Hereward, the Last of the English

A shout from his nephew, Sir Ascelin, made all turn their heads. Behind them, on the open lawn, in the throat between the woods by which they had entered, were some forty knights, galloping toward them.

“Ivo?”

“No!” almost shrieked the Abbot. “There is the white-bear banner. It is Hereward.”

“There is Winter on his left,” cried one. “And there, with the standard, is the accursed monk, Ranald of Ramsey.”

And on they came, having debouched from the wood some two hundred yards off, behind a roll in the lawn, just far enough off to charge as soon as they were in line.

On they came, two deep, with lances high over their shoulders, heads and heels well down, while the green tufts flew behind them, “A moi, hommes d’armes!” shouted the Abbot. But too late. The French turned right and left. To form was impossible, ere the human whirlwind would be upon them.

Another half-minute and with a shout of “A bear! a bear. The Wake! the Wake!” they were struck, ridden through, hurled over, and trampled into the mud.

“I yield. Grace! I yield!” cried Thorold, struggling from under his horse; but there was no one to whom to yield. The knights’ backs were fifty yards off, their right arms high in the air, striking and stabbing.

The battle was “à l’outrance.” There was no quarter given that day.

   “And he that came live out thereof       Was he that ran away.”

The Abbot tried to make for the wood, but ere he could gain it, the knights had turned, and one rode straight at him, throwing away a broken lance, and drawing his sword.

Abbot Thorold may not have been the coward which Peter of Blois would have him, over and above being the bully which all men would have him; but if so, even a worm will turn; and so did the Abbot: he drew sword from thigh, got well under his shield, his left foot forward, and struck one blow for his life, and at the right place,—his foe’s bare knee.

But he had to do with a warier man than himself. There was a quick jerk of the rein; the horse swerved round, right upon him, and knocked him head over heels; while his blow went into empty air.

“Yield or die!” cried the knight, leaping from his horse, and kneeling on his head.

“I am a man of God, an abbot, churchman, Thorold.”

“Man of all the devils!” and the knight lugged him up, and bound his arms behind him with the abbot’s own belt.

“Ahoi! Here! I have caught a fish. I have got the Golden Borough in my purse!” roared he. “How much has St. Peter gained since we borrowed of him last, Abbot? He will have to pay out the silver pennies bonnily, if he wishes to get back thee.”

“Blaspheme not, godless barbarian!” Whereat the knight kicked him.

“And you have Thorold the scoundrel, Winter?” cried Hereward, galloping up. “And we have three or four more dainty French knights, and a viscount of I know not where among them. This is a good day’s work. Now for Ivo and his tail.”

And the Abbot, with four or five more prisoners, were hoisted on to their own horses, tied firmly, and led away into the forest path.

“Do not leave a wounded man to die,” cried a knight who lay on the lawn.

“Never we. I will come back and put you out of your pain,” quoth some one.

“Siward! Siward Le Blanc! Are you in this meinie?” cried the knight in French.

“That am I. Who calls?”

“For God’s sake save him!” cried Thorold. “He is my own nephew, and I will pay—”

“You will need all your money for yourself,” said Siward the White, riding back.

“Are you Sir Ascelin of Ghent?”

“That am I, your host of old.”

“I wish I had met you in better company. But friends we are, and friends must be.”

And he dismounted, and did his best for the wounded man, promising to return and fetch him off before night, or send yeomen to do so.

As he pushed on through the wood, the Abbot began to see signs of a fight; riderless horses crashing through the copse, wounded men straggling back, to be cut down without mercy by the English. The war had been “à l’outrance” for a long while. None gave or asked quarter. The knights might be kept for ransom: they had money. The wretched men of the lower classes, who had none, were slain: as they would have slain the English.

Soon they heard the noise of battle; and saw horsemen and footmen pell-mell, tangled in an abattis, from behind which archers and cross-bowmen shot them down in safety.

Hereward dashed forward, with the shout of Torfrida; and at that the French, taken in the flank, fled, and were smitten as they fled, hip and thigh.

Hereward bade them spare a fugitive, and bring him to him.

“I give you your life; so run, and carry my message. That is Taillebois’s banner there forward, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“Then go after him, and tell him,—Hereward has the Abbot of Burgh, and half a dozen knights, safe by the heels. And unless Ivo clears the wood of his men by nightfall, I will hang every one of them up for the crows before morning.”

