“Not so much as of patriotism and of real devotion to our saint and foundress. Saint Etheldreda, a true Saxon and East Anglian saint, will approve of the deed, if it should become necessary to strip her shrine. Her honour and sanctity depend not on lamps of silver and plates of gold, however rich and rare: the faithful flocked to her tomb, and said their orisons over it when it was but a plain stone block, with no shrine near it; and well I ween more miracles were wrought there, in the simple old times, than we see wrought now. Should the Normans get into our church, they will strip the shrine, an we do not; and they will rifle the tombs of Saint Sexburga, Saint Ermenilda, and Saint Withburga[[104]] and cast forth the bodies of our saints upon the dung-heap! Oh, sacrist! know ye not how these excommunicated foreigners are everywhere treating the saints of Saxon birth, and are everywhere setting up strange saints, whose names were never before heard by Englishmen, and cannot be pronounced by them! The reason of all this is clear: our Saxon hagiology is filled with the names of those that were patriots as well as saints, and we cannot honour them in one capacity without thinking of them in the other.”
“This is most true,” said the chamberlain; “and the Normans be likewise setting up new shrines to the Blessed Virgin, and bringing in Notre Dames, and our Ladie of Walsingham, and other Ladies that were never heard of before; and they are enforcing pilgrimages in wholly new directions! If these things endure, alack and woe the while for our house of Ely, and for the monks of Saint Edmund’s-Bury, and for all Saxon houses! Our shrine boxes will be empty; we shall be neglected and forgotten in the land, even if the Normans do not dispossess us.”
CHAPTER VI.
IVO TAILLE-BOIS AND THE LADIE LUCIA.
Within the moated and battlemented manor-house near to the banks of the Welland, which Elfric had stopped to gaze upon as he was travelling from Crowland to Spalding, there was held a feast on the fourth day after the feast of Saint Edmund, for the said fourth day from the great Saxon festival was the feast-day of some saint of Normandie or of Anjou, and the Ladie Lucia, maugre her sorrow and affliction, had given birth to a male child a moon agone, and the child was to be baptized on this day with much rejoicing. Ivo Taille-Bois and his Norman retainers were glad, inasmuch as the birth of a son by a Saxon wife went to secure them in their possession of the estates; and the Ladie Lucia was glad of heart, as a mother cannot but rejoice at the birth of her first-born; and her Saxon servants, and all the old retainers of her father’s house, and all the Saxon serfs, were glad, because their future lord would be more than one half Saxon, being native to the country, a child of the good Ladie Lucia, the daughter of their last Saxon lord. So merry were all, that grievances seemed to be forgotten: the Normans ceased to oppress and insult; the Saxons ceased, for the time being, to complain. The feast was very bountiful, for the Ladie Lucia had been allowed the ordering of it; and the company was very numerous and much mixed, for many Saxons of name had been bidden to the feast, and pledges had been given on both sides that there should be a truce to all hostilities and animosities; that there should be what the Normans called the Truce of God until the son of Ivo Taille-Bois and Lucia, the presumptive heir to all the lands of the old lord, should be christened, and his christening celebrated in a proper manner. No less a man than the prelate Lanfranc had interfered in making this salutary arrangement. And for the first time since the death of her father, Lanfranc’s fair ward, the Ladie Alftrude, had come forth from her own manor-house to attend at the earnest invitation of her cousin the Ladie Lucia. The Saxon heiress had come attended by sundry armed men and by two aged English priests who stood high in the consideration and favour of the potent Lanfranc. When, landing from her boat (the country was now nearly everywhere under water), she walked up to the gate of the house, and entering, drew aside her wimple and showed her sweet young face and bright blue eyes, there rose a murmur of admiration from all that were assembled there: the Saxons vowed in good old English that the Ladie Alftrude was the fairest and noblest maiden in all England; and the Normans swore in Norman-French and with many a Vive Dieu that they had never beheld anything equal to her either on the other side of the seas or on this! Nay, some of the Norman knights, and more than one whose beard was growing grey while he was yet in poverty or wholly unprovided with any English estate, forgot the broad lands that Alftrude inherited, to think only of her beautiful face. Yet when Alftrude kissed her fair cousin and her cousin’s child, and sat down by the side of the Lady Lucia at the top of the hall, it was hard to say which was the more lovely, the young matron, or the scarcely younger maiden.
