Hereward, the Last of the English Part 51

Doubtless William would have so done if he could. Doubtless the angry and disappointed English raised such accusations against the earl, believing them to be true. But is not the simpler cause of Osbiorn's conduct to be found in this plain fact? He had sailed from Denmark to put Sweyn, his brother, on the throne. He found, on his arrival, that Gospatrick and Waltheof had seized it in the name of Edgar Atheling. What had he to do more in England, save what he did?--go out into the Humber, and winter safely there, waiting till Sweyn should come with reinforcements in the spring?

Then William had his revenge. He destroyed, in the language of Scripture, "the life of the land." Far and wide the farms were burnt over their owners' heads, the growing crops upon the ground; the horses were houghed, the cattle driven off; while of human death and misery there was no end.

Yorks.h.i.+re, and much of the neighboring counties, lay waste, for the next nine years. It did not recover itself fully till several generations after.

The Danes had boasted that they would keep their Yule at York. William kept his Yule there instead. He sent to Winchester for the regalia of the Confessor; and in the midst of the blackened ruins, while the English, for miles around, wandered starving in the snows, feeding on carrion, on rats and mice, and, at last, upon each other's corpses, he sat in his royal robes, and gave away the lands of Edwin and Morcar to his liegemen. And thus, like the Romans, from whom he derived both his strategy and his civilization, he "made a solitude and called it peace."

He did not give away Waltheof's lands; and only part of Gospatrick's. He wanted Gospatrick; he loved Waltheof, and wanted him likewise.

Therefore, through the desert which he himself had made, he forced his way up to the Tees a second time, over snow-covered moors; and this time St.

Cuthbert had sent no fog, being satisfied, presumably, with William's orthodox attachment to St. Peter and Rome; so the Conqueror treated quietly with Waltheof and Gospatrick, who lay at Durham.

Gospatrick got back his ancestral earldom from Tees to Tyne; and paid down for it much hard money and treasure; bought it, in fact, he said.

Waltheof got back his earldom, and much of Morcar's. From the fens to the Tees was to be his province. And then, to the astonishment alike of Normans and English, and it may be, of himself, he married Judith, the Conqueror's niece; and became, once more, William's loved and trusted friend--or slave.

It seems inexplicable at first sight. Inexplicable, save as an instance of that fascination which the strong sometimes exercise over the weak.

Then William turned southwest. Edwin, wild Edric, the dispossessed Thane of Shrops.h.i.+re, and the wilder Blethwallon and his Welshmen, were still harrying and slaying. They had just attacked Shrewsbury. William would come upon them by a way they thought not of.

So over the backbone of England, by way, probably, of Halifax, or Huddersfield, through pathless moors and bogs, down towards the plains of Lancas.h.i.+re and Ches.h.i.+re, he pushed over and on. His soldiers from the plains of sunny France could not face the cold, the rain, the bogs, the hideous gorges, the valiant peasants,--still the finest and shrewdest race of men in all England,--who set upon them in wooded glens, or rolled stones on them from the limestone crags. They prayed to be dismissed, to go home.

"Cowards might go back," said William; "he should go on. If he could not ride, he would walk. Whoever lagged, he would be foremost." And, cheered by his example, the army at last debouched upon the Ches.h.i.+re flats.

Then he fell upon Edwin, as he had fallen upon Morcar. He drove the wild Welsh through the pa.s.s of Mold, and up into their native hills. He laid all waste with fire and sword for many a mile, as Domesday-book testifies to this day. He strengthened the walls of Chester, and trampled out the last embers of rebellion; he went down south to Salisbury, King of England once again.

Why did he not push on at once against the one rebellion left alight,--that of Hereward and his fenmen?

It may be that he understood him and them. It may be that he meant to treat with Sweyn, as he had done, if the story be true, with Osbiorn. It is more likely that he could do no more; that his army, after so swift and long a campaign, required rest. It may be that the time of service of many of his mercenaries was expired. Be that as it may, he mustered them at Old Sarum,--the Roman British burgh which still stands on the down side, and rewarded them, according to their deserts, from the lands of the conquered English.

How soon Hereward knew all this, or how he pa.s.sed the winter of 1070-71, we cannot tell. But to him it must have been a winter of bitter perplexity.

It was impossible to get information from Edwin; and news from York was almost as impossible to get, for Gilbert of Ghent stood between him and it.

He felt himself now pent in, all but trapped. Since he had set foot last in England ugly things had risen up, on which he had calculated too little,--namely, Norman castles. A whole ring of them in Norfolk and Suffolk cut him off from the south. A castle at Cambridge closed the south end of the fens; another at Bedford, the western end; while Lincoln Castle to the north, cut him off from York.

