Book: Hereward, The Last of the English

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"By the hammer of Thor," cried the old master, "and thou wouldst make a
bonny one, my lad."

Hereward hesitated, delighted with the boy, but by no means sure of his
power to protect them.

But the boy rode back to his companions, who had by this time ridden
cautiously down to the sea, and talked and gesticulated eagerly.

Then the clerk rode down and talked with Hereward.

"Are you Christians?" shouted he, before he would adventure himself near
the ship.

"Christians we are, Sir Clerk, and dare do no harm to a man of God."

The Clerk rode nearer; his handsome palfrey, furred cloak, rich gloves and
boots, moreover his air of command, showed that he was no common man.

"I," said he, "am the Abbot of St. Bertin of Sithiu, and tutor of yonder
prince. I can bring down, at a word, against you, the Chatelain of St.
Omer, with all his knights, besides knights and men-at-arms of my own. But
I am a man of peace, and not of war, and would have no blood shed if I can
help it."

"Then make peace," said Hereward. "Your lord may kill us if he will, or
have us for his guests if he will. If he does the first, we shall kill,
each of us, a few of his men before we die; if the latter, we shall kill a
few of his foes. If you be a man of God, you will counsel him
accordingly."

"Alas! alas!" said the Abbot, with a shudder, "that, ever since Adam's
fall, sinful man should talk of nothing but slaying and being slain; not
knowing that his soul is slain already by sin, and that a worse death
awaits him hereafter than that death of the body of which he makes so
light!"

"A very good sermon, my Lord Abbot, to listen to next Sunday morning: but
we are hungry and wet and desperate just now; and if you do not settle
this matter for us, our blood will be on your head,--and may be your own
likewise."

The Abbot rode out of the water faster than he had ridden in, and a fresh
consultation ensued, after which the boy, with a warning gesture to his
companions, turned and galloped away through the sand-hills.

"He is gone to his grandfather himself, I verily believe," quoth Hereward.

They waited for some two hours, unmolested; and, true to their policy of
seeming recklessness, shifted and dried themselves as well as they could,
ate what provisions were unspoilt by the salt water, and, broaching the
last barrel of ale, drank healths to each other and to the Flemings on
shore.

At last down rode, with the boy, a noble-looking man, and behind him more
knights and men-at-arms. He announced himself as Manasses, Chatelain of
St. Omer, and repeated the demand to surrender.

"There is no need for it," said Hereward. "We are already that young
prince's guests. He has said that we shall be his friends and brothers. He
has said that he will answer to his grandfather, the great Marquis, whom I
and mine shall be proud to serve. I claim the word of a descendant of
Charlemagne."

"And you shall have it!" cried the boy. "Chatelain! Abbot! these men are
mine. They shall come with me, and lodge in St. Bertin."

"Heaven forefend!" murmured the Abbot.

"They will be safe, at least, within your ramparts," whispered the
Chatelain.

"And they shall tell me about the sea. Have I not told you how I long for
Vikings; how I will have Vikings of my own, and sail the seas with them,
like my Uncle Robert, and go to Spain and fight the Moors, and to
Constantinople and marry the Kaiser's daughter? Come," he cried to
Hereward, "come on shore, and he that touches you or your ship, touches
me!"

"Sir Chatelain and my Lord Abbot," said Hereward, "you see that, Viking
though I be, I am no barbarous heathen, but a French-speaking gentleman,
like yourselves. It had been easy for me, had I not been a man of honor,
to have cast a rope, as my sailors would have had me do, over that young
boy's fair head, and haled him on board, to answer for my life with his
own. But I loved him, and trusted him, as I would an angel out of heaven;
and I trust him still. To him, and him only, will I yield myself, on
condition that I and my men shall keep all our arms and treasure, and
enter his service, to fight his foes, and his grandfather's, wheresoever
they will, by land or sea."

"Fair sir," said the Abbot, "pirate though you call yourself, you speak so
courtly and clerkly, that I, too, am inclined to trust you; and if my
young lord will have it so, into St. Bertin I will receive you, till our
lord, the Marquis, shall give orders about you and yours."

So promises were given all round; and Hereward explained the matter to the
men, without whose advice (for they were all as free as himself) he could
not act.

"Needs must," grunted they, as they packed up each his little valuables.

Then Hereward sheathed his sword, and leaping from the bow, came up to the
boy.

"Put your hands between his, fair sir," said the Chatelain.

"That is not the manner of Vikings."

