All the evils done to England by Knut and his Danes are not yet told, but they will plainly appear hereafter.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE NORMAN WITCH.
So the Danes and their ships were gone with all that they could carry with them; and the Saxons of Ely and in the Camp of Refuge, after being robbed as well as betrayed, were left to their own devices. Much was Duke William heartened by the departure of Knut, and the treaty he had made with him; and, seeing no enemy in any other part of England, he gave his whole mind to the war in the Fen-country. More knights and adventurers had come over from France and from sundry other countries to aid the Conqueror in his enterprises, and to seek provision and fortune in unhappy England. Choosing some of the best of these new comers, and joining them to troops that had been tried in the hard warfare of the Fen-country, the Son of Robert the Devil by the harlot of Falaise sent strong garrisons to Grantham and Stamford, and Peterborough, and Cam-Bridge; and, carrying with him his chancellor and nearly the whole of his court, he quitted London and went himself to Cam-Bridge to direct the war in person. As he and his mighty great host were marching through the country towards the river Cam, and as the poor Saxon people counted the number of the lances, they said, “Miserere Domine! The conquest of our country is complete, and not even Hereward the Brave will be able longer to defend the Camp of Refuge!”
When Duke William arrived in the camp at Cam-Bridge, and examined the Fen-country which lay before him, he severely censured the folly and rashness of Eustache of Ambleville; and also chiding the impatient and self-confident knights that were now with him and eager to fall on, he swore his terrible oath, by the splendour of God’s face, that he would not allow of any fighting until the ancient causeway[[202]] should be repaired and fortified with towers, and another and a broader causeway carried across the marshes into the very heart of the fens, and opposite to the point whereon the Saxons had constructed the main defence of their Camp of Refuge. Timber and stones and baked bricks were brought from all parts of the country, and every Saxon serf that could be caught was impressed, and was forced to labour almost unto death upon works intended for the destruction of his countrymen. Skilful artizans and men experienced in the making of roads and the building of bridges were brought to Cam-Bridge from the city of London, from the city of Caen in Normandie, and from other places beyond the seas; and the task which William had in hand was made the easier by the long-continued, unwonted dryness of the season. But the Lord of Brunn, although he prayed heartily for rain, did in no wise lose heart; and in proportion as his difficulties increased, his wit and invention increased also. The working parties on the roads were constantly covered and protected by great bodies of troops put under the command of vigilant officers; but this did not prevent Hereward from stealing through the tall, concealing rushes of the fens, and the forests of willows and alders, and falling upon the workmen and destroying their works. On several occasions he cut the Norman guard to pieces before they could form in order of battle; and several times he destroyed in a single night the labour of many days, levelling the Norman towers with the ground, breaking up their bridges, and carrying off their timber and their tools and other good spoil. It always happened that when his enemies were surest he would not come, he came; and when they expected him at one given point, he was sure to make an attack upon another and distant point. At times his ambuscades, surprises, and onslaughts were so numerous and rapid that he seemed to have the faculty of being in many places at one and the same time. Many a Norman knight was surprised at his post, or even carried off from the midst of a camp, and dragged through the rushes and forests at the dead of night, an astounded and helpless captive. Many a time a great body of Norman troops would take to flight and leave all their baggage behind them, upon merely hearing the shout of “Hereward for England!” or those other shouts, “The Lord of Brunn is coming! Fly, ye Norman thieves! Out! out!” Such were Lord Hereward’s successes, and such the Norman awe of his unforeseen stratagems and unaccountable surprises, that the Normans entirely believed Hereward to be in league with the devil, and to be aided by witches and necromancers and fiends worse than the blubber devils of Crowland. Now it was true that, for many of his stratagems and devices, and for many of the sleights and tricks with which he appalled the Normans, Hereward was indebted to the science and travail of that thin, dark man of Salerno and Norman-hater, Girolamo; and, by means of deserters from the camp, and by means of ransomed Normans that had been allowed to quit the camp, the Salernitan, if he had not been made well known to the Normans, had been much talked about, and had become the object of so much dread that no knight or man-at-arms ever named his name without crossing himself. Nor were the Normans long before they agreed, one and all, that the dark and silent Salernitan was Hereward’s chief magician, the devil-dealing necromancer to whom he stood indebted for all his successes. Loudly did they raise their voices against this supposed wickedness; and yet, when they found that their misfortunes and losses went on increasing, they came to the resolution to meet what was no witchcraft at all with real witchcraft, and they told Duke William in Cam-Bridge Castle that he must send over into Normandie for the most famed witch of that land, where there was no lack either of witches or of warlocks; and the son of Robert the Devil, whose father, as his name imports, had been liege man to Lucifer, sent over to Normandie accordingly to seek for the most dreaded of Norman witches. Now, whether it was this wickedness that did it, or whether it was that the moist air of the fens and the autumnal season did not suit Duke William, certain at least it is that he fell sick of a fever and ague, and thereupon took a hurried departure from Cam-Bridge and travelled towards London, having first sent to call from Stamford town Ivo Taille-Bois to take the command of the great army. Now, when Ivo came to Cam-Bridge, and when Duke William was away in London, matters went far worse with the Normans than before, for the Viscomte was not a great captain, as the Duke assuredly was. Moreover, many of the troops took the ague, and others were so unmanned by their fears that they could never be made to stand their ground; and, in fine, all vowed that they would not venture among the woods and bulrushes, nor attempt any feat of arms whatever until the great witch should arrive from Normandy to countervail the black arts of the Salernitan and the other wizards and witches they falsely believed to be employed by the pious Lord of Brunn.
