Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II

The Bayeux tapestry—the “Toile de St. Jean,” as it is there called, from the feast-day when the cathedral was hung with it—remained unknown and forgotten, till it was brought to light by one of the last people that could have been expected—Napoleon. He was then full of his plan for invading England, and called general attention to the toile de St. Jean, to bring to mind the Norman Invasion, and show that England had once been conquered.

So she had, but he had to deal with the sons of both victors, and of those who were slain. Now vanquished, Norman and Saxon were one, and by the great mercy of Heaven upon their offspring, the English, not one battle has been fought, since Hastings, with a Continental foe upon English ground.

May that mercy be still vouchsafed us!

CAMEO VIII. THE CAMP OF REFUGE. (1067-1072.)

King of England.

1066. William I.

In the fen country of Lincolnshire, there lived, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, a wealthy Saxon franklin named Leofric, Lord of Bourn. He was related to the great Earls of Mercia, and his brother Brand was Abbot of Peterborough, so that he, and his wife Ediva, were persons of consideration in their own neighborhood. They had a son named Hereward, and called, for some unknown, reason, Le Wake, a youth of great height and personal strength, and of so fierce and violent a disposition, that he disturbed the peace of the neighborhood to such a degree that he was banished from the realm. His high spirit found fit occupation in the armies of foreign princes: and pilgrims and minstrels brought home such reports of his prowess, that the people of Bourn no longer regarded him as a turbulent young scapegrace, but considered him as their pride and glory.

After a brilliant career abroad, Hereward married a Flemish lady, and was settled on her estates when the tidings reached him that his father was dead, and that his aged mother had been despoiled of her property, and cruelly treated, by a Norman to whom William the Conqueror had presented the estate of Bourn. No sooner did he receive this intelligence, than he set off with his wife, and, arriving in Lincolnshire, communicated in secret with his old friends at Bourn, collected a small band, attacked the Norman, drove him away, and re-instated Ediva in his paternal home.

But this exploit only exposed him to further perils. Normans were in possession of every castle around; his cousins, the young Earls Edwin find Morkar, had submitted to the Conqueror; Edwin was betrothed to Agatha, William’s daughter; and their sister Lucy was married to an Angevin named Ivo Taillebois bringing him a portion of their lands, in right of which he called himself Viscount of Spalding. Their submission had availed them little; they, as well as Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon (son of Siward, and husband of the Conqueror’s niece, Judith), were feeling that a hand of iron was over them, and regretting every day that he had not made common cause against the enemy before he had fully established his power. Selfishness, jealousy, and wavering, had overthrown and ruined the Saxons. Each had sought to secure his own lands and life, careless of his neighbors. No one had the spirit of Frithric, Abbot of St. Alban’s, who blocked up the Conqueror’s march with trunks of trees, and when asked by William why he had injured his woods for the sake of making an unavailing resistance, replied, “I did my duty. If every one had done as much, you would not be here.” According to their own tradition, the men of Kent, coming forward, each carrying a branch of a tree, so that they advanced unperceived, “a moving wood,” so encumbered William’s passage that he could not proceed till he had taken an oath to respect their privileges. London, too, preserved its rights, owing to the management of a burgess, called Ansgard, who conducted the treaty with the Normans and would not admit them into the city till its liberties were secured.

William himself was anxious to be regarded not as a conqueror, but as reigning by inheritence from the Confessor. For this cause, when Matilda was crowned, he caused a Norman baron, Marmion of Fontenaye, to ride into the midst of Westminster Hall, and, throwing down his gauntlet, defy any man to single combat who denied the rights of William and Matilda. He himself took the old coronation oath drawn up by St. Dunstan, and pledged himself to execute justice according to the old laws of Alfred and Edward.

But William, whatever might be his own good intentions, was pressed by circumstances. He had lured his Normans across the channel with hopes of rich plunder in England, and knight and squire, man-at-arms and archer, were eager for their reward. Norman, Breton, Angevin, clamored for possession: families of peasants crossed the sea, expecting, in right of their French tongue, to be gentry at once, and lords of the churl Saxons; while the Saxons, fully conscious of their own nobility, and possessors of the soil for five hundred years, derided them in such rhymes as these:

 
  “William de Coningsby
  Came out of Brittany
  With his wife Tiffany,
  And his maid Manfas,
  And his dog Hardigras.”
 

