XXXIV
What in the meanwhile had become of Hereward? What was he doing when these shaven-pated traitors were betraying his stronghold? One would like to find that hero wreaking a terrible vengeance upon them, but we hear of nothing so pleasing and appropriate. The only vengeance was that taken by William upon the rank and file of the rebels, and that was merely cowardly and unworthy. It was not politic to anger the leaders of this last despairing stand of the Saxons, and so they obtained the King's Peace; but the churls and serfs felt the force of retribution in gouged eyes, hands struck off, ears lopped, and other ferocious pleasantries typical of the Norman mind. Hereward who, I am afraid, was not always so watchful as his name signifies, seems to have found pardon readily enough, and one set of legends tells how at last he died peacefully and of old age in his bed.
Others among the old monkish chroniclers give him an epic and more fitting end, in which, like Samson, he dies with his persecutors. They marry him to a rich Englishwoman, one Elfthryth, who had made her peace with the King, and afterwards obtained pardon for her lover. But the Normans still hated him, and one night, when his chaplain Ethelward, whose duty was to keep watch and ward within and without his house and to place guards, slumbered at his post, a band of assassins crept in and attacked Hereward as he lay. He armed himself in haste, and withstood their onslaught. His spear was broken, his sword too, and he was driven to use his shield as a weapon. Fifteen Frenchmen lay dead beneath his single arm when four of the party crept behind him and smote him with their swords in the back. This stroke brought him to his knees. A Breton knight, one Ralph of Dôl, then rushed on him, but Hereward, in a last effort, once more wielded his buckler, and the Englishman and the Breton fell dead together.
However, whenever, or wherever he came to his end, certainly the great Hereward was laid to rest in the nave of Crowland Abbey, but no man knows his grave. Just as the bones and the last resting-place of Harold at Waltham Abbey have disappeared, so the relics of "the Watchful," that "most strenuous man," that hardy fighter in a lost cause, are scattered to the winds.
There are alleged descendants of Hereward to this day, and a "Sir Herewald Wake" is at the head of them; but we know nothing of how they prove their descent. "Watch and pray" is their motto, and a very appropriate one, too; although it is possible that Hereward's praying was spelt with an "e," and himself not so prayerful as predatory.
Hereward, the old monkish chroniclers tell us, was "a man short in stature but of enormous strength." By that little fragment of personal description they do something to wreck an ideal. Convention demands that all heroes be far above the height of other men, just as all knights of old were conventionally gentle and chivalric and all ladies fair; though, if history do not lie and limners painted what they saw, the chivalry and gentleness of knighthood were as sadly to seek as the loving-kindness of the hyæena, and the fair ladies of old were most furiously ill-favoured. Hereward's figure, without that personal paragraph, is majestic. The feet of him squelch, it is true, through Fenland mud and slime, but his head is lost in the clouds until this very early piece of journalism disperses the mists and makes the hero something less of the demi-god than he had otherwise been.
The name of Hereward's stronghold offers a fine blue-mouldy bone of contention for rival antiquaries to gnaw at. In face of the clamour of disputants on this subject, it behoves us to take no side, but just to report the theories advanced. The most favoured view, then, is that "Aldreth" enshrines a corruption of St. Etheldreda's name,—that Etheldreda who was variously known as St. Ethelthryth and St. Audrey,—and that it was originally none other than St. Audrey's Hythe, or Landing, on this very stream of Ouse, now much shrunken and running in a narrow channel, instead of spreading over the country in foul swamps and unimaginable putrid bogs. "Aldreche"—the old reach of this Ouse—is another variant put forward; but it does not seem to occur to any of these disputants that, at anyrate, the termination of the place-name is identical with that in the names of Meldreth and Shepreth, where little streams, the mere shadows and wraiths of their former selves, still exist to hint that it was once necessary to ford them, and that, whatever the first syllable of Meldreth may mean, "reth" is perhaps the Celtic "rhyd," a ford, and Shepreth just the "sheep ford."
But whatever may have been the original form of Aldreth's name, the village nowadays has nothing to show of any connection with St. Etheldreda, save the site only of a well dedicated to her, situated half-way up the steeply rising street. It is a curious street, this of Aldreth, plunging down from the uplands of the Isle into the peat and ooze that William so laboriously crossed. Where it descends you may still see the stones with which he, or others at some later time, paved the way. For the rest, Aldreth is one long street of rustic cottages very scattered and much separated by gardens: over all a look of listlessness, as though this were the end of the known world, and nothing mattered very much. When a paling from a garden fence falls into the road, it lies there; when the plaster falls from a cottage wall, no one repairs the damage; when a window is broken, the hole is papered or stuffed with rags: economy of effort is studied at Aldreth.
The curious may still trace William's route through the Isle, to Ely city. It is not a straight course. Geographical conditions forbade it to be so, and I doubt not, that if the road were to make again, they would still forbid; for to rule a straight line across the map from Aldreth to Ely is to plunge into hollows where water still lies, though actual fens be of the past. His way lay along two sides of a square; due north for three miles and almost due east for a like distance, along the track pursued nowadays by the excellent road uphill to where the mile-long and populous village of Haddenham stands on a crest, and down again and turning to the right for Witchford, whence, along a gentle spur, you come presently into Ely.