Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock





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MAID MARIAN




CHAPTER I


Now come ye for peace here, or come ye for war? SCOTT.


"The abbot, in his alb arrayed," stood at the altar in the abbey-chapel
of Rubygill, with all his plump, sleek, rosy friars, in goodly lines disposed,
to solemnise the nuptials of the beautiful Matilda Fitzwater, daughter of
the Baron of Arlingford, with the noble Robert Fitz-Ooth, Earl of Locksley
and Huntingdon. The abbey of Rubygill stood in a picturesque valley,
at a little distance from the western boundary of Sherwood Forest, in a spot
which seemed adapted by nature to be the retreat of monastic mortification,