Hereward, the Last of the English
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“We will make room for you! We will make a rid road from here to Winchester!” shouted the holders and knights.
“It is too late. What say you, Hereward Leofricsson, who go for a wise man among men?”
Hereward rose, and spoke gracefully, earnestly, eloquently; but he could not deny Sweyn’s plain words.
“Sir Hereward beats about the bush,” said Earl Osbiorn, rising when Hereward sat down. “None knows better than he that all is over. Earl Edwin and Earl Morcar, who should have helped us along Watling Street, are here fugitives. Earl Gospatrick and Earl Waltheof are William’s men now, soon to raise the landsfolk against us. We had better go home, before we have eaten up the monks of Ely.”
Then Hereward rose again, and without an openly insulting word, poured forth his scorn and rage upon Osbiorn. Why had he not kept to the agreement which he and Countess Gyda had made with him through Tosti’s sons? Why had he wasted time and men from Dover to Norwich, instead of coming straight into the fens, and marching inland to succor Morcar and Edwin? Osbiorn had ruined the plan, and he only, if it was ruined.
“And who was I, to obey Hereward?” asked Osbiorn, fiercely.
“And who wert thou, to disobey me?” asked Sweyn, in a terrible voice. “Hereward is right. We shall see what thou sayest to all this, in full Thing at home in Denmark.”
Then Edwin rose, entreating peace. “They were beaten. The hand of God was against them. Why should they struggle any more? Or, if they struggled on, why should they involve the Danes in their own ruin?”
Then holder after holder rose, and spoke rough Danish common sense. They had come hither to win England. They had found it won already. Let them take what they had got from Peterborough, and go.
Then Winter sprang up. “Take the pay, and sail off with it, without having done the work? That would be a noble tale to carry home to your fair wives in Jutland. I shall not call you niddering, being a man of peace, as all know.” Whereat all laughed; for the doughty little man had not a hand’s breadth on head or arm without its scar. “But if your ladies call you so, you must have a shrewd answer to give, beside knocking them down.”
Sweyn spoke without rising: “The good knight forgets that this expedition has cost Denmark already nigh as much as Harold Hardraade’s cost Norway. It is hard upon the Danes, If they are to go away empty-handed as well as disappointed.”
“The King has right!” cried Hereward. “Let them take the plunder of Peterborough as pay for what they have done, and what beside they would have done if Osbiorn the Earl—Nay, men of England, let us be just!—what they would have done if there had been heart and wit, one mind and one purpose, in England. The Danes have done their best. They have shown themselves what they are, our blood and kin. I know that some talk of treason, of bribes. Let us have no more such vain and foul suspicions. They came as our friends; and as our friends let them go, and leave us to fight out our own quarrel to the last drop of blood.”
“Would God!” said Sweyn, “thou wouldest go too, thou good knight. Here, earls and gentlemen of England! Sweyn Ulfsson offers to every one of you, who will come to Denmark with him, shelter and hospitality till better times shall come.”
Then arose a mixed cry. Some would go, some would not. Some of the Danes took the proposal cordially; some feared bringing among themselves men who would needs want land, of which there was none to give. If the English came, they must go up the Baltic, and conquer fresh lands for themselves from heathen Letts and Finns.
Then Hereward rose again, and spoke so nobly and so well, that all ears were charmed.
They were Englishmen; and they would rather die in their own merry England than conquer new kingdoms in the cold northeast. They were sworn, the leaders of them, to die or conquer, fighting the accursed Frenchman. They were bound to St. Peter, and to St. Guthlac, and to St. Felix of Ramsey, and St. Etheldreda the holy virgin, beneath whose roof they stood, to defend against Frenchmen the saints of England whom they despised and blasphemed, whose servants they cast out, thrust into prison, and murdered, that they might bring in Frenchmen from Normandy, Italians from the Pope of Rome. Sweyn Ulfsson spoke as became him, as a prudent and a generous prince; the man who alone of all kings defied and fought the great Hardraade till neither could fight more; the true nephew of Canute the king of kings: and they thanked him: but they would live and die Englishmen.
And every Englishman shouted, “Hereward has right! We will live and die fighting the French!”
And Sweyn Ulfsson rose again, and said with a great oath, “That if there had been three such men as Hereward in England, all would have gone well.”
