folk. After the evening meal they retired to rest, but their guest
lay sleepless. Suddenly the distant sounds of singing and applause
burst on his ears. Springing from his couch, he roused a serving-man
and inquired the meaning of this nocturnal merrymaking, when he was
informed that the Norman intruders were celebrating the entry of their
lord into the patrimony of the youth they had murdered. The stranger
girded on his weapons, threw about him a long black cloak, and with his
companion repaired to the scene of this boisterous revelry. There the
first object that met his eyes was the head of the murdered boy. He
took it down, kissed it, and wrapped it in a cloth. Then the two placed
themselves in the dark shadow of a doorway whence they could command a
view into the hall. The Normans were scattered about a blazing fire,
most of them overcome with drunkenness and reclining on the bosoms of
their women. In their midst was a jongleur, or minstrel, chanting songs
of reproach against the Saxons and ridiculing their unpolished manners
in coarse dances and ludicrous gestures. He was proceeding to utter
indecent jests against the family of the youth they had slain, when
he was interrupted by one of the women, a native of Flanders. "Forget
not," she said, "that the boy has a brother, named Hereward, famed for
his bravery throughout the country whence I come, ay, and even in Spain
and Algiers. Were he here, things would wear a different aspect on the
morrow."
The new lord of the house, indignant at this, raised his head and
exclaimed, "I know the man well, and his wicked deeds that would have
brought him ere this to the gallows, had he not sought safety in
flight; nor dare he now make his appearance anywhere this side the
Alps."
The minstrel, seizing on this theme, began to improvise a scurrilous
song, when he was literally cut short in an unexpected manner--his head
clove in two by the swift stroke of a Saxon sword. It was Hereward who
had done this. Then he turned on the defenceless Normans, who fell,
one after the other, beneath his furious blows; those who attempted to
escape being intercepted by his companion at the door. His arm was not
stayed until the last was slain, and the heads of the Norman lord and
fourteen of his knights were raised over the doorway.
The historian of these things goes on to say that the Normans in the
neighbourhood, hearing of Hereward's return and of this midnight
exploit, fled. This proves their wisdom, at the expense of their
courage. The Saxons rose on every side, but Hereward at first checked
their zeal, selecting only a strong body of relations and adherents,
and with them attacking and slaying those of the Normans who dared
remain on his estates. Then he repaired to his friend Brand, the
Saxon Abbot of Peterborough, from whom, in the Anglo-Saxon manner,
he received the honour of knighthood. After suddenly attacking and
killing a Norman baron sent against him, he dispersed his followers,
and, promising to rejoin them in a year, sailed for Flanders. We next
hear of Hereward in the spring of 1070, when he appears in company with
the Danes whom William the Conqueror had allowed to winter on the east
coast. Together they raised a revolt, first in the Humber and along
the Yorkshire Ouse; and then they are found sacking and destroying
Peterborough Abbey, by that time under the control of the Norman Abbot
Turold. A hundred and sixty armed men were gathered by the Abbot to
force them back to their lair at Ely, but they had already left. With
the advent of spring Hereward's Danish allies sailed away, rich in
plunder, and he and his outlaws were left to do as best they could.
For a year he remained quiet in his island fastness, secured by the
trackless bogs and fens from attack, while the discontented elements
were being attracted to him. With him was that attendant who kept the
door at Bourne: Martin of the Light Foot was his name. Others were
Leofric "Prat," or the Cunning, skilful in spying out the dispositions
of the enemy; Leofric the Mower, who obtained his distinctive name
by mowing off the legs of a party of Normans with a scythe, the only
weapon he could lay hands on in a hurry; Ulric the Heron, and Ulric
the Black--all useful lieutenants in an exhausting irregular warfare.
Greater companions were the Saxon Archbishop Stigand, Bishop Egelwin of
Lincoln, and the Earls Morcar, Edwin, and Tosti. All these notables,
with a large following, flocked into the Isle of Ely, as a Camp of
Refuge, and quartered themselves on the monks of the Abbey of Ely.
There they lay, and constituted a continual menace to the Norman power.
