For now the sons of the Church’s darlings, of the Crusaders whom the Pope had sent, beneath a gonfalon blessed by him, to destroy the liberties of England, turned, by a just retribution, upon that very Norman clergy who had abetted all their iniquities in the name of Rome. “They spared neither church nor churchyard, but took all that was valuable therein, and then burned the church and all together. Neither did they spare the lands of bishops, nor of abbots, nor of priests; but they robbed the monks and clergy, and every man plundered his neighbor as much as he could. If two or three men came riding to a town, all the townsfolk fled before them, and thought that they were robbers. The bishops and clergy were forever cursing them; but this to them was nothing, for they were all accursed and forsworn and reprobate. The earth bare no corn: you might as well have tilled the sea, for all the land was ruined by such deeds, and it was said openly that Christ and his saints slept.”
And so was avenged the blood of Harold and his brothers, of Edwin and Morcar, of Waltheof and Hereward.
And those who had the spirit of Hereward in them fled to the merry greenwood, and became bold outlaws, with Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John, Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudeslee; and watched with sullen joy the Norman robbers tearing in pieces each other, and the Church who had blest their crime.
And they talked and sung of Hereward, and all his doughty deeds, over the hearth in lone farm-houses, or in the outlaw’s lodge beneath the hollins green; and all the burden of their song was, “Ah that Hereward were alive again!” for they knew not that Hereward was alive forevermore; that only his husk and shell lay mouldering there in Crowland choir; that above them, and around them, and in them, destined to raise them out of that bitter bondage, and mould them into a great nation, and the parents of still greater nations in lands as yet unknown, brooded the immortal spirit of Hereward, now purged from all earthly dross, even the spirit of Freedom, which can never die.
CHAPTER XLIII. — HOW DEEPING FEN WAS DRAINED.
But war and disorder, ruin and death, cannot last forever. They are by their own nature exceptional and suicidal, and spend themselves with what they feed on. And then the true laws of God’s universe, peace and order, usefulness and life, will reassert themselves, as they have been waiting all along to do, hid in God’s presence from the strife of men.
And even so it was with Bourne.
Nearly eighty years after, in the year of Grace 1155, there might have been seen sitting, side by side and hand in hand, upon a sunny bench on the Bruneswald slope, in the low December sun, an old knight and an old lady, the master and mistress of Bourne.