Hereward, the Last of the English

by Charles Kingsley

To him came “Guenoch and Alutus Grogan, foremost in all valor and fortitude, tall and large, and ready for work,” and with them their three nephews, Godwin Gille, “so called because he was not inferior to that Godwin Guthlacsson who is preached much in the fables of the ancients,” “and Douti and Outi, [Footnote: Named in Domesday-book (?).] the twins, alike in face and manners;” and Godric, the knight of Corby, nephew of the Count of Warwick; and Tosti of Davenesse, his kinsman; and Azer Vass, whose father had possessed Lincoln Tower; and Leofwin Moue, [Footnote: Probably the Leofwin who had lands in Bourne.]—that is, the scythe, so called, “because when he was mowing all alone, and twenty country folk set on him with pitchforks and javelins, he slew and wounded almost every one, sweeping his scythe among them as one that moweth”; and Wluncus the Black-face, so called because he once blackened his face with coal, and came unknown among the enemy, and slew ten of them with one lance; and “Turbertin, a great-nephew (surely a mistake) of Earl Edwin”; and Leofwin Prat (perhaps the ancestor of the ancient and honorable house of Pratt of Ryston), so called from his “Praet” or craft, “because he had oft escaped cunningly when taken by the enemy, having more than once killed his keepers;” and the steward of Drayton; and Thurkill the outlaw, Hereward’s cook; and Oger, Hereward’s kinsman; and “Winter and Linach, two very famous ones;” and Ranald, the butler of Ramsey Abbey,—“he was the standard-bearer”; and Wulfric the Black and Wulfric the White; and Hugh the Norman, a priest; and Wulfard, his brother; and Tosti and Godwin of Rothwell; and Alsin; and Hekill; and Hugh the Breton, who was Hereward’s chaplain, and Whishaw, his brother, “a magnificent” knight, which two came with him from Flanders; and so forth;—names merely of whom naught is known, save, in a few cases, from Domesday-book, the manors which they held. But honor to their very names! Honor to the last heroes of the old English race!

These valiant gentlemen, with the housecarles whom, more or fewer, they would bring with them, constituted a formidable force, as after years proved well. But having got his men, Hereward’s first care was, doubtless, to teach them that art of war of which they, like true Englishmen, knew nothing.

The art of war has changed little, if at all, by the introduction of gunpowder. The campaigns of Hannibal and Caesar succeeded by the same tactics as those of Frederic or Wellington; and so, as far as we can judge, did those of the master-general of his age, William of Normandy.

But of those tactics the English knew nothing. Their armies were little more than tumultuous levies, in which men marched and fought under local leaders, often divided by local jealousies. The commissariats of the armies seem to have been so worthless, that they had to plunder friends as well as foes as they went along; and with plunder came every sort of excess: as when the northern men marching down to meet Harold Godwinsson, and demand young Edwin as their earl, laid waste, seemingly out of mere brute wantonness, the country round Northampton, which must have been in Edwin’s earldom, or at least in that of his brother Morcar. And even the local leaders were not over-well obeyed. The reckless spirit of personal independence, especially among the Anglo-Danes, prevented anything like discipline, or organized movement of masses, and made every battle degenerate into a confusion of single combats.

But Hereward had learned that art of war, which enabled the Norman to crush, piecemeal, with inferior numbers, the vast but straggling levies of the English. His men, mostly outlaws and homeless, kept together by the pressure from without, and free from local jealousies, resembled rather an army of professional soldiers than a country posse comitatus. And to the discipline which he instilled into them; to his ability in marching and manoeuvring troops; to his care for their food and for their transport, possibly, also, to his training them in that art of fighting on horseback in which the men of Wessex, if not the Anglo-Danes of the East, are said to have been quite unskilled,—in short, to all that he had learned, as a mercenary, under Robert the Frison, and among the highly civilized warriors of Flanders and Normandy, must be attributed the fact, that he and his little army defied, for years, the utmost efforts of the Normans, appearing and disappearing with such strange swiftness, and conquering against such strange odds, as enshrouded the guerilla captain in an atmosphere of myth and wonder, only to be accounted for, in the mind of Normans as well as English, by the supernatural counsels of his sorceress wife.

But Hereward grew anxious and more anxious, as days and weeks went on, and yet there was no news of Osbiorn and his Danes at Norwich. Time was precious. He had to march his little army to the Wash, and then transport it by boats—no easy matter—to Lynn in Norfolk, as his nearest point of attack. And as the time went on, Earl Warren and Ralph de Guader would have gathered their forces between him and the Danes, and a landing at Lynn might become impossible. Meanwhile there were bruits of great doings in the north of Lincolnshire. Young Earl Waltheof was said to be there, and Edgar the Atheling with him; but what it portended, no man knew. Morcar was said to have raised the centre of Mercia, and to be near Stafford; Edwin to have raised the Welsh, and to be at Chester with Alfgiva, his sister, Harold Godwinsson’s widow. And Hereward sent spies along the Roman Watling Street—the only road, then, toward the northwest of England—and spies northward along the Roman road to Lincoln. But the former met the French in force near Stafford, and came back much faster than they went. And the latter stumbled on Gilbert of Ghent, riding out of Lincoln to Sleaford, and had to flee into the fens, and came back much slower than they went.

At last news came. For into Bourne stalked Wulfric the Heron, with axe and bow, and leaping-pole on shoulder, and an evil tale he brought.

The Danes had been beaten utterly at Norwich. Ralph de Guader and his Frenchmen had fought like lions. They had killed many Danes in the assault on the castle. They had sallied out on them as they recoiled, and driven them into the river, drowning many more. The Danes had gone down the Yare again, and out to sea northward, no man knew whither. He, the Heron, prowling about the fenlands of Norfolk to pick off straggling Frenchmen and looking out for the Danes, had heard all the news from the landsfolk. He had watched the Danish fleet along the shore as far as Blakeney. But when they came to the isle, they stood out to sea, right northwest. He, the Heron, believed that they were gone for Humber Mouth.

After a while, he had heard how Hereward was come again and sent round the war-arrow, and thought that a landless man could be in no better company; wherefore he had taken boat, and come across the deep fen. And there he was, if they had need of him.

“Need of you?” said Hereward, who had heard of the deed at Wrokesham Bridge. “Need of a hundred like you. But this is bitter news.”