But the laugh proved to be on the side of the new comers, and the Saxon, whether Earl, Thane, Franklin, or Ceorl, though he could trace his line up to Odin, and had held his land since Hengist first won Thanet, must give place to Hardigras and his master. And though our sympathies are all with the dispossessed Saxons, and the Normans appear as needy and rapacious spoilers, there is no cause for us to lament their coming. Without the Norman aristocracy, and the high spirit of chivalry and adventure thus infused, England could scarcely have attained her greatness; for, though many great men had existed among the unmixed Anglo-Saxon race, they had never been able to rouse the nation from the heavy, dull, stolid sensuality into which, to this day, an uncultivated Englishman is liable to fall.

One Norman, the gallant Gilbert Fitz-Richard, deserves to be remembered as an exception to the grasping temper of his countrymen. He would accept neither gold nor lands for the services he had rendered at Hastings. He said he had come in obedience to the summons of his feudal chief, and not for spoil, and, now his term of service was at an end, he would go back to his own inheritance, with which he was content, without the plunder of the widow and orphan.

For it was thus that William first strove to satisfy his followers. Every rich Saxon widow or heiress who could be found was compelled to marry a Norman baron or knight; but when there proved to be not a sufficiency of these unfortunate ladies, he was obliged to find other pretexts less apparently honorable. Every noble who had fought in the cause of Harold was declared a traitor, and his lands adjudged to be forfeited, and this filled the Earldoms of Wessex and Sussex with great numbers of Normans, who counted their wealth at so many Englishmen apiece, and made no scruple of putting their own immediate followers into the manors whence they thrust the ancient owners. As to the great nobles, they were treated so harshly that they were all longing, if possible, to throw off the yoke, and make the stand which they should have made a year ago, when William had won nothing but the single, hard-fought battle of Hastings.

Some of the Norman adventurers took great state on them, all the more, probably, because they had been nobodies in their own country. One of the most haughty of all was the Spalding Viscount, Ivo, whose surname of Taillebois seems to betray somewhat of his origin in Anjou. He was noted for his pompous language and insolent bearing; he insisted on his vassals kneeling on one knee when they addressed him, and he and his men-at-arms took every opportunity of tormenting the Saxons. He set his dogs at their flocks, lamed or drowned their cattle, killed their poultry, and, above all, harassed a few brethren of the Abbey of Croyland, who inhabited a grange not far from Spalding, to such a degree, that he obliged them at last to retreat to the Abbey, and then filled the house with monks from Anjou; and though the Abbot Ingulf was William’s secretary, he could obtain no redress.

Such a neighbor as this was not likely to allow the re-instated Ediva to remain at Bourn in peace, and Hereward found that he must continue in arms, for her protection and his own. He placed his wife, Torfrida, in a convent, and, collecting his friends around him, kept up a constant warfare with the Normans, until at length he succeeded in fortifying the Isle of Ely, and establishing there what he called the Camp of Refuge, as it gave shelter to any Saxon who had suffered from the violence of the Normans, or would not adopt the new habits they tried to enforce.

The weak, helpless, and aged, were sheltered by the monastery and its buildings; the strong, enrolled in Hereward’s gallant band. Some of them were of higher rank than himself, and in order that he might be on a par with them, as well as with his Norman enemies, he sought the order of knighthood from his uncle, Abbot Brand.

The Normans in general were knighted by lay nobles, and though their prince, William Rufus, received the order from Lanfranc, they would not acknowledge Hereward as a knight, though they could not help respecting his truth, honor, and courage; and it was a common saying among them, that if there had been only four men like him in England, they should never have gained a footing there. No wonder, when he never hesitated to fight singly with seven Normans at once, and each of his five principal followers was a match for three. They were Ibe Winter, his brother-in-arms; Eghelric, his cousin; Ital; Alfric; and Sexwald.