Sometimes they made incursions into other districts, and burnt and
slew; at others, when hard pressed, they had simply to retire into
these fens to be unapproachable. None among the Norman conquerors of
other parts of the land could cope with Hereward, and at last William,
in the summer of 1071, found it necessary to take the field in person
against this own brother to Will-o'-the-Wisp. His plan of campaign was
to attempt the invasion of the Isle of Ely simultaneously from two
different points; from Brandon on the north-east, and from Cottenham on
the south-west. The Brandon attempt was by boat, and soon failed: the
advance from Cottenham was a longer business. Why he did not advance by
that old Roman road, the Akeman Street, cannot now be explained. That
splendid example of a causeway built across the morasses must still
have afforded the better way, even though the Romans who made it had
been gone six hundred years. But the Conqueror chose to advance from
Cambridge by way of Impington, Histon, and Cottenham. It is, of course,
possible that the defenders of the Isle had destroyed a portion of the
old road, or in some way rendered it impracticable. His line of march
can be traced even to this day. Leaving the old coaching road here at
Cottenham Corner, we make for that village, famed in these days for
its cream cheeses and grown to the proportions of a small town.[1]
It was here, at Cottenham and at Rampton, that William collected his
invading force and amassed the great stores of materials necessary for
overcoming the great difficulty of entering the Isle of Ely, then an
isle in the most baulking and inconvenient sense to an invader. Before
the Isle could be entered by an army, it was necessary to build a
causeway across the two miles' breadth of marshes that spread out from
the Ouse at Aldreth, and this work had to be carried out in the face of
a vigorous opposition from Hereward and his allies. It was two years
before this causeway could be completed. Who shall say what strenuous
labour went to the making of this road across the reedy bogs; what
vast accumulations of reeds and brushwood, felled trees and earth?
The place has an absorbing interest, but to explore it thoroughly
requires no little determination, for the road that William made has
every appearance of being left just as it was when he had done with it,
more than eight hundred years ago, and the way from Rampton, in its
deep mud, unfathomable ruts and grassy hollows, soddened for lack of
draining, is a terrible damper of curiosity. The explorer's troubles
begin immediately he has left the village of Rampton. Turning to the
right, he is instantly plunged into the fearful mud of a mile-long
drove described on the large-scale Ordnance maps as "Cow Lane," a
dismal _malebolge_ of black greasy mud that only cattle can walk
without difficulty. The unfortunate cyclist who adventures this way and
pushes on, thinking these conditions will improve as he goes, is to be
pitied, for, instead of improving, they go from bad to worse. The mud
of this horrible lane is largely composed of the Cambridgeshire clay
called "gault," and is of a peculiarly adhesive quality. When he is at
last obliged to dismount and pick the pounds upon pounds of mud out
of the intimate places of his machine, his feelings are outraged and,
cursing all the road authorities of Cambridgeshire in one comprehensive
curse, he determines never again to leave the highways in search of
the historic. A few yards farther progress leaves him in as bad case
as before, and he is at last reduced to carrying the machine on his
shoulder, fearful with every stride that his shoes will part company
with his feet, withdrawn at each step from the mud with a resounding
"pop," similar to the sound made by the drawing of a cork from a
bottle. But it is only when at last, coming to the end of Cow Lane
and turning to the left into Iram Drove, he rests and clears away the
mud and simultaneously finds seven punctures in one tyre and two in
the other, that his stern indignation melts into tears. The wherefore
of this havoc wrought upon the inoffensive wheelman is found in the
cynical fact that although Cow Lane never receives the attentions of
the road-repairer, its thorn-hedges are duly clipped and the clippings
thrown into what, for the sake of convenience, may be called the road.
[1] Famous, too, in that Cambridgeshire byword, "a Cottenham jury,"
which arose (as the inhabitants of every other village will have you
believe) from the verdict of a jury of Cottenham men, in the case of
a man tried for the murder of his wife. The foreman, returning into
Court, said, "They were unanimously of opinion that it sarved her
right, for she were such a tarnation bad 'un as no man could live with."
[Illustration: THE ISLE OF ELY AND DISTRICT.]
