THE NORMAN WITCH.
So the Danes and their ships were gone with all that they could carry
with them; and the Saxons of Ely and in the Camp of Refuge, after being
robbed as well as betrayed, were left to their own devices. Much was
Duke William heartened by the departure of Knut, and the treaty he had
made with him; and, seeing no enemy in any other part of England, he
gave his whole mind to the war in the Fen-country. More knights and
adventurers had come over from France and from sundry other countries
to aid the Conqueror in his enterprises, and to seek provision and
fortune in unhappy England. Choosing some of the best of these new
comers, and joining them to troops that had been tried in the hard
warfare of the Fen-country, the Son of Robert the Devil by the harlot
of Falaise sent strong garrisons to Grantham and Stamford, and
Peterborough, and Cam-Bridge; and, carrying with him his chancellor and
nearly the whole of his court, he quitted London and went himself to
Cam-Bridge to direct the war in person. As he and his mighty great host
were marching through the country towards the river Cam, and as the
poor Saxon people counted the number of the lances, they said,
“_Miserere Domine!_ The conquest of our country is complete, and not
even Hereward the Brave will be able longer to defend the Camp of
Refuge!”
When Duke William arrived in the camp at Cam-Bridge, and examined the
Fen-country which lay before him, he severely censured the folly and
rashness of Eustache of Ambleville; and also chiding the impatient and
self-confident knights that were now with him and eager to fall on, he
swore his terrible oath, by the splendour of God’s face, that he would
not allow of any fighting until the ancient causeway[202] should be
repaired and fortified with towers, and another and a broader causeway
carried across the marshes into the very heart of the fens, and
opposite to the point whereon the Saxons had constructed the main
defence of their Camp of Refuge. Timber and stones and baked bricks
were brought from all parts of the country, and every Saxon serf that
could be caught was impressed, and was forced to labour almost unto
death upon works intended for the destruction of his countrymen.
Skilful artizans and men experienced in the making of roads and the
building of bridges were brought to Cam-Bridge from the city of London,
from the city of Caen in Normandie, and from other places beyond the
seas; and the task which William had in hand was made the easier by the
long-continued, unwonted dryness of the season. But the Lord of Brunn,
although he prayed heartily for rain, did in no wise lose heart; and in
proportion as his difficulties increased, his wit and invention
increased also. The working parties on the roads were constantly
covered and protected by great bodies of troops put under the command
of vigilant officers; but this did not prevent Hereward from stealing
through the tall, concealing rushes of the fens, and the forests of
willows and alders, and falling upon the workmen and destroying their
works. On several occasions he cut the Norman guard to pieces before
they could form in order of battle; and several times he destroyed in a
single night the labour of many days, levelling the Norman towers with
the ground, breaking up their bridges, and carrying off their timber
and their tools and other good spoil. It always happened that when his
enemies were surest he would not come, he came; and when they expected
him at one given point, he was sure to make an attack upon another and
distant point. At times his ambuscades, surprises, and onslaughts were
so numerous and rapid that he seemed to have the faculty of being in
many places at one and the same time. Many a Norman knight was
surprised at his post, or even carried off from the midst of a camp,
and dragged through the rushes and forests at the dead of night, an
astounded and helpless captive. Many a time a great body of Norman
troops would take to flight and leave all their baggage behind them,
upon merely hearing the shout of “Hereward for England!” or those other
shouts, “The Lord of Brunn is coming! Fly, ye Norman thieves! Out!