Ivo got the message, and having had enough fighting for the day, drew off, says the chronicler, for the sake of the Abbot and his fellow-captives.

Two hours after the Abbot and the other prisoners were sitting, unbound, but unarmed, in the forest encampment, waiting for a right good meal, with Torfrida bustling about them, after binding up the very few wounded among their own men.

Every courtesy was shown them; and their hearts were lifted up, as they beheld approaching among the trees great caldrons of good soup; forest salads; red deer and roe roasted on the wood embers; spits of pheasants and partridges, larks and buntings, thrust off one by one by fair hands into the burdock leaves which served as platters; and last, but not least, jacks of ale and wine, appearing mysteriously from a cool old stone quarry. Abbot Thorold ate to his heart’s content, complimented every one, vowed he would forswear all Norman cooks and take to the greenwood himself, and was as gracious and courtly as if he had been at the new palace at Winchester.

And all the more for this reason,—that he had intended to overawe the English barbarians by his polished Norman manners. He found those of Hereward and Torfrida, at least, as polished as his own.

“I am glad you are content, Lord Abbot,” said Torfrida; “I trust you prefer dining with me to burning me, as you meant to do.”

“I burn such peerless beauty! I injure a form made only for the courts of kings! Heaven and all saints, knighthood and all chivalry, forbid. What Taillebois may have said, I know not! I am no more answerable for his intentions than I am for his parentage,—or his success this day. Let churls be churls, and wood-cutters wood-cutters. I at least, thanks to my ancestors, am a gentleman.”

“And, as a gentleman, will of course contribute to the pleasure of your hosts. It will surely please you to gratify us with one stave at least of that song, which has made your name famous among all knights,” holding out a harp.

“I blush; but obey. A harp in the greenwood? A court in the wilderness! What joy!”

And the vain Abbot took the harp, and said,—“These, if you will allow my modesty to choose, are the staves on which I especially pride myself. The staves which Taillefer—you will pardon my mentioning him—”

“Why pardon? A noble minstrel he was, and a brave warrior, though our foe. And often have I longed to hear him, little thinking that I should hear instead the maker himself.”

So said Hereward; and the Abbot sang—those wondrous staves, where Roland, left alone of all the Paladins, finds death come on him fast. And on the Pyrenaean peak, beneath the pine, he lays himself, his “face toward the ground, and under him his sword and magic horn, that Charles, his lord, may say, and all his folk, The gentle count, he died a conqueror”; and then “turns his eyes southward toward Spain, betakes himself to remember many things; of so many lands which he conquered valiantly; of pleasant France; of the men of his lineage; of Charlemagne, his lord, who brought him up. He could not help to weep and sigh, but yet himself he would not forget. He bewailed his sins, and prayed God’s mercy:—True Father, who ne’er yet didst lie, who raised St. Lazarus from death, and guarded Daniel from the lions, guard my soul from all perils, for the sins which in my life I did! His right glove then he offered to God; St. Gabriel took it from his hand; on his arm the chief bowed down, with joined hands he went unto his end. God sent down his angel cherubim, and St. Michael, whom men call ‘del peril.’ Together with them, St. Gabriel, he came; the soul of the count they bore to Paradise.”

And the Abbot ended, sadly and gently, without that wild “Aoi!” the war-cry with which he usually ends his staves. And the wild men of the woods were softened and saddened by the melody; and as many as understood French, said, when he finished, “Amen! so may all good knights die!”

“Thou art a great maker, Abbot! They told truths of thee. Sing us more of thy great courtesy.”

And he sang them the staves of the Olifant, the magic horn,—how Roland would not sound it in his pride, and sounded it at Turpin’s bidding, but too late; and how his temples burst with that great blast, and Charles and all his peers heard it through the gorges, leagues away in France. And then his “Aoi” rang forth so loud and clear, like any trumpet blast, under the oaken glades, that the wild men leaped to their feet, and shouted, “Health to the gleeman! Health to the Abbot Thorold!”

“I have won them,” thought the Abbot to himself. Strange mixture that man must have been, if all which is told of him is true; a very typical Norman, compact of cunning and ferocity, chivalry and poetry, vanity and superstition, and yet able enough to help to conquer England for the Pope.