The geographical conditions here resemble those of Muckslush Heath in
Colman's play, and although Iram Drove is paradise compared with what
we have already come through, taken on its own merits it is not an
ideal thoroughfare. One mile of it, past Long Swath Barn, brings us
to the beginning of Aldreth Causeway, here a green lane, very bumpy
and full of rises and hollows. Maps and guide-books vaguely mention
Belsar's Hill near this point, and imaginative guides who have not
explored these wilds talk in airy fashion of it "overlooking" the
Causeway. As a matter of fact, the Causeway is driven squarely through
it, and it is so little of a hill, and so incapable of overlooking
anything, that you pass it and are none the wiser. The fact of the
Causeway being thus driven through the hill and the ancient earthworks
that ring around six acres of it, proves sufficiently that this
fortress is much more ancient than William the Conqueror's time. It is,
indeed, prehistoric. Who was Belsar? History does not tell us; but lack
of certain knowledge has not forbidden guesswork, more or less wild,
and there have been those who have found the name to be a corruption
of Belisarius. We are not told, however, what that general--that
unfortunate warrior whom tradition represents as begging in his old age
an obolus in the streets of Constantinople--was doing here. But the
real "Belsar" may perhaps have been that "Belasius, Præses Militum
versus Elye," mentioned in the "Tabula Eliensis," one of William's
captains in this long business, from whom descended the Belasyse family.
[Illustration: ALDRETH CAUSEWAY AND THE ISLE OF ELY.]
Two miles of green lane, solitary as though foot of man had not
passed by for years, lead down to the Ouse. Fens spread out on either
hand--Mow Fen, Willingham Fen, Smythy Fen, Great North Fen--fens
everywhere. It is true they are now chiefly cultivated fields,
remarkable for their fertility, but they are saved from being drowned
only by the dykes and lodes cut and dug everywhere and drained by the
steam pumping-station whose chimney-shaft, with its trail of smoke,
is seen far off across the levels. In front rises the high ground of
the Isle of Ely, a mile or more away across the river: high ground
for Cambridgeshire, but likely, in any other part of England, to be
called a low ridge. Here it is noticeable enough of itself, and made
still more so by a windmill and a row of tall slender trees on the
skyline. A new bridge now building across the Ouse at this point
is likely to bring Aldreth Causeway into use and repair again. On
the other shore, at High Bridge Farm, the Causeway loses its grassy
character, becoming a rutted and muddy road, inconceivably rugged,
and so continuing until it ends at the foot of the rising ground of
Aldreth. Drains and their protecting banks lie to the left of it; the
banks used by the infrequent pedestrians in preference to the Causeway,
low-lying and often flooded.
[Illustration: ALDRETH CAUSEWAY.]
XXXIII
THIS, then, was the way into that Isle of Refuge to which the Normans
directed their best efforts. At the crossing of the Ouse, the
fascines and hurdles, bags of earth and bundles of reeds, that had
thus far afforded a foundation, were no longer of use, and a wooden
bridge had of necessity to be constructed in the face of the enemy.
Disaster attended it, for the unlucky timbering gave way while the
advance was actually in progress, and hundreds were drowned. A second
bridge was begun, and William, calling in supernatural aid, brought a
"pythonissa"--a sorceress--to curse Hereward and his merry men and to
weave spells while the work was going forward. William himself probably
believed little in her unholy arts, but his soldiers and the vast army
of helpers and camp-followers gathered together in this unhealthy
hollow, dying of ague and marsh-sickness, and disheartened by failure
and delay, fancied forces of more than earthly power arrayed against
them. So the pythonissa was provided with a wooden tower whence she
could overlook the work and exercise her spells while the second bridge
was building. Fishermen from all the countryside were impressed to aid
in the work. Among them, in disguise, came Hereward, so the legends
tell, and when all was nearly done, he fired the maze of woodwork,
so that the sorceress in her tower was sent, shrieking, in flames to
Ahrimanes, and this, the second bridge, was utterly consumed. Kingsley,
in his very much overrated romance of _Hereward the Wake_, makes him
fire the reeds, but the Fenland reed does not burn and refuses to be
fired outside the pages of fiction.