Hereward laughed. “Thou art wrong for once, wise king. We have failed, just because there were a dozen men in England as good as me, every man wanting his own way; and too many cooks have spoiled the broth. What we wanted is, not a dozen men like me, but one like thee, to take us all by the back of the neck and shake us soundly, and say, ‘Do that, or die!’”
And so, after much talk, the meeting broke up. And when it broke up, there came to Hereward in the hall a noble-looking man of his own age, and put his hand within his, and said,—
“Do you not know me, Hereward Leofricsson?”
“I know thee not, good knight, more pity; but by thy dress and carriage, thou shouldest be a true Viking’s son.”
“I am Sigtryg Ranaldsson, now King of Waterford. And my wife said to me, ‘If there be treachery or faint-heartedness, remember this,—that Hereward Leofricsson slew the Ogre, and Hannibal of Gweek likewise, and brought me safe to thee. And, therefore, if thou provest false to him, niddering thou art; and no niddering is spouse of mine.’”
“Thou art Sigtryg Ranaldsson?” cried Hereward, clasping him in his arms, as the scenes of his wild youth rushed across his mind. “Better is old wine than new, and old friends likewise.”
“And I, and my five ships, are thine to death. Let who will go back.”
“They must go,” said Hereward, half-peevishly. “Sweyn has right, and Osbiorn too. The game is played out. Sweep the chessmen off the board, as Earl Ulf did by Canute the king.”
“And lost his life thereby. I shall stand by, and see thee play the last pawn.”
“And lose thy life equally.”
“What matter? I heard thee sing,—
‘A bed-death, a priest death, A straw death, a cow death, Such death likes not me!’Nor likes it me either, Hereward Leofricsson.”
So the Danes sailed away: but Sigtryg Ranaldsson and his five ships remained.
Hereward went to the minster tower, and watched the Ouse flashing with countless oars northward toward Southrey Fen. And when they were all out of sight, he went back, and lay down on his bed and wept,—once and for all. Then he arose, and went down into the hall to abbots and monks, and earls and knights, and was the boldest, cheeriest, wittiest of them all.
“They say,” quoth he to Torfrida that night, “that some men have gray heads on green shoulders. I have a gray heart in a green body.”
“And my heart is growing very gray, too,” said Torfrida.
“Certainly not thy head.” And he played with her raven locks.
“That may come, too; and too soon.”
For, indeed, they were in very evil case.
CHAPTER XXVIII. – HOW THEY FOUGHT AT ALDRETH
When William heard that the Danes were gone, he marched on Ely, as on an easy prey.
Ivo Taillebois came with him, hungry after those Spalding lands, the rents whereof Hereward had been taking for his men for now twelve months. William de Warrenne was there, vowed to revenge the death of Sir Frederic, his brother. Ralph Guader was there, flushed with his success at Norwich. And with them all the Frenchmen of the east, who had been either expelled from their lands, or were in fear of expulsion.
With them, too, was a great army of mercenaries, ruffians from all France and Flanders, hired to fight for a certain term, on the chance of plunder or of fiefs in land. Their brains were all aflame with the tales of inestimable riches hidden in Ely. There were there the jewels of all the monasteries round; there were the treasures of all the fugitive English nobles; there were there—what was there not? And they grumbled, when William halted them and hutted them at Cambridge, and began to feel cautiously the strength of the place,—which must be strong, or Hereward and the English would not have made it their camp of refuge.
Perhaps he rode up to Madingley windmill, and saw fifteen miles away, clear against the sky, the long line of what seemed naught but a low upland park, with the minster tower among the trees; and between him and them, a rich champaign of grass, over which it was easy enough to march all the armies of Europe; and thought Ely an easy place to take. But men told him that between him and those trees lay a black abyss of mud and peat and reeds, Haddenham fen and Smithy fen, with the deep sullen West water or “Ald-reche” of the Ouse winding through them. The old Roman road was sunk and gone long since under the bog, whether by English neglect, or whether (as some think) by actual and bodily sinking of the whole land. The narrowest space between dry land and dry land was a full half-mile; and how to cross that half-mile, no man knew.
What were the approaches on the west? There were none. Beyond Earith, where now run the great washes of the Bedford Level, was a howling wilderness of meres, seas, reed-ronds, and floating alder-beds, through which only the fen-men wandered, with leaping-pole and log canoe.
