Hereward, the Last of the English

“Then I command,—I, Hereward, Lord of Bourne!—that this abbey be held against him and all Frenchmen, in the name of Swend Ulfsson, king of England, and of me. And he that admits a Frenchman therein, I will shave his crown for him so well, that he shall never need razor more. This I tell thee; and this I shall tell your monks before I go. And unless you obey the same, my dream will be fulfilled; and you will see Goldenbregh in a light low, and burning yourselves in the midst thereof.”

“Swend Ulfsson? Swend of Denmark? What words are these?” cried Brand.

“You will know within six months, uncle.”

“I shall know better things, my boy, before six months are out.”

“Uncle, uncle, do not say that.”

“Why not? If this mortal life be at best a prison and a grave, what is it worth now to an Englishman?”

“More than ever; for never had an Englishman such a chance of showing English mettle, and winning renown for the English name. Uncle, you must do something for me and my comrades ere we go.”

“Well, boy?”

“Make us knights.”

“Knights, lad? I thought you had been a belted knight this dozen years?”

“I might have been made a knight by many, after the French, fashion, many a year agone. I might have been knight when I slew the white bear. Ladies have prayed me to be knighted again and again since. Something kept me from it. Perhaps” (with a glance at Herluin) “I wanted to show that an English squire could be the rival and the leader of French and Flemish knights.”

“And thou hast shown it, brave lad!” said Brand, clapping his great hands.

“Perhaps I longed to do some mighty deed at last, which would give me a right to go to the bravest knight in all Christendom, and say, ‘Give me the accolade, then! Thou only art worthy to knight as good a man as thyself.’”

“Pride and vainglory,” said Brand, shaking his head.

“But now I am of a sounder mind. I see now why I was kept from being knighted,—till I had done a deed worthy of a true knight; till I had mightily avenged the wronged, and mightily succored the oppressed; till I had purged my soul of my enmity against my own kin, and could go out into the world a new man, with my mother’s blessing on my head.”

“But not of the robbery of St. Peter,” said Herluin. The French monk wanted not for moral courage,—no French monk did in those days. And he proved it by those words.

“Do not anger the lad, Prior; now, too, above all times, when his heart is softened toward the Lord.”

“He has not angered me. The man is right. Here, Lord Abbot and Sir Prior, is a chain of gold, won in the wars. It is worth fifty times the sixteen pence which I stole, and which I repaid double. Let St. Peter take it, for the sins of me and my two comrades, and forgive. And now, Sir Prior, I do to thee what I never did for mortal man. I kneel, and ask thy forgiveness. Kneel, Winter! Kneel, Gwenoch!” And Hereward knelt.

Herluin was of double mind. He longed to keep Hereward out of St. Peter’s grace. He longed to see Hereward dead at his feet; not because of any personal hatred, but because he foresaw in him a terrible foe to the Norman cause. But he wished, too, to involve Abbot Brand as much as possible in Hereward’s “rebellions” and “misdeeds,” and above all, in the master-offence of knighting him; for for that end, he saw, Hereward was come. Moreover, he was touched with the sudden frankness and humility of the famous champion. So he answered mildly,—

“Verily, thou hast a knightly soul. May God and St. Peter so forgive thee and thy companions as I forgive thee, freely and from my heart.”

“Now,” cried Hereward, “a boon! a boon! Knight me and these my fellows, Uncle Brand, this day.”

Brand was old and weak, and looked at Herluin.

“I know,” said Hereward, “that the French look on us English monk-made knights as spurious and adulterine, unworthy of the name of knight. But, I hold—and what churchman will gainsay me?—that it is nobler to receive sword and belt from a man of God than from a man of blood like one’s self; the fittest to consecrate the soldier of an earthly king, is the soldier of Christ, the King of kings.” [Footnote: Almost word for word from the “Life of Hereward.”]

“He speaks well,” said Herluin. “Abbot, grant him his boon.”

“Who celebrates high mass to-morrow?”

“Wilton the priest, the monk of Ely,” said Herluin, aloud. “And a very dangerous and stubborn Englishman,” added he to himself.

“Good. Then this night you shall watch in the church. To-morrow, after the Gospel, the thing shall be done as you will.”

That night two messengers, knights of the Abbot, galloped from Peterborough. One to Ivo Taillebois at Spalding, to tell him that Hereward was at Peterborough, and that he must try to cut him off upon the Egelric’s road, the causeway which one of the many Abbots Egelric had made some thirty years before, through Deeping Fen to Spalding, at an enormous expense of labor and of timber. The other knight rode south, along the Roman road to London, to tell King William of the rising of Kesteven, and all the evil deeds of Hereward and of Brand.

