So the monks were scattered and the wealth of the Golden Borough was carried off to Ely and handed over to the Danes, who do not seem to have shared Hereward’s sentiments with regard to its ultimate destination. Among the captives who were carried off from Peterborough was Ethelwold, the prior, who, in hope of better days, devoted himself secretly to the recovery of the relics contained in the jewelled shrines which formed the most valuable part of the plunder that had just been taken. With this object in view, he deliberately set himself to win the favour of the despoilers of his home, and succeeded so well, that the Danes committed their treasure to his custody, and promised him a bishopric in Denmark if he chose to return with them. Being a discreet man, he pretended to comply with their wishes, and in the meantime possessed himself of the tools which were necessary for the abstraction of the relics. And on a certain day, while the Danes were holding a great feast, to celebrate the winning of so great a treasure at so small a cost, Ethelwold took his tools and set to work, beginning his operations on the reliquary which he knew to contain the arm of St. Oswald. To prevent interruption he placed two servants on guard, one in the house where the Danes were feasting, and the other midway between the latter place and the scene of his own labours. The task progressed without greater difficulty than was to be expected, although one of the chests was so tightly clamped with iron that Ethelwold would have abandoned it had he not trusted in God and St. Oswald. At last the relics were all secured and hidden temporarily in the straw of the prior’s bed, he being careful to replace the gold and silver fittings of the shrines as they were before. But at the critical moment the Danes broke up to go to vespers and Ethelwold was in imminent danger of being taken, in which event it is probable that his pious zeal would have been rewarded with the crown of martyrdom. But, without leaving his room, the prior, who was covered with sweat and very red from his labour in the heat of a June afternoon, washed his face in cold water and went out to his captors as if nothing had happened, and they, who we are told reverenced him as a father, flocked round him but asked no inconvenient questions. And on the following day he sent his two servants to Hereward—because his comrades were infesting all the water-ways—under the pretence that they wished to fetch something from Peterborough, but in reality they went to the nearer monastery of Ramsey and gave the relics into the charge of the abbot of that place.
At this point the adventures of Prior Ethelwold touch the current of the general history. King William, in order, presumably, to divide the insurgent Englishmen from their Danish allies, made a treaty with Swegn of Denmark, by which his subjects were to be allowed to sail for their fatherland without hindrance and in possession of all the spoil they had gained in the course of the past months. They took advantage of the offer, but gained little by it in the event, for a great storm arose which scattered their ships, and the last we hear of the treasures of Peterborough is their destruction, in a nameless Danish town, in a great fire which arose through the drunkenness of their guardians. In the meantime, Ethelwold, his troubles over, collected his fellow-monks and came back to Peterborough, where they found Abbot Thorold, and restored the services which had been suspended during the recent disturbances. One unexpected difficulty indeed manifested itself: the Ramsey people refused to give up the relics which had been entrusted to their care in the moment of peril. But the abbot of Ramsey was soon brought into a better mind; the sacristan of the monastery received a supernatural intimation that his house was acting unjustly, and Thorold of Peterborough threatened to burn Ramsey abbey to the ground unless the relics were given back. And so the heroic efforts of Ethelwold were not frustrated of their purpose.
So quickly had events moved that only one week had elapsed between the coming of Hereward to Peterborough and the departure of the Danish fleet. But an entire year had yet to pass before the Isle of Ely was finally cleared of its rebel garrison. It does not seem that the withdrawal of the Danes made any difference to the occupation of Ely by the English, and during the winter of 1070 the Isle became a gathering point for the last adherents of the broken national party. Very few of them were left now. Edgar, their nominal head, was living in peace with King Malcolm of Scotland; Waltheof, the last representative of the Danish earls of Northumbria, was at this moment in enjoyment of an earldom in the midlands which there is every reason to believe included the Isle of Ely itself. On the other hand, Edwin and Morcar now finally took their departure from William’s court, and raised the last of their futile protests against the Norman rule.
Hitherto inseparable, on this occasion the brother earls took different courses, and the result was disastrous to both of them. Morcar joined the outlaws in Ely; Edwin struck out for the Scotch kingdom, and from our meagre information about his last months it would seem that he had in view some great scheme of reviving once more the old friendship between his house and the Welsh princes and of supporting the combination with Scotch aid. But fate overtook him before he had time to give another exhibition of his political worthlessness, and the circumstances of his end were tragic and mysterious. Three brothers, who were on terms of intimacy with him and were attending him in his wanderings, betrayed him to the Normans, and in attempting to escape, his retreat was blocked by a river swollen at the moment by a high tide. On its bank the last earl of Mercia turned at bay, and with twenty horsemen at his side made a desperate defence until the whole band was cut down; Edwin himself, it would appear, falling by the hands of the three traitors of his household. His head was cut off and the same three brothers brought it to King William in the expectancy of a great reward. But the Conqueror on the spot outlawed them for their treason to their lord, and shed tears of grief over Edwin’s head; for the handsome, fickle young earl, with all his faults, had really won the love of the grim sovereign from whom he had thrice revolted.[[226]]
Edwin fell through treachery, but he met his death in the sight of the sun; another fate remained for his brother and for those of his associates whose end is known to us. The cause of the defenders of Ely was hopeless from the outset. Their revolt was a hindrance to the orderly conduct of the Anglo-Norman government, but a band of outlaws in the fenland could do little to affect the course of events elsewhere; Ely commanded no great road or river, and its Isle was too small an area to support an independent existence apart from the rest of the land. Its reduction was only a question of time, complicated by the geographical difficulties of the district. It was necessary that all the waterways leading from the fens to the open sea should be blocked, and this implied the concentration of a considerable number of ships and men-at-arms along the Great and Little Ouse. The siege of a quarter of Cambridgeshire demanded a greater expenditure of men and money than that of a single town or castle; but Hereward and his friends in due time were driven back on Ely itself, from which their raiding parties would make occasional descents upon the neighbouring villages. The Conqueror fixed his headquarters at Cambridge, some fifteen miles from Ely, and his main attack was directed at the point where the Ouse is crossed by an ancient causeway near the village of Aldreth. But even from the latter place there remained some six miles of fen to be crossed before Ely itself could be reached, and we are told on good authority that William caused a bridge, two miles long, to be built on the western side of the Isle.[[227]]