His men did not see the difficulty; and wanted him to march towards York, and clear all Lindsay and right up to the Humber.

Gladly would he have done so, when he heard that the Danes were wintering in the Humber.

"But how can we take Lincoln Castle without artillery, or even a battering-ram?"

"Let us march past, it then, and leave it behind."

"Ah, my sons," said Hereward, laughing sadly, "do you suppose that the Mamzer spends his time--and Englishmen's life and labor--in heaping up those great stone mountains, that you and I may walk past them? They are put there just to prevent our walking past, unless we choose to have the garrison sallying out to attack our rear, and cut us off from home, and carry off our women into the bargain, when our backs are turned."

The English swore, and declared that they had never thought of that.

"No. We drink too much ale this side of the Channel, to think of that,--or of anything beside."

"But," said Leofwin Prat, "if we have no artillery, we can make some."

"Spoken like yourself, good comrade. If we only knew how."

"I know," said Torfrida. "I have read of such things in books of the ancients, and I have watched them making continually,--I little knew why, or that I should ever turn engineer."

"What is there that you do not know?" cried they all at once. And Torfrida actually showed herself a fair practical engineer.

But where was iron to come from? Iron for catapult springs, iron for ram heads, iron for bolts and bars?

"Torfrida," said Here ward, "yon are wise. Can you use the divining-rod?

"Why, my knight?"

"Because there might be iron ore in the wolds; and if you could find it by the rod, we might get it up and smelt it."

Torfrida said humbly that she would try; and walked with the divining-rod between her pretty fingers for many a mile in wood and wold, wherever the ground looked red and rusty. But she never found any iron.

"We must take the tires off the cart-wheels," said Leofwin Prat.

"But how will the carts do without? For we shall want them if we march."

"In Provence, where I was born, the wheels of the carts are made out of one round piece of wood. Could we not cut out wheels like them?" asked Torfrida.

"You are the wise woman, as usual," said Hereward.

Torfrida burst into a violent flood of tears, no one knew why.

There came over her a vision of the creaking carts, and the little sleek oxen, dove-colored and dove-eyed, with their canvas mantles tied neatly on to keep off heat and flies, lounging on with their light load of vine and olive twigs beneath the blazing southern sun. When should she see the sun once more? She looked up at the brown branches overhead, howling in the December gale, and down at the brown fen below, dying into mist and darkness as the low December sun died down; and it seemed as if her life was dying down with it. There would be no more sun, and no more summers, for her upon this earth.

None certainly for her poor old mother. Her southern blood was chilling more and more beneath the bitter sky of Kesteven. The fall of the leaf had brought with it rheumatism, ague, an many miseries. Cunning old leech-wives treated the French lady with tonics, mugwort, and bogbean, and good wine enow, But, like David of old, she got no heat; and before Yule-tide came, she had prayed herself safely out of this world, and into the world to come. And Torfrida's heart was the more light when she saw her go.

She was absorbed utterly in Hereward and his plots. She lived for nothing else; and clung to them all the more fiercely, the more desperate they seemed.

So that small band of gallant men labored on, waiting for the Danes, and trying to make artillery and take Lincoln Keep. And all the while--so unequal is fortune when G.o.d so wills--throughout the Southern Weald, from Hastings to Hind-head, every copse glared with charcoal-heaps, every glen was burrowed with iron diggings, every hammer-pond stamped and gurgled night and day, smelting and forging English iron, wherewith the Frenchmen might slay Englishmen.

William--though perhaps he knew it not himself--had, in securing Suss.e.x and Surrey, secured the then great iron-field of England, and an unlimited supply of weapons; and to that circ.u.mstance, it may be, as much as to any other, the success of his campaigns may be due.

It must have been in one of these December days that a handful of knights came through the Bruneswold, mud and blood bespattered, urging on tired horses, as men desperate and foredone. And the foremost of them all, when he saw Hereward at the gate of Bourne, leaped down, and threw his arms round his neck and burst into bitter weeping.

"Hereward, I know you, though you know me not. I am your nephew, Morcar Algarsson; and all is lost."

As the winter ran on, other fugitives came in, mostly of rank and family.

At last Edwin himself came, young and fair, like Morcar; he who should have been the Conqueror's son-in-law; for whom his true-love pined, as he pined, in vain. Where were Sweyn and his Danes? Whither should they go till he came?

"To Ely," answered Hereward.

Whether or not it was his wit which first seized on the military capabilities of Ely is not told. Leofric the deacon, who is likely to know best, says that there were men there already holding theirs out against William, and that they sent for Hereward. But it is not clear from his words whether they were fugitives, or merely bold Abbot Thurstan and his monks.