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with heavy stones hanging on their ends. A door of rough planks was thrust open as they approached, and two wolf-like hounds rushed out, then cringed along the ground towards them, tails wagging. Behind them, outlined against a dim glow from a fire inside, was the figure of a tall woman, a sack around her shoulders to act as a shawl.
    'I wondered if you would get here or stay the night at the Cosdon shelter,' she said in greeting, her voice deep and harsh. Gunilda Hemforde was a formidable widow of about fifty, of extremely ugly appearance. Her deeply lined face was like leather, her greying hair was sparse and patchy, and the few teeth she had left were blackened stumps. Gunilda was a widow because she had killed her husband with an axe when she found him on their bed with her younger sister. Rather than face inevitable hanging, she had taken to the moor two years ago, later being declared by the shire court to be a 'waif', this being the female equivalent of an outlaw. Now she kept house for the dozen men of the Arundell gang at their main hideout in the deserted village of Challacombe.
    The woman stood aside to let the four weary travellers enter. Each greeted her warmly, for she made life more bearable for them by her simple ministrations.
    'Rest yourselves and I'll bring your meat directly,' she promised, going to the other end of the single, square room where she had a table for preparing food. The men slumped gratefully onto piles of dried ferns set back from the circle of stones that enclosed the firepit in the centre of the hut. Three other men were already there and the conversation centred around the day's activities.
    'We had very little luck,' observed Philip Girard. 'Two days lurking about the Okehampton road and almost nothing to show for it.'
    'An Exeter burgess who carried no more than thirty pence in his purse and a flask of wine on his saddle bow! ' added Peter Cuffe, in disgust. 'And we had to chase off a hulking great servant waving a sword to get even those.'
    Nicholas de Arundell pulled off his boots and held his feet towards the fire, steam soon coming off his damp hose. 'Any news of Martin and the others?' he asked. The remaining five men had gone south three days before to try their luck along the high road that ran between Plymouth and Exeter. There was some headshaking and grunting, then Gunilda replied from where she was hacking a large loaf into chunks as if it was her late husband's head.
    'By the sky today, I reckon the snow was worse down that way, so perhaps they've holed up in the cave near Dunscombe.'
    The outlaw band lived partly by armed robbery, especially during the winter months when there were few other sources of income. However, crime was not their only means of survival. Sometimes, they got casual work with the tinners, as the headmen of the teams often wanted extra labour when regular workers fell ill or were injured. At haymaking or harvest time, some village reeves would turn a blind eye to the employment of a stranger, and payment in kind, a goose or a small sack of corn, would be added to Gunilda's store of provisions.
    Tonight, their supper came from poaching, a deer that Philip Girard had shot with a crossbow the previous week in the park of a manor near Widecombe. Thanks to the icy weather, it had hung outside the hut in good condition, providing venison for many days, and now Gunilda had used the last of it in another stew, eked out with winter cabbage and stored carrots and turnips.
    They ate their food from a motley collection of tin, pewter and wooden bowls at a long table with benches on each side, luxurious surroundings compared with their refuge holes dotted over the moor. A couple of tallow dips, cord wicks floating in a dish of animal fat, provided the only light apart from that of the fire, but it was sufficient to dispel the gloom as they washed down the food with pottery mugs of ale and cider brewed by their grim housekeeper.
    As they drank, they talked, the