out!” Such were Lord Hereward’s successes, and such the Norman awe of
his unforeseen stratagems and unaccountable surprises, that the Normans
entirely believed Hereward to be in league with the devil, and to be
aided by witches and necromancers and fiends worse than the blubber
devils of Crowland. Now it was true that, for many of his stratagems
and devices, and for many of the sleights and tricks with which he
appalled the Normans, Hereward was indebted to the science and travail
of that thin, dark man of Salerno and Norman-hater, Girolamo; and, by
means of deserters from the camp, and by means of ransomed Normans that
had been allowed to quit the camp, the Salernitan, if he had not been
made well known to the Normans, had been much talked about, and had
become the object of so much dread that no knight or man-at-arms ever
named his name without crossing himself. Nor were the Normans long
before they agreed, one and all, that the dark and silent Salernitan
was Hereward’s chief magician, the devil-dealing necromancer to whom he
stood indebted for all his successes. Loudly did they raise their
voices against this supposed wickedness; and yet, when they found that
their misfortunes and losses went on increasing, they came to the
resolution to meet what was no witchcraft at all with real witchcraft,
and they told Duke William in Cam-Bridge Castle that he must send over
into Normandie for the most famed witch of that land, where there was
no lack either of witches or of warlocks; and the son of Robert the
Devil, whose father, as his name imports, had been liege man to
Lucifer, sent over to Normandie accordingly to seek for the most
dreaded of Norman witches. Now, whether it was this wickedness that did
it, or whether it was that the moist air of the fens and the autumnal
season did not suit Duke William, certain at least it is that he fell
sick of a fever and ague, and thereupon took a hurried departure from
Cam-Bridge and travelled towards London, having first sent to call from
Stamford town Ivo Taille-Bois to take the command of the great army.
Now, when Ivo came to Cam-Bridge, and when Duke William was away in
London, matters went far worse with the Normans than before, for the
Viscomte was not a great captain, as the Duke assuredly was. Moreover,
many of the troops took the ague, and others were so unmanned by their
fears that they could never be made to stand their ground; and, in
fine, all vowed that they would not venture among the woods and
bulrushes, nor attempt any feat of arms whatever until the great witch
should arrive from Normandy to countervail the black arts of the
Salernitan and the other wizards and witches they falsely believed to
be employed by the pious Lord of Brunn.
At last a terrible Norman witch[203] arrived at Cam-Bridge, and she was
received in the entrenched camp and in the castle with transports of
exceeding great joy. Loathsome and wicked at the same time were it to
describe the person and features, the attire and demeanour, the spells
and incantations of this frightful and detestable portentum. Her years
far exceeded the ordinary length of human life, and they had all been
spent in sin and in the practise of infernal arts: in sin and actual
devilry had she been conceived and born, for her mortal father was none
other than that arch-heresiarch and enemy to the saints, Leutarde of
Vertus, in the bishopric of Chalons, who went about with a
sledge-hammer breaking the images of God’s saints, and preaching that
God’s prophets had not always prophesied the truth, and that God-living
servants and ministers of the altar had no right to their tithes! Since
the day when her sire, pursued by his bishop, cast himself head
foremost into a deep well and was drowned (for the devils, in their
compact with him, had only agreed that he should never be burned), this
foul strega, his only daughter, had wandered over the face of the wide
earth doing mischief, and dwelling most in those forsaken, accursed
parts of the earth where witchcraft does most flourish. It was said
that she had been as far north as that dread isle which is covered with
snow, and which yet is for ever vomiting smoke and flames; even to that
northern isle[204] which pious men believe to be one of the entrances
into hell, and which has been notoriously inhabited at all times by
devils and devil-worshippers; that she had lived among the Laps, who
call up demons by beat of drum; and that she had dwelt in the
Orcades,[205] where the devil’s dam and her handmaidens use to raise
great storms, and to sell wind foul or fair. Of a surety was there no
witch of all that congregated round the witch-tree of Beneventum more
known than this! It was known, too, how she came by that broken leg
which made her limp in her gait. Once in flying through the air to the
hellish sabbat at Beneventum she came too near to the cross of Saint
Peter’s Church at Rome, and so fell to the earth.
