Book: Hereward, The Last of the English

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Such was the Fenland; hard, yet cheerful; rearing a race of hard and
cheerful men; showing their power in old times in valiant fighting, and
for many a century since in that valiant industry which has drained and
embanked the land of the Girvii, till it has become a very "Garden of the
Lord." And the Scotsman who may look from the promontory of Peterborough,
the "golden borough" of old time; or from the tower of Crowland, while
Hereward and Torfrida sleep in the ruined nave beneath; or from the
heights of that Isle of Ely which was so long "the camp of refuge" for
English freedom; over the labyrinth of dikes and lodes, the squares of
rich corn and verdure,--will confess that the lowland, as well as the
highland, can at times breed gallant men. [Footnote: The story of Hereward
(often sung by minstrels and old-wives in succeeding generations) may be
found in the "Metrical Chronicle of Geoffrey Gaimar," and in the prose
"Life of Hereward" (paraphrased from that written by Leofric, his house-
priest), and in the valuable fragment "Of the family of Hereward." These
have all three been edited by Mr. T. Wright. The account of Hereward in
Ingulf seems taken, and that carelessly, from the same source as the Latin
prose, "De Gestis Herewardi." A few curious details may be found in Peter
of Blois's continuation of Ingulf; and more, concerning the sack of
Peterborough, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I have followed the
contemporary authorities as closely as I could, introducing little but
what was necessary to reconcile discrepancies, or to illustrate the
history, manners, and sentiments of the time.--C. K.]




CHAPTER I.

HOW HEREWARD WAS OUTLAWED, AND WENT NORTH TO SEEK HIS FORTUNES.


Known to all is Lady Godiva, the most beautiful as well as the most
saintly woman of her day; who, "all her life, kept at her own expense
thirteen poor folk wherever she went; who, throughout Lent, watched in the
church at triple matins, namely, one for the Trinity, one for the Cross,
and one for St. Mary; who every day read the Psalter through, and so
persevered in good and holy works to her life's end,"--the "devoted friend
of St. Mary, ever a virgin," who enriched monasteries without
number,--Leominster, Wenlock, Chester, St. Mary's Stow by Lincoln,
Worcester, Evesham; and who, above all, founded the great monastery in
that town of Coventry, which has made her name immortal for another and a
far nobler deed; and enriched it so much "that no monastery in England
possessed such abundance of gold, silver, jewels, and precious stones,"
beside that most precious jewel of all, the arm of St. Augustine, which
not Lady Godiva, but her friend, Archbishop Ethelnoth, presented to
Coventry, "having bought it at Pavia for a hundred talents of silver and a
talent of gold." [Footnote: William of Malmesbury.]

Less known, save to students, is her husband, Leofric the great Earl of
Mercia and Chester, whose bones lie by those of Godiva in that same
minster of Coventry; how "his counsel was as if one had opened the Divine
oracles"; very "wise," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "for God and for
the world, which was a blessing to all this nation"; the greatest man,
save his still greater rival, Earl Godwin, in Edward the Confessor's
court.

Less known, again, are the children of that illustrious pair: Algar, or
Alfgar, Earl of Mercia after his father, who died, after a short and
stormy life, leaving two sons, Edwin and Morcar, the fair and hapless
young earls, always spoken of together, as if they had been twins; a
daughter, Aldytha, or Elfgiva, married first (according to some) to
Griffin, King of North Wales, and certainly afterwards to Harold, King of
England; and another, Lucia (as the Normans at least called her), whose
fate was, if possible, more sad than that of her brothers.

Their second son was Hereward, whose history this tale sets forth; their
third and youngest, a boy whose name is unknown.

They had, probably, another daughter beside; married, it may be, to some
son of Leofric's stanch friend old Siward Biorn, the Viking Earl of
Northumberland, and conqueror of Macbeth; and the mother, may be, of the
two young Siwards, the "white" and the "red," who figure in chronicle and
legend as the nephews of Hereward. But this pedigree is little more than a
conjecture.

Be these things as they may, Godiva was the greatest lady in England, save
two: Edith, Harold's sister, the nominal wife of Edward the Confessor; and
Githa, or Gyda, as her own Danes called her, Harold's mother, niece of
Canute the Great. Great was Godiva; and might have been proud enough, had
she been inclined to that pleasant sin. And even then (for there is a
skeleton, they say, in every house) she carried that about her which might
well keep her humble; namely, shame at the misconduct of Hereward, her
son.

