THE WORKS OF IGS' THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD FOR THE ENGLISH READING ROOM 'X s - S "9 ^ " } r r x* -,/f fit ^\7T / & & "dft*** ^2 '/ 9 f / ^ / / L/ iM_^ L CT^. 6 - / / / ^ (r / CASTLE MOUND AT CAMBRIDGE Drawn from a photograph, and appears exclusively in this edition of Kingsley. This is still pointed out to visitors as the point from which William the Conqueror di- rected his attacks on Hereward. Although William landed in England September 28, 1066, and was crowned King at Westminster on December 25th, after that decisive battle of Hastings which decided the right of power between the English and Norman nations, it took almost five years more to complete the conquest of England. Hereward was killed in 1071. Ingulf says Vorfrida died about 1085. "Hereward the Wake" M THE BIDEFORD EDITION 1 NOVELS, POEMS &* LETTERS OF CHARLES K.INGSLEY HEREWARD THE WAKE VOLUME I BY CHARLES [KINGSLEY ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK AND LONDON THE CO-OPERATIVE PUBLICATION SOCIETY O^^^iO fi Copyright, 1898 BY J. F. TAYLOR & COMPANY Herewwd. Volume I. CONTENTS VOLUME I CHAPTER PAOB PRELUDK OF THE FENS i I. How HEREWARD WAS OUTLAWED, AND WENT NORTH TO SEEK HIS FORTUNES 23 II. How HEREWARD SLEW THE BEAR 69 III. How HEREWARD SUCCORED A PRINCESS OF CORNWALL 87 IV. How HEREWARD TOOK SERVICE WITH RANALD, KING OF WATERFORD na V. How HEREWARD SUCCORED THE PRINCESS OF CORNWALL A SECOND TIME 129 VI. How HEREWARD WAS WRECKED UPON THE FLANDERS SHORE 139 VII. How HEREWARD WENT TO THE WAR AT GUISNES 159 VIII. How A FAIR LADY EXERCISED THE MECHANI- CAL ART TO WIN HEREWARD'S LOVE ... 167 IX. How HEREWARD WENT TO THE WAR IN SCALD- MARILAND 175 X. How HEREWARD WON THE MAGIC ARMOR. . 185 XL How THE HOLLANDERS TOOK HEREWARD FOR A MAGICIAN 202 XII. How HEREWARD TURNED BERSERKER .... 204 XIII. How HEREWARD WON MARE SWALLOW ... 213 XIV. How HEREWARD RODE INTO BRUGES LIKE A BEGGARMAN 224 Vol. 12 A x Contents CHAPTER PACK XV. How EARL TOSTI GODWINSSON CAME TO ST. OMER 232 XVI. How HEREWARD WAS ASKED TO SLAY AN OLD COMRADE 246 XVII. How HEREWARD TOOK THE NEWS FROM STAN- FORD-BRIGG AND HASTINGS 257 XVIII. How EARL GODWIN'S WIDOW CAME TO ST. OMER 271 XIX. How HEREWARD CLEARED BOURNE OF FRENCH- MEN 293 XX. How HEREWARD WAS MADE A KNIGHT AFTER THE FASHION OF THE ENGLISH 311 To THOMAS WRIGHT, ESQ., F.S.A., ETC., ETC. MY DEAR WRIGHT, Thus does Hereward, the hero of your youth, reappear at last in a guise fitted for a modern drawing-room. To you is due whatever new renown he may win for himself in that new field. You first disin- terred him, long ago, when scarcely a hand or foot of him was left standing out from beneath the dust of ages. You taught me, since then, how to furbish his rusty harness, botch his bursten saddle, and send him forth once more, upon the ghost of his gallant mare. Truly he should feel obliged to you ; and though we cannot believe that the last infirmity of noble minds endures beyond the grave, or that any touch of his old vanity still stains the spirit of the mighty Wake, yet we will please ourselves why should we not ? with the fancy that he is as grateful to you as I am this day. Yours faithfully, C. KJNGSLEY. HEREWARD THE WAKE HEREWARD THE WAKE "LAST OF THE ENGLISH" PRELUDE OF THE FENS THE heroic deeds of Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remem- ber, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, how- ever, poets have so seldom sung of them ; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his " Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of theii doughty deeds, is a question not difficult to answer. In the first place, they have been fewer in num- ber. The lowlands of the world, being the richest spots, have been generally the soonest conquered, the soonest civilized, and therefore the soonest taken out of the sphere of romance and wild adven- ture, into that of order and law, hard work and common sense, as well as too often into the sphere of slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed. The lowland populations, for the same reasons, have been generally the first to deteriorate, 2 Hereward the Wake though not on account of the vices of civilization. The vices of incivilization are far worse, and far more destructive of human life ; and it is just because they are so, that rude tribes deteriorate physically less than polished nations. In the savage struggle for life, none but the strongest, healthiest, cunning- est, have a chance of living, prospering, and propa- gating their race. In the civilized state, on the contrary, the weakliest and the silliest, protected by law, religion, and humanity, have their chance likewise, and transmit to their offspring their own weakliness or silliness. In these islands, for in- stance, at the time of the Norman Conquest, the average of man was doubtless superior, both in body and mind, to the average of man now, simply because the weaklings could not have lived at all ; and the rich and delicate beauty, in which the wo- men of the Eastern Counties still surpass all other races in these isles, was doubtless far more common in proportion to the numbers of the population. Another reason why lowland heroes " carent vate sacro," is that the lowlands and those who live in them are wanting in the poetic and romantic elements. There is in the lowland none of that background of the unknown fantastic, magical, terrible, perpetually feeding curiosity and wonder, which still remains in the Scottish Highlands ; and which, when it disappears from thence, will remain embalmed forever in the pages of Walter Scott. Against that half-magical background his heroes stand out in vivid relief; and justly so. It was not put there by him for stage purposes ; it was there as a fact; and the men of whom he wrote were conscious of it, were moulded by it, were not ashamed of its influence. For Nature among the Of the Fens 3 mountains is too fierce, too strong for man. He cannot conquer her, and she awes him. He can- not dig down the cliffs, or chain the storm-blasts ; and his fear of them takes bodily shape : he be- gins to people the weird places of the earth with weird beings, and sees nixies in the dark linns as he fishes by night, dwarfs in the caves where he digs, half-trembling, morsels of iron and copper for his weapons, witches and demons on the snow-blast which overwhelms his herd and his hut, and in the dark clouds which brood on the untrodden moun- tain peak. He lives in fear : and yet, if he be a valiant-hearted man, his fears do him little harm. They may break out, at times, in witch-manias, with all their horrible suspicions, and thus breed cruelty, which is the child of fear: but on the whole they rather produce in man thoughtfulness, reverence, a sense, confused yet precious, of the boundless importance of the unseen world. His superstitions develop his imagination ; the moving accidents of a wild life call out in him sympathy and pathos ; and the mountaineer becomes instinc- tively a poet. The lowlander, on the other hand, has his own strength, his own "virtues," or manfulnesses, in the good old sense of the word : but they are not for the most part picturesque, or even poetical. He finds out, soon enough for his weal and his bane, that he is stronger than Nature : and right tyrannously and irreverently he lords it over her, clearing, delving, dyking, building, without fear or shame. He knows of no natural force greater than himself, save an occasional thunder-storm; and against that, as he grows more cunning, he insures his crops. Why should he reverence Nature? 4 Hereward the Wake Let him use her, and live by her. One cannot blame him. Man was sent into the world (so says the Scripture) to fill and subdue the earth. But he was sent into the world for other purposes also, which the lowlander is but too apt to forget. With the awe of Nature, the awe of the unseen dies out in him. Meeting with no visible superior, he is apt to become not merely unpoetical and irreverent, but somewhat of a sensualist and an atheist. The sense of the beautiful dies out in him more and more. He has little or nothing around him to refine or lift up his soul ; and unless he meet with a religion and with a civilization which can deliver him, he may sink into that dull brutality which is too common among the lowest classes of the English Lowlands, and remain for generations gifted with the strength and industry of the ox and with the courage of the lion, but alas ! with the intellect of the former and the self-restraint of the latter. Nevertheless, there may be a period in the his- tory of a lowland race when they, too, become historic for a while. There was such a period for the men of the Eastern and Central Counties ; for they proved it by their deeds. When the men of Wessex, the once conquering, and even to the last the most civilized, race of Britain, fell at Hastings once and for all, and struck no second blow, then the men of the Dane- lagh disdained to yield to the Norman invader. For seven long years they held their own, not knowing, like true Englishmen, when they were beaten; and fought on desperate, till there were none left to fight. Their bones lay white on every island in the fens ; their corpses rotted on gallows Of the Fens 5 beneath every Norman keep ; their few survivors crawled into monasteries, with eyes picked out, hands and feet cut off ; or took to the wild wood as strong outlaws, like their successors and repre- sentatives, Robin Hood, Scarlet, and Little John ; Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudeslee. But they never really bent their necks to the Norman yoke ; they kept alive in their hearts that proud spirit of personal independ- ence, which they brought with them from the moors of Denmark and the dales of Norway; and they kept alive, too, though in abeyance for a while, those free institutions which were without a doubt the germs of our British liberty. They were a changed folk since first they settled in that Danelagh ; since first in the days of King Beorhtric, " in the year 787, three ships of North- men came from Haeretha land, and the King's reeve rode to the place, and would have driven them up to the King's town, for he knew not what men they were : but they slew him there and then ; " and after that the Saxons and Angles began to find out to their bitter bale what men they were, those fierce Vikings out of the dark northeast. But they had long ceased to burn farms, sack convents, torture monks