Book: Hereward, The Last of the English

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"That is St. Etheldreda shooting at us, eh? Then all I can say is, she is
a very bad marksman. And the French are in the island?"

"They are."

"Then forward, men, for one half-hour's pleasure; and then to die like
Englishmen."

"On?" cried Alwyn. "You cannot go on. The King is at Whichford at this
moment with all his army, half a mile off! Right across the road to Ely!"

Hereward grew Berserk. "On! men!" shouted he, "we shall kill a few
Frenchmen apiece before we die!"

"Hereward," cried Torfrida, "you shall not go on! If you go, I shall be
taken. And if I am taken, I shall be burned. And I cannot burn,--I cannot!
I shall go mad with terror before I come to the stake. I cannot go stript
to my smock before those Frenchmen. I cannot be roasted piecemeal!
Hereward, take me away! Take me away! or kill me, now and here!"

He paused. He had never seen Torfrida thus overcome.

"Let us flee! The stars are against us. God is against us! Let us
hide,--escape abroad: beg our bread, go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem
together,--for together it must be always: but take me away!"

"We will go back to the boats, men," said Hereward.

But they did not go. They stood there, irresolute, looking towards Ely.

The sky was pitchy dark. The minster roofs, lying northeast, were utterly
invisible against the blackness.

"We may at least save some who escape out," said Hereward. "March on
quickly to the left, under the hill to the plough-field."

They did so.

"Lie down, men. There are the French, close on our right. Down among the
bushes."

And they heard the heavy tramp of men within a quarter of a mile.

"Cover the mare's eyes, and hold her mouth, lest she neigh," said Winter.

Hereward and Torfrida lay side by side upon the heath. She was shivering
with cold and horror. He laid his cloak over her; put his arm round her.

"Your stars did not foretell you this, Torfrida." He spoke not bitterly,
but in utter sadness.

She burst into an agony of weeping.

"My stars at least foretold me nothing but woe, since first I saw your
face."

"Why did you marry me, then?" asked he, half angrily.

"Because I loved you. Because I love you still."

"Then you do not regret?"

"Never, never, never! I am quite happy,--quite happy. Why not?"

A low murmur from the men made them look up. They were near enough to the
town to hear,--only too much. They heard the tramp of men, shouts and
yells. Then the shrill cries of women. All dull and muffled the sounds
came to them through the still night; and they lay there spell-bound, as
in a nightmare, as men assisting at some horrible tragedy, which they had
no power to prevent. Then there was a glare, and a wisp of smoke against
the black sky, and then a house began burning brightly, and then another.

"This is the Frenchman's faith!"

And all the while, as the sack raged in the town below, the minster stood
above, dark, silent, and safe. The church had provided for herself, by
sacrificing the children beneath her fostering shadow.

They waited nearly an hour: but no fugitives came out.

"Come, men," said Hereward, wearily, "we may as well to the boats."

And so they went, walking on like men in a dream, as yet too stunned to
realize to themselves the hopeless horror of their situation. Only
Hereward and Torfrida saw it all, looking back on the splendid past,--the
splendid hopes for the future: glory, honor, an earldom, a free Danish
England,--and this was all that was left!

"No it is not!" cried Torfrida suddenly, as if answering her own unspoken
thoughts, and his. "Love is still left. The gallows and the stake cannot
take that away." And she clung closer to her husband's side, and he again
to hers.

They reached the shore, and told their tale to their comrades. Whither
now?

"To Well. To the wide mere," said Hereward.

"But their ships will hunt us out there."

"We shall need no hunting. We must pick up the men at Cissham. You would
not leave them to be murdered, too, as we have left the Ely men?"

No. They would go to Well. And then?

"The Bruneswald, and the merry greenwood," said Hereward.

"Hey for the merry greenwood!" shouted Leofric the Deacon. And the men, in
the sudden delight of finding any place, any purpose, answered with a
lusty cheer.

"Brave hearts," said Hereward. "We will live and die together like
Englishmen."

"We will, we will, Viking."

"Where shall we stow the mare?" asked Geri, "the boats are full already."

"Leave her to me. On board, Torfrida."

He got on board last, leading the mare by the bridle.

"Swim, good lass!" said he, as they pushed off; and the good lass, who had
done it many a time before, waded in, and was soon swimming behind.
Hereward turned, and bent over the side in the darkness. There was a
strange gurgle, a splash, and a swirl. He turned round, and sat upright
again. They rowed on.

"That mare will never swim all the way to Well," said one.

"She will not need it," said Hereward.