It was at last by fraud rather than by force that the Isle of Ely was
entered. A rebel earl, a timorous noble, might surrender himself from
time to time, and most of his allies thus fell away, but it was the
false monks who at last led the invader in where he could not force
his way. Those holy men, with the Saxon Abbot, Thurston, at their
head, who prayed and meditated while the defenders of this natural
fortress did the fighting, came as a result of their meditations to
the belief that William, so dogged in his efforts, must in the end be
successful. He had threatened--pious man though he was--to confiscate
the property of the monastery when he should come to Ely, and so,
putting this and that together, they conceived it to be the better plan
to bring him in before he broke in; for in this way their revenues
might yet be saved. It is Ingulphus, himself a monk, who chronicles
this treachery. Certain of them, he says, sending privily to William,
undertook to guide his troops by a secret path through the fens into
the Isle. It was a chance too good to be thrown away, and was seized.
The imagination can picture the mail-clad Normans winding single file
along a secret path among the rushes, at the tail of some guide whose
life was to be forfeit on the instant if he led them into ambush; and
one may almost see and hear the swift onset and fierce cries when they
set foot on firm land and fell suddenly upon the Saxon camp, killing
and capturing many of the defenders.
But history shows the monks of Ely in an ill light, for it really
seems that William's two years' siege of the Isle might have been
indefinitely prolonged, and then been unsuccessful, had it not been
for this treachery. Does anyone ever stop to consider how great a
part treachery plays in history? It was the monks who betrayed the
Isle, otherwise impregnable, and endless in its resources, as Hereward
himself proved to a Norman knight whom he had captured. He conducted
his prisoner over his water-and-morass-girdled domain, showed him most
things within it, and then sent him back to the besieging camp to
report what he had seen. This is the tale he told, as recorded in the
_Liber Eliensis_:--
"In the Isle, men are not troubling themselves about the siege; the
ploughman has not taken his hand from the plough, nor has the hunter
cast aside his arrow, nor does the fowler desist from beguiling birds.
If you care to hear what I have heard and seen with my own eyes, I
will reveal all to you. The Isle is within itself plenteously endowed,
it is supplied with various kinds of herbage, and in richness of soil
surpasses the rest of England. Most delightful for charming fields
and pastures, it is also remarkable for beasts of chase, and is, in
no ordinary way, fertile in flocks and herds. Its woods and vineyards
are not worthy of equal praise, but it is begirt by great meres and
fens, as though by a strong wall. In this Isle there is an abundance of
domestic cattle, and a multitude of wild animals; stags, roes, goats,
and hares are found in its groves and by those fens. Moreover, there is
a fair sufficiency of otters, weasels, and polecats; which in a hard
winter are caught by traps, snares, or any other device. But what am
I to say of the kinds of fishes and of fowls, both those that fly and
those that swim? In the eddies at the sluices of these meres are netted
innumerable eels, large water-wolves, with pickerels, perches, roaches,
burbots, and lampreys, which we call water-snakes. It is, indeed, said
by many that sometimes salmon are taken there, together with the royal
fish, the sturgeon. As for the birds that abide there and thereabouts,
if you are not tired of listening to me, I will tell you about them, as
I have told you about the rest. There you will find geese, teal, coots,
didappers, water-crows, herons, and ducks, more than man can number,
especially in winter, or at moulting-time. I have seen a hundred--nay,
even three hundred--taken at once; sometimes by bird-lime, sometimes
in nets and snares." The most eloquent auctioneer could not do better
than this, and if this knight excelled in fighting as he did in
description, he must have been a terrible fellow.
It is pleasant to think how the monks of Ely met with harder measures
than they had expected. William was not so pleased with their belated
submission as he was angered by their ever daring to question his right
and power. Still, things might have gone better with them had they not
by ill-luck been at meals in the refectory when the King unexpectedly
appeared. None knew of his coming until he was seen to enter the
church. Gilbert de Clare, himself a Norman knight, but well disposed
towards the monks, burst in upon them: "Miserable fools that you are,"
he said, "can you do nothing better than eat and drink while the King
is here?"
Forthwith they rushed pellmell into the church; fat brothers and lean,
as quickly as they could, but the King, flinging a gold mark upon the
altar, had already gone. He had done much in a short time. Evidently
he was what Americans nowadays call a "hustler," for he had marked
out the site for a castle within the monastic precincts, and had
already given orders for its building by men pressed from the three
shires of Cambridge, Hertford, and Bedford. Torn with anxiety, the
whole establishment of the monastery hasted after him on his return to
Aldreth, and overtook him at Witchford, where, by the intercession of
Gilbert de Clare, they were admitted to an audience, and after some
difficulty allowed to purchase the King's Peace by a fine of seven
hundred marks of silver.
