Book: Hereward, The Last of the English

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"Well ridden!" shouted they both at once, as they leaped up laughing and
drew their swords.

After which they hammered away at each other merrily in "the devil's
smithy"; the sparks flew, and the iron rang, and all men stood still to
see that gallant fight.

So they watched and cheered, till Hereward struck his man such a blow
under the ear, that he dropped, and lay like a log.

"I think I can carry you," quoth Hereward, and picking him up, he threw
him over his shoulder, and walked toward his men.

"A bear! a bear!" shouted they in delight, laughing at the likeness
between Hereward's attitude, and that of a bear waddling off on his hind
legs with his prey in his arms.

"He should have killed his bullock outright before he went to carry him.
Look there!"

And the knight, awaking from his swoon, struggled violently (says Leofric)
to escape.

But Hereward, though the smaller, was the stronger man; and crushing him
in his arms, walked on steadily.

"Knights, to the rescue! Hoibricht is taken!" shouted they of Guisnes,
galloping towards him.

"A bear! a bear! To me, Biornssons! To me, Vikings all!" shouted Hereward.
And the Danes leapt up, and ran toward him, axe in hand.

The chatelain's knights rode up likewise; and so it befell, that Hereward
carried his prisoner safe into camp.

"And who are you, gallant knight?" asked he of his prisoner.

"Hoibricht, nephew of Eustace, Count of Guisnes."

"So I suppose you will be ransomed. Till then--Armorer!"

And the hapless Hoibricht found himself chained and fettered, and sent off
to Hereward's tent, under the custody of Martin Lightfoot.

"The next day," says the chronicler, "the Count of Guisnes, stupefied with
grief at the loss of his nephew, sent the due honor and service to his
prince, besides gifts and hostages."

And so ended the troubles of Baldwin, and Eustace of Guisnes




CHAPTER VIII.

HOW A FAIR LADY EXERCISED THE MECHANICAL ART TO WIN HEREWARD'S LOVE.


The fair Torfrida sat in an upper room of her mother's house in St. Omer,
alternately looking out of the window and at a book of mechanics. In the
garden outside, the wryneck (as is his fashion in May) was calling
Pi-pi-pi among the gooseberry bushes, till the cobwalls rang again. In the
book was a Latin recipe for drying the poor wryneck, and using him as a
philtre which should compel the love of any person desired. Mechanics, it
must be understood, in those days were considered as identical with
mathematics, and those again with astrology and magic; so that the old
chronicler, who says that Torfrida was skilled in "the mechanic art," uses
the word in the same sense as does the author of the "History of Ramsey,"
who tells us how a certain holy bishop of St. Dunstan's party, riding down
to Corfe through the forest, saw the wicked queen-mother Elfrida (her who
had St. Edward stabbed at Corfe Gate) exercising her "mechanic art," under
a great tree; in plain English, performing heathen incantations; and how,
when she saw that she was discovered, she tempted him to deadly sin: but
when she found him proof against allurement, she had him into her bower;
and there the enchantress and her ladies slew him by thrusting red-hot
bodkins under his arms, so that the blessed man was martyred without any
sign of wound. Of all which let every man believe as much as he list.

Torfrida had had peculiar opportunities of learning mechanics. The fairest
and richest damsel in St. Omer, she had been left early by her father an
orphan, to the care of a superstitious mother and of a learned uncle, the
Abbot of St. Bertin. Her mother was a Provencale, one of those Arlesiennes
whose dark Greek beauty still shines, like diamonds set in jet, in the
doorways of the quaint old city. Gay enough in her youth, she had, like a
true Southern woman, taken to superstition in her old age; and spent her
days in the churches, leaving Torfrida to do and learn what she would. Her
nurse, moreover, was a Lapp woman, carried off in some pirating foray, and
skilled in all the sorceries for which the Lapps were famed throughout the
North. Her uncle, partly from good-nature, partly from a pious hope that
she might "enter religion," and leave her wealth to the Church, had made
her his pupil, and taught her the mysteries of books; and she had proved
to be a strangely apt scholar. Grammar, rhetoric, Latin prose and poetry,
such as were taught in those days, she mastered ere she was grown up. Then
she fell upon romance, and Charlemagne and his Paladins, the heroes of
Troy, Alexander and his generals, peopled her imagination. She had heard,
too, of the great necromancer Virgilius (for into such the middle age
transformed the poet), and, her fancy already excited by her Lapp nurse's
occult science, she began eagerly to court forbidden lore.

