“I don’t know that,” said Ascelin, “my Lord Uncle; I shall never sing ‘Dominus Illuminatio’ till I see your coffers illuminated once more by those thirty thousand marks.”
“Or I,” said Oger le Breton, “till I see myself safe in that bit of land which Hereward holds wrongfully of me in Locton.”
“Or I,” said Ivo Taillebois, “till I see Hereward’s head on Bourne gable, where he stuck up those Norman’s heads seven years ago. But what the Lord Abbot means by saying that we have done with English saints I do not see, for the villains of Crowland have just made a new one for themselves.”
“A new one?”
“I tell you truth and fact; I will tell you all, Lord Abbot; and you shall judge whether it is not enough to drive an honest man mad to see such things going on under his nose. Men say of me that I am rough, and swear and blaspheme. I put it to you, Lord Abbot, if Job would not have cursed if he had been Lord of Spalding? You know that the king let these Crowland monks have Waltheof’s body?”
“Yes, I thought it an unwise act of grace. It would have been wiser to leave him, as he desired, out on the down, in ground unconsecrate.”
“Of course, of course; for what has happened?”
“That old traitor, Ulfketyl, and his monks bring the body to Crowland, and bury it as if it had been the Pope’s. In a week they begin to spread their lies,—that Waltheof was innocent; that Archbishop Lanfranc himself said so.”
“That was the only act of human weakness which I have ever known the venerable prelate commit,” said Thorold.
“That these Normans at Winchester were so in the traitor’s favor, that the king had to have him out and cut off his head in the gray of the morning, ere folks were up and about; that the fellow was so holy that he passed all his time in prison in weeping and praying, and said over the whole Psalter every day, because his mother had taught it him,—I wish she had taught him to be an honest man;—and that when his head was on the block he said all the Paternoster, as far as ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ and then off went his head; whereon, his head being off, finished the prayer with—you know best what comes next, Abbot?”