At last a terrible Norman witch[[203]] arrived at Cam-Bridge, and she was received in the entrenched camp and in the castle with transports of exceeding great joy. Loathsome and wicked at the same time were it to describe the person and features, the attire and demeanour, the spells and incantations of this frightful and detestable portentum. Her years far exceeded the ordinary length of human life, and they had all been spent in sin and in the practise of infernal arts: in sin and actual devilry had she been conceived and born, for her mortal father was none other than that arch-heresiarch and enemy to the saints, Leutarde of Vertus, in the bishopric of Chalons, who went about with a sledge-hammer breaking the images of God’s saints, and preaching that God’s prophets had not always prophesied the truth, and that God-living servants and ministers of the altar had no right to their tithes! Since the day when her sire, pursued by his bishop, cast himself head foremost into a deep well and was drowned (for the devils, in their compact with him, had only agreed that he should never be burned), this foul strega, his only daughter, had wandered over the face of the wide earth doing mischief, and dwelling most in those forsaken, accursed parts of the earth where witchcraft does most flourish. It was said that she had been as far north as that dread isle which is covered with snow, and which yet is for ever vomiting smoke and flames; even to that northern isle[[204]] which pious men believe to be one of the entrances into hell, and which has been notoriously inhabited at all times by devils and devil-worshippers; that she had lived among the Laps, who call up demons by beat of drum; and that she had dwelt in the Orcades,[[205]] where the devil’s dam and her handmaidens use to raise great storms, and to sell wind foul or fair. Of a surety was there no witch of all that congregated round the witch-tree of Beneventum more known than this! It was known, too, how she came by that broken leg which made her limp in her gait. Once in flying through the air to the hellish sabbat at Beneventum she came too near to the cross of Saint Peter’s Church at Rome, and so fell to the earth.
Ivo Taille-Bois,[[206]] profane man as he was, would have turned with horror from the witch, but in his sinful ignorance he believed that the devil’s arts might be employed against the devil, and he saw that all the soldiery, nay, and all the chivalry put under his command, believed that without witchcraft they could never cope with the Lord of Brunn, nor make any way in the Fen-country. As for the witch herself, she promised the men immediate and most marvellous victories. Therefore it was agreed that she should go forth with the troops and the working parties and penetrate into the fens, and that she should take her station on a high wooden tower, and thence give her directions as well to the working men as to the fighting men. Now Lord Hereward and Girolamo of Salerno, being advised of the arrival of the hag and of the plans of the Normans, took counsel together, and trusted, with the aid of the saints, to break the spell and sortilege, and consume the witch while in the very act of her witchcraft. Calling in his merry men from all their outposts, and posting them behind a river, Lord Hereward allowed the Normans to advance a good way into the fens, and he offered them no molestation while they were building a lofty wooden tower in the midst of an open plain. But when the tower was finished and the witch was at her incantations, and when the Norman band was gathered round the foot of the tower in that open plain, Hereward and Girolamo, aided only by Elfric and a few other alert Saxons, came round unseen to the edge of the plain and set fire to the dense reeds and rushes that grew upon it. It is the custom of the fenners to burn their reeds and stubble in the month of November of every year in order to fertilize the soil with the ashes thereof; and at this season one sees all this moorish country in a flame, to his great wonder and surprise, if he be a stranger in these parts. It was now the burning-time, and owing to the exceeding dryness of the summer and of the autumn likewise, the reeds and junci in this plain were all as dry as matches: add to this that the Saleritan had brought with him and had sprinkled over the plain some of his marvellous compounds which made a raging and inextinguishable fire, and that the wind was blowing keenly from the north-east right across the plain and towards the tall wooden tower, and then it may be, to some degree, imagined, how rapidly and awfully the flames, once lit, rolled over that broad open field, crackling, and hissing, and then roaring in the wind, while columns of thick, pungent, suffocating smoke rolled after them, darkening the sun and sky and making visible the horrible red glare. At the first glimpse of the mighty blaze the hag stopped her incantation and let the hell-broth she was brewing drop from her skinny hands with a hideous yell; and the men-at-arms and the labourers that were gathered at the foot of the tower cast a look of dread and horror to windward and screamed like the witch, and then took to their heels and ran across the plain in the desperate hope of keeping before the winds and the flames, and paying no heed to the witch, who had no means of descending from her tower. “Ha! ha! thou hag! where is thy witch-tree of Beneventum now, which no mortal axe can cut down or lop, and no earthly fire consume? Ha! witch! where be the broad double channels and the rapid and cool streams of the river Calor? If they flowed by thee close as they used to do when thou wast perched on that witch-tree, high as is thy tower, wouldst not leap headlong into the deep water? Ha! accursed daughter of Leutard Iconoclastes, wouldst call upon the saints whose blessed effigies were broken by thy fathers sledge hammer? What! dost scream and raise thy skinny hands to Heaven? ’Tis vain, ’tis vain! the saints in Heaven will not hear thee, so down with thy hands towards earth and the fiery plain, and invoke the fiends to whom thou hast sold thy soul. So! so! the fire catcheth and thy tower of wood crackles in the flames, and the flames mount upward and embrace thee round about and lick thee with their blistering tongues! Ha! shriek and writhe! these flames give only a mild foretaste of thine eternal doom. These flames be but fed with dry rushes and fen-grass, and the wood of the oak and pine; but the unquenchable flames of the nethermost pit are fed with brimstone and naphtha. See! the tower falls and she is consumed, flesh and bones, in the hissing fire!—and so perish all witches!”