And he took the boy's right hand, and grasped it in the plain English
fashion.

"There is the hand of an honest man. Come down, men, and take this young
lord's hand, and serve him in the wars as I will do."

One, by one the men came down; and each took Arnulf's hand, and shook it
till the lad's face grew red. But none of them bowed, or made obeisance.
They looked the boy full in the face, and as they stepped back, stared
round upon the ring of armed men with a smile and something of a swagger.

"These are they who bow to no man, and call no man master," whispered the
Abbot.

And so they were: and so are their descendants of Scotland and
Northumbria, unto this very day.

The boy sprang from his horse, and walked among them and round them in
delight. He admired and handled their long-handled double axes; their
short sea-bows of horn and deer-sinew; their red Danish jerkins; their
blue sea-cloaks, fastened on the shoulder with rich brooches; and the gold
and silver bracelets on their wrists. He wondered at their long shaggy
beards, and still more at the blue patterns with which the English among
them, Hereward especially, were tattooed on throat and arm and knee.

"Yes, you are Vikings,--just such as my Uncle Robert tells me of."

Hereward knew well the exploits of Robert le Frison in Spain and Greece.
"I trust that your noble uncle," he asked, "is well? He was one of us poor
sea-cocks, and sailed the swan's path gallantly, till he became a mighty
prince. Here is a man here who was with your noble uncle in Byzant."

And he thrust forward the old master.

The boy's delight knew no bounds. He should tell him all about that in St.
Bertin.

Then he rode back to the ship, and round and round her (for the tide by
that time had left her high and dry), and wondered at her long snake-like
lines, and carven stem and stern.

"Tell me about this ship. Let me go on board of her. I have never seen a
ship inland at Mons there; and even here there are only heavy ugly busses,
and little fishing-boats. No. You must be all hungry and tired. We will go
to St. Bertin at once, and you shall be feasted royally. Hearken,
villains!" shouted he to the peasants. "This ship belongs to the fair sir
here,--my guest and friend; and if any man dares to steal from her a stave
or a nail, I will have his thief's hand cut off."

"The ship, fair lord," said Hereward, "is yours, not mine. You should
build twenty more after her pattern, and man them with such lads as these,
and then go down to

'Miklagard and Spanialand,
That lie so far on the lee, O!'

as did your noble uncle before you."

And so they marched inland, after the boy had dismounted one of his men,
and put Hereward on the horse.

"You gentlemen of the sea can ride as well as sail," said the chatelain,
as he remarked with some surprise Hereward's perfect seat and hand.

"We should soon learn to fly likewise," laughed Hereward, "if there were
any booty to be picked up in the clouds there overhead"; and he rode on by
Arnulf's side, as the lad questioned him about the sea, and nothing else.

"Ah, my boy," said Hereward at last, "look there, and let those be Vikings
who must."

And he pointed to the rich pastures, broken by strips of corn-land and
snug farms, which stretched between the sea and the great forest of
Flanders.

"What do you mean?"

But Hereward was silent. It was so like his own native fens. For a moment
there came over him the longing for a home. To settle down in such a fair
fat land, and call good acres his own; and marry and beget stalwart sons,
to till the old estate when he could till no more. Might not that be a
better life--at least a happier one--than restless, homeless, aimless
adventure? And now, just as he had had a hope of peace,--a hope of seeing
his own land, his own folk, perhaps of making peace with his mother and
his king,--the very waves would not let him rest, but sped him forth, a
storm-tossed waif, to begin life anew, fighting he cared not whom or why,
in a strange land.

So he was silent and sad withal.

"What does he mean?" asked the boy of the Abbot.

"He seems a wise man: let him answer for himself."

The boy asked once more.

"Lad! lad!" said Hereward, waking as from a dream. "If you be heir to such
a fair land as that, thank God for it, and pray to Him that you may rule
it justly, and keep it in peace, as they say your grandfather and your
father do; and leave glory and fame and the Vikings' bloody trade to those
who have neither father nor mother, wife nor land, but live like the wolf
of the wood, from one meal to the next."

"I thank you for those words, Sir Harold," said the good Abbot, while the
boy went on abashed, and Hereward himself was startled at his own saying,
and rode silent till they crossed the drawbridge of St. Bertin, and
entered that ancient fortress, so strong that it was the hiding-place in
war time for all the treasures of the country, and so sacred withal that
no woman, dead or alive, was allowed to defile it by her presence; so that
the wife of Baldwin the Bold, ancestor of Arnulf, wishing to lie by her
husband, had to remove his corpse from St. Bertin to the Abbey of
Blandigni, where the Counts of Flanders lay in glory for many a
generation.