"Why," cried Torfrida, feeling in the darkness, "she is loose. What is
this in your hand? Your dagger! And wet!"

"Mare Swallow is at the bottom of the reach. We could never have got her
to Well."

"And you have--" cried a dozen voices.

"Do you think that I would let a cursed Frenchman--ay, even William's
self--say that he had bestridden Hereward's mare?"

None answered: but Torfrida, as she laid her head upon her husband's
bosom, felt the great tears running down from his cheek on to her own.

None spoke a word. The men were awe-stricken. There was something
despairing and ill-omened in the deed. And yet there was a savage grandeur
in it, which bound their savage hearts still closer to their chief.

And so mare Swallow's bones lie somewhere in the peat unto this day.

They got to Well; they sent out spies to find the men who had been
"wasting Cissham with fire and sword"; and at last brought them in. Ill
news, as usual, had travelled fast. They had heard of the fall of Ely, and
hidden themselves "in a certain very small island which is called
Stimtench," where, thinking that the friends in search of them were
Frenchmen in pursuit, they hid themselves among the high reeds. There two
of them--one Starkwolf by name, the other Broher--hiding near each other,
"thought that, as they were monks, it might conduce to their safety if
they had shaven crowns; and set to work with their swords to shave each
other's heads as well as they could. But at last, by their war-cries and
their speech, recognizing each other, they left off fighting," and went
after Hereward.

So jokes, grimly enough, Leofric the Deacon, who must have seen them come
in the next morning, with bleeding coxcombs, and could laugh over the
thing in after years. But he was in no humor for jesting in the days in
which they lay at Well. Nor was he in jesting humor when, a week
afterwards, hunted by the Normans from Well, and forced too take to meres
and waterways known only to them, and too shallow and narrow for the
Norman ships, they found their way across into the old Nene, and so by
Thorney on toward Crowland, leaving Peterborough far on the left. For as
they neared Crowland, they saw before them, rowing slowly, a barge full of
men. And as they neared that barge, behold, ail they who rowed were blind
of both their eyes; and all they who sat and guided them were maimed of
both their hands. And as they came alongside, there was not a man in all
that ghastly crew but was an ancient friend, by whose side they had fought
full many a day, and with whom they had drunk deep full many a night. They
were the first-fruits of William's vengeance; thrust into that boat, to
tell the rest of the fen-men what those had to expect who dared oppose the
Norman. And they were going, by some by-stream, to Crowland, to the
sanctuary of the Danish fen-men, that they might cast themselves down
before St. Guthlac, and ask of him that mercy for their souls which the
conqueror had denied to their bodies. Alas for them! they were but a
handful among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mutilated cripples, who
swarmed all over England, and especially in the north and east, throughout
the reign of the Norman conquerors. They told their comrades' fate,
slaughtered in the first attack, or hanged afterwards as rebels and
traitors to a foreigner whom they had never seen, and to whom they owed no
fealty by law of God or man.

"And Ranald Sigtrygsson?"

None knew aught of him. He never got home again to his Irish princess.

"And the poor women?" asked Torfrida.

But she received no answer.

And the men swore a great oath, and kept it, never to give quarter to a
Norman, as long as there was one left on English ground.

Neither were the monks of Ely in jesting humor, when they came to count up
the price of their own baseness. They had (as was in that day the cant of
all cowardly English churchmen, as well as of the more crafty Normans)
"obeyed the apostolic injunction, to submit to the powers that be, because
they are ordained," &c. But they found the hand of the powers that be a
very heavy one. Forty knights were billeted on them at free quarters with
all their men. Every morning the butler had to distribute to them food and
pay in the great hall; and in vain were their complaints of bad faith.
William meanwhile, who loved money as well as he "loved the tall deer,"
had had 1,000 (another says 700) marks of them as the price of their
church's safety, for the payment whereof, if one authority is to be
trusted, they sold "all the furniture of gold and silver, crosses, altars,
coffers, covers, chalices, platters, ewers, urnets, basons, cups, and
saucers." Nay, the idols themselves were not spared, "for," beside that,
"they sold a goodly image of our Lady with her little Son, in a throne
wrought with marvellous workmanship, which Elsegus the abbot had made.
Likewise, they stripped many images of holy virgins of much furniture of
gold and silver." [Footnote: These details are from a story found in the
Isle of Ely, published by Dr. Giles. It seems a late composition,--
probably of the sixteenth century,--and has manifest errors of fact; but
_valeat quantum_.] So that poor St. Etheldreda had no finery in which to
appear on festivals, and went in russet for many years after. The which
money (according to another [Footnote: Stow's "Annals."]) they took, as
they had promised, to Picot the Viscount at Cambridge. He weighed the
money; and finding it an ounce short, accused them of cheating the King,
and sentenced them to pay 300 marks more. After which the royal
commissioners came, plundered the abbey of all that was left, and took
away likewise "a great mass of gold and silver found in Wentworth,
wherewith the brethren meant to repair the altar vessels"; and also a
"notable cope which Archbishop Stigand gave, which the church hath wanted
to this day."