Many fugitives of high rank did Hereward receive in his Camp of Refuge. He had nearly been honored by the presence of his hereditary sovereign, Edgar the Etheling, but the plan failed. He did, however, shelter his two cousins, Morkar and Edwin. They had suffered much from the insolence of the Normans, and experienced the futility of the promises in which they had trusted, until at length they had been driven to join a rising in the North. It had been quickly suppressed, and the worst of all the cruelties of the Normans had avenged it, while the two earls, now become outlaws, fled to the Camp of Refuge. Thence Edwin was sent on a mission to Scotland, but on the way he was attacked by a party of his enemies and slain, after a gallant resistance. He was the handsomest man of his time, and his betrothed, Agatha, was devotedly attached to him; it is even said that the stern William himself wept when the bloody head of his daughter’s lover was presented to him. A curious gold ornament has been of late years found in the field where Edwin was killed, and antiquaries allow us to imagine that it might have been a love-token from the Norman princess to the Saxon earl.

Another fugitive in Hereward’s camp was the high-spirited Abbot Frithric, whose steady opposition to the illegal encroachments of the Normans had given great offence to William. Once Frithric had combined with other influential ecclesiastics to require of the Conqueror another oath to abide by the old English laws, and thus brought on himself an accusation of rebellion and sentence of banishment. He assembled his monks, and told them the time was come when, according to the words of Holy Scripture, they must flee from city to city, bade them, farewell, and, taking nothing with him but a few books, safely reached the Camp of Refuge, where he soon after died.

Thorold, the new Norman Abbot of Malmesbury, kept a body of archers in his pay, and whenever his monks resisted any of his improper measures, he used to call out, “Here, my men-at-arms!” At length the Conqueror heard of his proceedings. “I’ll find him his match!” cried William. “I will send him to Peterborough, ‘where Hereward will give him as much fighting as he likes.”

To Peterborough, then, Thorold was appointed on the death of Hereward’s uncle, Abbot Brand, while the poor monks of Malmesbury received for their new superior a certain Guerin de Lire, who disinterred and threw away the bones of his Saxon predecessors, and took all the treasure in the coffers of the convent, in order that he might display his riches in the eyes of those who had seen him poor.

Yet all the Norman clergy were not such as these, and never should be forgotten the beautiful answer of Guimond, a monk of St. Leufroi, such a priest as Fitz-Richard was a knight. William had summoned him to England, and he came without delay; but when he was told it was for the purpose of raising him to high dignity, he spoke thus: “Many causes forbid me to seek dignity and power; I will not mention all. I will only say that I see not how I could ever properly be the head of men whose manners and language I do not understand, and whose fathers, brothers, and friends, have been slain by your sword, disinherited, exiled, imprisoned, or harshly enslaved by you. Search the Holy Scriptures whether any law permits that the shepherd should be forced on the flock by their enemy. Can you divide what you have won by war and bloodshed, with one who has laid aside his own goods for the sake of Christ? All priests are forbidden to meddle with rapine, or to take any share of the prey, even as an offering at the altar; for, as the Scriptures say, ‘He that bringeth an offering of the goods of the poor, is as one that slayeth the son before the father’s eyes.’ When I remember these commands of God, I am filled with terror; I look on England as one great prey, and dread to touch it or its treasures, as I should a red-hot iron.”

Guimond then returned to Normandy, uninjured by the Conqueror, who, with all his faults, never took offence at such rebukes; but the worldly-minded clergy were excessively affronted at his censure of their rapacity, and raised such a persecution against him that he was obliged to take refuge in Italy.

As soon as the news arrived at the Camp of Refuge that the warlike Thorold had been appointed to Peterborough, Hereward and his hand hastened to the Abbey, and, probably with the consent of the Saxon monks, carried off all the treasures into the midst of the fens. Thorold, with one hundred and sixty men-at-arms, soon made his appearance, was installed as Abbot, and quickly made friends with his Norman neighbor, Ivo Taillebois.