And old Brand slept quietly in his bed, little thinking on what errands his prior had sent his knights.

Hereward and his comrades watched that night in St. Peter’s church. Oppressed with weariness of body, and awe of mind, they heard the monks drone out their chants through the misty gloom; they confessed the sins—and they were many—of their past wild lives. They had to summon up within themselves courage and strength henceforth to live, not for themselves, but for the fatherland which they hoped to save. They prayed to all the heavenly powers of that Pantheon which then stood between man and God, to help them in the coming struggle; but ere the morning dawned, they were nodding, unused to any long strain of mind.

Suddenly Hereward started, and sprang up, with a cry of fire.

“What? Where?” cried his comrades, and the monks who ran up.

“The minster is full of flame. No use! too late! you cannot put it out! It must burn.”

“You have been dreaming,” said one.

“I have not,” said Hereward. “Is it Lammas night?”

“What a question! It is the vigil of the Nativity of St. Peter and St. Paul.”

“Thank heaven! I thought my old Lammas night’s dream was coming true at last.”

Herluin heard, and knew what he meant.

After which Hereward was silent, filled with many thoughts.

The next morning, before the high mass, those three brave men walked up to the altar; laid thereon their belts and swords; and then knelt humbly at the foot of the steps till the Gospel was finished.

Then came down from the altar Wilton of Ely, and laid on each man’s bare neck the bare blade, and bade him take back his sword in the name of God and of St. Peter and St. Paul, and use it like a true knight, for a terror and punishment to evil-doers, and a defence for women and orphans, and the poor and the oppressed, and the monks the servants of God.

And then the monks girded each man with his belt and sword once more. And after mass was sung, they rose and went forth, each feeling himself—and surely not in vain—a better man.

At least this is certain, that Hereward would say to his dying day, how he had often proved that none would fight so well as those who had received their sword from God’s knights the monks. And therefore he would have, in after years, almost all his companions knighted by the monks; and brought into Ely with him that same good custom which he had learnt at Peterborough, and kept it up as long as he held the isle.

So says the chronicler Leofric, the minstrel and priest.

It was late when they got back to Crowland. The good Abbot received them with a troubled face.

“As I feared, my Lord, you have been too hot and hasty. The French have raised the country against you.”

“I have raised it against them, my lord. But we have news that Sir Frederick—”

“And who may he be?”

“A very terrible Goliath of these French; old and crafty, a brother of old Earl Warrenne of Norfolk, whom God confound. And he has sworn to have your life, and has gathered knights and men-at-arms at Lynn in Norfolk.”

“Very good; I will visit him as I go home, Lord Abbot. Not a word of this to any soul.”

“I tremble for thee, thou young David.”

“One cannot live forever, my lord. Farewell.”

A week after, a boatman brought news to Crowland, how Sir Frederick was sitting in his inn at Lynn, when there came in one with a sword, and said: “I am Hereward. I was told that thou didst desire, greatly, to see me; therefore I am come, being a courteous knight,” and therewith smote off his head. And when the knights and others would have stopped him, he cut his way through them, killing some three or four at each stroke, himself unhurt; for he was clothed from head to foot in magic armor, and whosoever smote it, their swords melted in their hands. And so, gaining the door, he vanished in a great cloud of sea-fowl, that cried forever, “Hereward is come home again!”

And after that, the fen-men said to each other, that all the birds upon the meres cried nothing, save “Hereward is come home again!”

And so, already surrounded with myth and mystery, Hereward flashed into the fens and out again, like the lightning brand, destroying as he passed. And the hearts of all the French were turned to water; and the land had peace from its tyrants for many days.

CHAPTER XXI. – HOW IVO TAILLEBOIS MARCHED OUT OF SPALDING TOWN

A proud man was Ivo Taillebois, as he rode next morning out of Spalding town, with hawk on fist, and hound at heel, and a dozen men-at-arms at his back, who would, on due or undue cause shown, hunt men while he hunted game.

An adventurer from Anjou, brutal, ignorant, and profligate,—low-born, too (for his own men whispered, behind his back, that he was no more than his name hinted, a wood-cutter’s son), he still had his deserts. Valiant he was, cunning, and skilled in war. He and his troop of Angevine ruttiers had fought like tigers by William’s side, at Hastings; and he had been rewarded with many a manor, which had been Earl Algar’s, and should now have been Earl Edwin’s, or Morcar’s, or, it may be, Hereward’s own.

