispels the cramped feeling they had
acquired when bound.

The inhabitants of Wolf's Hope began to grumble, to resist, and at
length positively to refuse compliance with the exactions of Caleb
Balderstone. It was in vain he reminded them, that when the eleventh
Lord Ravenswood, called the Skipper, from his delight in naval matters,
had encouraged the trade of their port by building the pier (a bulwark
of stones rudely piled together), which protected the fishing-boats from
the weather, it had been matter of understanding that he was to have
the first stone of butter after the calving of every cow within the
barony, and the first egg, thence called the Monday's egg, laid by every
hen on every Monday in the year.

The feuars heard and scratched their heads, coughed, sneezed, and being
pressed for answer, rejoined with one voice, "They could not say"--the
universal refuge of a Scottish peasant when pressed to admit a