Forbidden, indeed, magic was by the Church in public; but as a reality,
not as an imposture. Those whose consciences were tough and their faith
weak, had little scruple in applying to a witch, and asking help from the
powers below, when the saints above were slack to hear them. Churchmen,
even, were bold enough to learn the mysteries of nature, Algebra, Judicial
Astrology, and the occult powers of herbs, stones, and animals, from the
Mussulman doctors of Cordova and Seville; and, like Pope Gerbert, mingle
science and magic, in a fashion excusable enough in days when true
inductive science did not exist.

Nature had her miraculous powers,--how far good, how far evil, who could
tell? The belief that God was the sole maker and ruler of the universe was
confused and darkened by the cross-belief, that the material world had
fallen under the dominion of Satan and his demons; that millions of
spirits, good and evil in every degree, exercised continually powers over
crops and cattle, mines and wells, storms and lightning, health and
disease. Riches, honors, and royalties, too, were under the command of the
powers of darkness. For that generation, which was but too apt to take its
Bible in hand upside down, had somehow a firm faith in the word of the
Devil, and believed devoutly his somewhat startling assertion, that the
kingdoms of the world were his, and the glory of them; for to him they
were delivered, and to whomsoever he would he gave them: while it had a
proportionally weak faith in our Lord's answer, that they were to worship
and serve the Lord God alone. How far these powers extended, how far they
might be counteracted, how far lawfully employed, were questions which
exercised the minds of men and produced a voluminous literature for
several centuries, till the search died out, for very weariness of
failure, at the end of the seventeenth century.

The Abbot of St. Bertin, therefore, did not hesitate to keep in his
private library more than one volume which he would not have willingly
lent to the simple monks under his charge; nor to Torfrida either, had she
not acquired so complete a command over the good old man, that he could
deny her nothing.

So she read of Gerbert, Pope Silvester II., who had died only a generation
back: how (to quote William of Malmesbury) "he learned at Seville till he
surpassed Ptolemy with the astrolabe, Alcandrus in astronomy, and Julius
Firmicus in judicial astrology; how he learned what the singing and flight
of birds portended, and acquired the art of calling up spirits from hell;
and, in short, whatever--hurtful or healthful--human curiosity had
discovered, besides the lawful sciences of arithmetic and astronomy, music
and geometry"; how he acquired from the Saracens the abacus (a counting
table); how he escaped from the Moslem magician, his tutor, by making a
compact with the foul fiend, and putting himself beyond the power of
magic, by hanging himself under a wooden bridge so as to touch neither
earth nor water; how he taught Robert, King of France, and Otto the
Kaiser; how he made an hydraulic organ which played tunes by steam, which
stood even then in the Cathedral of Rheims; how he discovered in the
Campus Martius at Rome wondrous treasures, and a golden king and queen,
golden courtiers and guards, all lighted by a single carbuncle, and
guarded by a boy with a bent bow; who, when Gerbert's servant stole a
golden knife, shot an arrow at that carbuncle, and all was darkness, and
yells of demons.

All this Torfrida had read; and read, too, how Gerbert's brazen head had
told him that he should be Pope, and not die till he had sung mass at
Jerusalem; and how both had come true,--the latter in mockery; for he was
stricken with deadly sickness in Rome, as he sang mass at the church
called Jerusalem, and died horribly, tearing himself in pieces.

Which terrible warning had as little effect on Torfrida as other terrible
warnings have on young folk, who are minded to eat of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil.

So Torfrida beguiled her lonely life in that dull town, looking out over
dreary flats and muddy dikes, by a whole dream-world of fantastic
imaginations, and was ripe and ready for any wild deed which her wild
brain might suggest.

Pure she was all the while, generous and noble-hearted, and with a deep
and sincere longing--as one soul in ten thousand has--after knowledge for
its own sake; but ambitious exceedingly, and that not of monastic
sanctity. She laughed to scorn the notion of a nunnery; and laughed to
scorn equally the notion of marrying any knight, however much of a
prudhomme, whom she had yet seen. Her uncle and Marquis Baldwin could have
between them compelled her, as an orphan heiress, to marry whom they
liked. But Torfrida had as yet bullied the Abbot and coaxed the Count
successfully. Lances had been splintered, helmets split, and more than one
life lost in her honor; but she had only, as the best safeguard she could
devise, given some hint of encouragement to one Ascelin, a tall knight of
St. Valeri, the most renowned bully of those parts, by bestowing on him a
scrap of ribbon, and bidding him keep it against all comers. By this means
she insured the personal chastisement of all other youths who dared to
lift their eyes to her, while she by no means bound herself to her
spadassin of St. Valeri. It was all very brutal, but so was the time; and
what better could a poor lady do in days when no man's life or woman's
honor was safe, unless--as too many were forced to do--she retired into a
cloister, and got from the Church that peace which this world certainly
could not give, and, happily, dared not take away?