for gold, and slay every human being they met, in mere Berserker lust of blood. No Barnakill could now earn his nick- name by entreating his comrades, as they tossed the children on their spear-points, to " Na kill the barns." Gradually they had settled down on the land, intermarried with the Angles and Saxons, and colonized all England north and east of Wat- ling Street (a rough line from London to Chester), 6 Hereward the Wake as far as the Tees. 1 Gradually they had deserted Thor and Odin for " the White Christ ; " had their own priests and bishops, and built their own min- sters. The convents which the fathers had de- stroyed, the sons, or at least the grandsons, rebuilt ; and often, casting away sword and axe, they entered them as monks themselves; and Peter- borough, Ely, and above all Crowland, destroyed by them in Alfred's time with a horrible destruc- tion, had become their holy places, where they decked the altars with gold and jewels, with silks from the far East, and furs from the far North; and where, as in sacred fortresses, they, and the liberty of England with them, made their last unavailing stand. For a while they had been lords of all England. The Anglo-Saxon race was wearing out The 1 For the distribution of Danish and Norwegian names in England and the prevalence, north of the Danelagh, from Tees to Forth, of names neither Scandinavian nor Celtic, but purely Anglo-Saxon, consult the Rev. Isaac Taylor's book, " Words and Places." Bear in mind, meanwhile, that these names repre- sent for the most part, if not altogether, the Danish and Norse settlement at the end of the ninth century : but that this Scandi- navian element was further strengthened by the free men who conquered England under Sweyn and Canute, at the beginning of the eleventh century. These men seem to have become not so much settlers of great lands as an intrusive military aristocracy, who gave few or no names to estates, but amalgamated them- selves rapidly by marriage with the remnants of that English nobility which was destroyed at the battle of Assingdon. This fact explains the number of purely Anglo-Saxon names to be met with among Hereward's companions. Some of them, like " Goderic of Corby," themselves with English names, held manors with Danish ones, even in that part of Lincolnshire where the Scandinavian element was strongest. In fact, the aris- tocracies and the two races had been thoroughly amalgamated, not merely in the Danelagh, but over the greater part of England, and must be called, as in the case of King Harold Godwinsson, neither Saxons nor Anglo-Saxons, but rather Anglo-Danes. Of the Fens 7 men of Wessex, priest-ridden, and enslaved by their own aristocracy, quailed before the free Norsemen, among whom was not a single serf. The God-descended line of Cerdic and Alfred was exhausted. Vain, incapable, profligate kings, the tools of such prelates as Odo and Dunstan, were no match for such wild heroes as Thorkill the Tall, or Olaf Trygvasson, or Swend Forkbeard. The Danes had gradually seized, not only their own Danelagh and Northumbria, but great part of Wessex. Vast sums of Danegelt were yearly sent out of the country to buy off the fresh invasions which were perpetually threatened. Then Ethel- red the Unready, or rather Evil-counsel, advised himself to fulfil his name, and the curse which Dunstan had pronounced against him at the bap- tismal font. By his counsel the men of Wessex rose against the unsuspecting Danes; and on St. Bf ice's eve, A. D. 1002, murdered them all, or nearly all, man, woman, and child. It may be that they only did to the children as the fathers had done to them: but the deed was "worse than a crime ; it was a mistake." The Danes of the Danelagh and of Northumbria, their brothers of Denmark and Norway, the Orkneys and the east coast of Ireland, remained unharmed. A mighty host of Vikings poured from thence into England the very next year, under Swend Forkbeard and the great Canute ; and after thirteen fearful cam- paigns came the great battle of Assingdon in Essex where " Canute had the victory ; and all the English nation fought against him ; and all the nobility of the English race was there destroyed." That same year saw the mysterious death of Edmund Ironside, the last man of Cerdic's race 8 Hereward the Wake worthy of the name. For the next twenty- five years, Danish kings ruled from the Forth to the Land's End. A noble figure he was, that great and wise Canute, the friend of the famous Godiva, and Leo- fric, Godiva's husband, and Godwin Ulfnothsson, and Siward Digre; trying to expiate by justice and mercy the dark deeds of his blood-stained youth ; trying (and not in vain) to blend the two races over which he ruled ; rebuilding the churches and monasteries which his father had destroyed ; bring- ing back in state to Canterbury the body of Arch- bishop Elphege not unjustly called by the Saxons martyr and saint whom Tall Thorkill's men had murdered with beef bones and ox skulls, because he would not give up to them the money destined for God's poor ; rebuking, as every child has heard, his housecarles' flattery by setting his chair on the brink of the rising tide; and then laying his golden crown, in token of humility, on the high altar of Winchester, never to wear it more. In Winchester lie his bones, unto this day, or what of them the civil wars have left ; and by them lie the bones of his son Hardicanute, in whom, as in his half-brother Harold Harefoot, before him, the Danish power fell to swift decay, by insolence and drink and civil war; while with the Danish power England fell to pieces likewise. Canute had divided England into four great Earldoms, each ruled, under him, by a jarl, or earl, a Danish, not a Saxon title. At his death in 1036, the earldoms of Northum- bria and East Anglia the more strictly Danish parts were held by a true Danish hero, Siward Biorn, alias Digre, "the Stout," conqueror of Of the Fens 9 Macbeth, and son of the fairy bear; proving his descent, men said, by his pointed and hairy ears. Mercia, the great central plateau of England, was held by Earl Leofric, husband of the famous Lady Godiva. Wessex, which Canute had at first kept in his own hands, had passed into those of the famous Earl Godwin, the then ablest man in England. Possessed of boundless tact and cunning, gifted with an eloquence, which seems from the accounts remaining of it to have been rather that of a Greek than an Englishman; and married to Canute's niece, 1 he was fitted, alike by fortunes and by talents, to be the king-maker which he became. Such a system may have worked well as long as the brain of a hero was there to overlook it all. But when that brain was turned to dust, the history of England became, till the Norman Conquest, little more than the history of the rivalries of the two great houses of Godwin and Leofric. Leofric had the first success in king-making. He, though bearing a Saxon name, seems to have been the champion of the Danish party, and of Canute's son or reputed son, Harold Harefoot; and he succeeded, by the help of the Thanes north of Thames, and the lithsmen of London, which city was more than half Danish in those days, in 1 The Archaeological Journal, in vol. xi. and vol. xii., contains two excellent Articles on the Life and Death of Earl Godwin, from the pen of that able antiquary E. A. Freeman, Esq. By him the facts of Godwin's life have been more carefully investigated, and his character more fully judged, than by any author of whom I am aware; and I am the more bound to draw attention to these articles, because, some years since, I had a little paper controversy with Mr. Freeman on this very subject. I have now the pleasure of saying that he has proved himself to have been in the right, while I was in the wrong. io Hereward the Wake setting his puppet on the throne. But the blood of Canute had exhausted itself. Within seven years Harold Harefoot, and Hardicanute, who succeeded him, had died as foully as they lived ; and Godwin's turn had come. He, though married to a Danish princess, and acknowledging his Danish connection by the Norse names which were borne by his three most famous sons, Harold, Sweyn, and Tostig, constituted him- self (with a sound patriotic instinct) the champion of the men of Wessex, and the house of Cerdic. He had probably caused, or at least allowed, to be murdered, Alfred, the Etheling, King Ethel- red's son and heir-apparent, when he was support- ing the claims of Hardicanute against Harefoot; he now tried to atone for that crime (if indeed he actually committed it), by placing Alfred's younger brother on the throne, to become at once his king, his son-in-law, and his puppet. It had been well, perhaps, for England, had Godwin's power over Edward been even more complete than it actually was. The " Confessor " was, if we arc to believe the monks, unmixed virtue anJ piety, meekness and magnanimity; a model ruler of men. No wonder, therefore, that (according to William of Malmesbury) the hap- piness of his times (famed as he was both for miracles and the spirit of prophecy) was revealed in a dream to Brithwin, bishop of Wilton, who made it public ; for, meditating in King Canute's time on the near extinction of the royal race of the English, he was rapt up on high, and saw St. Peter consecrating Edward King. " His chaste life also was pointed out, and the exact period of his reign (twenty-four years) determined ; and Of the Fens n when he inquired about his posterity, it was an- swered, ' The kingdom of the English belongs to God. After Edward, He will provide a king according to His pleasure.' " But the conduct which earned him the title of Confessor was the direct cause of the Norman Conquest and the ruin of his people ; while those who will look at facts will see in the holy king's character little but what is pitiable, and in his reign little but what is tragical. Civil wars, invasions, outlawry of Godwin and his sons by the Danish and French parties ; then of Alfgar, Leofric's son, by the Saxon party ; the outlaws on either side attacking and plundering the English shores by the help of Norsemen, Welshmen, Irish and Danes any mercenaries who could be got together ; and then " In the same year Bishop Aldred consecrated the minis- ter at Gloucester to the glory of God and of St. Peter, and then went to Jerusalem with such splendour as no man had displayed before him ; " and so forth. The sum and substance of what was done in those " happy times " may be well described in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chron- icler for the year 1058. "This year Alfgar the earl was banished : but he came in again with violence, through aid of Griffin (the king of North Wales, his brother-in-law). And this year came a fleet from Norway. It is tedious to tell how these matters went." These were the normal phenomena of a reign which seemed, to the eyes of chroniclers, a holy and a happy one ; because the king refused, whether from spite or supersti- tion, to leave an heir to the house of Cerdic, and spent his time between prayer, hunting, the seeing 12 Hereward the Wake of fancied visions, the uttering of fancied prophe- cies, and the performance of fancied miracles. But there were excuses for him. An Englishman only in name, a Norman, not only by his mother's descent (she was aunt of William the Conqueror), but by his early education on the Continent, he loved the Norman better than the Englishman ; Norman knights and clerks filled his court, and often the high dignities of his provinces, and re- turned as often as they w r expelled ; the Norman- French language became fashionable; Norman customs and manners the signs of civilization ; and thus all was preparing steadily for the great catas- trophe, by which, within a year of Edward's death, the Norman became master of the land. We have gained, doubtless, by that calamity. By it England and Scotland, and in due time Ireland, became integral parts of the comity of Christendom, and partakers of that classic civilization and learn- ing, the fount whereof, for good or for evil, was Rome and the Pope of Rome : but the method was at least wicked ; the actors in it tyrannous, brutal, treacherous, hypocritical : and to say that so it must have been, that by no other method could the result (or some far better result) have been ob- tained, is it not to say that men's crimes are not merely overruled by, but necessary to the gracious designs of Providence ; and that to speak plainly the Deity has made this world so ill, that He is forced at times to do ill that good may come ? Against the new tyranny the free men of the Danelagh and of Northumbria rose. If Edward the descendant of Cerdic had been little to them, William the descendant of Rollo was still less. That French-speaking knights should expel them Of the Fens 13 from their homes, French-chanting monks from their convents, because Edward had promised the crown of England to William, his foreign cousin, or because Harold Godwinsson of Wessex had sworn on the relics of all the saints to be William's man, was contrary to their common-sense of right and reason. So they rose, and fought ; too late, it may be, and without unity or purpose ; and they were worsted by an enemy who had both unity and purpose; whom superstition, greed, and feudal discipline kept together, at least in England, in one compact body of unscrupulous and terrible confederates. And theirs was a land worth fighting for a good land and large : from Humbermouth inland to the Trent and merry Sherwood, across to Chester and the Dee, round by Leicester and the five burghs of the Danes; eastward again to Huntingdon and Cambridge (then a poor village on the site of an old Roman town) ; and then northward again into the wide fens, the land of the Girvii, where the great central plateau of England slides into the sea, to form, from the rain and river washings of eight shires, lowlands of a fertility inexhaustible, because ever-growing to this day. Into those fens, as into a natural fortress, the Anglo-Danish noblemen crowded down instinc- tively from the inland, to make their last stand against the French. Children of the old Vikings, or " Creekers," they took, in their great need, to the seaward and the estuaries, as other conquered races take to the mountains, and died like their forefathers, within scent of the salt sea from whence they came. They have a beauty of their own, these great fens, even now when they are dyked and drained, 14 Hereward the Wake tilled and fenced a beauty as of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Much more had they that beauty eight hundred years ago, when they were still, for the most part, as God had made them, or rather was making them even then. The low rolling uplands were clothed in primeval forest; oak and ash, beech and elm, with here and there, perhaps, a group of ancient pines, ragged and decayed, and fast dying out in England even then, though lingering still in the forests of the Scotch Highlands. Between the forests were open wolds, dotted with white sheep and golden gorse ; rolling plains of rich though ragged turf, whether cleared by the hand of man or by the wild fires which often swept over the hills. And between the wood and the wold stood many a Danish " town," with its clusters of low straggling buildings round the holder's house, of stone or mud below, and of wood above; its high dykes round tiny fields ; its flocks of sheep ranging on the wold; its herds of swine in the forest; and below, a more precious possession still its herds of mares and colts, which fed with the cattle and the geese in the rich grass-fen. For always, from the foot of the wolds, the green flat stretched away, illimitable, to an horizon where, from the roundness of the earth, the distant trees and islands were hulled down like ships at sea. The firm horse-fen lay, bright green, along the foot of the wold ; beyond it, the browner peat, or deep fen ; and among that, dark velvet alder beds, long lines of reed-rond, emerald in spring, and golden under the autumn sun ; shining " eas," or river-reaches ; broad meres dotted with a million fowl, while the cattle waded along their edges after Of the Fens 15 the rich sedge-grass, or wallowed in the mire through the hot summer's day. Here and there, too, upon the far horizon, rose a tall line of ashen trees, marking some island of firm rich soil. In some of them, as at Ramsey and Crowland, the huge ashes had disappeared before the axes of the monks; and a minster tower rose over the fen, amid orchards, gardens, cornfields, pastures, with here and there a tree left standing for shade. " Painted with flowers in the spring," with "pleasant shores embosomed in still lakes," as the monk- chronicler of Ramsey has it, those islands seemed to such as the monk terrestrial paradises. Overhead the arch of heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea ; and that vast- ness gave, and still gives, such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles. They might well have been star worshippers, those Girvii, had their sky been as clear as that of the East: but they were like to have worshipped the clouds rather than the stars, according to the too universal law, that mankind worship the powers which do them harm, rather than the powers which do them good. Their priestly teachers, too, had darkened still further their notion of the world around, as accursed by sin, and swarming with evil sp rits. The gods and fairies of their old mythology had been trans- formed by the Church into fiends, alluring or loathsome, but all alike destructive to man, against whom the soldier of God, the celibate monk, fought day and night with relics, Agnus Dei, and sign of Holy Cross. And therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword or axe, feared witches, ghosts, 1 6 Hereward the Wake pucks, wills-o'-the-wisp, werwolves, spirits of the wells and of the trees, and all dark, capricious", and harmful beings whom their fancy conjured up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its darker aspect. The foul exhalations of autumn called up fever and ague, crippling and enervating, and tempting, almost compelling, to that wild and desperate drinking which was the Scandinavian's special sin. Dark and sad were those short autumn days, when all the distances were shut off, and the air choked with foul brown fog and drenching rains from off the eastern sea; and pleasant the bursting forth of the keen northeast wind, with all its whirling snow-storms. For though it sent men hurrying out into the storm, to drive the cattle in from the fen, and lift the sheep out of the snow-wreaths, and now and then never to return, lost in mist and mire, in ice and snow ; yet all knew that after the snow would come the keen frost and bright sun and cloudless blue sky, and the fenman's yearly holiday, when, work being impossible, all gave themselves up to play, and swarmed upon the ice on skates and sledges, to run races, township against township, or visit old friends full forty miles away; and met everywhere faces as bright and ruddy as their own, cheered by the keen wine of that dry and bracing frost. Such was the Fenland ; hard, yet cheerful ; rear- ing a race of hard and cheerful men ; showing their power in old times in valiant fighting, and for many a century since in that valiant industry which has drained and embanked the land of the Girvii, till it has become a very Garden of the Lord. And the Of the Fens 17 Highlander who may look from the promontory of Peterborough, the " golden borough " of old time ; or from that Witham on the Hill, which once was a farm of Hereward the Wake's ; or from the tower of Crowland, while he and Torfrida sleep in the ruined nave beneath; or from the heights of that Isle of Ely which was so long the camp of refuge for English freedom ; over the labyrinth of dykes and lodes, the squares of rich corn and verdure, will confess that the lowlands, as well as the highlands, can at times breed gallant men. Most gallant of them all, and their leader in the fatal struggle against William, was Hereward the Wake, Lord of Bourne, and ancestor of that family of Wake, the arms of whom appear in front of this book. These, of course, are much later than the time of Hereward. Not so, probably, the badge of the " Wake Knot," in which (according to tradi- tion) two monks' girdles are worked into the form of the letter W. It and the motto "Vigila et ora," may well have been used by Hereward himself. I owe them (as I do numberless details and correc- tions) to the exceeding courtesy of that excellent antiquary, the Rev. E. Trollope, of Leasingham, in those parts. Hereward's pedigree is a matter of no import- ance, save to a few antiquaries, and possibly to his descendants, the ancient and honorable house of the Wakes. But as I have, in this story, followed facts as strictly as I could, altering none which I found, and inventing little