The Siege of Norwich Castle: A story of the last struggle against the Conqueror

by M. M. Blake

When the son of Siward had carried to William the news of the plot in which he had taken part, the Conqueror had received him graciously, and had pardoned him freely for his own share of the mischief. But he kept him at his side, although he did not call him a prisoner; and, soon after landing in England, arrested him on a charge of complicity with the Danes, who had been his old comrades. William had that excuse for thinking him dangerous.

Then came Judith's opportunity. She hated the husband she had been forced to marry for State purposes, and stood forth as his accuser, pouring her poison into the ears of her royal uncle. Unfortunately William listened, and cast the son of Siward into prison at Winchester, where he languished for months, while a mock trial was going on, which many hungry Normans, who wanted his estates, were determined should end to their liking. Ivo Taillebois, who had been one of Hereward's most venomous foes, and whose lands adjoined those of Waltheof, was amongst the most clamorous for his destruction; and the Primate Lanfranc his best advocate and almost sole friend, recognising perhaps that it was by his persuasion that Waltheof had been induced to place himself in the power of the Conqueror.

Early one morning, while the good folks of Winchester were asleep in their beds, the Normans led the Saxon chief without the walls of the town. Waltheof walked to the place of execution clothed in his earl's apparel, which he distributed among some priests, or gave to some poor people who had followed him, and whom the Normans permitted to approach on account of their small numbers and entirely peaceful appearance. Having reached a hill at a short distance from the walls, the soldiers halted, and the Saxon, prostrating himself, prayed aloud for a few moments; but the Normans, fearing that too long a delay would cause a rumour of the intended execution to be spread in the town, and that the citizens would rise to save their fellow-countryman, exclaimed with impatience to Waltheof, 'Arise, that we may fulfil our orders.' He asked, as a last favour, that they would wait only until he had once more repeated, for them and for himself, the Lord's Prayer. They allowed him to do so; and Waltheof, rising from the ground, but remaining on his knees, began aloud, 'Our Father who art in Heaven;' but at the verse, 'and lead us not into temptation,' the executioner, seeing perhaps that daylight was beginning to appear, would wait no longer, but, suddenly drawing his large sword, struck off the Saxon's head at one blow. The body was thrown into a hole, dug between two roads, and hastily covered with earth.[ [9] But the monks of Crowland, to whom he had made rich gifts in his lifetime, and who had been staunch throughout to the English cause, got the body up again a fortnight later, and averred that it was still unchanged and the blood fresh (sixteen years later they pronounced that it was still as fresh, and that the head had grown on to the body again!); and they bore it away to 'Holland,' to St. Guthlac's in the Fens, and erected a tomb in the abbey, with William's permission, whereat great miracles took place. When his traitress wife Judith, the 'foreign woman,' as the chroniclers style her, went to cover this monument to her husband with a rich pall of silk, which she had prepared for it, the martyred hero refused her hypocritical gift, and the offering was snatched away and thrown to a distance by an invisible hand.

So the Saxon monks made a holy martyr of the wavering Waltheof, whose fate, and the fate of England with it, might have been very different if he had possessed as much moral as physical courage.

The Norman ecclesiastics accused the Saxons as idolaters, and found the occasion good for deposing and dishonouring Abbot Wulfketel, and putting Norman Toustain in his stead; which only made the English more keen to honour their dead hero, and they rushed in crowds to his tomb.

Judith thought herself very lucky to have all the money and lands that had belonged to Waltheof, and to be free of him, and made up her mind to have a second husband according to her own taste. But she wished him alive again when William made a present of her, possessions and all, to one Simon de Senlis, a brave, but lame and deformed knight.

She refused to carry out the bargain, so William consoled De Senlis with her daughter instead, together with all the lands and money; and the Saxon chroniclers gloat over Judith's subsequent poverty and sorrows. But we, looking back, now the years have rolled away, may pity her, and see that the crime lay with those who treated a woman as a chattel, and 'gave' her away to this man and that, without consulting her welfare or her happiness, rather than with the woman so treated.

And Emma's brother, the son of William's staunchest vassal, how fared he?

When the Conqueror passed the Straits after his attempt to reduce De Guader at Dol, he called a great council of Norman barons to pass judgment on the authors of the recent conspiracy. Ralph de Guader they dispossessed of all his English property as absent and contumacious; and Roger of Hereford, being a prisoner, was brought before them, and condemned to lose all his lands, and to pass the rest of his days in prison.

But William seems still to have had a soft place in his heart for the son of his old friend, and sent him one Easter, according to the custom of the Norman court, a complete suit of precious stuffs, a silk tunic and mantle, and a close coat trimmed with foreign furs.