Her favorite residence, among the many manors and "villas," or farms which
Leofric possessed, was neither the stately hall at Loughton by
Bridgenorth, nor the statelier castle of Warwick, but the house of Bourne
in South Lincolnshire, between the great woods of the Bruneswald and the
great level of the fens. It may have been her own paternal dowry, and have
come down to her in right of her Danish ancestors, and that great and
"magnificent" Jarl Oslac, from whom she derived her all-but-royal blood.
This is certain, that Leofric, her husband, went in East Anglia by the
name of Leofric, Lord of Bourne; that, as Domesday Book testifies, his son
Alfgar, and his grandson Morcar, held large lands there and thereabout.
Alfgar's name, indeed, still lives in the village of Algar-Kirk; and Lady
Godiva, and Algar after her, enriched with great gifts Crowland, the
island sanctuary, and Peterborough, where Brand, either her brother or
Leofric's, was a monk, and in due time an abbot.

The house of Bourne, as far as it can be reconstructed by imagination, was
altogether unlike one of the tall and gloomy Norman castles which twenty
years later reared their evil donjons over England. It was much more like
a house in a Chinese painting; an irregular group of low buildings, almost
all of one story, stone below and timber above, with high-peaked
roofs,--at least in the more Danish country,--affording a separate room,
or rather house, for each different need of the family. Such a one may be
seen in the illuminations of the century. In the centre of the building is
the hall, with door or doors opening out into the court; and sitting
thereat, at the top of a flight of steps, the lord and lady, dealing
clothes to the naked and bread to the hungry. On one side of the hall is a
chapel; by it a large room or "bower" for the ladies; behind the hall a
round tower, seemingly the strong place of the whole house; on the other
side a kitchen; and stuck on to bower, kitchen, and every other principal
building, lean-to after lean-to, the uses of which it is impossible now to
discover. The house had grown with the wants of the family,--as many good
old English houses have done to this day. Round it would be scattered
barns and stables, in which grooms and herdsmen slept side by side with
their own horses and cattle; and outside all, the "yard," "garth," or
garden-fence, high earth-bank with palisades on top, which formed a strong
defence in time of war. Such was most probably the "villa," "ton," or
"town" of Earl Leofric, the Lord of Bourne, the favorite residence of
Godiva,--once most beautiful, and still most holy, according to the
holiness of those old times.

Now on a day--about the year 1054--while Earl Siward was helping to bring
Birnam wood to Dunsinane, to avenge his murdered brother-in-law, Lady
Godiva sat, not at her hall door, dealing food and clothing to her
thirteen poor folk, but in her bower, with her youngest son, a two-years'
boy, at her knee. She was listening with a face of shame and horror to the
complaint of Herluin, Steward of Peterborough, who had fallen in that
afternoon with Hereward and his crew of "housecarles."

To keep a following of stout housecarles, or men-at-arms, was the pride as
well as the duty of an Anglo-Danish Lord, as it was, till lately, of a
Scoto-Danish Highland Laird. And Hereward, in imitation of his father and
his elder brother, must needs have his following from the time he was but
fifteen years old. All the unruly youths of the neighborhood, sons of free
"holders," who owed some sort of military service to Earl Leofric; Geri,
his cousin; Winter, whom he called his brother-in-arms; the Wulfrics, the
Wulfards, the Azers, and many another wild blade, had banded themselves
round a young nobleman more unruly than themselves. Their names were
already a terror to all decent folk, at wakes and fairs, alehouses and
village sports. They atoned, be it remembered, for their early sins by
making those names in after years a terror to the invaders of their native
land: but as yet their prowess was limited to drunken brawls and
faction-fights; to upsetting old women at their work, levying blackmail
from quiet chapmen on the high road, or bringing back in triumph, sword in
hand and club on shoulder, their leader Hereward from some duel which his
insolence had provoked.

But this time, if the story of the sub-prior was to be believed, Hereward
and his housecarles had taken an ugly stride forward toward the pit. They
had met him riding along, intent upon his psalter, in a lonely path of the
Bruneswald,--"Whereon your son, most gracious lady, bade me stand, saying
that his men were thirsty and he had no money to buy ale withal, and none
so likely to help him thereto as a fat priest,--for so he scandalously
termed me, who, as your ladyship knows, am leaner than the minster
bell-ropes, with fasting Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year,
beside the vigils of the saints, and the former and latter Lents.

"But when he saw who I was, as if inspired by a malignant spirit, he
shouted out my name, and bade his companions throw me to the ground."