They agreed to make an expedition against the robber Saxons, and united their forces, but Thorold appears to have been not quite as willing to face Hereward as to threaten his monks, and let Ivo advance into the midst of an extensive wood of alders, while he remained in the rear with some other Normans of distinction. Ivo sought through the whole wood without meeting a Saxon, and returning to the spot where he had left the Abbot, found no one there, for Hereward had quitted the wood on the opposite side, made a circuit, and falling suddenly on Thorold and his party, carried them off to the fens, and kept them there till they had paid a heavy ransom.

In 1072, the fifth year of the Camp of Refuge, it had assumed so formidable an aspect, that William thought it necessary to take vigorous measures against it, more especially as there had been lately a commencement of correspondence with the Danes. The difficulty was to reach it, for the treacherous ground of the fens afforded no firm footing for an army; there was not water enough for boats, no station for archers, no space for a charge of the ponderous knights, amongst the reedy pools. William decided on constructing a causeway, and employed workmen to cut trenches to drain off the water, and raise the bank of stones and turf, under the superintendence of Ivo Taillebois. However, Hereward was on the alert, harassing them perpetually, breaking on them sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, in such strange, unexpected ways, that at last the viscount came to the conclusion that he must have magic arts to aid him, and persuaded the king to let him send for a witch to work against him by counter spells. Accordingly, she was installed in a wooden tower raised at the end of the part of the causeway which was completed, and the workmen were beginning to advance boldly under her protection, when suddenly smoke and flame came driving upon them. Hereward had set fire to the dry reeds, and, spreading quickly, the flame cut off their retreat, and the unhappy woman perished, with many of the Normans.

Again and again were the Norman attacks disconcerted, and all that they could attempt was a blockade, which lasted many months, and might probably have been sustained many more by the hardy warriors, if some of the monks of Ely, growing weary of the privations they endured, had not gone in secret to the king, and offered to show him a way across the Marches, on condition that the wealth of the Abbey was secured.

Accordingly, a band of Normans crossed the fens, took the Saxons by surprise, killed a thousand men, and forced the camp. Hereward and his five comrades still fought on, crossed bogs where the enemy did not dare to follow them, and at length escaped into the low lands of Lincoln, where they met with some Saxon fishermen, who were in the habit of supplying a Norman station of soldiers. These Saxons willingly received the warriors into their boats, and hid them under heaps of straw, while they carried their fish as usual to the Normans. While the Normans were in full security, Hereward and his men suddenly attacked them, killed some, put the rest to flight, and seized their horses.

Collecting others of his scattered followers, Hereward kept up his warfare from his own house at Bourn, continually harassing the Normans, until at length he took prisoner his old enemy, Ivo Taillebois, and, as the price of his liberty, required him to make his peace with the Conqueror. This was good news to William, who highly esteemed his valor and constancy, and could accuse him of no breach of faith, since he had made no engagements to him. Hereward was therefore received as a subject of King William, retained his own estate, and died there at a good old age, respected by both Saxons and Normans.

There is, indeed, an old Norman-French poem, that declares it was for the love of a noble Saxon lady, named Alftrude, that Hereward ceased to struggle with the victors. According to this story, Alftrude, an heiress of great wealth, was so charmed by the report of Hereward’s fame, that she offered him her hand, and persuaded him to make peace with William. It is further said, that one afternoon, as he lay asleep under a tree, a band of armed men, among whom were several Bretons, surrounded and murdered him, though not till he had slain fifteen of them.

But this story is not likely to be true, since we know that Hereward was already married, and the testimony of more than one ancient English chronicler declares that he spent his latter years in peace and honor. He was the only one of the Saxon chieftains who thus closed his days in his native home—the only one who had not sought to preserve his own possessions at the expense of his country, and who had broken no oaths nor engagements. His exploits are told in old ballads and half-romantic histories, and it is not safe to believe them implicitly, but his existence and his gallant resistance are certain.