more than was needed to give the story coherence, or to illustrate the manners of the time, I owe it to myself to give my reason for believing Hereward to have been the son Vol. 12 B 1 8 Hereward the Wake of Earl Leofric and Godiva, a belief in which I am supported, as far as I know, only by Sir Henry Ellis (Introduction to Domesday) and by Mr. Thomas Wright. The reasons against my belief (well known to antiquaries) are these Richard of Ely calls him simply the son of Leofric, Lord of Brunne, and of JEdiva ; and his MS. is by far the most important document relating to Hereward. But he says that the older MSS. which he con- sulted were so ruined by damp, and torn, that " vix ex eis principium a genitoribus ejus incep- tum, et pauca interim expressimus, et nomen ; " in fact, that he had much difficulty in making out Hereward's pedigree. He says, moreover, as to Leofric the Mass Priest's Anglo-saxon MSS., " In quibus (Anglicae literae) vero non licet non satis periti aut potius exarare deleta incognitarum liter- arum," which passage (whatever may have been the word now wanting to complete it) certainly con- fesses that he was but a poor adept at deciphering Anglo-Saxon MSS. He need hardly have con- fessed as much; for the misspellings of English names in his work are more gross than even those in Domesday; and it is not improbable that among the rest he may have rendered Godiva, or its English equivalent, by JEdiva. That he should have been ignorant that Leofric was not merely Lord of Bourne, but Earl of Mercia, will not seem surprising to those who know how utterly the English nobility were trampled into the mud. To the Normans they were barbarians without a name or a race. They were dead and gone, too; and who cared for the pedigree of a dead man whose lands had passed to another? Thus of Marlesweyn nothing is known. Of Edric Of the Fens 19 the Wild, a great chieftain in his day, all but nothing. Gospatric's pedigree has been saved, in part, by his relationship to Royalty, both Scotch and English; and Siward Digre's, like that of Gyda, his kinswoman, by their relationship with the kings of Denmark, and the Fairy Bear. But Gyda's husband, the great Earl Godwin, had be- come within three generations a "herdsman's son," and even Mr. Freeman's research and judgment cannot decide his true pedigree. As for Leofric, we know that he was son (according to Florence of Worcester) of Leofwin the Alderman, and had two brothers, one Norman, killed by Canute with Edric Streon 1017 (according to Ingulf); the other Edric Edwin, killed by the Welsh 1039. But we know no more. That Ingulf should make him die A. D. 1057, is not strange, in spite of his many mistakes ; for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the same date. But the monk, who probably a century or more after Ingulf, interpolated from Richard of Ely the pas- sage beginning, " At this time a nobleman, the Lord of Bourne, etc., sub anno 1062, may well have been ignorant that Leofric, Lord of Bourne, was also Earl of Mercia. But what need to argue over any statement of the so-called Ingulf, or rather " Ingulfic Cycle " ? I shall only add that the passage sub anno 1066, beginning " Herward, who has been previously mentioned," seems to be by again a different hand. Meanwhile the " Excerptum de Familia Here- wardi," calls him plainly the son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and the Lady Godiva; giving to her the same genealogy as is given by Richard of Ely to ^Ediva. 2O Hereward the Wake This account of Hereward's family is taken from a document of no greater antiquity than the fifteenth century, a genealogical roll of the Lords of Bourne and Deeping, who traced their descent and title to the lands from Hereward's daughter: but it was no doubt taken either from previously existing records, or from the old tradition of the family ; and, with no authority for contradicting it, and considering its general agreement with the other evidence, it is plain that Leofric of Bourne was generally understood to be the great Earl of Mercia of that name. But the strongest evidence of the identity be- tween Leofric of Bourne, and Leofric, Earl of Mercia, is to be found in Domesday Book. The Lord of Bourne at the time of the Con- quest, as is proved by the " Clamores de Kest- even," was Morcar, Leofric of Mercia's grandson. This one fact is all but conclusive, unless we sup- pose that Leofric of Bourne had been dispossessed of his " dominium " by Morcar, or by Earl Algar his father, or, again, by Earl Leofric his grand- father. But such an hypothesis accords ill with the amity between Morcar and Hereward ; and it is all but impossible that, if Hereward's family was then dispossessed, the fact should not appear in any of his biographies. But Domesday Book gives no hint of any large landholders in or near Bourne, save Morcar, Lord thereof, whose name still lingers in the " Morkery Woods," a few miles off; Edwin his brother; and Algar his father, a son of Earl Leofric and Godiva. The famous Godiva, also, was probably a Lincoln- shire woman, though the manors which she held in her widowhood were principally in Shropshire. Of the Fens 21 The domains of her ancestor, " The magnificent Earl Oslac," who lived in the days of King Edgar, were Deira, i. e. Danish Northumbria, from Humber to Tees; and he may have sprung from (as his name hints) the ancient kings of Deira. But charters (as far as we can trust them) connect him both with Peterborough and Crowland; and his descendant was Thorold of Bukenhale near Crow- land, sheriff of Lincoln, from whom the ancient Thorolds of those parts claim descent; and this Thorold appears, in a charter of 1061, attested by Leofric and Godiva, as giving the cell of Spalding to Crowland. The same charter describes the manor of Spalding as belonging to Earl Leofric. His son, Algar, whose name remains in Algarkirk, 1 1 The first Earl "Algar," who signs a charter in the days of Beorrhed, king of the Mercians, and who does doughty deeds about A. D. 870, is, to me, as mythical as the first " Morcard, Lord of Brune," who accompanies him ; the first Thorold of Bukenhale, who gave that place to Crowland about A. D. 806, and the first Leofric, or " Levric," Earl of Leicester (t. e. Mercia), who helps to found in Crowland, A. D. 716, a "monastery of black Monks." The monks of Crowland were, perhaps, trying to work on Hugh Evermue, Hereward's son-in-law, or Richard of Rulos, his grandson-in-law, as they were trying to work on the Norman kings, when they invented these charters of the eighth and ninth centuries, with names of Saxon kings, and nobles of Leofric and Godiva's house ; or, again, the land being notoriously given to Crowland by men of certain names, who were then of no authority as rebels and dispossessed, it was necessary to invent men of like names, who were safely en- trenched behind Saxon antiquity with the ancestors of Edward the Confessor. But in their clumsiness they seem to have mingled with them in the said charters and their mythic battles against the Danes, purely Danish names, such as Siward, Asketyl, Azer, Harding, Grimketyl, Wulfketyl, etc., which surely prove the fraud. Meanwhile, the very names of Levric, Algar, Morcar, Thorold, genuine or not, seem to prove that the houses of Leofric and Godiva were ancient rulers in these parts, whose phantoms had to be evoked when needed. 22 Hereward the Wake appears as a benefactor to Crowland. And, in fine, the great folk of Bourne, as well as Spalding, were without doubt the family of Leofric, Earl of Mercia and Chester, and of the Lady Godiva ; the parents, as I conceive, of Hereward. He would thus, on the death of Morcar, son of his elder brother Algar, take possession by natural right of the Lordship of Bourne, and keep up a special enmity against Ivo Taillebois, who had taken Spalding from his patrimony. Lastly, it is difficult to me to suppose that Here- ward would have been allowed to take the undis- puted command of a rebellion so aristocratic as that of the Fens, over the heads of three earls, Morcar among them, had he not possessed some such natural right of birth as an earl's son, and, probably, like most great English Earls' families, of ancient royal, and therefore God-descended, blood. On the supposition, too, that he was the last remaining heir of the Earls of Mercia, may be explained William's strong desire to spare his life and receive his homage ; as an atonement for his conduct to Edwin and Morcar, and a last effort to attach to himself the ancient English nobility. But of this enough, and more than enough ; and so to my story. CHAPTER I HOW HEREWARD WAS OUTLAWED, AND WENT NORTH TO SEEK HIS FORTUNES IN Kesteven of Lincolnshire, between the forest and the fen, lies the good market-town of Bourne, the birthplace, according to all tradition, of two great Englishmen ; of Cecil Lord Burleigh, justly remembered throughout all time, and of Hereward the Wake, not unjustly, perhaps, long forgotten. Two long streets meet opposite the house where Burleigh was born, one from Spal- ding and the eastern fens, the other from the forest, and the line of the old Roman road on the north. From thence the Watergang Street leads, by the side of clear running streams, to the old Priory church, and the great labyrinth of grass-grown banks, which was once the castle of the Wakes. Originally, it may be, those earthworks were a Roman camp, guarding the King Street, or Roman road, which splits off from the Ermine Street near Castor, and runs due north through Bourne to Sleaford. They may have guarded, too, the Car-dyke, or great Catchwater drain, which runs from Peterborough northward into the heart of Lincolnshire, a still-enduring monument of Roman genius. Their site, not on one of the hills behind, but on the dead flat meadow, was determined 24 Hereward the Wake doubtless by the noble fountain, bourn, or brunne, which rises among the earthworks, and gives its name to the whole town. In the flat meadow bubbles up still the great pool of limestone water, crystal clear, suddenly and at once; and runs away, winter and summer, a stream large enough to turn many a mill, and spread perpetual verdure through the fat champaign lands. The fountain was, doubtless, in the middle age, miraculous and haunted : perhaps in heathen times, divine and consecrate. Even till a late date, the millers of Bourne paid water-dues to those of a village some miles away: on the strength of the undoubted fact, that a duck put