What in the east? The dry land neared the island on that side. And it may be that William rowed round by Burwell to Fordham and Soham, and thought of attempting the island by way of Barraway, and saw beneath him a labyrinth of islands, meres, fens, with the Ouse, now increased by the volume of the Cam, lying deep and broad between Barraway and Thetford-in-the-Isle; and saw, too, that a disaster in that labyrinth might be a destruction.
So he determined on the near and straight path, through Long Stratton and Willingham, down the old bridle-way from Willingham ploughed field,—every village there, and in the isle likewise, had and has still its “field,” or ancient clearing of ploughed land,—and then to try that terrible half-mile, with the courage and wit of a general to whom human lives were as those of the gnats under the hedge.
So all his host camped themselves in Willingham field, by the old earthwork which men now call Belsar’s Hills; and down the bridle-way poured countless men, bearing timber and fagots cut from all the hills, that they might bridge the black half-mile.
They made a narrow, firm path through the reeds, and down to the brink of the Ouse, if brink it could be called, where the water, rising and falling a foot or two each tide, covered the floating peat for many yards before it sunk into a brown depth of bottomless slime. They would make a bottom for themselves by driving piles.
The piles would not hold; and they began to make a floating bridge with long beams, says Leofric, and blown-up cattle-hides to float them.
Soon they made a floating sow, and thrust it on before them as they worked across the stream; for they were getting under shot from the island.
Meanwhile the besieged had not been idle. They had thrown up, says Leofric, a turf rampart on the island shore, and antemuralia et propugnacula,—doubtless overhanging “hoardings,” or scaffolds, through the floor of which they could shower down missiles. And so they awaited the attack, contenting themselves with gliding in and out of the reeds in their canoes, and annoying the builders with arrows and cross-bow bolts.
At last the bridge was finished, and the sow safe across the West water, and thrust in, as far as it would float, among the reeds on the high tide. They in the fort could touch it with a pole.
The English would have destroyed it if they could. But Hereward bade them leave it alone. He had watched all their work, and made up his mind to the event.
“The rats have set a trap for themselves,” he said to his men, “and we shall be fools to break it up till the rats are safe inside.”
So there the huge sow lay, black and silent, showing nothing to the enemy but a side of strong plank, covered with hide to prevent its being burned. It lay there for three hours, and Hereward let it lie.
He had never been so cheerful, so confident. “Play the man this day, every one of you, and ere nightfall you will have taught the Norman once more the lesson of York. He seems to have forgotten that. It is me to remind him of it.”
And he looked to his bow and to his arrows, and prepared to play the man himself,—as was the fashion in those old days, when a general proved his worth by hitting harder and more surely than any of his men.
At last the army was in motion, and Willingham field opposite was like a crawling ants’ nest. Brigade after brigade moved down to the reed beds, and the assault began.
And now advanced along the causeway and along the bridge a dark column of men, surmounted by glittering steel. Knights in complete mail, footmen in leather coats and quilted jerkins; at first orderly enough, each under the banner of his lord; but more and more mingled and crowded as they hurried forward, each eager for his selfish share of the inestimable treasures of Ely. They pushed along the bridge. The mass became more and more crowded; men stumbled over each other, and fell off into the mire and the water, calling vainly for help, while their comrades hurried on unheeding, in the mad thirst for spoil.
On they came in thousands; and fresh thousands streamed out of the fields, as if the whole army intended to pour itself into the isle at once.
“They are numberless,” said Torfrida, in a serious and astonished voice, as she stood by Hereward’s side.
“Would they were!” said Hereward. “Let them come on, thick and threefold. The more their numbers the fatter will the fish below be before to-morrow morning. Look there, already!”
And already the bridge was swaying, and sinking beneath their weight. The men in places were ankle deep in water. They rushed on all the more eagerly, and filled the sow, and swarmed up to its roof.
Then, what with its own weight, what with the weight of the laden bridge,—which dragged upon it from behind,—the huge sow began to tilt backwards, and slide down the slimy bank.
The men on the top tried vainly to keep their footing, to hurl grapnels into the rampart, to shoot off their quarrels and arrows.
“You must be quick, Frenchmen,” shouted Hereward in derision, “if you mean to come on board here.”