The pirates entered, not without gloomy distrust, the gates of that
consecrated fortress; while the monks in their turn were (and with some
reason) considerably frightened when they were asked to entertain as
guests forty Norse rovers. Loudly did the elder among them bewail (in
Latin, lest their guests should understand too much) the present weakness
of their monastery, where St. Bertin was left to defend himself and his
monks all alone against the wicked world outside. Far different had been
their case some hundred and seventy years before. Then St. Valeri and St.
Riquier of Ponthieu, transported thither from their own resting-places in
France for fear of the invading Northmen, had joined their suffrages and
merits to those of St. Bertin, with such success that the abbey had never
been defiled by the foot of the heathen. But, alas! the saints, that is
their bodies, after a while became homesick; and St. Valeri appearing in a
dream to Hugh Capet, bade him bring them back to France in spite of
Arnulf, Count of those parts, who wished much to retain so valuable an
addition to his household gods.

But in vain. Hugh Capet was a man who took few denials. With knights and
men-at-arms he came, and Count Arnulf had to send home the holy corpses
with all humility, and leave St. Bertin all alone.

Whereon St. Valeri appeared in a dream to Hugh Capet, and said unto him,
"Because thou hast zealously done what I commanded, thou and thy
successors shall reign in the kingdom of France to everlasting
generations." [Footnote: "Histoire des Comtes de Flandre," par E. le Glay.
E. gestis SS. Richarii et Walerici.]

However, there was no refusing the grandson and heir of Count Baldwin; and
the hearts of the monks were comforted by hearing that Hereward was a good
Christian, and that most of his crew had been at least baptized. The Abbot
therefore took courage, and admitted them into the hospice, with solemn
warnings as to the doom which they might expect if they took the value of
a horse-nail from the patrimony of the blessed saint. Was he less powerful
or less careful of his own honor than St. Lieven of Holthem, who, not more
than fifty years before, had struck stone-blind four soldiers of the
Emperor Henry's, who had dared, after warning, to plunder the altar?
[Footnote: Ibid.] Let them remember, too, the fate of their own
forefathers, the heathens of the North, and the check which, one hundred
and seventy years before, they had received under those very walls. They
had exterminated the people of Walcheren; they had taken prisoner Count
Regnier; they had burnt Ghent, Bruges, and St. Omer itself, close by;
they had left naught between the Scheldt and the Somme, save stark corpses
and blackened ruins. What could withstand them till they dared to lift
audacious hands against the heavenly lord who sleeps there in Sithiu? Then
they poured down in vain over the Heilig-Veld, innumerable as the locusts.
Poor monks, strong in the protection of the holy Bertin, sallied out and
smote them hip and thigh, singing their psalms the while. The ditches of
the fortress were filled with unbaptized corpses; the piles of vine-twigs
which they lighted to burn down the gates turned their flames into the
Norsemen's faces at the bidding of St. Bertin; and they fled from that
temporal fire to descend into that which is eternal, while the gates of
the pit were too narrow for the multitude of their miscreant souls.
[Footnote: This gallant feat was performed in the A. D. 891.]

So the Norsemen heard, and feared; and only cast longing eyes at the gold
and tapestries of the altars, when they went in to mass.

For the good Abbot, gaining courage still further, had pointed out to
Hereward and his men that it had been surely by the merits and suffrages
of the blessed St. Bertin that they had escaped a watery grave.

Hereward and his men, for their part, were not inclined to deny the
theory. That they had miraculously escaped, from the accident of the tide
being high, they knew full well; and that St. Bertin should have done them
the service was probable enough. He, of course, was lord and master in his
own country, and very probably a few miles out to sea likewise.

So Hereward assured the Abbot that he had no mind to eat St. Bertin's
bread, or accept his favors, without paying honestly for them; and after
mass he took from his shoulders a handsome silk cloak (the only one he
had), with a great Scotch Cairngorm brooch, and bade them buckle it on the
shoulders of the great image of St. Bertin.

At which St. Bertin was so pleased (being, like many saints, male and
female, somewhat proud after their death of the finery which they despised
during life), that he appeared that night to a certain monk, and told him
that if Hereward would continue duly to honor him, the blessed St. Bertin,
and his monks at that place, he would, in his turn, insure him victory in
all his battles by land and sea.