into Bourne Pool would pass underground into the millhead of the said village. Doubtless it was a holy well, such as were common in the eastern counties, as they are still in Ireland ; a well where rags, flowers, and other gew-gaws might have been seen hanging, offerings to the spirit of the well, whether one of those "nickers," "develen," or " luther-gostes," which St. Botulf met when he founded Boston near by, or one of those " fair ladies," " elves," or water-nymphs, who, exorcised from the North, still linger in the fountains of modern Greece. Exorcised, certainly, the fairy of Bourne was at an early date; for before the Conquest the Peter- borough monks had founded a cell outside the castle ditch, and, calling in the aid of the Chief of the Apostles against those spirits of darkness who peopled, innumerable, earth, air, water, and fen, had rechristened it as " Peterspool," which name it bears unto this day. Military skill has, evidently, utilized the waters of the Peterspool from the earliest times. They How Hereward was Outlawed 25 filled, at some remote period, the dykes at a great earthwork to the north, which has been over- looked by antiquaries, because it did not (seem- ingly) form part of the enceinte of the mediaeval castle of the Wakes. It still fills the dykes of that castle, whereof nothing remains now save banks of turf, and one great artificial barrow, on which stood the keep, even in Leland's time, it would seem, somewhat dilapidate. "There appear," he says, " grete ditches, and the dungeon hill of an ancient castle agayn the west end of the Priory. . . . It longgid to the Lord Wake ; and much service of the Wake fee is done to this Castelle, and every feodary knoweth his station and place of service." Of the stonework nothing now remains. The square dungeon, " a fayre and prettie building, with iv. square towers . . . hall, chambers, all manner of houses and offices for the lord and his train," l and so forth, is utterly gone. The gate- house, thirty feet high, with its circular Saxon (probably Norman) arch, has been pulled down by the Lords of Burleigh, to build a farm-house; the fair park is divided into fair meadows; and a large part of the town of Bourne is, probably, built of the materials of the Wakes' castle, and the Priory, which arose under its protection. Those Priory lands passed into the hands of Trollopes and Pochins, as did the lands of the castle into those of the Cecils ; and of that fee of the Wakes, all, as far as I know, is lost, fors I'honneur, which shone out of late in that hero of " Arrah," who proved, by his valor, pertinacity, and shiftfulness, not unworthy of his great ancestor Hereward. Verily the good old blood of England is not yet worn out. 1 Peak's account of the towns in Kesteven. 26 Hereward the Wake A pleasant place, and a rich, is Bourne now; and a pleasant place and rich must it have been in the old Anglo-Danish times, when the hall of Leofric, the great Earl of Mercia, stood where the Wakes' feudal castle stood in after years. To the south and west stretched, as now, the illimitable flat of fen, with the spires of Crowland gleaming bright between high trees upon the southern hori- zon : and to the north, from the very edge of the town fields rose the great Bruneswald, the forest of oak, and ash, and elm, which still covers many miles of Lincolnshire, as Bourne Wood, Grims- thorpe Park, and parks and woodlands without number. To the southwest it joined the great forest of Rockingham, in Northamptonshire. To the west, it all but marched with Charnwood For- est in Leicestershire, and to the northwest, with the great Sherwood, which covered Nottingham- shire, and reached over the borders of York- shire. Mighty fowling and fishing was there in the fen below, and mighty hunting on the weald above, where still haunt, in Grimsthorpe Park, the primeval red-deer, descendants of those who fell by Hereward's bow, ere yet the first Lovell had built his castle on the steep, or the Cistercian monks of Fountains had found out the deep-em- bowered Vale of God, and settled themselves in the glen beneath the castle walls. It is of those earlier days that this story tells; of the latter half of the eleventh century, and the eve of the Norman Conquest, when Leofric the Earl had the dominion in forest and manorial rights, in wood, and town, and fen ; and beside him, upon the rich strip of champaign, other free Danish holders, whose names may be still found in How Hereward was Outlawed 27 Domesday Book, held small estates; and owed, probably, some military service to the great earl at the hall within the Roman earthwork. The house of Bourne, as far as it can be recon- structed by imagination, was altogether unlike one of the tall and gloomy Norman castles which, in the course of the next few generations, must have taken its place. It was much more like a house in a Chinese painting : an irregular group of low build- ings, almost all of one story, stone below and timber above, with high-peaked roofs at least in the more Danish country affording a separate room, or rather house, for each different need of the family. Such a one may be seen in the illumina- tions of the century. In the centre of the building is the hall, with a door or doors opening out into the court ; and sitting thereat at the top of a flight of steps, the lord and lady, dealing clothes to the naked and bread to the hungry. Behind the hall is a round tower, seemingly the strong place of the whole house. It must have stood at Bourne upon the dungeon hill. On one side of the hall is a chapel ; by it a large room or bower for the ladies ; on the other side a kitchen : and stuck on to bower, kitchen, and every other principal building, lean-to after lean-to, the uses of which it is impossible now to discover. The house had grown with the wants of the family as many good old English houses have done to this day. Round it would be scattered barns and stables, in which grooms and herdsmen slept side by side with their own horses and cattle; beyond, the yard, garth, or garden-fence, high earth-banks with palisades on top, while the waters of the Peterspool wandered around outside all. Such was most probably the " villa," " ton," or 28 Hereward the Wake " town," of Earl Leofric, the Lord of Bourne ; such too, probably, the hall at Laughton-en-le-Morthem in Yorkshire, which belonged to his grandson Edwin, and therefore, probably, to him. Leofric's other residence, the Castle of Warwick, was already, it may be, a building of a more solid and Norman type, such as had been built already, here and there, for Edward the Confessor's French courtiers, by the hands of " Welisce men," i. e. French-speak- ing foreigners. 1 Known, I presume, to all is Lady Godiva, mis- tress of Bourne, the most beautiful as well as the most saintly woman of her day ; who, all her life, kept at her own expense thirteen poor folk wher- ever she went ; who, throughout Lent, watched in the church at triple matins, namely, one for the Trinity, one for the Cross, and one for St. Mary; who every day read the Psalter through, and so persevered in good and holy works to her life's end, the devoted friend of St. Mary, ever a virgin ; who enriched monasteries without number Leo- minster, Wenlock, Chester, St. Mary's Stow by Lincoln, Worcester, Evesham ; and who, above all, founded the great monastery in that town of Coventry, which has made her name immortal for another and a far nobler deed ; and enriched it so much, that no monastery in England possessed such abundance of gold, silver, jewels, and precious stones, besides that most precious jewel of all, the arm of St. Augustine, which not Lady Godiva, but her friend Archbishop Ethelnoth, presented to 1 One such had certainly been built in Herefordshire. Lap- penberg attributes it, with great probability, to Raoul, or Ralph the Stnller, nephew of Edward the Confessor, and a near relation of Leofric. How Hereward was Outlawed 29 Coventry ; having bought it at Pavia for a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold. 1 Less known, save to students, is her husband Leofric, whose bones lie by those of Godiva in that same minster of Coventry ; how " his counsel was as if one had opened the Divine oracles ; " very " wise," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, " for God and for the world, which was a blessing to all this nation ; " the greatest man, as I have said, in Edward the Confessor's court, save his still greater rival, Earl Godwin. Less known, again, are the children of that illus- trious pair ; Algar, or Alfgar, Earl of Mercia after his father, who died after a short and stormy life, leaving two sons, Edwin and Morcar, the fair and hapless young earls, always spoken of together, as if they had been twins ; a daughter, Aldytha, or Elfgiva married first (according to some) to Griffin, King of North Wales, and certainly after- wards to Harold, King of England ; and another, Lucia (as the Normans at least called her), whose fate was, if possible, more sad than that of her brothers. Their second son was Hereward, whose history this tale sets forth ; their third and youngest, a boy whose name is unknown. They had, probably, another daughter beside ; married, it may be, to some son of Leofric's stanch friend old Siward Digre ; and the mother, may be, of the two young Siwards, the " white " and the " red," who figure in chronicle and legend as the nephews of Hereward. But this last pedigree is little more than a conjecture. Be these things as they may, Godiva was the 1 William of Malmesbury. 