The Normans knew that well; and as Hereward spoke two panels in the front of the sow creaked on their hinges, and dropped landward, forming two draw-bridges, over which reeled to the attack a close body of knights, mingled with soldiers bearing scaling ladders.
They recoiled. Between the ends of the draw-bridges and the foot of the rampart was some two fathoms’ depth of black ooze. The catastrophe which Hereward had foreseen was come, and a shout of derision arose from the unseen defenders above.
“Come on,—leap it like men! Send back for your horses, knights, and ride them at it like bold huntsmen!”
The front rank could not but rush on: for the pressure behind forced them forward, whether they would or not. In a moment they were wallowing waist deep, trampled on, and disappearing under their struggling comrades, who disappeared in their turn.
“Look, Torfrida! If they plant their scaling ladders, it will be on a foundation of their comrades’ corpses.”
Torfrida gave one glance through the openings of the hoarding, upon the writhing mass below, and turned away in horror. The men were not so merciful. Down between the hoarding-beams rained stones, javelins, arrows, increasing the agony and death. The scaling ladders would not stand in the mire. If they had stood a moment, the struggles of the dying would have thrown them down; and still fresh victims pressed on from behind, shouting “Dex Aie! On to the gold of Ely!” And still the sow, under the weight, slipped further and further back into the stream, and the foul gulf widened between besiegers and besieged.
At last one scaling ladder was planted upon the bodies of the dead, and hooked firmly on the gunwale of the hoarding. Ere it could be hurled off again by the English, it was so crowded with men that even Hereward’s strength was insufficient to lift it off. He stood at the top, ready to hew down the first comer; and he hewed him down.
But the Normans were not to be daunted. Man after man dropped dead from the ladder top,—man after man took his place; sometimes two at a time; sometimes scrambling over each other’s backs.
The English, even in the insolence of victory, cheered them with honest admiration. “You are fellows worth fighting, you French!”
“So we are,” shouted a knight, the first and last who crossed that parapet; for, thrusting Hereward back with a blow of his sword-hilt, he staggered past him over the hoarding, and fell on his knees.
A dozen men were upon him; but he was up again and shouting,—
“To me, men-at-arms! A Dade! a Dade!” But no man answered.
“Yield!” quoth Hereward.
Sir Dade answered by a blow on Hereward’s helmet, which felled the chief to his knees, and broke the sword into twenty splinters.
“Well hit,” said Hereward, as he rose. “Don’t touch him, men! this is my quarrel now. Yield, sir! you have done enough for your honor. It is madness to throw away your life.”
The knight looked round on the fierce ring of faces, in the midst of which he stood alone.
“To none but Hereward.”
“Hereward am I.”
“Ah,” said the knight, “had I but hit a little harder!”
“You would have broke your sword into more splinters. My armor is enchanted. So yield like a reasonable and valiant man.”
“What care I?” said the knight, stepping on to the earthwork, and sitting down quietly. “I vowed to St. Mary and King William that into Ely I would get this day; and in Ely I am; so I have done my work.”
“And now you shall taste—as such a gallant knight deserves—the hospitality of Ely.”
It was Torfrida who spoke.
“My husband’s prisoners are mine; and I, when I find them such prudhommes as you are, have no lighter chains for them than that which a lady’s bower can afford.”
Sir Dade was going to make an equally courteous answer, when over and above the shouts and curses of the combatants rose a yell so keen, so dreadful, as made all hurry forward to the rampart.
That which Hereward had foreseen was come at last. The bridge, strained more and more by its living burden, and by the falling tide, had parted,—not at the Ely end, where the sliding of the sow took off the pressure,—but at the end nearest the camp. One sideway roll it gave, and then, turning over, engulfed in that foul stream the flower of Norman chivalry; leaving a line—a full quarter of a mile in length—of wretches drowning in the dark water, or, more hideous still, in the bottomless slime of peat and mud.
Thousands are said to have perished. Their armor and weapons were found at times, by delvers and dikers, for centuries after; are found at times unto this day, beneath the rich drained cornfields which now fill up that black half-mile, or in the bed of the narrow brook to which the Westwater, robbed of its streams by the Bedford Level, has dwindled down at last.
William, they say, struck his tents and departed forthwith, “groaning from deep grief of heart;” and so ended the first battle of Aldreth.