Unhappily, their troubles were not, even then, at an end, for when on
the appointed day the money, raised by the sacrifice of many of the
cherished ornaments of the church, was brought to the King's officers
at Cambridge, the coins were found, through some fraud of the moneyers,
to be of light weight. William was studiously and politically angry
at what he affected to believe an attempt on the part of the monks to
cheat him, and his forbearance was only purchased by a further fine of
three hundred marks, raised by melting down the remainder of the holy
ornaments. The quality of William's piety is easily to be tested by a
comparison of the value of his single gold mark, worth in our money one
hundred pounds, with that of the one thousand silver marks, the sum
total of the fines he exacted. A sum equal to thirty thousand pounds
was extracted from the monastery and church of Ely, and forty Norman
knights were quartered upon the brethren; one knight to each monk, as
the old "Tabula Eliensis" specifies in detail.
XXXIV
WHAT in the meanwhile had become of Hereward? What was he doing when
these shaven-pated traitors were betraying his stronghold? One would
like to find that hero wreaking a terrible vengeance upon them, but
we hear of nothing so pleasing and appropriate. The only vengeance
was that taken by William upon the rank and file of the rebels, and
that was merely cowardly and unworthy. It was not politic to anger
the leaders of this last despairing stand of the Saxons, and so they
obtained the King's Peace; but the churls and serfs felt the force of
retribution in gouged eyes, hands struck off, ears lopped, and other
ferocious pleasantries typical of the Norman mind. Hereward who, I am
afraid, was not always so watchful as his name signifies, seems to have
found pardon readily enough, and one set of legends tells how at last
he died peacefully and of old age in his bed.
Others among the old monkish chroniclers give him an epic and more
fitting end, in which, like Samson, he dies with his persecutors. They
marry him to a rich Englishwoman, one Elfthryth, who had made her peace
with the King, and afterwards obtained pardon for her lover. But the
Normans still hated him, and one night, when his chaplain Ethelward,
whose duty was to keep watch and ward within and without his house
and to place guards, slumbered at his post, a band of assassins crept
in and attacked Hereward as he lay. He armed himself in haste, and
withstood their onslaught. His spear was broken, his sword too, and
he was driven to use his shield as a weapon. Fifteen Frenchmen lay
dead beneath his single arm when four of the party crept behind him
and smote him with their swords in the back. This stroke brought him
to his knees. A Breton knight, one Ralph of Dôl, then rushed on him,
but Hereward, in a last effort, once more wielded his buckler, and the
Englishman and the Breton fell dead together.
However, whenever, or wherever he came to his end, certainly the great
Hereward was laid to rest in the nave of Crowland Abbey, but no man
knows his grave. Just as the bones and the last resting-place of Harold
at Waltham Abbey have disappeared, so the relics of "the Watchful,"
that "most strenuous man," that hardy fighter in a lost cause, are
scattered to the winds.
There are alleged descendants of Hereward to this day, and a "Sir
Herewald Wake" is at the head of them; but we know nothing of how
they prove their descent. "Watch and pray" is their motto, and a very
appropriate one, too; although it is possible that Hereward's praying
was spelt with an "e," and himself not so prayerful as predatory.
Hereward, the old monkish chroniclers tell us, was "a man short in
stature but of enormous strength." By that little fragment of personal
description they do something to wreck an ideal. Convention demands
that all heroes be far above the height of other men, just as all
knights of old were conventionally gentle and chivalric and all ladies
fair; though, if history do not lie and limners painted what they
saw, the chivalry and gentleness of knighthood were as sadly to seek
as the loving-kindness of the hyæena, and the fair ladies of old were
most furiously ill-favoured. Hereward's figure, without that personal
paragraph, is majestic. The feet of him squelch, it is true, through
Fenland mud and slime, but his head is lost in the clouds until this
very early piece of journalism disperses the mists and makes the hero
something less of the demi-god than he had otherwise been.