30 Hereward the Wake greatest lady in England, save two : Edith, Harold's sister, the nominal wife of Edward the Confessor ; and Githa, or Gyda, as her own Danes called her, Harold's mother, niece of Canute the Great. Great was Godiva ; and might have been proud enough, had she been inclined to that pleasant sin. But always (for there is a skeleton, they say, in every house) she carried that about her which might well keep her humble ; namely, shame at the misconduct of Hereward, her son. Now on a day about the year 1054 while Earl Siward was helping to bring Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, to avenge his murdered brother-in-law, Lady Godiva sat, not at her hall-door, dealing food and clothing to her thirteen poor folk, but in her bower, with her youngest son, a two-years' boy, at her knee. She was listening with a face of shame and horror to the complaint of Herluin, Steward of Peterborough, who had fallen in this afternoon with Hereward and his crew of house- cretes. To keep a following of stout housecarles, or men-at-arms, was the pride as well as the duty of an Anglo-Danish Lord, as it was, till lately, of a Scoto-Danish Highland Laird. And Hereward, in imitation of his father and his elder brother, must needs have his following from the time he was but fifteen years old. All the unruly youths of the neighborhood, sons of free " Holders," who owed some sort of military service to Earl Leofric; Geri, Hereward's cousin ; Winter, whom he called his brother-in-arms ; the Wulfrics, the Wulfards, the Azers, and many another wild blade, had banded themselves round a young nobleman more unruly than themselves. Their names were al- How Hereward was Outlawed 3 1 ready a terror to all decent folk, at wakes and fairs, alehouses and village sports. They atoned, be it remembered, for their early sins, by making those names in after years a terror to the invaders of their native land : but as yet their prowess was limited to drunken brawls and faction-fights; to upsetting old women at their work, levying black- mail from quiet chapmen on the high-road, or bringing back in triumph, sword in hand and club on shoulder, their leader Hereward from some duel which his insolence had provoked. But this time, if the story of the steward was to be believed, Hereward and his housecarles had taken an ugly stride forward toward the pit. They had met him riding along, intent upon his psalter, home towards his abbey from its cell at Bourne " Whereon your son, most gracious lady, bade me stand, saying that his men were thirsty; and he had no money to buy ale withal, and none so likely to help him thereto as a fat priest for so he scandalously termed me, who, as your ladyship knows, am leaner than the minster bell-ropes, with fasting Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year, beside the vigils of the saints, and the former and latter Lents. " But when he saw who I was. as if inspired by a malignant spirit, he shouted out my name, and bade his companions throw me to the ground." "Throw you to the ground?" shuddered the Lady Godiva. " In much mire, madam. After which he took my palfrey, saying that heaven's gate was too lowly for men on horseback to get in thereat; and then my marten's fur gloves and cape which your gra- cious self bestowed on me, alleging that the rules 32 Hereward the Wake of my order allowed only one garment, and no furs save catskins and suchlike. And lastly I tremble while I relate, thinking not of the loss of my poor money, but the loss of an immortal soul took from me a purse with sixteen silver pen- nies, which I had collected from our tenants for the use of the monastery, and said blasphemously that I and mine had cheated your ladyship, and therefore him your son, out of many a fat manor ere now ; and it was but fair that he should tithe the rents thereof, as he should never get the lands out of our claws again ; with more of the like, which I blush to repeat And so left me to trudge hither in the mire." " Wretched boy ! " said the Lady Godiva, and hid her face in her hands ; " and more wretched I to have brought such a son into the world ! " The monk had hardly finished his doleful story, when there was a pattering of heavy feet, a noise of men shouting and laughing outside, and a voice above all calling for the monk by name, which made that good man crouch behind the curtain of Lady Godiva's bed. The next moment the door of the bower was thrown violently open, and in swaggered a noble lad eighteen years old. His face was of extraordinary beauty, save that the lower jaw was too long and heavy, and that his eyes wore a strange and almost sinister expression, from the fact that the one of them was gray and the other blue. He was short, but of immense breadth of chest and strength of limb ; while his delicate hands and feet and long locks of golden hair marked him of most noble, and even, as he really was, of ancient royal race. He was dressed in a gaudy costume, resembling on the whole that How Hereward was Outlawed 33 of a Highland chieftain. His wrists and throat were tattooed in blue patterns ; l and he carried sword and dagger, a gold ring round his neck, 2 and gold rings on his wrists. He was a lad to have gladdened the eyes of any mother : but there was no gladness in the Lady Godiva's eyes as she received him, nor had there been for many a year. She looked on him with sternness, with all but horror : and he, his face flushed with wine, which he had tossed off as he passed through the hall, to* steady his nerves for the coming storm, looked at her with smiling defiance, the result of long estrangement between mother and son. " Well, my lady," said he, ere she could speak, " I heard that this good fellow was here ; and came home as fast as I could, to see that he told you as few lies as possible." "He has told me," said she, "that you have robbed the church of God." "Robbed him, it may be, an old hoody crow, 1 Some antiquaries have denied, on the ground of insufficient evidence, that the English tattooed themselves. Others have referred to some such custom the secret marks by which heroes are so often recognized in old romances, as well as those by which Edith the Swan-neck is said to have recognized Harold's body on the field of Hastings. Hereward is, likewise, recognized by " signis satis exquisitis in corpore designantia vulnera tenuis- simorum cicatricum." I am not answerable for the Latin ; but as I understand it, it refers not to war-wounds but to very delicate marks. Moreover, William of Malmesbury, sub anno 1066, seems sufficiently explicit when he says that the English " adorned their skins with punctured designs." May not our sailors' fashion of tattooing their arms and chests with strange devices be a remnant of this very fashion, kept up, if not originated by, the desire that the corpse should be recognized after death ? 8 Earl Waltheof appears to Ingulf in a dream, a few years after, with a gold tore round his neck. 34 Hereward the Wake against whom I have a grudge of ten years' standing." " Wretched, wretched boy ! What wickedness next ? Know you not, that he who robs the Church robs God Himself? " " If a man sin against another," put in the monk from behind the curtain, " the judge shall judge him : but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for him?" "Who indeed?" cried Lady Godiva. "Think, think, hapless boy, what it is to go about the world henceforth with the wrath of Him who made it abiding on you cut off from the protection of all angels, open to the assaults of all devils ! How will your life be safe a moment, from lightning, from flood, from slipping knife, from stumbling horse, from some hidden and hideous death? If the fen-fiends lure you away to drown you in the river, or the wood-fiends leap on you in the thicket to wring your neck, of what use to you then the suffrages of the saints, or the sign of the holy cross ? What help, what hope, for you for me but that you must perish foully, and, it may be, never find a grave?" Lady Godiva as the constant associate of clerks and monks spoke after an artificial and Latinized fashion, at which Hereward was not wont to laugh and jest: but as he believed, no less than his pious mother, in innumerable devils and ghosts, and other uncanny creatures, who would surely do him a mischief if they could, he began to feel somewhat frightened ; but he answered none the less stoutly : " As for devils, and such like, I never saw one yet, by flood or field, night or day. And if one How Hereward was Outlawed 35 comes, I must just copy old Baldwin Bras-de-Fer of Flanders, and see whether the devil or I can hit hardest. As for the money I have no grudge against St. Peter ; and I will warrant myself to rob some one else of sixteen pennies erelong, and pay the saint back every farthing." " The saint takes not the fruits of robbery. He would hurl them far away, by might divine, were they laid upon his altar," quoth the steward. " I wonder he has not hurled thee away long ago, then, with thy gifts about thine ears ; for thou hast brought many a bag of grist to his mill, ere now, that was as foully earned as aught of mine. I tell thee, man, if thou art wise, thou wilt hold thy tongue, and let me and St. Peter settle this quarrel between us. I have a long score against thee, as thou knowest, which a gentle battery in the green- wood has but half paid off; and I warn thee not to make it longer by thy tongue, lest I shorten the said tongue for thee with cold steel." " What does he mean ? " asked Godiva, shud- dering. " This ! " quoth Hereward, fiercely enough ; " That this monk forgets that I have been a monk myself, or should have been one by now, if you, my pious mother, had had your will of me, as you may if you like of that baby there at your knee. He forgets why I left Peterborough Abbey, when Winter and I turned all the priest's books upside down, in the choir, and they would have flogged us me, the Earl's son me, the Viking's son me, the champion as I will be yet, and make all lands ring with the fame of my deeds, as they rang with the fame of my forefathers, before they became the slaves of monks ; and how, when Winter and I 36 Hereward the Wake got hold of the kitchen spits, and up to the top of the peat-stack by Bolldyke-gate, and held them all at bay there, a whole abbeyful of cowards there against two seven-years' children, it was that weasel there bade set the peat-stack alight under us, and so bring us down ; and would have done it, too, had it not been for my uncle Brand, the only man that I care for in this wide world. Do you think I have not owed you a grudge ever since that day, monk? And do you think I will not pay it? Do you think I would not have burned Peterborough Minster over your head before now, had it not been for Uncle Brand's sake? See that I do not do it yet. See that when there is another Prior in Borough you do not find Hereward the Berserker smoking you out some dark night, as he would smoke a wasps' nest. And I will, by " " Hereward, Hereward ! " cried his mother, "godless, god-forgotten boy, what words are these ? Silence, before you burden your soul with an oath which the devils in hell will accept, and force you to keep," and she sprang up, and seizing his arm, laid her hand upon his mouth. Hereward looked at her majestic face, once lovely, now stern and careworn ; and trembled for a moment. Had there