“That have I, and will more, till I reduce these swine into something like obedience to his Holiness of Rome.”
“Ah, but your Majesty has not heard how one Bruman, a valiant English knight, was sailing on the sea and caught those monks. Whereon he tied a great sack to the ship’s head, and cut the bottom out, and made every one of those monks get into that sack and so fall through into the sea; whereby he rid the monks of Ely of their rivals.”
“Pish! why tell me such an old-wives’ fable, knight?”
“Because the monks believe that old-wives’ fable, and are stout-hearted and stiff-necked accordingly.”
“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” said William’s chaplain, a pupil and friend of Lanfranc; “and if these men of Belial drowned every man of God in Normandy, ten would spring up in their places to convert this benighted and besotted land of Simonites and Balaamites, whose priests, like the brutes which perish, scruple not to defile themselves and the service of the altar with things which they impudently call their wives.”
“We know that, good chaplain,” quoth William, impatiently. He had enough of that language from Lanfranc himself; and, moreover, was thinking more of the Isle of Ely than of the celibacy of the clergy.
“Well, Sir Dade?”
“So they have got together all their kin; for among these monks every one is kin to a Thane, or Knight, or even an Earl. And there they are, brother by brother, cousin by cousin, knee to knee, and back to back, like a pack of wolves, and that in a hold which you will not enter yet awhile.”
“Does my friend Dade doubt his Duke’s skill at last?”
“Sir Duke,—Sir King I mean now, for King you are and deserve to be,—I know what you can do. I remember how we took England at one blow on Senlac field; but see you here, Sir King. How will you take an island where four kings such as you (if the world would hold four such at once) could not stop one churl from ploughing the land, or one bird-catcher from setting lime-twigs?”