Many years after, the remains of a wooden fort, the citadel, so to speak of the Camp of Refuge, still existed in the Isle of Ely, and was called by the peasantry Hereward’s Castle. The treacherous monks of Ely were well punished by having forty men-at-arms quartered on their Abbey.

Of the captives taken in the camp, many were most cruelly treated, their eyes put out, and their hands cut off; others were imprisoned, and many slain. Morkar, who was here taken, spent the rest of his life in the same captivity as Ulfnoth, Stigand, and many other Saxons of distinction, with the one gleam of hope when liberated at William’s death, and then the bitter disappointment of renewed seizure and captivity. If it could be any consolation to them, these Saxons were not William’s only captives. Bishop Odo, of Bayeux, whom William had made Earl of Kent, after giving a great deal of trouble to his brother the king, and to Archbishop Lanfranc, by his avarice and violence, heard a prediction that the next Pope should be named Odo, and set off to try to bring about its fulfilment in his own person, carrying with him an immense quantity of ill-gotten treasure, and a large number of troops, commanded by Hugh the Wolf, Earl of Chester.

However, Odo had reckoned without King William, and he had but just set sail, when William, setting off from Normandy, met him in the Channel, took his ships, and making him land in the Isle of Wight, and convoking an assembly of knights, declared his offences, and asked them what such a brother deserved.

Between fear of the king and fear of the Bishop, no one ventured to answer, upon which William sentenced him to imprisonment; and when he declared that no one but the Pope had a right to judge him, answered, “I do not try you, the Bishop of Bayeux, but the Earl of Kent,” and sent him closely guarded to Normandy.

Another Norman state-prisoner was Roger Fitzosborn, the son of William’s early friend, who had died soon after the Conquest. Roger’s offence was the bestowing his sister Emma in marriage without the consent of the king, and in addition, much seditious language was used at the wedding banquet, where, unhappily, was present Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, the last Saxon noble.

Roger, finding himself in danger, broke out into open rebellion, but was soon made prisoner. Still the king would have pardoned him for the sake of his father, whom William seems to have regarded with much more affection that he be stowed on any one else, and, as a mark of kindness, sent him a costly robe. The proud and passionate Roger, disdaining the gift, kindled a fire, and burnt the garment on the dungeon floor; and William, deeply affronted, swore in return that he should never pass the threshold of his prison.

Waltheof, who was innocent of all save being present at the unfortunate feast, might have been spared but for the wickedness of his wife, Judith, William’s niece, who had been married to him when it was her uncle’s policy to conciliate the Saxons. She hated and despised the Saxon churl given her for a lord, kind, generous, and pious though he was; and having set her affections on a young Norman, herself became the accuser of her husband. Waltheof succeeded in disproving the calumnies, and the best and wisest Normans spoke in his favor; but the spite of Ivo Taillebois, and the hatred of his wife, prevailed, and he was sentenced to die.

He was executed at Winchester, where, lest the inhabitants should attempt a rescue, he was led out, early in the morning, to St. Giles’s hill, outside the walls. He wore the robes of an earl, and gave them to the priests who attended him, and to the poor people who followed him. When he came to the spot he knelt down to pray, begging the soldiers to wait till he had said the Lord’s Prayer; but he had only come to “Lead us not into temptation,” when one of them severed his head from his body with one blow of a sword.

His body was hastily thrown into a hole; but the Saxons, who loved him greatly, disinterred it in secret, and contrived to carry it all the way to Croyland, where it was buried with due honors, and we may think of Hereward le Wake attending the funeral of the son of the stalwart old Siward Biorn.

As to the perfidious Judith, she reaped the reward of her crimes; she was not permitted to marry her Norman lover, and he was stripped of all the wealth she expected as the widow of Waltbeof. This was secured to her infant daughter, and was so considerable, that at one time William thought the little Matilda of Huntingdon a fit match for his son Robert; but Robert despised the Saxon blood, and made this project an excuse for one of his rebellions. Matilda was, however, a royal bride, since her hand was given to David I. of Scotland, the representative of the old race of Cerdic, and a most excellent prince, with whom she was much happier than she could well have: been with the unstable Robert Courtheuse.