From Crowland the marauders proceeded, taking Turgar with them, to another large and wealthy abbey in the neighborhood, which they plundered and destroyed, as they had the abbey at Crowland. Sidroc made Turgar his own attendant, keeping him always near him. When the expedition had completed their second conquest, they packed the valuables which they had obtained from both abbeys in wagons, and moved toward the south. It happened that some of these wagons were under Count Sidroc's charge, and were in the rear of the line of march. In passing a ford, the wheels of one of these rear wagons sank in the muddy bottom, and the horses, in attempting to draw the wagon out, became entangled and restive. While Sidroc's whole attention was engrossed by this difficulty, Turgar contrived to steal away unobserved. He hid himself in a neighboring wood, and, with a degree of sagacity and discretion remarkable in a boy of his years, he contrived to find his way back to the smoking ruins of his home at the Abbey of Crowland.
The monks who had gone away to seek concealment at the cell of the anchorite had returned, and were at work among the smoking ruins, saving what they could from the fire, and [page 102] gathering together the blackened remains of their brethren for interment. They chose one of the monks that had escaped to succeed the abbot who had been murdered, repaired, so far as they could, their ruined edifices, and mournfully resumed their functions as a religious community.
Many of the tales which the ancient chroniclers tell of those times are romantic and incredible; they may have arisen, perhaps, in the first instance, in exaggerations of incidents and events which really occurred, and were then handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition, till they found historians to record them. The story of the martyrdom of King Edmund is of this character. Edmund was a sort of king over one of the nations of Anglo-Saxons called East Angles, who, as their name imports, occupied a part of the eastern portion of the island. Their particular hostility to Edmund was awakened, according to the story, in the following manner:
There was a certain bold and adventurous Dane named Lothbroc, who one day took his falcon on his arm and went out alone in a boat on the Baltic Sea, or in the straits connecting it with the German Ocean, intending to go to [page 105] a certain island and hunt. The falcon is a species of hawk which they were accustomed to train in those days, to attack and bring down birds from the air, and falconry was, as might have been expected, a very picturesque and exciting species of hunting. The game which Lothbroc was going to seek consisted of the wild fowl which frequents sometimes, in vast numbers, the cliffs and shores of the islands in those seas. Before he reached his hunting ground, however, he was overtaken by a storm, and his boat was driven by it out to sea. Accustomed to all sorts of adventures and dangers by sea and by land, and skilled in every operation required in all possible emergencies, Lothbroc contrived to keep his boat before the wind, and to bail out the water as fast as it came in, until at length, after being driven entirely across the German Ocean, he was thrown upon the English shore, where, with his hawk still upon his arm, he safely landed.
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He knew that he was in the country of the most deadly foes of his nation and race, and accordingly sought to conceal rather than to make known his arrival. He was, however, found, after a few days, wandering up and down in a solitary wood, and was conducted, together with his hawk, to King Edmund.
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