The arrival of Hereward and his men had of course stirred the great
current of her life, and indeed that of St. Omer, usually as stagnant as
that of the dikes round its wall. Who the unknown champion was,--for his
name of "Naemansson" showed that he was concealing something at
least,--whence he had come, and what had been his previous exploits,
busied all the gossips of the town. Would he and his men rise and plunder
the abbey? Was not the chatelain mad in leaving young Arnulf with him all
day? Madder still, in taking him out to battle against the Count of
Guisnes? He might be a spy,--the _avant-courrier_ of some great
invading force. He was come to spy out the nakedness of the land, and
would shortly vanish, to return with Harold Hardraade of Norway, or Sweyn
of Denmark, and all their hosts. Nay, was he not Harold Hardraade himself
in disguise? And so forth. All which Torfrida heard, and thought within
herself that, be he who he might, she should like to look on him again.

Then came the news how the very first day that he had gone out against the
Count of Guisnes he had gallantly rescued a wounded man. A day or two
after came fresh news of some doughty deed; and then another, and another.
And when Hereward returned, after a week's victorious fighting, all St.
Omer was in the street to stare at him.

Then Torfrida heard enough, and, had it been possible, more than enough,
of Hereward and his prowess.

And when they came riding in, the great Marquis at the head of them all,
with Robert le Frison on one side of him, and on the other Hereward,
looking "as fresh as flowers in May," she looked down on him out of her
little lattice in the gable, and loved him, once and for all, with all her
heart and soul.

And Hereward looked up at her and her dark blue eyes and dark raven locks,
and thought her the fairest thing that he had ever seen, and asked who she
might be, and heard; and as he heard he forgot all about the Sultan's
daughter, and the Princess of Constantinople, and the Fairy of
Brocheliaunde, and all the other pretty birds which were still in the bush
about the wide world; and thought for many a day of naught but the pretty
bird which he held--so conceited was he of his own powers of winning
her--there safe in hand in St. Omer.

So he cast about to see her, and to win her love. And she cast about to
see him, and win his love. But neither saw the other for a while; and it
might have been better for one of them had they never seen the other
again.

If Torfrida could have foreseen, and foreseen, and foreseen----why, if she
were true woman, she would have done exactly what she did, and taken the
bitter with the sweet, the unknown with the known, as we all must do in
life, unless we wish to live and die alone.




CHAPTER IX.

HOW HEREWARD WENT TO THE WAR IN SCALDMARILAND.


It has been shown how the Count of Guisnes had been a thorn in the side of
Baldwin of Lille, and how that thorn was drawn out by Hereward. But a far
sharper thorn in his side, and one which had troubled many a Count before,
and was destined to trouble others afterward, was those unruly Hollanders,
or Frisians, who dwelt in Scaldmariland, "the land of the meres of the
Scheldt." Beyond the vast forests of Flanders, in morasses and alluvial
islands whose names it is impossible now to verify, so much has the land
changed, both by inundations and by embankments, by the brute forces of
nature and the noble triumphs of art, dwelt a folk, poor, savage, living
mostly, as in Caesar's time, in huts raised above the sea on piles or
mounds of earth; often without cattle or seedfield, half savage, half
heathen, but free. Free, with the divine instinct of freedom, and all the
self-help and energy which spring thereout.

They were a mongrel race; and, as most mongrel races are (when sprung from
parents not too far apart in blood), a strong race; the remnant of those
old Frisians and Batavians, who had defied, and all but successfully
resisted, the power of Rome; mingled with fresh crosses of Teutonic blood
from Frank, Sueve, Saxon, and the other German tribes, who, after the fall
of the Roman Empire, had swept across the land.