“A fat land and fair,” said he to himself; “and, after I have hanged a few more of these barbarians, a peaceful fief enough to hand down to the lawful heirs of my body, if I had one. I must marry. Blessed Virgin! this it is to serve and honor your gracious majesty, as I have always done according to my poor humility. Who would have thought that Ivo Taillebois would ever rise so high in life as to be looking out for a wife,—and that a lady, too?”

Then thought he over the peerless beauties of the Lady Lucia, Edwin and Morcar’s sister, almost as fair as that hapless aunt of hers,—first married (though that story is now denied) to the wild Griffin, Prince of Snowdon, and then to his conqueror, and (by complicity) murderer, Harold, the hapless king. Eddeva faira, Eddeva pulcra, stands her name in Domesday-book even now, known, even to her Norman conquerors, as the Beauty of her time, as Godiva, her mother, had been before her. Scarcely less beautiful was Lucia, as Ivo had seen her at William’s court, half captive and half guest: and he longed for her; love her he could not. “I have her father’s lands,” quoth he; “what more reasonable than to have the daughter, too? And have her I will, unless the Mamzer, in his present merciful and politic mood, makes a Countess of her, and marries her up to some Norman coxcomb with a long pedigree,—invented the year before last. If he does throw away his daughter on that Earl Edwin, in his fancy for petting and patting these savages into good humor, he is not likely to throw away Edwin’s sister on a Taillebois. Well, I must put a spoke in Edwin’s wheel. It will not be difficult to make him, or Morcar, or both of them, traitors. We must have a rebellion in these parts. I will talk about it to Gilbert of Ghent. We must make these savages desperate, and William furious, or he will be soon giving them back their lands, beside asking them to Court; and then, how are valiant knights, like us, who have won England for him, to be paid for their trouble? No, no. We must have a rebellion, and a confiscation, and then, when English lasses are going cheap, perhaps the Lady Lucia may fall to my share.”

And Ivo Taillebois kept his word; and without difficulty, for he had many to help him. To drive the English to desperation, and get a pretext for seizing their lands, was the game which the Normans played, and but too well.

As he rode out of Spalding town, a man was being hanged on the gallows there permanently provided.

That was so common a sight, that Ivo would not have stopped, had not a priest, who was comforting the criminal, ran forward, and almost thrown himself under the horse’s feet.

“Mercy, good my Lord, in the name of God and all his saints!”

Ivo went to ride on.

“Mercy!” and he laid hands on Ivo’s bridle. “If he took a few pike out of your mere, remember that the mere was his, and his father’s before him; and do not send a sorely tempted soul out of the world for a paltry pike.”

“And where am I to get fish for Lent, Sir Priest, if every rascal nets my waters, because his father did so before him? Take your hand off my bridle, or, par le splendeur Dex” (Ivo thought it fine to use King William’s favorite oath), “I will hew it off!”

The priest looked at him, with something of honest English fierceness in his eyes, and dropping the bridle, muttered to himself in Latin: “The bloodthirsty and deceitful man shall not live out half his days. Nevertheless my trust shall be in Thee, O Lord!”

“What art muttering, beast? Go home to thy wife” (wife was by no means the word which Ivo used) “and make the most of her, before I rout out thee and thy fellow-canons, and put in good monks from Normandy in the place of your drunken English swine. Hang him!” shouted he, as the by-standers fell on their knees before the tyrant, crouching in terror, every woman for her husband, every man for wife and daughter. “And hearken, you fen-frogs all. Who touches pike or eel, swimming or wading fowl, within these meres of mine, without my leave, I will hang him as I hanged this man,—as I hanged four brothers in a row on Wrokesham bridge but yesterday.”

“Go to Wrokesham bridge and see,” shouted a shrill cracked voice from behind the crowd.

All looked round; and more than one of Ivo’s men set up a yell, the hangman loudest of all.

“That’s he, the heron, again! Catch him! Stop him! Shoot him!”

But that was not so easy. As Ivo pushed his horse through the crowd, careless of whom he crushed, he saw a long lean figure flying through the air seven feet aloft, with his heels higher than his head, on the further side of a deep broad ditch; and on the nearer side of the same one of his best men lying stark, with a cloven skull.