Thurstan, the traitor Abbot, died in a few months. Egelwin, the Bishop of
Durham, was taken in the abbey. He was a bishop, and they dared not kill
him. But he was a patriot, and must have no mercy. They accused him of
stealing the treasures of Durham, which he had brought to Ely for the
service of his country; and shut him up in Abingdon. A few months after,
the brave man was found starved and dead, "whether of his own will or
enforced"; and so ended another patriot prelate. But we do not read that
the Normans gave back the treasure to Durham. And so, yielding an immense
mass of booty, and many a fair woman, as the Norman's prey, ended the Camp
of Refuge, and the glory of the Isle of Ely.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

HOW HEREWARD WENT TO THE GREENWOOD.


And now is Hereward to the greenwood gone, to be a bold outlaw; and not
only an outlaw himself, but the father of all outlaws, who held those
forests for two hundred years, from the fens to the Scottish border.
Utlages, forestiers, latrunculi (robberlets), sicarii, cutthroats,
sauvages, who prided themselves upon sleeping on the bare ground; they
were accursed by the conquerors, and beloved by the conquered. The Norman
viscount or sheriff commanded to hunt them from hundred to hundred, with
hue and cry, horse and bloodhound. The English yeoman left for them a keg
of ale, or a basket of loaves, beneath the hollins green, as sauce for
their meal of "nombles of the dere."

"For hart and hind, and doe and roe,
Were in that forest great plentie,"

and

"Swannes and fesauntes they had full good
And foules of the rivere.
There fayled never so lytell a byrde,
That ever was bred on brere."

With the same friendly yeoman "that was a good felawe," they would lodge
by twos and threes during the sharp frosts of midwinter, in the lonely
farm-house which stood in the "field" or forest-clearing; but for the
greater part of the year their "lodging was on the cold ground" in the
holly thickets, or under the hanging rock, or in a lodge of boughs.

And then, after a while, the life which began in terror, and despair, and
poverty, and loss of land and kin, became not only tolerable, but
pleasant. Bold men and hardy, they cared less and less for

"The thornie wayes, the deep valleys,
The snowe, the frost, the rayne,
The colde, the hete; for dry or wete
We must lodge on the plaine,
And us above, none other roofe,
But a brake bushe, or twayne."

And they found fair lasses, too, in time, who, like Torfrida and Maid
Marian, would answer to their warnings against the outlaw life, with the
nut-browne maid, that--

"Amonge the wylde dere, such an archere
As men say that ye be,
He may not fayle of good vitayle
Where is so great plente:
And water clere of the rivere,
Shall be full swete to me,
With which in hele, I shall right wele,
Endure, as ye may see."

Then called they themselves "merry men," and the forest the "merry
greenwood"; and sang, with Robin Hood,--

"A merrier man than I, belyye
There lives not in Christentie."

They were coaxed back, at times, to civilized life; they got their grace
of the king, and entered the king's service; but the craving after the
greenwood was upon them. They dreaded and hated the four stone walls of a
Norman castle, and, like Robin Hood, slipt back to the forest and the
deer.

Gradually, too, law and order rose among them, lawless as they were; the
instinct of discipline and self-government, side by side with that of
personal independence, which is the peculiar mark and peculiar strength of
the English character. Who knows not how, in the "Lytell Geste of Robin
Hood," they shot at "pluck-buffet," the king among them, disguised as an
abbot; and every man who missed the rose-garland, "his tackle he should
tyne";--

"And bere a buffet on his head,
Iwys ryght all bare,
And all that fell on Robyn's lote,
He smote them wonder sair.

"Till Robyn fayled of the garlonde,
Three fyngers and mair."

Then good Gilbert bids him in his turn

"'Stand forth and take his pay.'

"'If it be so,' sayd Robyn,
'That may no better be,
Syr Abbot, I delyver thee myn arrowe,
I pray thee, Syr, serve thou me.'

"'It falleth not for myne order,' saith the kynge,
'Robyn, by thy leve,
For to smyte no good yeman,
For doute I should hym greve.'

