And as the Lord of Brunn said, so was it done. Eager to get possession of the bridge, the monk from Fescamp avoided the little township, and came straight to the stream[[181]] which flowed between it and the manor-house, and crossed over the bridge with all his people: and no sooner were they all over than the Saxons started up like armed men springing from the bowels of the earth, and shouting “Hereward for England!” they fell upon their amazed and confounded enemy, who could neither discover their strength nor form themselves into any order of battle. Instanter some of the Normans screamed that these were the devils of Crowland risen again; and so, screaming, they made a rush back to the bridge. Now the bridge was very narrow, and walled on either side with a parapet wall of brickwork; and when the whole of Torauld’s force began to follow the first fuyards,[[182]] with a mad rushing and confusion, they got jammed together upon that narrow bridge, or falling one over the other they obstructed the passage. Torauld, that big monk, could not get upon the bridge at all, or near to it. And as he stood crowded and squeezed by his disordered men, and heard the Saxon battle-axe ringing upon their mailed armour and plated shields, he set up his big voice and cried “Quarter! Quarter! Mercy, O Lord of Brunn!”
“Dost thou surrender, Torauld of Fescamp?” shouted Hereward.
“Aye, and at thy discretion,” said the terrible abbat, no longer terrible.
“Normans, do ye all surrender upon quarter?” shouted Hereward, who had already slain three of them with his own hand.
The Normans, not even excepting those on the bridge, or even those five or six that had gotten beyond the bridge, all declared that they surrendered at discretion.
“Then,” quoth the Lord of Brunn, “hand me your swords, and come hither and lay down all your arms!”
And, in that grim darkness, Torauld, and the several leaders of the band, stretched out their hands and delivered up their swords to Hereward; and Hereward, as he got them, handed them to his sword-bearer, and Elfric made a bundle of them all under his left arm, singing, as he had wont to do in the choir at Spalding, but with a louder note, “Infixæ sunt gentes!—The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made: in the net which they hid is their own foot taken!” And all the Norman men-at-arms, seeing but dimly what they were doing, and taking the trees on the skirts of the wood for Saxon warriors, piled their arms in a trice, and allowed themselves to be bound with their own girdles and baldrics. When Hereward’s people proceeded to bind Torauld, that tamed monster made a miserable lamentation, for he thought that the Saxons would bind him first, and then slay him; and none knew better than himself the intolerable wrongs he had done since his first coming to the kingdom, and the outrages he had been guilty of in the monasteries and churches of England. But Elfric bade him bellow not so miserably, and told him how that it was the custom of the Lord of Brunn not to slay his prisoners, but only to send them to a place of safe keeping, such as the Camp of Refuge, or the strong vault under Ely Abbey. And when the Normans were all bound, Hereward made his sword-bearer count them all; and Elfric, groping among them as the shepherd does among his sheep when the night is dark, found and reported that there were four score and ten of them. The rest had been slain, or had rushed into the stream to get drowned.
All this work by the bridge had not been done without much noise. In making their sudden onslaught, and in raising their shout for Hereward, the Saxons had made the welkin ring; and the cries and screams of the discomfited Normans were distinctly heard across the wood and at the manor-house. The Saxons within that house heard both cries, and well understood what they meant: Ivo Taille-Bois and his men also heard them and understood them; and so, cursing Torauld the monk for a fool, Ivo halted his men under cover of the trees; and then, after listening for a brief space of time, and after hearing plainer than before the Norman cry of misericorde instead of attempting to surround the house, Ivo began to retrace his steps through the wood. And although the night was brightening up elsewhere, it continued so dark in that wood, and his people ran in so great hurry, that at almost every step some of them missed the narrow path, or fell over the roots of the trees. And as Ivo thus retreated, his ear was assailed by the taunting shouts of the Saxons in the manor-house, and by the triumphant shouts of those who had sallied forth with Hereward to smite Torauld in the dark.
But louder and louder still were the shouts in the good house of Brunn when its young Lord returned unhurt (and not a man of his was hurt) with the captives he had made, and notably with the once terrible Torauld.
“Thou seest,” said Hereward, “that thy friend Ivo hath not stayed to keep his appointed meeting with thee at my humble house! but stay thou here awhile, oh monk of Fescamp! and I will even go try whether I can overtake Ivo, and bring him back to meet thee! He hath the start, but is not so good a fenner as I am. So, come, my merry men all, one horn of wine apiece, and then for a chase through the wood and across the stream! An we catch not the great wood-cutter, we may perchance cut off part of his tail. But first lock me up these prisoners in the turret. Our women and old men will suffice to take care of them while we follow the chase.”