“Benedicite,” said a young monk of Evreux who had come over for promotion in some English abbey, “but the daughters of this land be fair to look upon!”
“They be,” said a starch man in mail, “and they will conquer the conquerors of England, and soon cause the name and distinction of Norman to be swallowed up and forgotten in the country.”
“Had I come hither before taking my vows at Evreux, the devil might have been a monk for me, but I would have been none of it!”
Peaceably, ay, and merrily, passed off the day. The fair Ladie Alftrude stood at the font, and was one of the sponsors for her cousin’s first-born. The banquet succeeded to the baptism, and dancing and music in the hall followed on the banquet. The old times seemed to be coming back again, those peaceful days of good King Edward, Cœli deliciæ,[[105]] when every free-born Englishman enjoyed his own, and every noble thane or earl held hospitality to be one of his primary duties.
But Ivo Taille-Bois, though he boasted of being cousin to Duke William, was a greedy low-born churl, and therefore he needs must mar the happiness of his young wife (who ever since the birth of her son had been striving to forget how she had been made his wife), by talking of his unprovided brother, who had arrived in England, and was now tarrying about the Conqueror’s court in the hope of obtaining from Lanfranc the hand of his rich Saxon ward. The Ladie Lucia, knowing full well how her cousin’s heart lay toward Hereward, tried often to change the strain, but her Norman lord, forgetful even of courtesy to his guests, would still keep vexing her ear with his brother’s suit, and instead of continuing to be thankful to his saints for his own good fortune in getting so vast an heritage, and so fair a wife, and then so promising a child, he spoke as though he should feel himself a beggar until all the domains of the Ladie Alftrude were in the hands of his family. An anger that would not be concealed flashed in his eye whenever he saw any well-fa’red knight or gallant youth discoursing with Alftrude, and whether it were a Norman or a Saxon his wrath seemed equal. Desperate thoughts and dark designs flitted through his mind. At one time he thought that now that he had got the young heiress into his house he would forcibly keep her where she was until his brother should arrive and press his own suit in the ungodly manner of the first Norman conquerors; but he cowered under the dread of Lanfranc and a Norman sentence of excommunication, and he saw that the thing was not to be done without great peril and much bloodshed under his own roof, for the Saxon guests were numerous far above the Normans, and though, mayhap, several of his Norman guests would not have scrupled about the deed if it had been for their own profit, they could not be expected to concur in it, or even to allow it, when it was only for the profit of him and his brother. Vanity, thy name was Norman! There was young Guiscard[[106]] of Avranches, there was tall Etienne[[107]] of Rouen (and verily a tall and well-proportioned young man was he, and one that could talk glibly both in English and in French), there was Baldwin of the Mount, a most nimble dancer, and with a fine gilded cloak over his shoulders and not a crown in his purse (even like all the rest of them); there was old Mainfroy of La Perche, who had followed Robert Guiscard into Italie and Grecia, and had lost an eye and half of a nose in those wars before Ladie Alftrude was born; and there was old Drogo[[108]] from Chinon, who looked as though he had added to his own nose that half of a nose Mainfroy had lost (so hugeous and misshapen was Drogo’s nose!); and not one of these gay knights but thought that the Lady Alftrude having once seen and heard him must prefer him to all the world. In their own conceit they were, one and all of them, already Lords of Ey and husbands of Alftrude. Judge ye then whether Ivo Taille-Bois could have safely ventured to stay his fair guest against her will, or shut up his wife’s cousin in close bower for his as yet unknown and unseen brother!