At Lynn, on the other side of the Wash, still more Saxons joined Lord Hereward’s army, some of them coming in boats, and some marching by land. Ha! had there been but five Herewards in England, England would have been saved!
It was on the eve of the most solemn, yet most joyous festival of Pasche, or on the 24th day of the month Aprilis, in the year of grace one thousand and seventy-one, that the Lord of Brunn, arrived with his host at the great house of Ely, to the inconceivable joy of every true Saxon heart that was there. Pass we the welcome and the feast, and come we to the councils and deliberations in the Aula Magna of the house. On the third day after the paschal Sunday all the Saxon lords and chiefs, prelates and cloister-monks, met early in the morning, or immediately after prime, and ceased not their deliberations until the dinner hour. On one great point there was no difference of opinion—the victorious Lord of Brunn was to hold supreme command over all the troops and bands, of whatsoever description, collected in the Camp of Refuge, and have the entire management of the war wherever it should be carried. On other heads of debate opinions were very various, but the greatest divergency of all was upon the question whether the Danes should or should not be invited again to the assistance of the Saxons. When all had spoken on the one side or the other, and with much vehemence of speech, the Lord of Brunn, who had been forced to correct his taciturn habits, and to speak on many occasions at greater length than he had ever fancied he should speak, rose and said—
“Prelates and chiefs, ancients and younger men, if one so young as myself may deliver opinions in this assemblage, I would say let us take heed ere we tamper any more with Danemarck. The woes of the Anglo-Saxons first began when the Danes crossed the seas in their nailed ships and came among them first to rob and plunder, and next to seek a settlement in this fat and fertile land of England. Our rubric is filled with Saxon martyrs butchered by the Danes. This noble house of religion where we now consult was plundered and burned by the Danes; and the Danes slew all the ancient brotherhood of the house, and did the foulest things upon the tombs of the four Saxon virgins and saints—Saint Etheldreda, Saint Sexburga, Saint Ermenilda, Saint Withburga. I am lately from the Abbey of Peterborough, where I read upon the monumental stones the names of the good Saxon abbats and monks of that house that were murthered by the Danes. The same thing happened at Crowland, and at fifty more religious houses. The Danes have been the great makers of Saxon martyrdoms. The worst famed of our Saxon kings are those who submitted to them or failed in conquering them; the name of King Alfred is honoured chiefly for that he defeated the Danes in an hundred battles, and checked their rapacity and blood-thirstiness.”
“Oh, Hereward of Brunn!” said the bishop of Lindisfarne, “this is all true; but all this happened when the Danes were unconverted Pagans.”
“But good my Lord Bishop of Lindisfarne,” quoth the Lord of Brunn, “let us note well the conduct of the Danes since they have been Christian men, and we shall find as Saxons that we have not much to praise them for. Had it not been for the unmeet alliance between Lord Tostig and the strangers, and the invasion of Northumbria and York, and the need King Harold lay under of breaking that unholy league, and fighting Tostig in the great battle by Stamford Bridge, King Harold would never have been worsted at the battle of Hastings, for his armed forces would have been entire, and fresh for the fight, instead of being thinned as they were by that first bloody combat, and worn out by that long march from York unto Hastings.”
“It was an army of Norwegians that fought King Harold by Stamford Bridge,” said the Prior of Ely.
“I fought in that battle,” quoth Hereward, “and know that it was a mixed army of Danes and Norwegians, even like most of the armies that, for two hundred years and more, devastated this land and the kingdom of Scotland. But let that pass. Those armies came as open enemies: let us see the conduct of an army that came as friends. Only last year the good Saxon people from the Tyne to the York Ouse were deserted in the hour of success and victory by an army of Danes, commanded by the brothers of the King of Danemarck, who had been invited into the country by the suffering Saxons, and who had sworn upon the relics of saints not to leave this land until it was clear of the Normans. The two royal Danes took the gold of the son of Robert the Devil and the harlot of Falaise, and thereupon took their departure in their ships, and left the Saxons, with their plan all betrayed, to be slaughtered in heaps, and the whole north country to be turned into a solitude and desert, a Golgotha, or place of skulls.”
“This is too true,” said the Bishop of Durham; “and terrible is all this truth!”
“But,” said the Bishop of Lindisfarne, “the King of Danemarck’s brothers are not the King of Danemarck himself. We hear that the king is incensed at what those brothers did, and that he hath banished them from his presence and from the land of Danemarck, and that he hath sworn by the rood[[163]] that he will send four hundred keels across the ocean, and take himself the command of the army.”
“Yet even if he come,” quoth the Lord of Brunn, “he may prove as faithless and as greedy for gold as his brothers; or he may set up his pretended right to the throne of King Harold, our absent but not lost lord, and in that case we shall find that the Saxon people will fall from our side; for if they are to be cursed with a new and foreign master, they will not overmuch care whether his name be William of Normandie or Svend of Danemarck.”