Their able modern historian has well likened the struggle between Civilis
and the Romans to that between William the Silent and the Spaniard. It
was, without doubt, the foreshadow of their whole history. They were
distinguished, above most European races, for sturdy independence, and,
what generally accompanies it, sturdy common sense. They could not
understand why they should obey foreign Frank rulers, whether set over
them by Dagobert or by Charlemagne. They could not understand why they
were to pay tithes to foreign Frank priests, who had forced on them, at
the sword's point, a religion which they only half believed, and only half
understood. Many a truly holy man preached to them to the best of his
powers: but the cross of St. Boniface had too often to follow the sword of
Charles Martel; and for every Frisian who was converted another was
killed.

"Free Frisians," nevertheless, they remained, at least in name and in
their statute-book, "as long as the wind blows out of the clouds, and the
world stands." The feudal system never took root in their soil. [Footnote:
Motley. "Rise of the Dutch Republic."] If a Frank Count was to govern
them, he must govern according to their own laws. Again and again they
rebelled, even against that seemingly light rule. Again and again they
brought down on themselves the wrath of their nominal sovereigns the
Counts of Flanders; then of the Kaisers of Germany; and, in the thirteenth
century, of the Inquisition itself. Then a crusade was preached against
them as "Stadings," heretics who paid no tithes, ill-used monks and nuns,
and worshipped (or were said to worship) a black cat and the foul fiend
among the meres and fens. Conrad of Marpurg, the brutal Director of St.
Elizabeth of Hungary, burnt them at his wicked will, extirpating, it may
be, heresy, but not the spirit of the race. That, crushed down and
seemingly enslaved, during the middle age, under Count Dirk and his
descendants, still lived; destined at last to conquer. They were a people
who had determined to see for themselves and act for themselves in the
universe in which they found themselves; and, moreover (a necessary
corollary of such a resolution), to fight to the death against any one who
interfered with them in so doing.

Again and again, therefore, the indomitable spirit rose, founding free
towns with charters and guilds; embanking the streams, draining the meres,
fighting each other and the neighboring princes; till, in their last great
struggle against the Pope and Spain, they rose once and for all,

"Heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the strokes of doom
To shape and use,"

as the great Protestant Dutch Republic.

A noble errand it had been for such a man as Hereward to help those men
toward freedom, instead of helping Frank Counts to enslave them;--men of
his own blood, with laws and customs like those of his own Anglo-Danes,
living in a land so exactly like his own that every mere and fen and wood
reminded him of the scenes of his boyhood. The very names of the two lands
were alike,--"Holland," the hollow land,--the one of England, the other of
Flanders.

But all this was hidden from Hereward. To do as he would be done by was a
lesson which he had never been taught. If men had invaded his land, he
would have cried, like the Frisians whom he was going to enslave, "I am
free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds!" and died where he
stood. But that was not the least reason why he should not invade any
other man's land, and try whether or not he, too, would die where he
stood. To him these Frieslanders were simply savages, probably heathens,
who would not obey their lawful lord, who was a gentleman and a Christian;
besides, renown, and possibly a little plunder, might be got by beating
them into obedience. He knew not what he did; and knew not, likewise, that
as he had done to others, so would it be done to him.

Baldwin had at that time made over his troublesome Hollanders to his
younger son Robert, the Viking whom little Arnulf longed to imitate.

Florent, Count of Holland, and vassal of the great Marquis, had just died,
leaving a pretty young widow, to whom the Hollanders had no mind to pay
one stiver more than they were forced. All the isles of Zeeland, and the
counties of Eonham and Alost, were doing that which was right in the sight
of their own eyes, and finding themselves none the worse therefor,--though
the Countess Gertrude doubtless could buy fewer silks of Greece or gems of
Italy. But to such a distressed lady a champion could not long be wanting;
and Robert, after having been driven out of Spain by the Moors with
fearful loss, and in a second attempt wrecked with all his fleet as soon
as he got out of port, resolved to tempt the main no more, and leave the
swan's path for that of the fat oxen and black dray-horses of Holland.

So he rushed to avenge the wrongs of the Countess Gertrude; and his
father, whose good-natured good sense foresaw that the fiery Robert would
raise storms upon his path,--happily for his old age he did not foresee
the worst,--let him go, with his blessing.

So Robert gathered to him valiant ruffians, as many as he could find; and
when he heard of the Viking who had brought Eustace of Guisnes to reason,
it seemed to him that he was a man who would do his work. So when the
great Marquis came down to St. Omer to receive the homage of Count Eustace
of Guisnes, Robert came thither too, and saw Hereward.