been any tenderness in it, his history might have been a very different one ; but alas ! there was none. Not that she was in herself untender : but that her great piety (call it not superstition, for it was then the only form known or possible to pure and devout souls) was so out- raged by this insult to that clergy whose willing slave she had become, that the only method of reclaiming the sinner had been long forgotten in genuine horror at his sin. " Is it not enough," she How Hereward was Outlawed 37 went on sternly, " that you should have become the bully and the ruffian of all the fens? that Hereward the leaper, Hereward the wrestler, Here- ward the thrower of the hammer, sports after all only fit for the sons of slaves, should be also Here- ward the drunkard, Hereward the common fighter, Hereward the breaker of houses, Hereward the leader of mobs of boon companions who bring back to us, in shame and sorrow, the days when our heathen forefathers ravaged this land with fire and sword ? Is it not enough for me that my son should be a common stabber ? " " Whoever called me stabber to you, lies. If I have killed men, or had them killed, I have done it in fair fight." But she went on unheeding " Is it not enough that after having squandered on your fellows all the money that you could wring from my bounty, or win at your base sports, you should have robbed your own father, collected his rents behind his back, taken money and goods from his tenants by threats and blows : but that, after outraging them, you must add to all this a worse sin likewise, out- raging God, and driving me me who have borne with you, me who have concealed all for your sake to tell your father that of which the very telling will turn my hair to gray? " "So you will tell my father?" said Hereward, coolly. " And if I should not, this monk himself is bound to do so, or his superior, your uncle Brand." " My uncle Brand will not, and your monk dare not." " Then I must. I have loved you long and well: but there is one thing which I must love 38 Hereward the Wake better than you, and that is my conscience and my Maker." " Those are two things, my lady mother, and not one ; so you had better not confound them. As for the latter, do you not think that He who made the world is well able to defend His own property if the lands, and houses, and cattle, and money, which these men wheedle and threaten and forge out of you and my father, are really His property, and not merely their plunder? As for your conscience, my lady mother, really you have done so many good deeds in your life, that it might be beneficial to you to do a bad deed once in a way, so as to keep your soul in a wholesome state of humility." The monk groaned aloud. Lady Godiva groaned : but it was inwardly. There was silence for a moment. Both were abashed by the lad's utter shamelessness. "And you will tell my father?" said he again. " He is at the old miracle-worker's court at West- minster. He will tell the miracle-worker; and I shall be outlawed." " And if you be, wretched boy, whom have you to blame but yourself? Can you expect that the king, sainted even as he is before his death, dare pass over such an offence against Holy Church? " "Blame? I shall blame no one. Pass over? I hope he will not pass over it. I only want an ex- cuse like that for turning kempery-man knight- errant, as those Norman puppies call it like Regnar Lodbrog, or Frithiof, or Harold Hard- raade ; and try what a man can do for himself in the world with nothing to help him in heaven and earth, with neither saint nor angel, friend nor counsellor, to see to him, save his wits and his How Hereward was Outlawed 39 good sword. So send off the messenger, good mother mine ; and I will promise you I will not have him hamstrung on the way, as some of my housecarles would do if I but held up my hand ; and let the miracle-monger fill up the measure of his folly, by making an enemy of one more bold fellow in the world." And he swaggered out of the room. When he was gone, the Lady Godiva bowed her head into her lap, and wept long and bitterly. Neither her maidens nor the priest dare speak to her for nigh an hour : but at the end of that time she lifted up her head, and settled her face again, till it was like that of a marble saint over a minster door; and called for ink and paper, and wrote her letter ; and then asked for a trusty messenger who should carry it up to Westminster. " None so swift or sure," said the house steward, " as Martin Lightfoot." Lady Godiva shook her head. " I mistrust that man," she said. " He is too fond of my poor of the Lord Hereward." " He is a strange one, my lady, and no one knows whence he came, and I sometimes fancy whither he may go either : but ever since my Lord threatened to hang him for talking with my young master, he has never spoken to him, nor scarcely, indeed, to living soul. And one thing there is makes him or any man sure, as long as he is well paid ; and that is, that he cares for nothing in heaven or earth save himself and what he can get." So Martin Lightfoot was sent for. He came in straight into the lady's bedchamber, after the sim- ple fashion of those days. He was a tall, bony 40 Hereward the Wake man, as was to be expected from his nickname ; lean as a rake, with a long hooked nose, a scanty brown beard, and a high conical head. His only garment was a shabby gray woollen tunic which served him both as coat and kilt, and laced brogues of untanned hide. He might have been any age from twenty to forty ; but his face was disfigured with deep scars and long exposure to the weather. He dropped on one knee, holding his greasy cap in his hand, and looked, not at his lady's face, but at her feet, with a stupid and frightened expres- sion. She knew very little of him, save that her husband had picked him up upon the road as a wanderer some five years since ; that he had been employed as a doer of odd jobs and runner of messages; and that he was supposed from his taciturnity and strangeness to have something uncanny about him. " Martin," said the lady, " they tell me that you are a silent and a prudent man." " That am I. ' Tongue breaketh bane, Though she herself hath nane.'" "I shall try you: do you know your way to London? " " Yes. Cardyke, King Street, Ermine Street, London town." " To your lord's lodgings? " " Yes." " How long shall you be going there with this letter?" " A day and a half." " When shall you be back hither? " " On the fourth day." How Hereward was Outlawed 41 " And you will go to my lord and deliver this letter safely?" " Yes." " And safely bring back an answer? " " Nay, not that." "Not that?" Martin made a doleful face, and drew his hand first across his leg, and then across his throat, as hints of the doom which he expected. "He the Lord Hereward has promised not to let thee be harmed." Martin gave a start, and his dull eyes flashed out a moment; but the next he answered, as curtly as was his wont, " The more fool he. But women's bodkins are sharp, as well as men's knives." "Bodkins? Whose? What babblest of ? " " Them," said Martin, pointing to the bower maidens, girls of good family who stood round ; chosen for their beauty, after the fashion of those times, to attend on great ladies. There was a cry of angry and contemptuous denial, not unmixed with something like laughter, which showed that Martin had but spoken the truth. Hereward, in spite of all his sins, was the darling of his mother's bower ; and there was not one of the damsels but would have done anything short of murder to have prevented Martin carrying the letter. " Silence, man ! " said Lady Godiva, so sternly that Martin saw that he had gone too far. " How knows such as thou what is in this letter? " " All the town must know," said Martin, sullenly. " Best that they should, and know that right is done here," said she, trying to be stern. " I will take it," said Martin. He held out his Vol. 12 C 42 Hereward the Wake hand, took it, and looked at it, but upside down and without any attempt to read it. " His own mother ! " said he, after a while. "What is that to thee?" said Lady Godiva, blushing and kindling. " Nothing I had no mother. But God has one." "What meanest thou, knave? Wilt thou take the letter or no? " " I will take it." And he again looked at it, without rising off his knee. " His own father, too." " What is that to thee, I say again ? " " Nothing I have no father. But God's Son has one." " What wilt thou, thou strange man ? " asked she, puzzled and half-frightened ; " and how earnest thou, again I ask, to know what is in this letter? " " All the town, I say again, must know. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. On the fourth day from this I will be back." And Martin rose, and putting the letter solemnly into the purse at his girdle, shot out of the door with clenched teeth, as a man upon a fixed purpose which it would lighten his heart to carry out. He ran rapidly through the large outer hall, past the long oak table, at which Hereward and his boon companions were drinking and roistering. As he passed the young lord he cast on him a look so full of meaning, that though Hereward knew not what the meaning was, it startled him, and for a moment softened him. Did this man, who had sullenly avoided him for more than two years, whom he had looked on as a clod or a post in the field beneath his notice, since he could be of no use to him did this man still care for him ? Hereward had reason to know better than most, that there How Hereward was Outlawed 43 was something strange and uncanny about the man. Did he mean him well? Or had he some grudge against him, which made him undertake this journey willingly and out of spite possibly with the will to make bad worse? For an instant Hereward's heart misgave him. He would stop the letter at all risks. " Hold him ! " he cried to his comrades. But Martin turned to him, laid his finger on his lips, smiled kindly, and saying, " You promised ! " caught up a loaf from the table, slipped from amongst them like an eel, and darted through the door, and out of the close. They followed him to the great gate, and there stopped, some cursing, some laughing. To give Martin Lightfoot a yard of law was never to come up with him again. Some called for bows to bring him down with a parting shot. But Hereward forbade them; and stood leaning against the gate-post, watching him trot on like a lean wolf over the lawn, till he sprang upon the Car-dyke bank, and fled