Hereward, the Last of the English by Charles Kingsley (best self help books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Kingsley
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And every Englishman shouted, “Hereward has right! We will live and die fighting the French!”
And Sweyn Ulfsson rose again, and said with a great oath, “That if there had been three such men as Hereward in England, all would have gone well.”
Hereward laughed. “Thou art wrong for once, wise king. We have failed, just because there were a dozen men in England as good as me, every man wanting his own way; and too many cooks have spoiled the broth. What we wanted is, not a dozen men like me, but one like thee, to take us all by the back of the neck and shake us soundly, and say, ‘Do that, or die!’”
And so, after much talk, the meeting broke up. And when it broke up, there came to Hereward in the hall a noble-looking man of his own age, and put his hand within his, and said,—
“Do you not know me, Hereward Leofricsson?”
“I know thee not, good knight, more pity; but by thy dress and carriage, thou shouldest be a true Viking’s son.”
“I am Sigtryg Ranaldsson, now King of Waterford. And my wife said to me, ‘If there be treachery or faint-heartedness, remember this,—that Hereward Leofricsson slew the Ogre, and Hannibal of Gweek likewise, and brought me safe to thee. And, therefore, if thou provest false to him, niddering thou art; and no niddering is spouse of mine.’”
“Thou art Sigtryg Ranaldsson?” cried Hereward, clasping him in his arms, as the scenes of his wild youth rushed across his mind. “Better is old wine than new, and old friends likewise.”
“And I, and my five ships, are thine to death. Let who will go back.”
“They must go,” said Hereward, half-peevishly. “Sweyn has right, and Osbiorn too. The game is played out. Sweep the chessmen off the board, as Earl Ulf did by Canute the king.”
“And lost his life thereby. I shall stand by, and see thee play the last pawn.”
“And lose thy life equally.”
“What matter? I heard thee sing,—
‘A bed-death, a priest death, A straw death, a cow death, Such death likes not me!’Nor likes it me either, Hereward Leofricsson.”
So the Danes sailed away: but Sigtryg Ranaldsson and his five ships remained.
Hereward went to the minster tower, and watched the Ouse flashing with countless oars northward toward Southrey Fen. And when they were all out of sight, he went back, and lay down on his bed and wept,—once and for all. Then he arose, and went down into the hall to abbots and monks, and earls and knights, and was the boldest, cheeriest, wittiest of them all.
“They say,” quoth he to Torfrida that night, “that some men have gray heads on green shoulders. I have a gray heart in a green body.”
“And my heart is growing very gray, too,” said Torfrida.
“Certainly not thy head.” And he played with her raven locks.
“That may come, too; and too soon.”
For, indeed, they were in very evil case.
CHAPTER XXVIII. — HOW THEY FOUGHT AT ALDRETH.
When William heard that the Danes were gone, he marched on Ely, as on an easy prey.
Ivo Taillebois came with him, hungry after those Spalding lands, the rents whereof Hereward had been taking for his men for now twelve months. William de Warrenne was there, vowed to revenge the death of Sir Frederic, his brother. Ralph Guader was there, flushed with his success at Norwich. And with them all the Frenchmen of the east, who had been either expelled from their lands, or were in fear of expulsion.
With them, too, was a great army of mercenaries, ruffians from all France and Flanders, hired to fight for a certain term, on the chance of plunder or of fiefs in land. Their brains were all aflame with the tales of inestimable riches hidden in Ely. There were there the jewels of all the monasteries round; there were the treasures of all the fugitive English nobles; there were there—what was there not? And they grumbled, when William halted them and hutted them at Cambridge, and began to feel cautiously the strength of the place,—which must be strong, or Hereward and the English would not have made it their camp of refuge.
Perhaps he rode up to Madingley windmill, and saw fifteen miles away, clear against the sky, the long line of what seemed naught but a low upland park, with the minster tower among the trees; and between him and them, a rich champaign of grass, over which it was easy enough to march all the armies of Europe; and thought Ely an easy place to take. But men told him that between him and those trees lay a black abyss of mud and peat and reeds, Haddenham fen and Smithy fen, with the deep sullen West water or “Ald-reche” of the Ouse winding through them. The old Roman road was sunk and gone long since under the bog, whether by English neglect, or whether (as some think) by actual and bodily sinking of the whole land. The narrowest space between dry land and dry land was a full half-mile; and how to cross that half-mile, no man knew.
What were the approaches on the west? There were none. Beyond Earith, where now run the great washes of the Bedford Level, was a howling wilderness of meres, seas, reed-ronds, and floating alder-beds, through which only the fen-men wandered, with leaping-pole and log canoe.
What in the east? The dry land neared the island on that side. And it may be that William rowed round by Burwell to Fordham and Soham, and thought of attempting the island by way of Barraway, and saw beneath him a labyrinth of islands, meres, fens, with the Ouse, now increased by the volume of the Cam, lying deep and broad between Barraway and Thetford-in-the-Isle; and saw, too, that a disaster in that labyrinth might be a destruction.
So he determined on the near and straight path, through Long Stratton and Willingham, down the old bridle-way from Willingham ploughed field,—every village there, and in the isle likewise, had and has still its “field,” or ancient clearing of ploughed land,—and then to try that terrible
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