The legendary accounts of the exploits of Hereward tell many tales of the struggle which raged before the Norman army had pierced the natural defences of Ely, but we cannot be sure of the exact means by which the place was finally reduced. One stream of tradition assigned the fall of the Isle to the treachery of the abbot and monks of Ely, and, although the authority for such a statement is not first-rate, it has commonly been accepted as representing the truth of the matter.[[228]] It is at least certain that the position in which the monks of Ely found themselves was undesirable at the best. The conduct of Hereward and his men at Peterborough proves them to have been no respecters of holy places, and if the abbey bought immediate safety by conniving at the deeds of the outlaws in its neighbourhood, it ran the risk of the ultimate confiscation of its lands when King William had restored order. Small blame should rest upon the abbot if he broke through the dilemma in which he was placed by assisting the Conqueror in the reduction of the Isle. But whatever the immediate cause of the fall of Ely, a large number of its defenders fell into William’s hands and many of them received from him such measure as twenty years before he had dealt to the men of Alençon. Some were blinded or otherwise mutilated and allowed to go free, others were thrown into prison. Earl Morcar himself was sent into Normandy a prisoner and committed to the charge of Roger de Beaumont[[229]]; the other captives of note were scattered over the country in different fortresses. But Hereward, who in all our authorities stands out as the leader of the resistance, escaped through the marshes and a small part of his band got clear of the Isle in his company.[[230]]
Whatever the recent behaviour of the monks of Ely may have been, the abbey was constrained to buy the king’s peace at a heavy price. Seven hundred marks of silver were originally demanded by the Conqueror, but the money was found to be of light weight, and three hundred marks more were exacted before the abbot and monks were reckoned quit by the king’s officer. Moreover, the very precincts of the abbey were invaded to find the site for a castle to command the southern fenland: King William himself having chosen the ground during a flying visit which he had paid to Ely one day while the monks were seated at dinner. The building of the castle, by a Norman interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon duty of burhbot, was laid upon the men of the three adjacent counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Bedford, and it was garrisoned when built by a body of picked knights. Another castle at Aldreth commanded the eastern approaches to the Isle.[[231]] On the other hand, it would be some compensation for these disturbances that within four years from the fall of Ely, and in the lifetime of Abbot Thurstan, King William decreed a formal restitution to the abbey of all the lands of which it had unjustly been despoiled in recent years.[[232]] Now that no further danger was to be apprehended from the nationalist proclivities of the monks of Ely, there was no reason why the abbey should not be suffered to enjoy its ancient possessions in peace; but the record of the plea which followed the Conqueror’s writ directing restitution proves that many of the greater people of the land, including the archbishop Stigand and Count Eustace of Boulogne, had been committing wholesale depredations on the estates of St. Ethelthryth.
The subsequent fate of Hereward is a matter of utter uncertainty; with his flight across the marshes of Ely he vanishes into the night which has engulfed the entire class to which he belonged, the smaller native land-owners of King Edward’s day. Two lines of tradition were current in later years about the manner of his end. According to the more dramatic narrative, Hereward became reconciled to the Conqueror, accompanied him in the Mancel campaign of 1074, married a noble and wealthy Englishwoman, and fell at last, before overwhelming odds, at the hands of a number of Normans, whose feud he would seem to have provoked in the wild days of his outlawry.[[233]] In the other story, Hereward still receives King William’s favour and marries the same English lady as in the former legend, but he dies at last in peace after many years in the quiet possession of his father’s lands.[[234]] The choice which we may make between these divergent traditions will largely be guided by inference from more truly historical sources of information. It is very probable that Hereward made his peace with King William—both traditions agree upon this point; and that casual expression in the narrative of the sack of Peterborough, that Hereward “in after time often told the monks that he had done all for the best,” proves at least that there had been a period after the troubles of 1071 in which Hereward had been on terms of peaceful intercourse with his monkish neighbours. So too the coincidence of both lines of tradition with regard to his marriage is in favour of its probability, but the negative evidence of Domesday Book compels us to put a period to his life before the winter of 1085. In no part of England did a more numerous body of native thegns hold land at the latter date than in Hereward’s own county of Lincoln, but Hereward’s name is not written among them, and the lands which he had held of Peterborough abbey had been let to a stranger. But if the Hereward legend is not consistent with itself, there is a more significant discrepancy between the part which its subject plays in recorded history and his position as a hero of romance. It is at least certain that the man must have been something more than the vulgar freebooter who appears in the story of the ruin of Peterborough. To him we may safely credit the long defence of the Isle of Ely, and we may feel confident that that defence was accompanied by deeds of gallantry round which minstrel and gleeman might weave their fabric of legend and marvel. Hereward, after all, in literature, if not in fact, is the English hero of the Norman Conquest. A native annalist might express his bitter regret for the tragedy of King Harold, the common folk of England might turn Earl Waltheof into an uncanonised saint, but Hereward was removed by no great chasm of rank from the humble people who made his deeds their story. And it is not a small thing that the tale of the resistance to the Norman Conqueror, inglorious as much of it had been, should end with the name of a man in whom the succeeding generations might see a true champion of the independence of the beaten race.
Penny of Swegn Estuthson