Hereward, the Last of the English

“He must be knighted,—he shall be knighted, as soon as Sir Gilbert comes home,” said all the ladies in chorus.

“I should be sorry to think,” said Hereward, with the blundering mock humility of a self-conceited boy, “that I had done anything worthy of such an honor. I hope to win my spurs by greater feats than these.”

A burst of laughter from the knights and gentlemen followed.

“How loud the young bantam crows after his first little scuffle!”

“Hark to him! What will he do next? Eat a dragon? Fly to the moon? Marry the Sophy of Egypt’s daughter?”

This last touched Hereward to the quick, for it was just what he thought of doing; and his blood, heated enough already, beat quicker, as some one cried, with the evident intent of picking a quarrel:

“That was meant for us. If the man who killed the bear has not earned knighthood, what must we be, who have not killed him? You understand his meaning, gentlemen,—don’t forget it!”

Hereward looked down, and setting his foot on the bear’s head, wrenched out of it the sword which he had left till now, with pardonable pride, fast set in the skull.

Martin Lightfoot, for his part, drew stealthily from his bosom the little magic axe, keeping his eye on the brain-pan of the last speaker.

The lady of the house cried “Shame!” and ordered the knights away with haughty words and gestures, which, because they were so well deserved, only made the quarrel more deadly.

Then she commanded Hereward to sheathe his sword.

He did so; and turning to the knights, said with all courtesy: “You mistake me, sirs. You were where brave knights should be, within the beleaguered fortress, defending the ladies. Had you remained outside, and been eaten by the bear, what must have befallen them, had he burst open the door? As for this little lass, whom you left outside, she is too young to requite knight’s prowess by lady’s love; and therefore beneath your attention, and only fit for the care of a boy like me.” And taking up Alftruda in his arms, he carried her in and disappeared.

Who now but Hereward was in all men’s mouths? The minstrels made ballads on him; the lasses sang his praises (says the chronicler) as they danced upon the green. Gilbert’s lady would need give him the seat, and all the honors, of a belted knight, though knight he was none. And daily and weekly the valiant lad grew and hardened into a valiant man, and a courteous one withal, giving no offence himself, and not over-ready to take offence at other men.

The knights were civil enough to him, the ladies more than civil; he hunted, he wrestled, he tilted; he was promised a chance of fighting for glory, as soon as a Highland chief should declare war against Gilbert, or drive off his cattle,—an event which (and small blame to the Highland chiefs) happened every six months.

No one was so well content with himself as Hereward; and therefore he fancied that the world must be equally content with him, and he was much disconcerted when Martin drew him aside one day, and whispered: “If I were my lord, I should wear a mail shirt under my coat to-morrow out hunting.”

“What?”

“The arrow that can go through a deer’s bladebone can go through a man’s.”

“Who should harm me?”

“Any man of the dozen who eat at the same table.”

“What have I done to them? If I had my laugh at them, they had their laugh at me; and we are quits.”

“There is another score, my lord, which you have forgotten, and that is all on your side.”

“Eh?”

“You killed the bear. Do you expect them to forgive you that, till they have repaid you with interest?”

“Pish!”

“You do not want for wit, my lord. Use it, and think. What right has a little boy like you to come here, killing bears which grown men cannot kill? What can you expect but just punishment for your insolence,—say, a lance between your shoulders while you stoop to drink, as Sigfried had for daring to tame Brunhild? And more, what right have you to come here, and so win the hearts of the ladies, that the lady of all the ladies should say, ‘If aught happen to my poor boy,—and he cannot live long,—I would adopt Hereward for my own son, and show his mother what a fool some folks think her?’ So, my lord, put on your mail shirt to-morrow, and take care of narrow ways, and sharp corners. For to-morrow it will be tried, that I know, before my Lord Gilbert comes back from the Highlands; but by whom I know not, and care little, seeing that there are half a dozen in the house who would be glad enough of the chance.”

Hereward took his advice, and rode out with three or four knights the next morning into the fir-forest; not afraid, but angry and sad. He was not yet old enough to estimate the virulence of envy, to take ingratitude and treachery for granted. He was to learn the lesson then, as a wholesome chastener to the pride of success. He was to learn it again in later years, as an additional bitterness in the humiliation of defeat; and find out, as does many a man, that if he once fall, or seem to fall, a hundred curs spring up to bark at him, who dared not open their mouths while he was on his legs.