CHAPTER XXIX. – HOW SIR DADE BROUGHT NEWS FROM ELY
A month after the fight, there came into the camp at Cambridge, riding on a good horse, himself fat and well-liking, none other than Sir Dade.
Boisterously he was received, as one alive from the dead; and questioned as to his adventures and sufferings.
“Adventures I have had, and strange ones; but for sufferings, instead of fetter-galls, I bring back, as you see, a new suit of clothes; instead of an empty and starved stomach, a surfeit from good victuals and good liquor; and whereas I went into Ely on foot, I came out on a fast hackney.”
So into William’s tent he went; and there he told his tale.
“So, Dade, my friend?” quoth the Duke, in high good humor, for he loved Dade, “you seem to have been in good company?”
“Never in better, Sire, save in your presence. Of the earls and knights in Ely, all I can say is, God’s pity that they are rebels, for more gallant and courteous knights or more perfect warriors never saw I, neither in Normandy nor at Constantinople, among the Varangers themselves.”
“Eh! and what are the names of these gallants; for you have used your eyes and ears, of course?”
“Edwin and Morcar, the earls,—two fine young lads.”
“I know it. Go on”; and a shade passed over William’s brow, as he thought of his own falsehood, and his fair Constance, weeping in vain for the fair bridegroom whom he had promised to her.
“Siward Barn, as they call him, the boy Orgar, and Thurkill Barn. Those are the knights. Egelwin, bishop of Durham, is there too; and besides them all, and above them all, Hereward. The like of that knight I may have seen. His better saw I never.”
“Sir fool!” said Earl Warrenne, who had not yet—small blame to him—forgotten his brother’s death. “They have soused thy brains with their muddy ale, till thou knowest not friend from foe. What! hast thou to come hither praising up to the King’s Majesty such an outlawed villain as that, with whom no honest knight would keep company?”
“If you, Earl Warrenne, ever found Dade drunk or lying, it is more than the King here has done.”
“Let him speak, Earl,” said William. “I have not an honester man in my camp; and he speaks for my information, not for yours.”
“Then for yours will I speak, Sir King. These men treated me knightly, and sent me away without ransom.”
“They had an eye to their own profit, it seems,” grumbled the Earl.
“But force me they did to swear on the holy Gospels that I should tell your Majesty the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And I keep my oath,” quoth Dade.
“Go on, then, without fear or favor. Are there any other men of note in the island!”
“No.”
“Are they in want of provisions?”
“Look how they have fattened me.”
“What do they complain of?”
“I will tell you, Sir King. The monks, like many more, took fright at the coming over of our French men of God to set right all their filthy, barbarous ways; and that is why they threw Ely open to the rebels.”
“I will be even with the sots,” quoth William.
“However, they think that danger blown over just now; for they have a story among them, which, as my Lord the King never heard before, he may as well hear now.”
“Eh?”
“How your Majesty should have sent across the sea a whole shipload of French monks.”
“That have I, and will more, till I reduce these swine into something like obedience to his Holiness of Rome.”
“Ah, but your Majesty has not heard how one Bruman, a valiant English knight, was sailing on the sea and caught those monks. Whereon he tied a great sack to the ship’s head, and cut the bottom out, and made every one of those monks get into that sack and so fall through into the sea; whereby he rid the monks of Ely of their rivals.”
“Pish! why tell me such an old-wives’ fable, knight?”
“Because the monks believe that old-wives’ fable, and are stout-hearted and stiff-necked accordingly.”
“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” said William’s chaplain, a pupil and friend of Lanfranc; “and if these men of Belial drowned every man of God in Normandy, ten would spring up in their places to convert this benighted and besotted land of Simonites and Balaamites, whose priests, like the brutes which perish, scruple not to defile themselves and the service of the altar with things which they impudently call their wives.”
“We know that, good chaplain,” quoth William, impatiently. He had enough of that language from Lanfranc himself; and, moreover, was thinking more of the Isle of Ely than of the celibacy of the clergy.
“Well, Sir Dade?”
“So they have got together all their kin; for among these monks every one is kin to a Thane, or Knight, or even an Earl. And there they are, brother by brother, cousin by cousin, knee to knee, and back to back, like a pack of wolves, and that in a hold which you will not enter yet awhile.”