"'Smyte on boldly,' sayd Robyn,
'I give thee large leve.'
Anon our kynge, with that word,
He folde up his sleve.

"And such a buffet he gave Robyn,
To grounde he yode full nere.
'I make myn avowe,' sayd Robyn,
'Thou art a stalwarte frere.

"'There is pyth in thyn arme,' sayd Robyn,
'I trowe thou canst well shoote.'
Thus our kynge and Hobyn Hode
Together they are met."

Hard knocks in good humor, strict rules, fair play, and equal justice, for
high and low; this was the old outlaw spirit, which has descended to their
inlawed descendants; and makes, to this day, the life and marrow of an
English public school.

One fixed idea the outlaw had,--hatred of the invader. If "his herde were
the king's deer," "his treasure was the earl's purse"; and still oftener
the purse of the foreign churchman, Norman or Italian, who had expelled
the outlaw's English cousins from their convents; shamefully scourged and
cruelly imprisoned them, as the blessed Archbishop Lanfranc did at
Canterbury, because they would not own allegiance to a French abbot; or
murdered them at the high altar, as did the new abbot of Glastonbury,
because they would not change their old Gregorian chant for that of
William of Fecamp. [Footnote: See the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle".]

On these mitred tyrants the outlaw had no mercy, as far as their purses
were concerned. Their persons, as consecrated, were even to him sacred and
inviolable,--at least, from wounds and death; and one may suppose Hereward
himself to have been the first author of the laws afterward attributed to
Robin Hood. As for "robbing and reving, beting and bynding," free warren
was allowed against the Norman.

"'Thereof no fors,' said Robyn,
'We shall do well enow.
But look ye do no housbonde harme,
That tilleth wyth his plough.

"'No more ye shall no good yeman,
That walketh by grene wood shawe;
Ne no knyght, ne no squyer,
That will be good felawe.

"'These bysshoppes, and these archbysshoppes,
Ye shall them bete and binde;
The hye sheryff of Nottingham,
Hym holde in your mynde.'

"Robyn loved our dere Ladye,
For doubt of dedely synne,
Wolde he never do company harme
That any woman was ynne."

And even so it was with Hereward in the Bruneswald, if the old
chroniclers, Leofric especially, are to be believed.

And now Torfrida was astonished. She had given way utterly at Ely, from
woman's fear, and woman's disappointment. All was over. All was lost. What
was left, save to die?

But--and it was a new and unexpected fact to one of her excitable Southern
blood, easily raised, and easily depressed--she discovered that neither
her husband, nor Winter, nor Geri, nor Wenoch, nor Ranald of Ramsey, nor
even the romancing harping Leofric, thought that all was lost. She argued
it with them, not to persuade them into base submission, but to satisfy
her own surprise.

"But what will you do?"

"Live in the greenwood."

"And what then?"

"Burn every town which a Frenchman holds, and kill every Frenchman we
meet."

"But what plan have you?"

"Who wants a plan, as you call it, while he has the green hollies
overhead, the dun deer on the lawn, bow in his hand, and sword by his
side?"

"But what will be the end of it all?"

"We shall live till we die."

"But William is master of all England."

"What is that to us? He is not our master."

"But he must be some day. You will grow fewer and fewer. His government
will grow stronger and stronger."

"What is that to us? When we are dead, there will be brave yeomen in
plenty to take our place. You would not turn traitor?"

"I? Never! never! I will live and die with you in your greenwood, as you
call it. Only--I did not understand you English."

Torfrida did not. She was discovering the fact, which her nation have more
than once discovered since, that the stupid valor of the Englishman never
knows when it is beaten; and sometimes, by that self-satisfied ignorance,
succeeds in not being beaten after all.

So Hereward--if the chronicles speak truth--assembled a formidable force,
well-nigh, at last, four hundred men. Winter, Geri, Wenoch, Grogan, one of
the Azers of Lincoln, were still with him. Ranald the butler still carried
his standard. Of Duti and Outi, the famous brothers, no more is heard. A
valiant Matelgar takes their place; Alfric and Sexwold and many another
gallant fugitive cast up, like scattered hounds, at the sound of "The
Wake's" war-horn. There were those among them (says Gaimar) who scorned to
fight single-handed less than three Normans. As for Hereward, he would
fight seven.

"Les quatre oscist, les treis fuirent;
Naffrez, sanglant, cil s'en partirent
En plusurs lius issi avint,
K'encontre seit tres bien se tuit
De seit hommes avait vertu,
Un plus hardi ne fu veu."