After which Hereward stayed quietly in the abbey certain days; and young
Arnulf, in spite of all remonstrances from the Abbot, would never leave
his side till he had heard from him and from his men as much of their
adventures as they thought it prudent to relate.




CHAPTER VII.

HOW HEREWARD WENT TO THE WAR AT GUISNES.


The dominion of Baldwin of Lille,--Baldwin the Debonair,--Marquis of
Flanders, and just then the greatest potentate in Europe after the Kaiser
of Germany and the Kaiser of Constantinople, extended from the Somme to
the Scheldt, including thus much territory which now belongs to France.
His forefathers had ruled there ever since the days of the "Foresters" of
Charlemagne, who held the vast forests against the heathens of the fens;
and of that famous Baldwin Bras-de-fer,--who, when the foul fiend rose out
of the Scheldt, and tried to drag him down, tried cold steel upon him
(being a practical man), and made his ghostly adversary feel so sorely the
weight of the "iron arm," that he retired into his native mud,--or even
lower still.

He, like a daring knight as he was, ran off with his (so some say) early
love, Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald of France, a descendant of
Charlemagne himself. Married up to Ethelwulf of England, and thus
stepmother of Alfred the Great,--after his death behaving, alas for her!
not over wisely or well, she had verified the saying:

"Nous revenons toujours
A nos premiers amours,"

and ran away with Baldwin.

Charles, furious that one of his earls, a mere lieutenant and creature,
should dare to marry a daughter of Charlemagne's house, would have
attacked him with horse and foot, fire and sword, had not Baldwin been the
only man who could defend his northern frontier against the heathen
Norsemen.

The Pope, as Charles was his good friend, fulminated against Baldwin the
excommunication destined for him who stole a widow for his wife, and all
his accomplices.

Baldwin and Judith went straight to Rome, and told their story to the
Pope.

He, honest man, wrote to Charles the Bald a letter which still
remains,--alike merciful, sentimental, and politic, with its usual
ingrained element of what we now call (from the old monkish word
"cantare") cant. Of Baldwin's horrible wickedness there is no doubt. Of
his repentance (in all matters short of amendment of life, by giving up
the fair Judith), still less. But the Pope has "another motive for so
acting. He fears lest Baldwin, under the weight of Charles's wrath and
indignation, should make alliance with the Normans, enemies of God and the
holy Church; and thus an occasion arise of peril and scandal for the
people of God, whom Charles ought to rule," &c., &c., which if it
happened, it would be worse for them and for Charles's own soul.

To which very sensible and humane missive (times and creeds being
considered), Charles answered, after pouting and sulking, by making
Baldwin _bona fide_ king of all between Somme and Scheldt, and
leaving him to raise a royal race from Judith, the wicked and the fair.

This all happened about A. D. 863. Two hundred years after, there ruled
over that same land Baldwin the Debonair, as "Marquis of the Flamands."

Baldwin had had his troubles. He had fought the Count of Holland. He had
fought the Emperor of Germany; during which war he had burnt the cathedral
of Nimeguen, and did other unrighteous and unwise things; and had been
beaten after all.

Baldwin had had his troubles, and had deserved them. But he had had his
glories, and had deserved them likewise. He had cut the Fosse Neuf, or new
dike, which parted Artois from Flanders. He had so beautified the
cathedral of Lille, that he was called Baldwin of Lille to his dying day.
He had married Adela, the queen countess, daughter of the King of France.
He had become tutor of Philip, the young King, and more or less thereby
regent of the north of France, and had fulfilled his office wisely and
well. He had married his eldest son, Baldwin the Good, to the terrible
sorceress Richilda, heiress of Hainault, wherefore the bridegroom was
named Baldwin of Mons. He had married one of his daughters, Matilda, to
William of Normandy, afterwards the Conqueror; and another, Judith, to
Tosti Godwinsson, the son of the great Earl Godwin of England. She
afterwards married Welf, Duke of Bavaria; whereby, it may be, the blood of
Baldwin of Flanders runs in the veins of Queen Victoria.

And thus there were few potentates of the North more feared and respected
than Baldwin, the good-natured Earl of Flanders.

But one sore thorn in the side he had, which other despots after him
shared with him, and with even worse success in extracting it,--namely,
the valiant men of Scaldmariland, which we now call Holland. Of them
hereafter. At the moment of Hereward's arrival, he was troubled with a
lesser thorn, the Count of Guisnes, who would not pay him up certain dues,
and otherwise acknowledge his sovereignty.

