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.
CAMEO IX. THE LAST SAXON BISHOP. (1008-1095.)
Kings of England.
1066. William I.
1087. William II.
The last saint of the Anglo-Saxon Church, the Bishop who lived from the days of Edward the Confessor, to the evil times of the Red King, was Wulstan of Worcester, a homely old man, of plain English character, and of great piety. The quiet, even tenor of his life is truly like a “soft green isle” in the midst of the turbulent storms and tempests of the Norman Conquest.
Wulstan was born at Long Itchington, a village in Warwickshire, in the time of Ethelred the Unready. He was the son of the Thane Athelstan, and was educated in the monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough. When he had been trained in such learning as these could afford, he came home for a few years, and entered into the sports and occupations of the noble youths of the time, without parting with the piety and purity of his conventual life, and steadily resisting temptation.
His parents were grown old, and having become impoverished, perhaps by the exactions perpetrated either by the Danes, or to bribe them away, retired from the world, and entered convents at Worcester. Wulstan, wishing to devote himself to the Church, sought the service of the Bishop, who ordained him to the priesthood.
He lived, though a secular priest, with monastic strictness, and in time obtained permission from the Bishop to become a monk in the convent, where he continued for twenty-five years, and at length became Prior of the Convent. The Prior was the person next in office to the Abbot, and governed the monastery in his absence; and in some religious orders, where there was no Abbot, the Prior was the superior.
Wulstan’s habits in the convent show us what the devotional life of that time was. Each day he bent the knee at each verse of the seven Penitential Psalms, and the same at the 119th Psalm at night. He would lock himself into the church, and pray aloud with tears and cries, and at night he would often retire into some solitary spot, the graveyard, or lonely village church, to pray and meditate. His bed was the church floor, or a narrow board, and stern were his habits of fasting and mortification; but all the time he was full of activity in the cause of the poor, and, finishing his devotions early in the morning, gave up the whole day to attend to the common people, sitting at the church door to listen to, and redress, as far as in him lay, the grievances that they brought him—at any rate, to console and advise. The rude, secular country clergy, at that time, it may be feared, a corrupt, untaught race, had in great measure ceased to instruct or exhort their flocks, and even refund baptism without payment. He did his best to remedy these abuses, and from all parts of the country children were brought to the good Prior for baptism. Every Sunday, too,