They ranged up the Bruneswald, dashing out to the war-cry of "A Wake! a
Wake!" laying all waste with fire and sword, that is, such towns as were
in the hands of Normans. And a noble range they must have had for gallant
sportsmen. Away south, between the Nene and Welland, stretched from
Stamford and Peterborough the still vast forests of Rockingham, nigh
twenty miles in length as the crow flies, down beyond Rockingham town, and
Geddington Chase. To the west, they had the range of the "hunting
counties," dotted still, in the more eastern part, with innumerable copses
and shaughs, the remnants of the great forest, out of which, as out of
Rockinghamshire, have been cut those fair parks and

"Handsome houses,
Where the wealthy nobles dwell";

past which the Lord of Burleigh led his Welsh bride to that Burghley House
by Stamford town, well-nigh the noblest of them all, which was, in
Hereward's time, deep wood, and freestone down. Round Exton, and
Normanton, and that other Burley on the Hill; on through those Morkery
woods, which still retain the name of Hereward's ill-fated nephew; north
by Irnham and Corby; on to Belton and Syston (_par nobile_), and
southwest again to those still wooded heights, whence all-but-royal
Belvoir looks out over the rich green vale below, did Hereward and his men
range far and wide, harrying the Frenchman, and hunting the dun deer.
Stags there were in plenty. There remain to this day, in Grimsthorpe Park
by Bourne, the descendants of the very deer which Earl Leofric and Earl
Algar, and after them Hereward the outlaw, hunted in the Bruneswald.

Deep-tangled forest filled the lower claylands, swarming with pheasant,
roe, badger, and more wolves than were needed. Broken, park-like glades
covered the upper freestones, where the red deer came out from harbor for
their evening graze, and the partridges and plovers whirred up, and the
hares and rabbits loped away, innumerable; and where hollies and ferns
always gave dry lying for the night. What did men need more, whose bodies
were as stout as their hearts?

They were poachers and robbers; and why not? The deer had once been
theirs, the game, the land, the serfs; and if Godric of Corby slew the
Irnham deer, burned Irnham Hall over the head of the new Norman lord, and
thought no harm, he did but what he would with that which had been once
his own.

Easy it was to dash out by night and make a raid; to harry the places
which they once had owned themselves, in the vale of Belvoir to the west,
or to the east in the strip of fertile land which sloped down into the
fen, and levy black-mail in Rippinghale, or Folkingham, or Aslackby, or
Sleaford, or any other of the "Vills" (now thriving villages) which still
remain in Domesday-book, and written against them the ugly and
significant,--

"In Tatenai habuerunt Turgisle et Suen IIII. Carrucas terae," &c. "Hoc Ivo
Taillebosc ibi habet in dominio,"--all, that is, that the wars had left of
them.

The said Turgisle (Torkill or Turketil misspelt by Frenchmen) and Sweyn,
and many a good man more,--for Ivo's possessions were enormous,--were
thorns in the sides of Ivo and his men which must be extracted, and the
Bruneswald a nest of hornets, which must be smoked out at any cost.

Wherefore it befell, that once upon a day there came riding to Hereward in
the Bruneswald a horseman all alone.

And meeting with Hereward and his men he made signs of amity, and bowed
himself low, and pulled out of his purse a letter, protesting that he was
an Englishman and a "good felawe," and that, though he came from Lincoln
town, a friend to the English had sent him.

That was believable enough, for Hereward had his friends and his spies far
and wide.

And when he opened the letter, and looked first, like a wary man, at the
signature, a sudden thrill went through him.

It was Alftruda's.

If he was interested in her, considering what had passed between them from
her childhood, it was nothing to be ashamed of. And yet somehow he felt
ashamed of that same sudden thrill.

And Hereward had reason to be ashamed. He had been faithful to
Torfrida,--a virtue most rare in those days. Few were faithful then, save,
it may be, Baldwin of Mons to his tyrant and idol, the sorceress Richilda;
and William of Normandy,--whatever were his other sins,--to his wise and
sweet and beautiful Matilda. The stories of his coldness and cruelty to
her seem to rest on no foundation. One need believe them as little as one
does the myth of one chronicler, that when she tried to stop him from some
expedition, and clung to him as he sat upon his horse, he smote his spur
so deep into her breast that she fell dead. The man had self-control, and
feared God in his own wild way,--therefore it was, perhaps, that he
conquered.

And Hereward had been faithful likewise to Torfrida, and loved her with an
overwhelming adoration, as all true men love. And for that very reason he
was the more aware that his feeling for Alftruda was strangely like his
feeling for Torfrida, and yet strangely different.

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