We hear a great deal about King and Parliament, great lords and able
generals, Cavaliers and Roundheads, but this story is to help us to
think how it must have gone in those times with quiet folk in
cottages and farmhouses.

There had been peace in England for a great many years, ever since
the end of the wars of the Roses. So the towns did not want
fortifications to keep out the enemy, and their houses spread out
beyond the old walls; and the country houses had windows and doors
large and wide open, with no thought of keeping out foes, and farms
and cottages were freely spread about everywhere, with their fields
round them.

The farms were very small, mostly held by men who did all the work
themselves with the help of their families.

Such a farm belonged to John Kenton of Elmwood. It lay at the head
of a long green lane, where the bushes overhead almost touched one
another in the summer, and the mud and mire were very deep in winter;
but that mattered the less as nothing on wheels went up or down it
but the hay or harvest carts, creaking under their load, and drawn by
the old mare, with a cow to help her.

Beyond lay a few small fields, and then a bit of open ground
scattered with gorse and thorn bushes, and much broken by ups and
downs. There, one afternoon on a big stone was seated Steadfast
Kenton, a boy of fourteen, sturdy, perhaps loutish, with an honest
ruddy face under his leathern cap, a coarse smock frock and stout
gaiters. He was watching the fifteen sheep and lambs, the old goose
and gander and their nine children, the three cows, eight pigs, and