Thus spake Girolamo of Salerno, like the true believer that he was, as the Norman witch was burning. But the hag did not perish alone; the crackling fire, carried onward by the strong wind, overtaking and consuming nearly all the Normans that had advanced with her into the plains to set up her accursed tower. Ivo Taille-Bois, with the rest of the Norman host, had stopped at the ford where the witch had crossed before she came into the plain; but when he saw the fire kindled and roll across the fen almost as rapidly as the waters of a mighty cataract, and saw the smoke arise and shut out the sight of the blessed sun, Ivo turned and fled, and every man with him fled in wild dismay, nor stopped until they came to the castle by Cam-Bridge. And the ford where the hag crossed over into the plain is called unto this day Witchford.[[207]]
And when the fire which Girolamo had lit had burned itself out, and the smoke had cleared away, the fierce wind fell and there came on a terrible storm of thunder and lightning; and when this was over the long delayed rains began to fall in torrents, filling the rivers and brooks and marshpools, and making the whole country once more impassable; and these rains, intermitting only for brief hours, continued to fall for seven days and seven nights; and that part of the causeway which had been built by Duke William’s orders was undermined and washed away, so that no trace remained of it. And then, while the Normans remained penned up in the castle and in the intrenched camp, the Lord of Brunn and his Saxons launched their light boats in the rivers and meres, and destroyed all the works which had been built to defend the whole road. Thus in the next year the Conqueror had everything to begin anew. In the meanwhile Ivo Taille-Bois gave up the command in despair, and went away to Stamford, where he had left his wife, the Ladie Lucia. During the winter this Vicomte of Spalding made an essay to recover possession of the Ladie Lucia’s manor-house and estates at Spalding; but as the Saxons had still a little fleet of barks and the entire command of the Welland river, Ivo failed entirely, and was not even able to do so much as disturb the tranquillity of the good Saxon monks of Crowland. And while the Norman vicomte was thus unsuccessful, other and great successes attended the Saxon lord. With one numerous band collected near his house at Brunn, the Lord Hereward found his way across the country as far as Newark, where he defeated a great body of Normans, and found good spoil; and after this, with another band, drawn mostly from the impenetrable bogs of Hoilandia, he ascended the Witham as far as Boston and there surprised and captured three Norman knights, and some three-score Norman men-at-arms. And it so chanced that among these three knights was that unlucky wooer Geoffroy, the brother of Ivo, who had found in some upland part of England a Saxon wife and heiress, but one neither so handsome nor so rich as the Ladie Alftrude, for it was a widow quite old enough to be Sir Geoffroy’s mother, and her whole estate was not much larger than one of the Ladie Alftrude’s farms. Having no money to pay for his ransom, and his brother having none to give or lend him, Geoffroy was sent into the fens and kept there as a close prisoner. And before the Lord of Brunn had done, he made other members of that family know what it was to live among the bulrushes. But now, having done all these things, and performed many other exploits, Hereward, at the approach of spring, brought his fair young spouse from Ely to his house at Brunn, and a very few days after her arrival the lady gave birth[[208]] to an heir to the united honours of Brunn and Ey. And hereupon followed high rejoicings, and a christening, and such an hospitable feast as only true Saxon lords knew how to give. The good-hearted Lord Abbat of Crowland baptized the child, and sundry of his monks, and the good prior of Spalding among them, were bidden to the feast. “Elfric, my trusty sword-bearer,” said the Lord of Brunn when the feast was over, “Elfric, I say, methinks I have given proof, that a man may love and fight, and be a husband and a soldier, at one and the same time, and that if we are to put off thy espousal day with maid Mildred until this war be over, thou wilt run a chance of never being married at all!”
“Good, my Lord,” said Elfric, “This is what I have been thinking for more than these nine months past.”