Then he pressed Hereward to sing, with many compliments; and Hereward sang, and sang again, and all his men crowded round him as the outlaws of Judaea may have crowded round David in Carmel or Hebron, to hear, like children, old ditties which they loved the better the oftener they heard them.

“No wonder that you can keep these knights together, if you can charm them thus with song. Would that I could hear you singing thus in William’s hall.”

“No more of that, Sir Abbot. The only music which I have for William is the music of steel on steel.”

Hereward answered sharply, because he was half of Thorold’s mind.

“Now,” said Torfrida, as it grew late, “we must ask our noble guest for what he can give us as easily and well as he can song,—and that is news. We hear naught here in the greenwood, and must throw oneself on the kindness of a chance visitor.”

The Abbot leapt at the bait, and told them news, court gossip, bringing in great folks’ names and his own, as often and as familiarly mingled as he could.

“What of Richilda?” asked Torfrida.

“Ever since young Arnoul was killed at Cassel—”

“Arnoul killed?” shrieked Torfrida.

“Is it possible that you do not know?”

“How should I know, shut up in Ely for—years it seems.”

“But they fought at Cassel three months before you went to Ely.”

“Be it so. Only tell me. Arnoul killed!”

Then the Abbot told, not without feeling, a fearful story.

Robert the Frison and Richilda had come to open war, and Gerbod the Fleming, Earl of Clueter, had gone over from England to help Robert. William had sent Fitz-Osbern, Earl of Hereford, the scourge and tyrant of the Welsh, to help Richilda. Fitz Osbern had married her, there and then. She had asked help of her liege lord, the King of France, and he had sent her troops. Robert and Richilda had fought on St. Peter’s day, 1071,—nearly two years before, at Bavinchorum, by Cassel.

Richilda had played the heroine, and routed Robert’s left wing, taken him prisoner, and sent him off to St. Omer. Men said that she had done it by her enchantments. But her enchantments betrayed her nevertheless. Fitz Osbern, her bridegroom, fell dead. Young Arnoul had two horses killed under him. Then Gerbod smote him to the ground, and Richilda and her troops fled in horror. Richilda was taken, and exchanged for the Frison; at which the King of France, being enraged, had come down and burnt St. Omer. Then Richilda, undaunted, had raised fresh troops to avenge her son. Then Robert had met them at Broqueroie by Mons, and smote them with a dreadful slaughter. [Footnote: The place was called till late, and may be now, “The Hedges of Death.”] Then Richilda had turned and fled wildly into a convent; and, so men said, tortured herself night and day with fearful penances, if by any means she might atone for her great sins.

Torfrida heard, and laid her head upon her knees, and wept so bitterly, that the Abbot entreated pardon for having pained her so much.

The news had a deep and lasting effect on her. The thought of Richilda shivering and starving in the squalid darkness of a convent, abode by her thenceforth. Should she ever find herself atoning in like wise for her sorceries,—harmless as they had been; for her ambitions,—just as they had been; for her crimes? But she had committed none. No, she had sinned in many things: but she was not as Richilda. And yet in the loneliness and sadness of the forest, she could not put Richilda from before the eyes of her mind.

It saddened Hereward likewise. For Richilda he cared little. But that boy. How he had loved him! How he had taught him to ride, and sing, and joust, and handle sword, and all the art of war. How his own rough soul had been the better for that love. How he had looked forward to the day when Arnoul should be a great prince, and requite him with love. Now he was gone. Gone? Who was not gone, or going? He seemed to himself the last tree in the forest. When should his time come, and the lightning strike him down to rot beside the rest? But he tost the sad thoughts aside. He could not afford to nourish them. It was his only chance of life, to be merry and desperate.

“Well!” said Hereward, ere they hapt themselves up for the night. “We owe you thanks, Abbot Thorold, for an evening worthy of a king’s court, rather than a holly-bush.”

“I have won him over,” thought the Abbot.

“So charming a courtier,—so sweet a minstrel,—so agreeable a newsmonger,—could I keep you in a cage forever, and hang you on a bough, I were but too happy: but you are too fine a bird to sing in captivity. So you must go, I fear, and leave us to the nightingales. And I will take for your ransom—”

Abbot Thorold’s heart beat high.

“Thirty thousand silver marks.”

