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VOLUME I

CHAPTER PAGB

Pkelude — Of the Fens i

Introduction

The West Country has always claimed Charles Kingsley as its own; but the Eastern Countries have really an equal right to the author of Hereward the Wake — an historical romance of the eleventh century nearly as strong as is Westward Ho of the sixteenth. They perhaps have more than an equal right when we realize that the moors and trout-streams, the bold headlands and quaint fishing villages of Devon still remain with us ; but the wild, weird beauty of the old fens is no more.

" The dark velvet alder-beds, long lines of reed-rond, emerald in spring and golden under the autumn sun, shining ' eas,' or river-reaches ; and broad meres dotted with a million fowl " have given place to wide expanses of arable and grassland bounded by unpoetic straight banks of grass-grown earth.

Again, the glories of the sixteenth century and the beauties of Devon scenery have been told by generations of writers in prose and verse, while the period of the Norman Conquest — fit subject for a great national epic — is blank but for monks' chronicles and dry-as-dust histories, and only two historical romances, Lord Lytton's Harold and

b

XX Introduction

Hereward, give us the local coloring of that time. A third work, almost unknown to the present generation — The Camp of Refuge at Ely, by- Charles Macfarlane, published in 1844, and recently republished in G. Laurence Gomme's Library of Historical Novels and Romances — has the Lord of Bourne as the central figure. It is an able book, accurate in the description of the fens and their people ; but as the editor says : " It is written as the simple narrative of a chronicler, and touches one with the charm of early days," and therefore lacks the fire of Harold and the fire and poetry of Hereward.

It is not strange that Kingsley should have chosen the fens as the scene of an historical novel. Barnack, Northamptonshire, whose quarries furnished stone for Ely, Peterborough, Crowland and many a mile of Roman road, was his home from his sixth to his eleventh year, when the old fen still existed near it, and over which he wandered learning its natural history from his father, and drinking in nursery tales of Robin Hood and Little John, who had once ranged the forests on the western sky-line.

All his spare time for the first two years of his university life at Cambridge was spent with rod, gun and collecting-box among the hard-fisted, hard-drinking fen-men and wild bankers, living their lives and learning their folk-lore. It was also about this time that he became acquainted with Thomas Wright, to whom Hereward is dedicated for being the first to disinter the mighty Wake,

Introduction xxi

"when scarcely a foot or hand of him was left standing out from beneath the dust of ages."

All Kingsley's old love for the fens broke out afresh when he went into residence at Cambridge as Professor of Modern History in i860. But thirty and more years of dyking, draining and reclaiming had left scarce a vestige of the old fens ; and had not the impressions received in boyhood remained, some of the choicest pieces of Kingsley's word-painting would have been lost to the world. Strong as are parts of Westward Ho, the beauty of the introductory chapter to Hereward, " Of the Fens," surpasses it.

It was natural that with such surroundings the gallant Wake — the last man of note in England to hold out against the Norman — should be his hero ; for Kingsley was essentially a fighter. In all the religious, scientific, educational and social questions which were the marked features of the Victorian epoch between 1840 and 1870, he was to be found in the forefront of the battle against ignorance and vice, bigotry and oppression, regardless of personal consequences.

On the fly-leaf of a copy of Frithiof's Saga, in possession of the family, are written the words :

" To the Viking of the New Age, Charles Kingsley, this story of the Vikings of the Old, from a daughter of the Vikings, his friend and admirer,

Fredrika Bremer."

Yes ; the old Norse fighting blood was strong in him; and the cry of the hounds, the pulse of xxii Introduction

horses' gallop in the black nor'easter, or the whitening surges of the long Atlantic swell, stirred it into life, and created in his brain such fighting heroes as Wulf and Smid in Hypatia; Amyas Leigh and Salvation Yeo ; Hereward the Wake and Martin Lightfoot.

M. K.

"LAST OF THE ENGLISH"

PRELUDE

THE heroic deeds of highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them ; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question not difficult to answer.

In the first place, they have been fewer in number. The lowlands of the world, being the richest spots, have been generally the soonest conquered, the soonest civilized, and therefore the soonest taken out of the sphere of romance and wild adventure, into that of order and law, hard work and common sense, as well as — too often — into the sphere of slavery, cowardice, luxury, and ignoble greed. The lowland populations, for the same reasons, have been generally the first to deteriorate,

VOL. I. — I though not on account of the vices of civilization. The vices of incivilization are far worse, and far more destructive of human hfe ; and it is just because they are so, that rude tribes deteriorate physicallyless than polished nations. In the savage struggle for life, none but the strongest, healthiest, cunningest, have a chance of living, prospering, and propagating their race. In the civilized state, on the contrary, the weakliest and the silliest, protected by law, religion, and humanity, have their chance likewise, and transmit to their offspring their own weakliness or silliness. In these islands, for instance, at the time of the Norman Conquest, the average of man was doubtless superior, both in body and mind, to the average of man now, simply because the weaklings could not have lived at all ; and the rich and delicate beauty, in which the women of the Eastern Counties still surpass all other races in these isles, was doubtless far more common in proportion to the numbers of the population.