Ivo Taille-Bois,[206] profane man as he was, would have turned with
horror from the witch, but in his sinful ignorance he believed that the
devil’s arts might be employed against the devil, and he saw that all
the soldiery, nay, and all the chivalry put under his command, believed
that without witchcraft they could never cope with the Lord of Brunn,
nor make any way in the Fen-country. As for the witch herself, she
promised the men immediate and most marvellous victories. Therefore it
was agreed that she should go forth with the troops and the working
parties and penetrate into the fens, and that she should take her
station on a high wooden tower, and thence give her directions as well
to the working men as to the fighting men. Now Lord Hereward and
Girolamo of Salerno, being advised of the arrival of the hag and of the
plans of the Normans, took counsel together, and trusted, with the aid
of the saints, to break the spell and sortilege, and consume the witch
while in the very act of her witchcraft. Calling in his merry men from
all their outposts, and posting them behind a river, Lord Hereward
allowed the Normans to advance a good way into the fens, and he offered
them no molestation while they were building a lofty wooden tower in
the midst of an open plain. But when the tower was finished and the
witch was at her incantations, and when the Norman band was gathered
round the foot of the tower in that open plain, Hereward and Girolamo,
aided only by Elfric and a few other alert Saxons, came round unseen to
the edge of the plain and set fire to the dense reeds and rushes that
grew upon it. It is the custom of the fenners to burn their reeds and
stubble in the month of November of every year in order to fertilize
the soil with the ashes thereof; and at this season one sees all this
moorish country in a flame, to his great wonder and surprise, if he be
a stranger in these parts. It was now the burning-time, and owing to
the exceeding dryness of the summer and of the autumn likewise, the
reeds and junci in this plain were all as dry as matches: add to this
that the Saleritan had brought with him and had sprinkled over the
plain some of his marvellous compounds which made a raging and
inextinguishable fire, and that the wind was blowing keenly from the
north-east right across the plain and towards the tall wooden tower,
and then it may be, to some degree, imagined, how rapidly and awfully
the flames, once lit, rolled over that broad open field, crackling, and
hissing, and then roaring in the wind, while columns of thick, pungent,
suffocating smoke rolled after them, darkening the sun and sky and
making visible the horrible red glare. At the first glimpse of the
mighty blaze the hag stopped her incantation and let the hell-broth she
was brewing drop from her skinny hands with a hideous yell; and the
men-at-arms and the labourers that were gathered at the foot of the
tower cast a look of dread and horror to windward and screamed like the
witch, and then took to their heels and ran across the plain in the
desperate hope of keeping before the winds and the flames, and paying
no heed to the witch, who had no means of descending from her tower.
“Ha! ha! thou hag! where is thy witch-tree of Beneventum now, which no
mortal axe can cut down or lop, and no earthly fire consume? Ha! witch!
where be the broad double channels and the rapid and cool streams of
the river Calor? If they flowed by thee close as they used to do when
thou wast perched on that witch-tree, high as is thy tower, wouldst not
leap headlong into the deep water? Ha! accursed daughter of Leutard
Iconoclastes, wouldst call upon the saints whose blessed effigies were
broken by thy fathers sledge hammer? What! dost scream and raise thy
skinny hands to Heaven? ’Tis vain, ’tis vain! the saints in Heaven will
not hear thee, so down with thy hands towards earth and the fiery
plain, and invoke the fiends to whom thou hast sold thy soul. So! so!
the fire catcheth and thy tower of wood crackles in the flames, and the
flames mount upward and embrace thee round about and lick thee with
their blistering tongues! Ha! shriek and writhe! these flames give only
a mild foretaste of thine eternal doom. These flames be but fed with
dry rushes and fen-grass, and the wood of the oak and pine; but the
unquenchable flames of the nethermost pit are fed with brimstone and
naphtha. See! the tower falls and she is consumed, flesh and bones, in
the hissing fire!—and so perish all witches!”