Therefore when the chatelain of St. Omer sent him word to Bruges that a
strange Viking had landed with his crew, calling himself Harold
Naemansson, and offering to take service with him, he returned for answer
that the said Harold might make proof of his faith and prowess upon the
said Count, in which, if he acquitted himself like a good knight, Baldwin
would have further dealings with him.

So the chatelain of St. Omer, with all his knights and men-at-arms, and
Hereward with his sea-cocks, marched northwest up to Guisnes, with little
Arnulf cantering alongside in high glee; for it was the first war that he
had ever seen.

And they came to the Castle of Guisnes, and summoned the Count, by trumpet
and herald, to pay or fight.

Whereon, the Count preferring the latter, certain knights of his came
forth and challenged the knights of St. Omer to fight them man to man.
Whereon there was the usual splintering of lances and slipping up of
horses, and hewing at heads and shoulders so well defended in mail that no
one was much hurt. The archers and arbalisters, meanwhile, amused
themselves with shooting at the castle walls, out of which they chipped
several small pieces of stone. And when they were all tired, they drew off
on both sides, and went in to dinner.

At which Hereward's men, who were accustomed to a more serious fashion of
fighting, stood by, mightily amused, and vowing it was as pretty a play as
ever they saw in their lives.

The next day the same comedy was repeated.

"Let me go in against those knights, Sir chatelain," asked Hereward, who
felt the lust of battle tingling in him from head to heel; "and try if I
cannot do somewhat towards deciding all this. If we fight no faster than
we did yesterday, our beards will be grown down to our knees before we
take Guisnes."

"Let my Viking go!" cried Arnulf. "Let me see him fight!" as if he had
been a pet gamecock or bulldog.

"You can break a lance, fine sir, if it please you," said the chatelain.

"I break more than lances," quoth Hereward as he cantered off.

"You," said he to his men, "draw round hither to the left; and when I
drive the Frenchmen to the right, make a run for it, and get between them
and the castle gate; and we will try the Danish axe against their horses'
legs."

Then Hereward spurred his horse, shouting, "A bear! a bear!" and dashed
into the press; and therein did mightily, like any Turpin or Roland, till
he saw lie on the ground, close to the castle gate, one of the chatelain's
knights with four Guisnes knights around him. Then at those knights he
rode, and slew them every one; and mounted that wounded knight on his own
horse and led him across the field, though the archers shot sore at him
from the wall. And when the press of knights rode at him, his Danish men
got between them and the castle, and made a stand to cover him. Then the
Guisnes knights rode at them scornfully, crying,--

"What footpad churls have we here, who fancy they can face horsed
knights?"

But they did not know the stuff of the Danish men; who all shouted, "A
bear! A bear!" and turned the lances' points with their targets, and hewed
off the horses' heads, and would have hewed off the riders' likewise,
crying that the bear must be fed, had not Hereward bidden them give
quarter according to the civilized fashion of France and Flanders. Whereon
all the knights who were not taken rode right and left, and let them pass
through in peace, with several prisoners, and him whom Hereward had
rescued.

At which little Arnulf was as proud as if he had done it himself; and the
chatelain sent word to Baldwin that the new-comer was a prudhomme of no
common merit; while the heart of the Count of Guisnes became as water; and
his knights, both those who were captives and those who were not,
complained indignantly of the unchivalrous trick of the Danes,--how
villanous for men on foot, not only to face knights, but to bring them
down to their own standing ground by basely cutting off their horses'
heads!

To which Hereward answered, that he knew the rules of chivalry as well as
any of them; but he was hired, not to joust at a tournament, but to make
the Count of Guisnes pay his lord Baldwin, and make him pay he would.

The next day he bade his men sit still and look on, and leave him to
himself. And when the usual "monomachy" began, he singled out the burliest
and boldest knight whom he saw, rode up to him, lance point in air, and
courteously asked him to come and be killed in fair fight. The knight
being, says the chronicler, "magnificent in valor of soul and counsel of
war, and held to be as a lion in fortitude throughout the army," and
seeing that Hereward was by no means a large or heavy man, replied as
courteously, that he should have great pleasure in trying to kill
Hereward. On which they rode some hundred yards out of the press, calling
out that they were to be left alone by both sides, for it was an honorable
duel, and, turning their horses, charged.

After which act they found themselves and their horses all four in a row,
sitting on their hind-quarters on the ground, amid the fragments of their
lances.

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