"You have done us good service, Harold Naemansson, as it pleases you to be
called," said Baldwin, smiling. "But some man's son you are, if ever I saw
a gallant knight earl-born by his looks as well as his deeds."

Hereward bowed.

"And for me," said Robert, "Naemansson or earl's son, here is my Viking's
welcome to all Vikings like myself." And he held out his hand.

Hereward took it.

"You failed in Galicia, beausire, only because your foes were a hundred to
one. You will not fail where you are going, if (as I hear) they are but
ten to one."

Robert laughed, vain and gratified.

"Then you know where I have been, and where I am going?"

"Why not? As you know well, we Vikings are all brothers, and all know each
other's counsel, from ship to ship and port to port."

Then the two young men looked each other in the face, and each saw that
the other was a man who would suit him.

"Skall to the Viking!" cried Robert, aping, as was his fancy, the Norse
rovers' slang. "Will you come with me to Holland?"

"You must ask my young lord there," and he pointed to Arnulf. "I am his
man now, by all laws of honor."

A flush of jealousy passed over Robert's face. He, haplessly for himself,
thought that he had a grievance.

The rights of primogeniture--_droits d'ainesse_--were not respected
in the family of the Baldwins as they should have been, had prudence and
common sense had their way.

No sacred or divine right is conferred by the fact of a man's being the
first-born son. If Scripture be Scripture, the "Lord's anointed" was
usually rather a younger son of talent and virtue; one born, not according
to the flesh, but according to the spirit, like David and Solomon. And so
it was in other realms besides Flanders during the middle age. The father
handed on the work--for ruling was hard work in those days--to the son
most able to do it. Therefore we can believe Lambert of Aschaffenbourg
when he says, that in Count Baldwin's family for many ages he who pleased
his father most took his father's name, and was hereditary prince of all
Flanders; while the other brothers led an inglorious life of vassalage to
him.

But we can conceive, likewise, that such a method would give rise to
intrigues, envyings, calumnies, murders, fratracidal civil wars, and all
the train of miseries which for some years after this history made
infamous the house of Baldwin, as they did many another noble house, till
they were stopped by the gradual adoption of the rational rule of
primogeniture.

So Robert, who might have been a daring and useful friend to his brother,
had he been forced to take for granted from birth that he was nobody, and
his brother everybody,--as do all younger sons of English noblemen, to
their infinite benefit,--held himself to be an injured man for life,
because his father called his first-born Baldwin, and promised him the
succession,--which indeed he had worthily deserved, according to the laws
of Mammon and this world, by bringing into the family such an heiress as
Richilda and such a dowry as Mons.

But Robert, who thought himself as good as his brother,--though he was not
such, save in valor,--nursed black envy in his heart. Hard it was to him
to hear his elder brother called Baldwin of Mons, when he himself had not
a foot of land of his own. Harder still to hear him called Baldwin the
Good, when he felt in himself no title whatsoever to that epithet. Hardest
of all to see a beautiful boy grow up, as heir both of Flanders and of
Hainault.

Had he foreseen whither that envy would have led him; had he foreseen the
hideous and fratracidal day of February 22d, 1071, and that fair boy's
golden locks rolling in dust and blood,--the wild Viking would have
crushed the growing snake within his bosom; for he was a knight and a
gentleman. But it was hidden from his eyes. He had to "dree his
weird,"--to commit great sins, do great deeds, and die in his bed, mighty
and honored, having children to his heart's desire, and leaving the rest
of his substance to his babes. Heaven help him, and the like of him!

But he turned to young Arnulf.

"Give me your man, boy!"

Arnulf pouted. He wanted to keep his Viking for himself, and said so.

"He is to teach me to go 'leding,' as the Norsemen call it, like you."

Robert laughed. A hint at his piratical attempts pleased his vanity, all
the more because they had been signal failures.

"Lend him me, then, my pretty nephew, for a month or two, till he has
conquered these Friesland frogs for me; and then, if thou wilt go leding
with him--"

"I hope you may never come back," thought Robert to himself; but he did
not say it,

"Let the knight go," quoth Baldwin.

"Let me go with him, then."

"No, by all saints! I cannot have thee poked through with a Friesland
pike, or rotted with a Friesland ague."

Arnulf pouted still.

"Abbot, what hast thou been at with the boy? He thinks of naught but blood
and wounds, instead of books and prayers."

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