"Throw you to the ground?" shuddered the Lady Godiva.

"In much mire, madam. After which he took my palfrey, saying that heaven's
gate was too lowly for men on horseback to get in thereat; and then my
marten's fur gloves and cape which your gracious self bestowed on me,
alleging that the rules of my order allowed only one garment, and no furs
save catskins and such like. And lastly--I tremble while I relate,
thinking not of the loss of my poor money, but the loss of an immortal
soul--took from me a purse with sixteen silver pennies, which I had
collected from our tenants for the use of the monastery, and said,
blasphemously, that I and mine had swindled your ladyship, and therefore
him, your son, out of many a fair manor ere now; and it was but fair that
he should tithe the rents thereof, as he should never get the lands out of
our claws again; with more of the like, which I blush to repeat,--and so
left me to trudge hither in the mire."

"Wretched boy!" said the Lady Godiva, and hid her face in her hands; "and
more wretched I, to have brought such a son into the world!"

The monk had hardly finished his doleful story, when there was a pattering
of heavy feet, a noise of men shouting and laughing outside, and a voice,
above all, calling for the monk by name, which made that good man crouch
behind the curtain of Lady Godiva's bed. The next moment the door of the
bower was thrown violently open, and in walked, or rather reeled, a noble
lad eighteen years old. His face was of extraordinary beauty, save that
the lower jaw was too long and heavy, and that his eyes wore a strange and
almost sinister expression, from the fact that the one of them was gray
and the other blue. He was short, but of immense breadth of chest and
strength of limb; while his delicate hands and feet and long locks of
golden hair marked him of most noble, and even, as he really was, of
ancient royal race. He was dressed in a gaudy costume, resembling on the
whole that of a Highland chieftain. His knees, wrists, and throat were
tattoed in bright blue patterns; and he carried sword and dagger, a gold
ring round his neck, and gold rings on his wrists. He was a lad to have
gladdened the eyes of any mother: but there was no gladness in the Lady
Godiva's eyes as she received him; nor had there been for many a year. She
looked on him with sternness,--with all but horror; and he, his face
flushed with wine, which he had tossed off as he passed through the hall
to steady his nerves for the coming storm, looked at her with smiling
defiance, the result of long estrangement between mother and son.

"Well, my lady," said he, ere she could speak, "I heard that this good
fellow was here, and came home as fast as I could, to see that he told you
as few lies as possible."

"He has told me," said she, "that you have robbed the Church of God."

"Robbed him, it may be, an old hoody crow, against whom I have a grudge of
ten years' standing."

"Wretched, wretched boy! What wickedness next? Know you not, that he who
robs the Church robs God himself?"

"And he who harms God's people," put in the monk from behind the chair,
"harms his Maker."

"His Maker?" said the lad, with concentrated bitterness. "It would be a
gay world, if the Maker thereof were in any way like unto you, who call
yourselves his people. Do you remember who told them to set the peat-stack
on fire under me ten years ago? Ah, ha, Sir Monk, you forget that I have
been behind the screen,--that I have been a monk myself, or should have
been one, if my pious lady mother here had had her will of me, as she may
if she likes of that doll there at her knee. Do you forget why I left
Peterborough Abbey, when Winter and I turned all your priest's books
upside down in the choir, and they would have flogged us,--me, the Earl's
son,--me, the Viking's son,--me, the champion, as I will be yet, and make
all lands ring with the fame of my deeds, as they rung with the fame of my
forefathers, before they became the slaves of monks; and how when Winter
and I got hold of the kitchen spits, and up to the top of the peat-stack,
and held you all at bay there, a whole abbeyful of cowards there, against
two seven years' children? It was you bade set the peat-stack alight under
us, and so bring us down; and would have done it, too, had it not been for
my Uncle Brand, the only man that I care for in this wide world. Do you
think I have not owed you a grudge ever since that day, monk? And do you
think I will not pay it? Do you think I would not have burned Peterborough
minster over your head before now, had it not been for Uncle Brand's sake?
See that I do not do it yet. See that when there is another Prior in
Borough you do not find Hereward the Berserker smoking you out some dark
night, as he would smoke a wasps' nest. And I will, by--"

"Hereward, Hereward!" cried his mother, "godless, god-forgotten boy, what
words are these? Silence, before you burden your soul with an oath which
the devils in hell will accept, and force you to keep!" and she sprung up,
and, seizing his arm, laid her hand upon his mouth.