Thus spake Girolamo of Salerno, like the true believer that he was, as
the Norman witch was burning. But the hag did not perish alone; the
crackling fire, carried onward by the strong wind, overtaking and
consuming nearly all the Normans that had advanced with her into the
plains to set up her accursed tower. Ivo Taille-Bois, with the rest of
the Norman host, had stopped at the ford where the witch had crossed
before she came into the plain; but when he saw the fire kindled and
roll across the fen almost as rapidly as the waters of a mighty
cataract, and saw the smoke arise and shut out the sight of the blessed
sun, Ivo turned and fled, and every man with him fled in wild dismay,
nor stopped until they came to the castle by Cam-Bridge. And the ford
where the hag crossed over into the plain is called unto this day
Witchford.[207]
And when the fire which Girolamo had lit had burned itself out, and the
smoke had cleared away, the fierce wind fell and there came on a
terrible storm of thunder and lightning; and when this was over the
long delayed rains began to fall in torrents, filling the rivers and
brooks and marshpools, and making the whole country once more
impassable; and these rains, intermitting only for brief hours,
continued to fall for seven days and seven nights; and that part of the
causeway which had been built by Duke William’s orders was undermined
and washed away, so that no trace remained of it. And then, while the
Normans remained penned up in the castle and in the intrenched camp,
the Lord of Brunn and his Saxons launched their light boats in the
rivers and meres, and destroyed all the works which had been built to
defend the whole road. Thus in the next year the Conqueror had
everything to begin anew. In the meanwhile Ivo Taille-Bois gave up the
command in despair, and went away to Stamford, where he had left his
wife, the Ladie Lucia. During the winter this Vicomte of Spalding made
an essay to recover possession of the Ladie Lucia’s manor-house and
estates at Spalding; but as the Saxons had still a little fleet of
barks and the entire command of the Welland river, Ivo failed entirely,
and was not even able to do so much as disturb the tranquillity of the
good Saxon monks of Crowland. And while the Norman vicomte was thus
unsuccessful, other and great successes attended the Saxon lord. With
one numerous band collected near his house at Brunn, the Lord Hereward
found his way across the country as far as Newark, where he defeated a
great body of Normans, and found good spoil; and after this, with
another band, drawn mostly from the impenetrable bogs of Hoilandia, he
ascended the Witham as far as Boston and there surprised and captured
three Norman knights, and some three-score Norman men-at-arms. And it
so chanced that among these three knights was that unlucky wooer
Geoffroy, the brother of Ivo, who had found in some upland part of
England a Saxon wife and heiress, but one neither so handsome nor so
rich as the Ladie Alftrude, for it was a widow quite old enough to be
Sir Geoffroy’s mother, and her whole estate was not much larger than
one of the Ladie Alftrude’s farms. Having no money to pay for his
ransom, and his brother having none to give or lend him, Geoffroy was
sent into the fens and kept there as a close prisoner. And before the
Lord of Brunn had done, he made other members of that family know what
it was to live among the bulrushes. But now, having done all these
things, and performed many other exploits, Hereward, at the approach of
spring, brought his fair young spouse from Ely to his house at Brunn,
and a very few days after her arrival the lady gave birth[208] to an
heir to the united honours of Brunn and Ey. And hereupon followed high
rejoicings, and a christening, and such an hospitable feast as only
true Saxon lords knew how to give. The good-hearted Lord Abbat of
Crowland baptized the child, and sundry of his monks, and the good
prior of Spalding among them, were bidden to the feast. “Elfric, my
trusty sword-bearer,” said the Lord of Brunn when the feast was over,
“Elfric, I say, methinks I have given proof, that a man may love and
fight, and be a husband and a soldier, at one and the same time, and
that if we are to put off thy espousal day with maid Mildred until this
war be over, thou wilt run a chance of never being married at all!”
“Good, my Lord,” said Elfric, “This is what I have been thinking for
more than these nine months past.”
“Then beshrew me,” said the Lord of Brunn, “thou and Mildred shall be
made one before the world be a moon older!”
The Lord of Brunn meant what he said; but Heaven ordered it otherwise.