“Go to Wrokesham!” shrieked the lean man, as he rose and showed a ridiculously long nose, neck, and legs,—a type still not uncommon in the fens,—a quilted leather coat, a double-bladed axe slung over his shoulder by a thong, a round shield at his back, and a pole three times as long as himself, which he dragged after him, like an unwieldy tail.

“The heron! the heron!” shouted the English.

“Follow him, men, heron or hawk!” shouted Ivo, galloping his horse up to the ditch, and stopping short at fifteen feet of water.

“Shoot, some one! Where are the bows gone?”

The heron was gone two hundred yards, running, in spite of his pole, at a wonderful pace, before a bow could be brought to bear. He seemed to expect an arrow; for he stopped, glanced his eye round, threw himself flat on his face, with his shield, not over his body, but over his bare legs; sprang up as the shaft stuck in the ground beside him, ran on, planted his pole in the next dike, and flew over it.

In a few minutes he was beyond pursuit; and Ivo turned, breathless with rage, to ask who he was.

“Alas, sir! he is the man who set free the four men at Wrokesham Bridge last night.”

“Set free! Are they not hanged and dead?”

“We—we dared not tell you. But he came upon us—”

“Single-handed, you cowards?”

“Sir, he is not a man, but a witch or a devil. He asked us what we did there. One of our men laughed at his long neck and legs, and called him heron. ‘Heron I am,’ says he, ‘and strike like a heron, right at the eyes’; and with that he cuts the man over the face with his axe, and laid him dead, and then another, and another.’

“Till you all ran away, villains!”

“We gave back a step,—no more. And he freed one of those four, and he again the rest; and then they all set on us, and went to hang us in their own stead.”

“When there were ten of you, I thought?”

“Sir, as we told you, he is no mortal man, but a fiend.”

“Beasts, fools! Well, I have hanged this one, at least!” growled Ivo, and then rode sullenly on.

“Who is this fellow?” cried he to the trembling English.

“Wulfric Raher, Wulfric the Heron, of Wrokesham in Norfolk.”

“Aha! And I hold a manor of his,” said Ivo to himself. “Look you, villains, this fellow is in league with you.”

A burst of abject denial followed. “Since the French,—since Sir Frederick, as they call him, drove him out of his Wrokesham lands, he wanders the country, as you see: to-day here, but Heaven only knows where he will be to-morrow.”

“And finds, of course, a friend everywhere. Now march!” And a string of threats and curses followed.

It was hard to see why Wulfric should not have found friends; as he was simply a small holder, or squire, driven out of house and land, and turned adrift on the wide world, for the offence of having fought in Harold’s army at the battle of Hastings. But to give him food or shelter was, in Norman eyes, an act of rebellion against the rightful King William; and Ivo rode on, boiling over with righteous indignation, along the narrow drove which led toward Deeping.

A pretty lass came along the drove, driving a few sheep before her, and spinning as she walked.

“Whose lass are you?” shouted Ivo.

“The Abbot of Crowland’s, please your lordship,” said she, trembling.

“Much too pretty to belong to monks. Chuck her up behind you, one of you.”

The shrieking and struggling girl was mounted behind a horseman and bound, and Ivo rode on.

A woman ran out of a turf-hut on the drove side, attracted by the girl’s cries. It was her mother.

“My lass! Give me my lass, for the love of St. Mary and all saints!” and she clung to Ivo’s bridle.

He struck her down, and rode on over her.

A man cutting sedges in a punt in the lode alongside looked up at the girl’s shrieks, and leapt on shore, scythe in hand.

“Father! father!” cried she.

“I’ll rid thee, lass, or die for it,” said he, as he sprang up the drove-dike and swept right and left at the horses’ legs.

The men recoiled. One horse went down, lamed for life; another staggered backwards into the further lode, and was drowned. But an arrow went through the brave serf’s heart, and Ivo rode on, cursing more bitterly than ever, and comforted himself by flying his hawks at a covey of patridges.

Soon a group came along the drove which promised fresh sport to the man-hunters: but as the foremost person came up, Ivo stopped in wonder at the shout of,—

“Ivo! Ivo Taillebois! Halt and have a care! The English are risen, and we are all dead men!”

The words were spoken in French; and in French Ivo answered, laughing,—

“Thou art not a dead man yet it seems, Sir Robert; art going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, that thou comest in this fashion? Or dost mean to return to Anjou as bare as thou camest out of it?”

