nearly midnight
The feudal law does not regard a blacksmith 's hammer as a weapon . And as for treason , Count of Burg Arras , may my throne always be surrounded by such treason as yours . '' And for centuries after , the descendants of the blacksmith were Counts of Burg Arras , and held the castle of that name , whose ruins to-day attest the excellence of the Archbishop 's building . It was nearly midnight when Count Konrad von Hochstaden reached his castle on the Rhine , with a score of very tired and hungry men behind him . The warder at the gate of Schloss Hochstaden , after some cautious parley with the newcomers , joyously threw apart the two great iron-studded oaken leaves of the portal when he was convinced that it was indeed his young master who had arrived after some tumultuous years at the crusades , and Count Konrad with his followers rode clattering under the stone arch , into the ample courtyard . It is recorded that , in the great hall of the castle , the Count and his twenty bronzed and scarred knights ate such a meal as had never before been seen to disappear in Hochstaden , and that after drinking with great cheer to the downfall of the Saracene and the triumph of the true cross , they all lay on the floor of the Rittersaal and slept the remainder of the night , the whole of next day , and did not awaken until the dawn of the second morning . They had had years of hard fighting in the east , and on the way home they had been compelled to work their passage through the domains of turbulent nobles by good stout broadsword play , the only argument their opposers could understand , and thus they had come through to the Rhine without contributing aught to their opponents except fierce blows , which were not commodities as marketable as yellow gold , yet with this sole exchange did the twenty-one win their way from Palestine to the Palatinate , and thus were they so long on the road that those in Schloss Hochstaden had given up all expectation of their coming .