“Thirty thousand fiends!”

“My beau Sire, will you undervalue yourself? Will you degrade yourself? I took Abbot Thorold, from his talk, to be a man who set even a higher value on himself than other men set on him. What higher compliment can I pay to your vast worth, than making your ransom high accordingly, after the spirit of our ancient English laws? Take it as it is meant, beau Sire; be proud to pay the money; and we will throw you Sir Ascelin into the bargain, as he seems a friend of Siward’s.”

Thorold hoped that Hereward was drunk, and might forget, or relent; but he was so sore at heart that he slept not a wink that night. But in the morning he found, to his sorrow, that Hereward had been as sober as himself.

In fine, he had to pay the money; and was a poor man all his days.

“Aha! Sir Ascelin,” said Hereward apart, as he bade them all farewell with many courtesies. “I think I have put a spoke in your wheel about the fair Alftruda.”

“Eh? How? Most courteous victor?”

“Sir Ascelin is not a very wealthy gentleman.”

Ascelin laughed assent.

“Nudus intravi, nudus exeo—England; and I fear now, this mortal life likewise.”

“But he looked to his rich uncle the Abbot, to further a certain marriage-project of his. And, of course, neither my friend Gilbert of Ghent, nor my enemy William of Normandy, are likely to give away so rich an heiress without some gratification in return.”

“Sir Hereward knows the world, it seems.”

“So he has been told before. And, therefore, having no intention that Sir Ascelin, however worthy of any and every fair lady, should marry this one; he took care to cut off the stream at the fountain-head. If he hears that the suit is still pushed, he may cut off another head beside the fountain’s.”

“There will be no need,” said Ascelin, laughing again. “You have very sufficiently ruined my uncle, and my hopes.”

“My head?” said he, as soon as Hereward was out of hearing. “If I do not cut off thy head ere all is over, there is neither luck nor craft left among Normans. I shall catch the Wake sleeping some day, let him be never so wakeful.”

CHAPTER XXXVI. – HOW ALFTRUDA WROTE TO HEREWARD

The weary months ran on, from summer into winter, and winter into summer again, for two years and more, and neither Torfrida nor Hereward were the better for them. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: and a sick heart is but too apt to be a peevish one. So there were fits of despondency, jars, mutual recriminations. “If I had not taken your advice, I should not have been here.” “If I had not loved you so well, I might have been very differently off,”—and so forth. The words were wiped away the next hour, perhaps the next minute, by sacred kisses; but they had been said, and would be recollected, and perhaps said again.

Then, again, the “merry greenwood” was merry enough in the summer tide, when shaughs were green, and

   “The woodwele sang, and would not cease,      Sitting upon the spray.    So loud, it wakened Robin Hood      In the greenwood where he lay.”

But it was a sad place enough, when the autumn fog crawled round the gorse, and dripped off the hollies, and choked alike the breath and the eyesight; when the air sickened with the graveyard smell of rotting leaves, and the rain-water stood in the clay holes over the poached and sloppy lawns.

It was merry enough, too, when they were in winter quarters in friendly farm-houses, as long as the bright sharp frosts lasted, and they tracked the hares and deer merrily over the frozen snows; but it was doleful enough in those same farm-houses in the howling wet weather, when wind and rain lashed in through unglazed window, and ill-made roof, and there were coughs and colds and rheumatisms, and Torfrida ached from head to foot, and once could not stand upright for a whole month together, and every cranny was stuffed up with bits of board and rags, keeping out light and air as well as wind and water; and there was little difference between the short day and the long night; and the men gambled and wrangled amid clouds of peat-reek, over draughtboards and chessmen which they had carved for themselves, and Torfrida sat stitching and sewing, making and mending, her eyes bleared with peat-smoke, her hands sore and coarse from continual labor, her cheek bronzed, her face thin and hollow, and all her beauty worn away for very trouble. Then sometimes there was not enough to eat, and every one grumbled at her; or some one’s clothes were not mended, and she was grumbled at again. And sometimes a foraging party brought home liquor, and all who could got drunk to drive dull care away; and Hereward, forgetful of all her warnings, got more than was good for him likewise; and at night she coiled herself up in her furs, cold and contemptuous; and Hereward coiled himself up, guilty and defiant, and woke her again and again with startings and wild words in his sleep. And she felt that her beauty was gone, and that he saw it; and she fancied him (perhaps it was only fancy) less tender than of yore; and then in very pride disdained to take any care of her person, and said to herself, though she dare not say it to him, that if he only loved her for her face, he did not love her at all. And because she fancied him cold at times, she was cold likewise, and grew less and less caressing, when for his sake, as well as her own, she should have grown more so day by day.