straight south into the misty fen. " Now, lads," said Hereward, " home with you all, and make your peace with your fathers. In this house you never drink ale again." They looked at him, surprised. " You are disbanded, my gallant army. As long as I could cut long thongs out of other men's hides, I could feed you like earls' sons : but now I must feed myself; and a dog over his bone wants no company. Outlawed I shall be, before the week is out; and unless you wish to be out- lawed too, you will obey orders, and home." " We will follow you to the world's end," cried some. 44 Hereward the Wake " To the rope's end, lads : that is all you will get in my company. Go home with you, and those who feel a calling, let them turn monks; and those who have not, let them learn * For to plough and to sow, And to reap and to mow, And to be a farmer's boy.' Good night" And he went in, and shut the great gates after him, leaving them astonished. To take his advice, and go home, was the simplest thing to be done. A few of them on their return were soundly beaten, and deserved it; a few were hidden by their mothers for a week in hay-lofts and hen-roosts, till their fathers' anger had passed away. But only one seems to have turned monk or clerk, and that was Leofric the Unlucky, godson of the great earl, and poet-in- ordinary to the band. The next morning at dawn Hereward mounted his best horse, armed himself from head to foot and rode over to Peterborough. When he came to the abbey-gate, he smote thereon with his lance-butt, till the porter's teeth rattled in his head for fear. " Let me in ! " he shouted. " I am Hereward Leofricsson. I must see my uncle Brand." " Oh, my most gracious lord," cried the porter, thrusting his head out of the wicket, " what is this that you have been doing to our steward ? " " The tithe of what I will do unless you open the gate ! " " Oh, my lord ! " said the porter, as he opened it, " if our Lady and St. Peter would but have How Hereward was Outlawed 45 mercy on your fair face, and convert your soul to the fear of God and man " "She would make me as good an old fool as you. Fetch my uncle the prior." The porter obeyed. The son of Earl Leofric was as a young lion among the sheep in those parts ; and few dare say him nay, certainly not the monks of Peterborough ; moreover, the good porter could not help being strangely fond of Hereward as was every one whom he did not insult, rob, or kill. Out came Brand, a noble elder : more fit, from his eye and gait, to be a knight than a monk. He looked sadly at Hereward. " ' Dear is bought the honey that is licked off the thorn,' quoth Hending," said he. " Hending bought his wisdom by experience, I suppose," said Hereward, " and so must I. So I am just starting out to see the world, uncle." " Naughty, naughty boy ! If we had thee safe here again for a week, we would take this hot blood out of thee, and send thee home in thy right mind." " Bring a rod and whip me, then. Try, and you shall have your chance. Every one else has had, and this is the end of their labors." " By the chains of St. Peter," quoth the monk, "that is just what thou needest. To hoist thee on such another fool's back, truss thee up, and lay it on lustily, till thou art ashamed. To treat thee as a man is only to make thee a more heady blown up ass than thou art already." " True, most wise uncle. And therefore my still wiser parents are going to treat me like a man indeed, and send me out into the world to seek my fortunes ! " "Eh?" " They are going to prove how thoroughly they 46 Hereward the Wake trust me to take care of myself, by outlawing me. Eh? say I in return. Is not that an honor, and a proof that I have not shown myself a fool, though I may have a madman?" "Outlaw you? Oh, my boy, my darling, my pride ! Get off thy horse, and don't sit up there, hand on hip, like a turbaned Saracen, defying God and man : but come down and talk reason to me, for the sake of St. Peter and all saints." Hereward threw himself off his horse, and threw his arms round his uncle's neck. " Pish ! Now, uncle, don't cry, do what you will ; lest I cry too. Help me to be a man while I live, even if I go to the black place when I die." " It shall not be ! " . . . and the monk swore by all the relics in Peterborough minster. " It must be. It shall be. I like to be outlawed. I want to be outlawed. It makes one feel like a man. There is not an earl in England, save my father, who has not been outlawed in his time. My brother Algar will be outlawed before he dies, if he has the spirit of a man in him. It is the fashion, my uncle, and I must follow it. So hey for the merry greenwood, and the long ships, and the swan's bath, and all the rest of it. Uncle, you will lend me fifty silver pennies ? " " I ? I would not lend thee one, if I had it, which I have not. And yet, old fool that I am, I believe I would." " I would pay thee back honestly. I shall go down to Constantinople to the Varangers, get my Polotaswarf l out of the Kaiser's treasure, and pay thee back five to one." 1 See " The Heimskringla," Harold Hardraade's Saga, for the meaning of this word. How Hereward was Outlawed 47 " What does this son of Belial here ? " asked an austere voice. " Ah ! Abbot Leofric, my very good lord. I have come to ask hospitality of you for some three days. By that time I shall be a wolfs head, and out of the law : and then, if you will give me ten minutes' start, you may put your bloodhounds on my track, and see which run fastest, they or I. You are a gentleman, and a man of honor; so I trust you to feed my horse fairly the meanwhile, and not to let your monks poison me." The abbot's face relaxed. He tried to look as solemn as he could ; but he ended in bursting into a very great laughter. " The insolence of this lad passes the miracles of all saints. He robs St. Peter on the highway, breaks into his abbey, insults him to his face, and then asks him for hospitality ; and " " And gets it," quoth Hereward. " What is to be done with him, Brand, my friend ? If we turn him out " " Which we cannot do," said Brand, looking at the well-mailed and armed lad, " without calling in half-a-dozen of our men-at-arms." " In which case there would be blood shed and scandal made in the holy precincts." " And nothing gained ; for yield he would not till he was killed outright, which Heaven forbid ! " " Amen. And if he stay here, he may be per- suaded to repentance." "And restitution." " As for that," quoth Hereward (who had remounted his horse from prudential motives, and set him athwart the gateway, so that there was no chance of the doors being slammed behind 48 Hereward the Wake him), " if either of you will lend me sixteen pennies, I will pay them back to you and St. Peter before I die, with interest enough to satisfy any Jew, on the word of a gentleman and an earl's son." The abbot burst again into a great laughter. " Come in, thou graceless renegade, and we will see to thee and thy horse; and I will pray to St. Peter; and I doubt not he will have patience with thee, for he is very merciful ; and after all, thy parents have been exceeding good to us, and the righteousness of the father, like his sins, is sometimes visited on the children." Now, why were the two ecclesiastics so uncanoni- cally kind to this wicked youth? Perhaps because both the old bachelors were wishing from their hearts that they had just such a son of their own. And beside, Earl Leofric was a very great man indeed ; and the wind might change; for it is an unstable world. " Only, mind one thing," said the naughty boy, as he dismounted, and halloed to a lay-brother to see to his horse " don't let me see the face of that Herluin." "And why? You have wronged him, and he will forgive you, doubtless, like a good Christian as he is." "That is his concern. But if I see him, I cut off his head. And, as uncle Brand knows, I always sleep with my sword under my pillow." " Oh, that such a mother should have borne such a son ! " groaned the abbot, as they went in. On the fifth day came Martin Lightfoot, and found Hereward in Prior Brand's private cell. "Well?" asked Hereward, coolly. How Hereward was Outlawed 49 " Is he ? Is he ? " stammered Brand, and could not finish his sentence. Martin nodded. Hereward laughed a loud, swaggering, uneasy laugh. " See what it is to be born of just and pious parents. Come, Master Trot-alone, speak out and tell us all about it. Thy lean wolf's legs have run to some purpose. Open thy lean wolf's mouth and speak for once, lest I ease thy legs for the rest of thy life by a cut across the hams. Find thy lost tongue, I say ! " " Walls have ears, as well as the wild wood," said Martin. " We are safe here," said the prior ; " so speak, and tell us the whole truth." "Well, when the earl read the letter he turned red, and pale again, and then naught but ' Men, follow me to the king at Westminster.' So we went, all with our weapons, twenty or more, along the Strand, and up into the king's new hall; and a grand hall it is, but not easy to get into, for the crowd of monks and beggars on the stairs, hinder- ing honest folks' business. And there sat the king on a high settle, with his pink face and white hair, looking as royal as a bell-wether new washed ; and on either side of him, on the same settle, sat the old fox and the young wolf." 1 "Godwin and Harold? And where was the queen?" " Sitting on a stool at his feet, with her hands together as if she were praying, and her eyes down- cast, as demure as any cat. And so is fulfilled the 1 It must be remembered that the house of Godwin is spoken of throughout this book by hereditary enemies. 50 Hereward the Wake story, how the sheep dog went out to get married, and left the fox, the wolf, and the cat to guard the flock." " If thou hast found thy tongue," said Brand, " thou art like enough to lose it again by slice of knife, talking such ribaldry of dignities. Dost not know " and he sank his voice " that Abbot Leofric is Earl Harold's man, and that Harold himself made him abbot?" "I said Walls have ears. It was you who told me that we were safe. However, I will bridle the unruly one." And he went on. " And your father walked up the hall, his left hand on his sword-hilt, looking an earl all over, as he is." " He is that," said Hereward, in a low voice. " And he bowed ; and the most magnificent, powerful, and virtuous Godwin (is that speaking evil of dignities?) would have beckoned him up to sit on the high settle: but he looked straight at the kin