Hereward, the Last of the English Part 71

"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 m.u.f.fled the sounds came to them through the still night; and they lay there spell-bound, as in a nightmare, as men a.s.sisting 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 l.u.s.ty 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 la.s.s!" said he, as they pushed off; and the good la.s.s, 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 c.o.xcombs, 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 G.o.d or man.

"And Ra.n.a.ld 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 x.x.xIV.

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.