Alas for them! there are many excuses. Sorrow may be a softening medicine at last, but at first it is apt to be a hardening one; and that savage outlaw life which they were leading can never have been a wholesome one for any soul of man, and its graces must have existed only in the brains of harpers and gleemen. Away from law, from self-restraint, from refinement, from elegance, from the very sound of a church-going bell, they were sinking gradually down to the level of the coarse men and women whom they saw; the worse and not the better parts of both their characters were getting the upper hand; and it was but too possible that after a while the hero might sink into the ruffian, the lady into a slattern and a shrew.

But in justice to them be it said, that neither of them had complained of the other to any living soul. Their love had been as yet too perfect, too sacred, for them to confess to another (and thereby confess to themselves) that it could in any wise fail. They had each idolized the other, and been too proud of their idolatry to allow that their idol could crumble or decay.

And yet at last that point, too, was reached. One day they were wrangling about somewhat, as they too often wrangled, and Hereward in his temper let fall the words. “As I said to Winter the other day, you grow harder and harder upon me.”

Torfrida started and fixed on him wide, terrible, scornful eyes “So you complain of me to your boon companions?”

And she turned and went away without a word. A gulf had opened between them. They hardly spoke to each other for a week.

Hereward complained of Torfrida? What if Torfrida should complain of Hereward? But to whom? Not to the coarse women round her; her pride revolted from that thought;—and yet she longed for counsel, for sympathy,—to open her heart but to one fellow-woman. She would go to the Lady Godiva at Crowland, and take counsel of her, whether there was any method (for so she put it to herself) of saving Hereward; for she saw but too clearly that he was fast forgetting all her teaching, and falling back to a point lower than that even from which she had raised him up.

To go to Crowland was not difficult. It was mid-winter. The dikes were all frozen. Hereward was out foraging in the Lincolnshire wolds. So Torfrida, taking advantage of his absence, proposed another foraging party to Crowland itself. She wanted stuff for clothes, needles, thread, what not. A dozen stout fellows volunteered at once to take her. The friendly monks of Crowland would feast them royally, and send them home heaped with all manner of good things; while as for meeting Ivo Taillebois’s men, if they had but three to one against them, there was a fair chance of killing a few, and carrying off their clothes and weapons, which would be useful. So they made a sledge, tied beef-bones underneath it, put Torfrida thereon, well wrapped in deer and fox and badger skin, and then putting on their skates, swept her over the fen to Crowland, singing like larks along the dikes.

And Torfrida went in to Godiva, and wept upon her knees; and Godiva wept likewise, and gave her such counsel as she could,—how if the woman will keep the men heroic, she must keep herself not heroic only, but devout likewise; how she herself, by that one deed which had rendered her name famous then, and famous (though she never dreamt thereof) now, and it may be to the end of time,—had once for all, tamed, chained, and as it were converted, the heart of her fierce young lord; and enabled her to train him in good time into the most wise, most just, most pious, of all King Edward’s earls.

And Torfrida said yes, and yes, and yes, and felt in her heart that she knew all that already. Had not she, too, taught, entreated, softened, civilized? Had not she, too, spent her life upon a man, and that man a wolf’s-head and a landless outlaw, more utterly than Godiva could ever have spent hers on one who lived lapped in luxury and wealth and power? Torfrida had done her best, and she had failed, or at least fancied in her haste that she had failed.

What she wanted was, not counsel, but love. And she clung round the Lady Godiva, till the broken and ruined widow opened all her heart to her, and took her in her arms, and fondled her as if she had been a babe. And the two women spoke few words after that, for indeed there was nothing to be said. Only at last, “My child, my child,” cried Godiva, “better for thee, body and soul, to be here with me in the house of God, than there amid evil spirits and deeds of darkness in the wild woods.”

“Not a cloister, not a cloister,” cried Torfrida, shuddering, and half struggling to get away.