So they rode into the forest, and parted, each with his footman and his dogs, in search of boar and deer; and each had his sport without meeting again for some two hours or more.

Hereward and Martin came at last to a narrow gully, a murderous place enough. Huge fir-trees roofed it in, and made a night of noon. High banks of earth and great boulders walled it in right and left for twenty feet above. The track, what with pack-horses’ feet, and what with the wear and tear of five hundred years’ rain-fall, was a rut three feet deep and two feet broad, in which no horse could turn. Any other day Hereward would have cantered down it with merely a tightened rein. Today he turned to Martin and said,—

“A very fit and proper place for this same treason, unless you have been drinking beer and thinking beer.”

But Martin was nowhere to be seen.

A pebble thrown from the right bank struck him, and he looked up. Martin’s face was peering through the heather overhead, his finger on his lips. Then he pointed cautiously, first up the pass, then down.

Hereward felt that his sword was loose in the sheath, and then gripped his lance, with a heart beating, but not with fear.

The next moment he heard the rattle of a horse’s hoofs behind him; looked back; and saw a knight charging desperately down the gully, his bow in hand, and arrow drawn to the head.

To turn was impossible. To stop, even to walk on, was to be ridden over and hurled to the ground helplessly. To gain the mouth of the gully, and then turn on his pursuer, was his only chance. For the first and almost the last time in his life, he struck spurs into his horse, and ran away. As he went, an arrow struck him sharply in the back, piercing the corslet, but hardly entering the flesh. As he neared the mouth, two other knights crashed their horses through the brushwood from right and left, and stood awaiting him, their spears ready to strike. He was caught in a trap. A shield might have saved him; but he had none.

He did not flinch. Dropping his reins, and driving in the spurs once more, he met them in full shock. With his left hand he hurled aside the left-hand lance, with his right he hurled his own with all his force at the right-hand foe, and saw it pass clean through the felon’s chest, while his lance-point dropped, and passed harmlessly behind his knee.

So much for lances in front. But the knight behind? Would not his sword the next moment be through his brain?

There was a clatter, a crash, and looking back Hereward saw horse and man rolling in the rut, and rolling with them Martin Lightfoot. He had already pinned the felon knight’s head against the steep bank, and, with uplifted axe, was meditating a pick at his face which would have stopped alike his love-making and his fighting.

“Hold thy hand,” shouted Hereward. “Let us see who he is; and remember that he is at least a knight.”

“But one that will ride no more to-day. I finished his horse’s going as I rolled down the bank.”

It was true. He had broken the poor beast’s leg with a blow of the axe, and they had to kill the horse out of pity ere they left.

Martin dragged his prisoner forward.

“You?” cried Hereward. “And I saved your life three days ago!”

The knight answered nothing.

“You will have to walk home. Let that be punishment enough for you,” and he turned.

“He will have to ride in a woodman’s cart, if he have the luck to find one.”

The third knight had fled, and after him the dead man’s horse. Hereward and his man rode home in peace, and the third knight, after trying vainly to walk a mile or two, fell and lay, and was fain to fulfil Martin’s prophecy, and be brought home in a cart, to carry for years after, like Sir Lancelot, the nickname of the Chevalier de la Charette.

And so was Hereward avenged of his enemies. Judicial, even private, inquiry into the matter there was none. That gentlemen should meet in the forest and commit, or try to commit, murder on each other’s bodies, was far too common a mishap in the ages of faith to stir up more than an extra gossiping and cackling among the women, and an extra cursing and threatening among the men; and as the former were all but unanimously on Hereward’s side, his plain and honest story was taken as it stood.

“And now, fair lady,” said Hereward to his hostess, “I must thank you for all your hospitality, and bid you farewell forever and a day.”

She wept, and entreated him only to stay till her lord came back; but Hereward was firm.

“You, lady, and your good lord will I ever love; and at your service my sword shall ever be: but not here. Ill blood I will not make. Among traitors I will not dwell. I have killed two of them, and shall have to kill two of their kinsmen next, and then two more, till you have no knights left; and pity that would be. No; the world is wide, and there are plenty of good fellows in it who will welcome me without forcing me to wear mail under my coat out hunting.”

And he armed himself cap-à-pié, and rode away. Great was the weeping in the bower, and great the chuckling in the hall: but never saw they Hereward again upon the Scottish shore.

CHAPTER III. – HOW HEREWARD SUCCORED A PRINCESS OF CORNWALL

The next place in which Hereward appeared was far away on the southwest, upon the Cornish shore. How he came there, or after how long, the chronicles do not say. All that shall be told is, that he went into port on board a merchant ship carrying wine, and intending to bring back tin. The merchants had told him of one Alef, a valiant regulus or kinglet of those parts, who was indeed a distant connection of Hereward himself, having married, as did so many of the Celtic princes, the daughter of a Danish sea-rover, of Siward’s blood. They told him also that the kinglet increased his wealth, not only by the sale of tin and of red cattle, but by a certain amount of autumnal piracy in company with his Danish brothers-in-law from Dublin and Waterford; and Hereward, who believed, with most Englishmen of the East Country, that Cornwall still produced a fair crop of giants, some of them with two and even three heads, had hopes that Alef might show him some adventure worthy of his sword. He sailed in, therefore, over a rolling bar, between jagged points of black rock, and up a tide river which wandered away inland, like a land-locked lake, between high green walls of oak and ash, till they saw at the head of the tide Alef’s town, nestling in a glen which sloped towards the southern sun. They discovered, besides, two ships drawn up upon the beach, whose long lines and snake-heads, beside the stoat carved on the beak-head of one and the adder on that of the other, bore witness to the piratical habits of their owner. The merchants, it seemed, were well known to the Cornishmen on shore, and Hereward went up with them unopposed; past the ugly dikes and muddy leats, where Alef’s slaves were streaming the gravel for tin ore; through rich alluvial pastures spotted with red cattle, and up to Alef’s town. Earthworks and stockades surrounded a little church of ancient stone, and a cluster of granite cabins thatched with turf, in which the slaves abode, and in the centre of all a vast stone barn, with low walls and high sloping roof, which contained Alef’s family, treasures, fighting tail, horses, cattle, and pigs. They entered at one end between the pigsties, passed on through the cow-stalls, then through the stables, and saw before them, dim through the reek of thick peat-smoke, a long oaken table, at which sat huge dark-haired Cornishmen, with here and there among them the yellow head of a Norseman, who were Alef’s following or fighting men. Boiled meat was there in plenty, barley cakes, and ale. At the head of the table, on a high-backed settle, was Alef himself, a jolly giant, who was just setting to work to drink himself stupid with mead made from narcotic heather honey. By his side sat a lovely dark-haired girl, with great gold torcs upon her throat and wrists, and a great gold brooch fastening a shawl which had plainly come from the looms of Spain or of the East, and next to her again, feeding her with titbits cut off with his own dagger, and laid on barley cake instead of a plate, sat a more gigantic personage even than Alef, the biggest man that Hereward had ever seen, with high cheek bones, and small ferret eyes, looking out from a greasy mass of bright red hair and beard.

No questions were asked of the new-comers. They set themselves down in silence in empty places, and, according to the laws of the good old Cornish hospitality, were allowed to eat and drink their fill before they spoke a word.

“Welcome here again, friend,” said Alef at last, in good enough Danish, calling the eldest merchant by name. “Do you bring wine?”

The merchant nodded.

“And you want tin?”

The merchant nodded again, and lifting his cup drank Alef’s health, following it up by a coarse joke in Cornish, which raised a laugh all round.

The Norse trader of those days, it must be remembered, was none of the cringing and effeminate chapmen who figure in the stories of the Middle Ages. A free Norse or Dane, himself often of noble blood, he fought as willingly as he bought; and held his own as an equal, whether at the court of a Cornish kinglet or at that of the Great Kaiser of the Greeks.

“And you, fair sir,” said Alef, looking keenly at Hereward, “by what name shall I call you, and what service can I do for you? You look more like an earl’s son than a merchant, and are come here surely for other things besides tin.”

“Health to King Alef,” said Hereward, raising the cup. “Who I am I will tell to none but Alef’s self; but an earl’s son I am, though an outlaw and a rover. My lands are the breadth of my boot-sole. My plough is my sword. My treasure is my good right hand. Nothing I have, and nothing I need, save to serve noble kings and earls, and win me a champion’s fame. If you have battles to fight, tell me, that I may fight them for you. If you have none, thank God for his peace; and let me eat and drink, and go in peace.”

“King Alef needs neither man nor boy to fight his battle as long as Ironhook sits in his hall.”

It was the red-bearded giant who spoke in a broken tongue, part Scotch, part Cornish, part Danish, which Hereward could hardly understand; but that the ogre intended to insult him he understood well enough.

Hereward had hoped to find giants in Cornwall: and behold he had found one at once; though rather, to judge from his looks, a Pictish than a Cornish giant; and, true to his reckless determination to defy and fight every man and beast who was willing to defy and fight him, he turned on his elbow and stared at Ironhook in scorn, meditating some speech which might provoke the hoped-for quarrel.

As he did so his eye happily caught that of the fair Princess. She was watching him with a strange look, admiring, warning, imploring; and when she saw that he noticed her, she laid her finger on her lip in token of silence, crossed herself devoutly, and then laid her finger on her lips again, as if beseeching him to be patient and silent in the name of Him who answered not again.

Hereward, as is well seen, wanted not for quick wit, or for chivalrous feeling. He had observed the rough devotion of the giant to the Lady. He had observed, too, that she shrank from it; that she turned away with loathing when he offered her his own cup, while he answered by a dark and deadly scowl.

Was there an adventure here? Was she in duress either from this Ironhook or from her father, or from both? Did she need Hereward’s help? If so, she was so lovely that he could not refuse it. And on the chance, he swallowed down his high stomach, and answered blandly enough,—

“One could see without eyes, noble sir, that you were worth any ten common men; but as every one has not like you the luck of so lovely a lady by your side, I thought that perchance you might hand over some of your lesser quarrels to one like me, who has not yet seen so much good fighting as yourself, and enjoy yourself in pleasant company at home, as I should surely do in your place.”

The Princess shuddered and turned pale; then looked at Hereward and smiled her thanks. Ironhook laughed a savage laugh.

Hereward’s jest being translated into Cornish for the benefit of the company, was highly approved by all; and good humor being restored, every man got drunk save Hereward, who found the mead too sweet and sickening.

After which those who could go to bed went to bed, not as in England, [Footnote: Cornwall was not then considered part of England.] among the rushes on the floor, but in the bunks or berths of wattle which stood two or three tiers high along the wall.

The next morning as Hereward went out to wash his face and hands in the brook below (he being the only man in the house who did so), Martin Lightfoot followed him.

“What is it, Martin? Hast thou had too much of that sweet mead last night that thou must come out to cool thy head too?”

“I came out for two reasons,—first, to see fair play, in case that Ironhook should come to wash his ugly visage, and find you on all fours over the brook—you understand? And next, to tell you what I heard last night among the maids.”

“And what did you hear?”

“Fine adventures, if we can but compass them. You saw that lady with the carrot-headed fellow?—I saw that you saw. Well, if you will believe me, that man has no more gentle blood than I have,—has no more right to sit on the settle than I. He is a No-man’s son, a Pict from Galloway, who came down with a pirate crew and has made himself the master of this drunken old Prince, and the darling of all his housecarles, and now will needs be his son-in-law whether he will or not.”

“I thought as much,” said Hereward; “but how didst thou find out this?”

“I went out and sat with the knaves and the maids, and listened to their harp-playing, and harp they can, these Cornish, like very elves; and then I, too, sang songs and told them stories, for I can talk their tongue somewhat, till they all blest me for a right good fellow. And then I fell to praising up old Ironhook to the women.”

“Praising him up, man?”

“Ay, just because I suspected him; for the women are so contrary, that if you speak evil of a man they will surely speak good of him; but if you will only speak good of him, then you will hear all the evil of him he ever has done, and more beside. And this I heard; that the King’s daughter cannot abide him, and would as lief marry a seal.”

“One did not need to be told that,” said Hereward, “as long as one has eyes in one’s head. I will kill the fellow, and carry her off, ere four-and-twenty hours be past.”

“Softly, softly, my young master. You need to be told something that your eyes would not tell you, and that is, that the poor lass is betrothed already to a son of old King Ranald the Ostman, of Waterford, son of old King Sigtryg, who ruled there when I was a boy.”

“He is a kinsman of mine, then,” said Hereward. “All the more reason that I should kill this ruffian.”

“If you can,” said Martin Lightfoot.

“If I can?” retorted Hereward, fiercely.

“Well, well, wilful heart must have its way; only take my counsel: speak to the poor young lady first, and see what she will tell you, lest you only make bad worse, and bring down her father and his men on her as well as you.”

Hereward agreed, and resolved to watch his opportunity of speaking to the princess.

As they went in to the morning meal they met Alef. He was in high good humor with Hereward; and all the more so when Hereward told him his name, and how he was the son of Leofric.

“I will warrant you are,” he said, “by the gray head you carry on green shoulders. No discreeter man, they say, in these isles than the old earl.”

“You speak truth, sir,” said Hereward, “though he be no father of mine now; for of Leofric it is said in King Edward’s court, that if a man ask counsel of him, it is as though he had asked it of the oracles of God.”

“Then you are his true son, young man. I saw how you kept the peace with Ironhook, and I owe you thanks for it; for though he is my good friend, and will be my son-in-law erelong, yet a quarrel with him is more than I can abide just now, and I should not like to have seen my guest and my kinsman slain in my house.”

Hereward would have said that he thought there was no fear of that; but he prudently held his tongue, and having an end to gain, listened instead of talking.

“Twenty years ago, of course, I could have thrashed him as easily as—; but now I am getting old and shaky, and the man has been a great help in need. Six kings of these parts has he killed for me, who drove off my cattle, and stopped my tin works, and plundered my monks’ cells too, which is worse, while I was away sailing the seas; and he is a right good fellow at heart, though he be a little rough. So be friends with him as long as you stay here, and if I can do you a service I will.”

They went in to their morning meal, at which Hereward resolved to keep the peace which he longed to break, and therefore, as was to be expected, broke.

For during the meal the fair lady, with no worse intention, perhaps, than that of teasing her tyrant, fell to open praises of Hereward’s fair face and golden hair; and being insulted therefore by the Ironhook, retaliated by observations about his personal appearance, which were more common in the eleventh century than they happily are now. He, to comfort himself, drank deep of the French wine which had just been brought and broached, and then went out into the court-yard, where, in the midst of his admiring fellow-ruffians, he enacted a scene as ludicrous as it was pitiable. All the childish vanity of the savage boiled over. He strutted, he shouted, he tossed about his huge limbs, he called for a harper, and challenged all around to dance, sing, leap, fight, do anything against him: meeting with nothing but admiring silence, he danced himself out of breath, and then began boasting once more of his fights, his cruelties, his butcheries, his impossible escapes and victories; till at last, as luck would have it, he espied Hereward, and poured out a stream of abuse against Englishmen and English courage.

“Englishmen,” he said, “were naught. Had he not slain three of them himself with one blow?”

“Of your mouth, I suppose,” quoth Hereward, who saw that the quarrel must come, and was glad to have it done and over.

“Of my mouth?” roared Ironhook; “of my sword, man!”

“Of your mouth,” said Hereward. “Of your brain were they begotten, of the breath of your mouth they were born, and by the breath of your mouth you can slay them again as often as you choose.”

The joke, as it has been handed down to us by the old chroniclers, seems clumsy enough; but it sent the princess, say they, into shrieks of laughter.

“Were it not that my Lord Alef was here,” shouted Ironhook, “I would kill you out of hand.”

“Promise to fight fair, and do your worst. The more fairly you fight, the more honor you will win,” said Hereward.

Whereupon the two were parted for the while.

Two hours afterwards, Hereward, completely armed with helmet and mail shirt, sword and javelin, hurried across the great court-yard, with Martin Lightfoot at his heels, towards the little church upon the knoll above. The two wild men entered into the cool darkness, and saw before them, by the light of a tiny lamp, the crucifix over the altar, and beneath it that which was then believed to be the body of Him who made heaven and earth. They stopped, trembling, for a moment, bowed themselves before that, to them, perpetual miracle, and then hurried on to a low doorway to the right, inside which dwelt Alef’s chaplain, one of those good Celtic priests who were supposed to represent a Christianity more ancient than, and all but independent of, the then all-absorbing Church of Rome.