Hereward looked at her majestic face, once lovely, now careworn, and
trembled for a moment. Had there been any tenderness in it, his history
might have been a very different one; but alas! there was none. Not that
she was in herself untender; but that her great piety (call it not
superstition, for it was then the only form known or possible to pure and
devout souls) was so outraged by this, or even by the slightest insult to
that clergy whose willing slave she had become, that the only method of
reclaiming the sinner had been long forgotten, in genuine horror at his
sin. "Is it not enough," she went on, sternly, "that you should have
become the bully and the ruffian of all the fens?--that Hereward the
leaper, Hereward the wrestler, Hereward the thrower of the hammer--sports,
after all, only fit for the sons of slaves--should be also Hereward the
drunkard, Hereward the common fighter, Hereward the breaker of houses,
Hereward the leader of mobs of boon companions which bring back to us, in
shame and sorrow, the days when our heathen forefathers ravaged this land
with fire and sword? Is it not enough for me that my son should be a
common stabber--?"

"Whoever called me stabber to you, lies. If I have killed men, or had them
killed, I have done it in fair fight."

But she went on unheeding,--"Is it not enough, that, after having
squandered on your fellows all the money that you could wring from my
bounty, or win at your brutal sports, you should have robbed your own
father, collected his rents behind his back, taken money and goods from
his tenants by threats and blows; but that, after outraging them, you must
add to all this a worse sin likewise,--outraging God, and driving me--me
who have borne with you, me who have concealed all for your sake--to tell
your father that of which the very telling will turn my hair to gray?"

"So you will tell my father?" said Hereward, coolly.

"And if I should not, this monk himself is bound to do so, or his
superior, your Uncle Brand."

"My Uncle Brand will not, and your monk dare not."

"Then I must. I have loved you long and well; but there is one thing which
I must love better than you: and that is, my conscience and my Maker."

"Those are two things, my lady mother, and not one; so you had better not
confound them. As for the latter, do you not think that He who made the
world is well able to defend his own property,--if the lands and houses
and cattle and money which these men wheedle and threaten and forge out of
you and my father are really His property, and not merely their plunder?
As for your conscience, my lady mother, really you have done so many good
deeds in your life, that it might be beneficial to you to do a bad one
once in a way, so as to keep your soul in a wholesome state of humility."

The monk groaned aloud. Lady Godiva groaned; but it was inwardly. There
was silence for a moment. Both were abashed by the lad's utter
shamelessness.

"And you will tell my father?" said he again. "He is at the old
miracle-worker's court at Westminster. He will tell the miracle-worker,
and I shall be outlawed."

"And if you be, wretched boy, whom have you to blame but yourself? Can you
expect that the king, sainted even as he is before his death, dare pass
over such an atrocity towards Holy Church?"

"Blame? I shall blame no one. Pass over? I hope he will not pass over it,
I only want an excuse like that for turning kempery-man--knight-errant, as
those Norman puppies call it,--like Regnar Lodbrog, or Frithiof, or Harold
Hardraade; and try what man can do for himself in the world with nothing
to help him in heaven and earth, with neither saint nor angel, friend or
counsellor, to see to him, save his wits and his good sword. So send off
the messenger, good mother mine: and I will promise you I will not have
him ham-strung on the way, as some of my housecarles would do for me if I
but held up my hand; and let the miracle-monger fill up the measure of his
folly, by making an enemy of one more bold fellow in the world."

And he swaggered out of the room.

And when he was gone, the Lady Godiva bowed her head into her lap and wept
long and bitterly. Neither her maidens nor the priest dare speak to her
for nigh an hour; but at the end of that time she lifted up her head, and
settled her face again, till it was like that of a marble saint over a
minster door; and called for ink and paper, and wrote her letter; and then
asked for a trusty messenger who should carry it up to Westminster.

"None so swift or sure," said the house steward, "as Martin Lightfoot."

Lady Godiva shook her head. "I mistrust that man," she said. "He is too
fond of my poor--of the Lord Hereward."

"He is a strange one, my lady, and no one knows whence he came, and, I
sometimes fancy, whither he may go either; but ever since my lord
threatened to hang him for talking with my young master, he has never
spoken to him, nor scarcely, indeed, to living soul. And one thing there
is makes him or any man sure, as long as he is well paid; and that is,
that he cares for nothing in heaven or earth save himself and what he can
get."