For Sir Robert had, like Edgar in Shakespear’s Lear, “reserved himself a blanket, else had we all been shamed.”

But very little more did either he, his lady, and his three children wear, as they trudged along the drove, in even poorer case than that

   Robert of Coningsby,   Who came out of Normandy,   With his wife Tiffany,   And his maid Maupas,   And his dog Hardigras.

“For the love of heaven and all chivalry, joke me no jokes, Sir Ivo, but give me and mine clothes and food! The barbarians rose on us last night,—with Azer, the ruffian who owned my lands, at their head, and drove us out into the night as we are, bidding us carry the news to you, for your turn would come next. There are forty or more of them in West Deeping now, and coming eastward, they say, to visit you, and, what is more than all, Hereward is come again.”

“Hereward?” cried Ivo, who knew that name well.

Whereon Sir Robert told him the terrible tragedy of Bourne.

“Mount the lady on a horse, and wrap her in my cloak. Get that dead villain’s clothes for Sir Robert as we go back. Put your horses’ heads about and ride for Spalding.”

“What shall we do with the lass?”

“We cannot be burdened with the jade. She has cost us two good horses already. Leave her in the road, bound as she is, and let us see if St. Guthlac her master will come and untie her.”

So they rode back. Coming from Deeping two hours after, Azer and his men found the girl on the road, dead.

“Another count in the long score,” quoth Azer. But when, in two hours more, they came to Spalding town, they found all the folk upon the street, shouting and praising the host of Heaven. There was not a Frenchman left in the town.

For when Ivo returned home, ere yet Sir Robert and his family were well clothed and fed, there galloped into Spalding from, the north Sir Ascelin, nephew and man of Thorold, would-be Abbot of Peterborough, and one of the garrison of Lincoln, which was then held by Hereward’s old friend, Gilbert of Ghent.

“Not bad news, I hope,” cried Ivo, as Ascelin clanked into the hall. “We have enough of our own. Here is all Kesteven, as the barbarians call it, risen, and they are murdering us right and left.”

“Worse news than that, Ivo Taillebois,” (“Sir,” or “Sieur,” Ascelin was loath to call him, being himself a man of family and fashion; and holding the nouveaux venus in deep contempt,)—“worse news than that: the North has risen again, and proclaimed Prince Edgar King.”

“A king of words! What care I, or you, as long as the Mamzer, God bless him! is a king of deeds?”

“They have done their deeds, though, too. Gospatrick and Marlesweyn are back out of Scotland. They attacked Robert de Comines [Footnote: Ancestor of the Comyns of Scotland.] at Durham, and burnt him in his own house. There was but one of his men got out of Durham to tell the news. And now they have marched on York; and all the chiefs, they say, have joined them,—Archill the Thane, and Edwin and Morcar, and Waltheof too, the young traitors.”

“Blessed Virgin!” cried Ivo, “thou art indeed gracious to thy most unworthy knight!”

“What do you mean?”

“You will see some day. Now, I will tell you but one word. When fools make hay, wise men can build ricks. This rebellion,—if it had not come of itself, I would have roused it. We wanted it, to cure William of this just and benevolent policy of his, which would have ended in sending us back to France as poor as we left it. Now, what am I expected to do? What says Gilbert of Ghent, the wise man of Lic—nic—what the pest do you call that outlandish place, which no civilized lips can pronounce?”

“Lic-nic-cole?” replied Ascelin, who, like the rest of the French, never could manage to say Lincoln. “He says, ‘March to me, and with me to join the king at York.’”

“Then he says well. These fat acres will be none the leaner, if I leave the English slaves to crop them for six months. Men! arm and horse Sir Robert of Deeping. Then arm and horse yourselves. We march north in half an hour, bag and baggage, scrip and scrippage. You are all bachelors, like me, and travel light. So off with you!—Sir Ascelin, you will eat and drink?”

“That will I.”

“Quick, then, butler! and after that pack up the Englishman’s plate-chest, which we inherited by right of fist,—the only plate and the only title-deeds I ever possessed.”

“Now, Sir Ascelin,”—as the three knights, the lady, and the poor children ate their fastest,—“listen to me. The art of war lies in this one nutshell,—to put the greatest number of men into one place at one time, and let all other places shift. To strike swiftly, and strike heavily. That is the rule of our liege lord, King William; and by it he will conquer England, or the world, if he will; and while he does that, he shall never say that Ivo Taillebois stayed at home to guard his own manors while he could join his king, and win all the manors of England once and for all.”