England in the late Middle Ages. Escaping from vagabonds, three peasants, two men and a woman, flee into a forest where they are attacked by monks and robbed of their possessions. The subsequent progression through the forest is extended historically over some four hundred years, marked by incidents both real and imaginary: they discover a wounded knight and, at his orders, carry him through the forest for days, unaware that he has died; picking over the scrap metal left behind from a battle in the Wars of the Roses, they are cheated of their boaty by a cunning pedlar who resells it to a merchant; they come upon a small forest community wiped out by the plague; later they appear as actors in a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth.