The historian of these things goes on to say that the Normans in the neighbourhood, hearing of Hereward's return and of this midnight exploit, fled. This proves their wisdom, at the expense of their courage. The Saxons rose on every side, but Hereward at first checked their zeal, selecting only a strong body of relations and adherents, and with them attacking and slaying those of the Normans who dared remain on his estates. Then he repaired to his friend Brand, the Saxon Abbot of Peterborough, from whom, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, he received the honour of knighthood. After suddenly attacking and killing a Norman baron sent against him, he dispersed his followers, and, promising to rejoin them in a year, sailed for Flanders. We next hear of Hereward in the spring of 1070, when he appears in company with the Danes whom William the Conqueror had allowed to winter on the east coast. Together they raised a revolt, first in the Humber and along the Yorkshire Ouse; and then they are found sacking and destroying Peterborough Abbey, by that time under the control of the Norman Abbot Turold. A hundred and sixty armed men were gathered by the Abbot to force them back to their lair at Ely, but they had already left. With the advent of spring Hereward's Danish allies sailed away, rich in plunder, and he and his outlaws were left to do as best they could. For a year he remained quiet in his island fastness, secured by the trackless bogs and fens from attack, while the discontented elements were being attracted to him. With him was that attendant who kept the door at Bourne: Martin of the Light Foot was his name. Others were Leofric "Prat," or the Cunning, skilful in spying out the dispositions of the enemy; Leofric the Mower, who obtained his distinctive name by mowing off the legs of a party of Normans with a scythe, the only weapon he could lay hands on in a hurry; Ulric the Heron, and Ulric the Black—all useful lieutenants in an exhausting irregular warfare. Greater companions were the Saxon Archbishop Stigand, Bishop Egelwin of Lincoln, and the Earls Morcar, Edwin, and Tosti. All these notables, with a large following, flocked into the Isle of Ely, as a Camp of Refuge, and quartered themselves on the monks of the Abbey of Ely. There they lay, and constituted a continual menace to the Norman power. Sometimes they made incursions into other districts, and burnt and slew; at others, when hard pressed, they had simply to retire into these fens to be unapproachable. None among the Norman conquerors of other parts of the land could cope with Hereward, and at last William, in the summer of 1071, found it necessary to take the field in person against this own brother to Will-o'-the-Wisp. His plan of campaign was to attempt the invasion of the Isle of Ely simultaneously from two different points; from Brandon on the north-east, and from Cottenham on the south-west. The Brandon attempt was by boat, and soon failed: the advance from Cottenham was a longer business. Why he did not advance by that old Roman road, the Akeman Street, cannot now be explained. That splendid example of a causeway built across the morasses must still have afforded the better way, even though the Romans who made it had been gone six hundred years. But the Conqueror chose to advance from Cambridge by way of Impington, Histon, and Cottenham. It is, of course, possible that the defenders of the Isle had destroyed a portion of the old road, or in some way rendered it impracticable. His line of march can be traced even to this day. Leaving the old coaching road here at Cottenham Corner, we make for that village, famed in these days for its cream cheeses and grown to the proportions of a small town.[1] It was here, at Cottenham and at Rampton, that William collected his invading force and amassed the great stores of materials necessary for overcoming the great difficulty of entering the Isle of Ely, then an isle in the most baulking and inconvenient sense to an invader. Before the Isle could be entered by an army, it was necessary to build a causeway across the two miles' breadth of marshes that spread out from the Ouse at Aldreth, and this work had to be carried out in the face of a vigorous opposition from Hereward and his allies. It was two years before this causeway could be completed. Who shall say what strenuous labour went to the making of this road across the reedy bogs; what vast accumulations of reeds and brushwood, felled trees and earth? The place has an absorbing interest, but to explore it thoroughly requires no little determination, for the road that William made has every appearance of being left just as it was when he had done with it, more than eight hundred years ago, and the way from Rampton, in its deep mud, unfathomable ruts and grassy hollows, soddened for lack of draining, is a terrible damper of curiosity. The explorer's troubles begin immediately he has left the village of Rampton. Turning to the right, he is instantly plunged into the fearful mud of a mile-long drove described on the large-scale Ordnance maps as "Cow Lane," a dismal malebolge of black greasy mud that only cattle can walk without difficulty. The unfortunate cyclist who adventures this way and pushes on, thinking these conditions will improve as he goes, is to be pitied, for, instead of improving, they go from bad to worse. The mud of this horrible lane is largely composed of the Cambridgeshire clay called "gault," and is of a peculiarly adhesive quality. When he is at last obliged to dismount and pick the pounds upon pounds of mud out of the intimate places of his machine, his feelings are outraged and, cursing all the road authorities of Cambridgeshire in one comprehensive curse, he determines never again to leave the highways in search of the historic. A few yards farther progress leaves him in as bad case as before, and he is at last reduced to carrying the machine on his shoulder, fearful with every stride that his shoes will part company with his feet, withdrawn at each step from the mud with a resounding "pop," similar to the sound made by the drawing of a cork from a bottle. But it is only when at last, coming to the end of Cow Lane and turning to the left into Iram Drove, he rests and clears away the mud and simultaneously finds seven punctures in one tyre and two in the other, that his stern indignation melts into tears. The wherefore of this havoc wrought upon the inoffensive wheelman is found in the cynical fact that although Cow Lane never receives the attentions of the road-repairer, its thorn-hedges are duly clipped and the clippings thrown into what, for the sake of convenience, may be called the road.
[1] Famous, too, in that Cambridgeshire byword, "a Cottenham jury," which arose (as the inhabitants of every other village will have you believe) from the verdict of a jury of Cottenham men, in the case of a man tried for the murder of his wife. The foreman, returning into Court, said, "They were unanimously of opinion that it sarved her right, for she were such a tarnation bad 'un as no man could live with."
THE ISLE OF ELY AND DISTRICT.
The geographical conditions here resemble those of Muckslush Heath in Colman's play, and although Iram Drove is paradise compared with what we have already come through, taken on its own merits it is not an ideal thoroughfare. One mile of it, past Long Swath Barn, brings us to the beginning of Aldreth Causeway, here a green lane, very bumpy and full of rises and hollows. Maps and guide-books vaguely mention Belsar's Hill near this point, and imaginative guides who have not explored these wilds talk in airy fashion of it "overlooking" the Causeway. As a matter of fact, the Causeway is driven squarely through it, and it is so little of a hill, and so incapable of overlooking anything, that you pass it and are none the wiser. The fact of the Causeway being thus driven through the hill and the ancient earthworks that ring around six acres of it, proves sufficiently that this fortress is much more ancient than William the Conqueror's time. It is, indeed, prehistoric. Who was Belsar? History does not tell us; but lack of certain knowledge has not forbidden guesswork, more or less wild, and there have been those who have found the name to be a corruption of Belisarius. We are not told, however, what that general—that unfortunate warrior whom tradition represents as begging in his old age an obolus in the streets of Constantinople—was doing here. But the real "Belsar" may perhaps have been that "Belasius, Præses Militum versus Elye," mentioned in the "Tabula Eliensis," one of William's captains in this long business, from whom descended the Belasyse family.
ALDRETH CAUSEWAY AND THE ISLE OF ELY.
Two miles of green lane, solitary as though foot of man had not passed by for years, lead down to the Ouse. Fens spread out on either hand—Mow Fen, Willingham Fen, Smythy Fen, Great North Fen—fens everywhere. It is true they are now chiefly cultivated fields, remarkable for their fertility, but they are saved from being drowned only by the dykes and lodes cut and dug everywhere and drained by the steam pumping-station whose chimney-shaft, with its trail of smoke, is seen far off across the levels. In front rises the high ground of the Isle of Ely, a mile or more away across the river: high ground for Cambridgeshire, but likely, in any other part of England, to be called a low ridge. Here it is noticeable enough of itself, and made still more so by a windmill and a row of tall slender trees on the skyline. A new bridge now building across the Ouse at this point is likely to bring Aldreth Causeway into use and repair again. On the other shore, at High Bridge Farm, the Causeway loses its grassy character, becoming a rutted and muddy road, inconceivably rugged, and so continuing until it ends at the foot of the rising ground of Aldreth. Drains and their protecting banks lie to the left of it; the banks used by the infrequent pedestrians in preference to the Causeway, low-lying and often flooded.