So Martin Lightfoot was sent for. He came in straight into the lady's
bedchamber, after the simple fashion of those days. He was a tall, lean,
bony man, as was to be expected from his nickname, with a long hooked
nose, a scanty brown beard, and a high conical head. His only garment was
a shabby gray woollen tunic, which served him both as coat and kilt, and
laced brogues of untanned hide. He might have been any age from twenty to
forty; but his face was disfigured with deep scars and long exposure to
the weather. He dropped on one knee, holding his greasy cap in his hand,
and looked, not at his lady's face, but at her feet, with a stupid and
frightened expression. She knew very little of him, save that her husband
had picked him up upon the road as a wanderer some five years since; and
that he had been employed as a doer of odd jobs and runner of messages,
and that was supposed, from his taciturnity and strangeness, to have
something uncanny about him.

"Martin," said the lady, "they tell me that you are a silent and a prudent
man."

"That am I.
'Tongue speaketh bane,
Though she herself hath nane.'"

"I shall try you: do you know your way to London?"

"Yes."

"To your lord's lodgings in Westminster?"

"Yes."

"How long shall you be going there with this letter?"

"A day and a half."

"When shall you be back hither?"

"On the fourth day."

"And you will go to my lord and deliver this letter safely?"

"Yes, your Majesty."

"Why do you call me Majesty? The King is Majesty."

"You are my Queen."

"What do you mean, man?"

"You can hang me."

"I hang thee, poor soul! Who did I ever hang, or hurt for a moment, if I
could help it?"

"But the Earl may."

"He will neither hang nor hurt thee if thou wilt take this letter safely,
and bring me back the answer safely."

"They will kill me."

"Who?"

"They," said Martin, pointing to the bower maidens,--young ladies of good
family who stood round, chosen for their good looks, after the fashion of
those times, to attend on great ladies. There was a cry of angry and
contemptuous denial, not unmixed with something like laughter, which
showed that Martin had but spoken the truth. Hereward, in spite of all his
sins, was the darling of his mother's bower; and there was not one of the
damsels but would have done anything short of murder to have prevented
Martin carrying the letter.

"Silence, man!" said Lady Godiva, so sternly that Martin saw that he had
gone too far. "How know'st such as thou what is in this letter?"

"Those others will know," said Martin, sullenly, without answering the
last question.

"Who?"

"His housecarles outside there."

"He has promised that they shall not touch thee. But how knowest thou what
is in this letter?"

"I will take it," said Martin: he held out his hand, took it and looked at
it, but upside down, and without any attempt to read it.

"His own mother," said he, after a while.

"What is that to thee?" said Lady Godiva, blushing and kindling.

"Nothing: I had no mother. But God has one!"

"What meanest thou, knave? Wilt thou take the letter or no?"

"I will take it." And he again looked at it without rising off his knee.
"His own father, too."

"What is that to thee, I say again?"

"Nothing: I have no father. But God's Son has one!"

"What wilt thou, thou strange man?" asked she, puzzled and
half-frightened; "and how camest thou to know what is in this letter?"

"Who does not know? A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. On the
fourth day from this I will be back."

And Martin rose, and putting the letter solemnly into the purse at his
girdle, shot out of the door with clenched teeth, as a man upon a fixed
purpose which it would lighten his heart to carry out. He ran rapidly
through the large outer hall, past the long oak table, at which Hereward
and his boon companions were drinking and roistering; and as he passed the
young lord he cast on him a look so full of meaning, that though Hereward
knew not what the meaning was, it startled him, and for a moment softened
him. Did this man who had sullenly avoided him for more than two years,
whom he had looked on as a clod or a post in the field beneath his notice,
since he could be of no use to him,--did this man still care for him?
Hereward had reason to know better than most that there was something
strange and uncanny about the man. Did he mean him well? Or had he some
grudge against him, which made him undertake this journey willingly and
out of spite?--possibly with the will to make bad worse. For an instant
Hereward's heart misgave him. He would stop the letter at all risks. "Hold
him!" he cried to his comrades.

But Martin turned to him, laid his finger on his lips, smiled kindly, and
saying "You promised!" caught up a loaf from the table, slipped from among
them like an eel, and darted out of the door, and out of the close. They
followed him to the great gate, and there stopped, some cursing, some
laughing. To give Martin Lightfoot a yard advantage was never to come up
with him again. Some called for bows to bring him down with a parting
shot. But Hereward forbade them; and stood leaning against the gate-post,
watching him trot on like a lean wolf over the lawn, till he was lost in
the great elm-woods which fringed the southern fen.

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