Another reason why lowland heroes " carent vate sacro," is that the lowlands and those who live in them are wanting in the poetic and romantic elements. There is in the lowland none of that background of the unknown fantastic, magical, terrible, perpetually feeding curiosity and wonder, which still remains in the Scottish Highlands ; and which, when it disappears from thence, will remain embalmed forever in the pages of Walter Scott. Against that half-magical background his heroes stand out in vivid relief; and justly so. It was not put there by him for stage purposes ; it was there as a fact ; and the men of whom he wrote were conscious of it, were moulded by it, were not ashamed of its influence. For Nature among the mountains is too fierce, too strong for man. He cannot conquer her, and she awes him. He cannot dig down the cHffs, or chain the storm-blasts ; and his fear of them takes bodily shape : he begins to people the weird places of the earth with weird beings, and sees nixies in the dark linns as he fishes by night, dwarfs in the caves where he digs, half-trembling, morsels of iron and copper for his weapons, witches and demons on the snow-blast which overwhelms his herd and his hut, and in the dark clouds which brood on the untrodden mountain peak. He lives in fear: and yet, if he be a valiant-hearted man, his fears do him little harm. They may break out, at times, in witch-manias, with all their horrible suspicions, and thus breed cruelty, which is the child of fear: but on the whole they rather produce in man thoughtfulness, reverence, a sense, confused yet precious, of the boundless importance of the unseen world. His superstitions develop his imagination ; the moving accidents of a wild life call out in him sympathy and pathos; and the mountaineer becomes instinctively a poet.

The lowlander, on the other hand, has his own strength, his own "virtues," or manfulnesses, in the good old sense of the word : but they are not for the most part picturesque, or even poetical.

He finds out, soon enough for his weal and his bane, that he is stronger than Nature : and right tyrannously and irreverently he lords it over her, clearing, delving, dyking, building, without fear or shame. He knows of no natural force greater than himself, save an occasional thunder-storm; and against that, as he grows more cunning, he insures his crops. Why should he reverence Nature?

Let him use her, and live by her. One cannot blame him. Man was sent into the world (so says the Scripture) to fill and subdue the earth. But he was sent into the world for other purposes also, which the lowlander is but too apt to forget. With the awe of Nature, the awe of the unseen dies out in him. Meeting with no visible superior, he is apt to become not merely unpoetical and irreverent, but somewhat of a sensualist and an atheist. The sense of the beautiful dies out in him more and more. He has little or nothing around him to refine or lift up his soul ; and unless he meet with a religion and with a civilization which can deliver him, he may sink into that dull brutality which is too common among the lowest classes of the English Lowlands, and remain for generations gifted with the strength and industry of the ox and with the courage of the lion, but alas ! with the intellect of the former and the self-restraint of the latter.

Nevertheless, there may be a period in the history of a lowland race when they, too, become historic for a while. There was such a period for the men of the Eastern and Central Counties ; for they proved it by their deeds.

When the men of Wessex, the once conquering, and even to the last the most civilized, race of Britain, fell at Hastings once and for all, and struck no second blow, then the men of the Danelagh disdained to yield to the Norman invader. For seven long years they held their own, not knowing, like true Englishmen, when they were beaten; and fought on desperate, till there were none left to fight. Their bones lay white on every island in the fens ; their corpses rotted on gallows beneath every Norman keep ; their few survivors crawled into monasteries, with eyes picked out, hands and feet cut off; or took to the wild wood as strong outlaws, like their successors and representatives, Robin Hood, Scarlet, and Little John ; Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudeslee. But they never really bent their necks to the Norman yoke; they kept alive in their hearts that proud spirit of personal independence, which they brought with them from the moors of Denmark and the dales of Norway; and they kept alive, too, though in abeyance for a while, those free institutions which were without a doubt the germs of our British liberty.

They were a changed folk since first they settled in that Danelagh ; since first in the days of King Beorhtric, " in the year 787, three ships of Northmen came from Haeretha land, and the King's reeve rode to the place, and would have driven them up to the King's town, for he knew not what men they were: but they slew him there and then ; " and after that the Saxons and Angles began to find out to their bitter bale what men they were, those fierce Vikings out of the dark northeast.

But they had long ceased to burn farms, sack convents, torture monks for gold, and slay every human being they met, in mere Berserker lust of blood. No Barnakill could now earn his nickname by entreating his comrades, as they tossed the children on their spear-points, to " Na kill the barns." Gradually they had settled down on the land, intermarried with the Angles and Saxons, and colonized all England north and east of Watling Street (a rough line from London to Chester), as far as the Tees.^ Gradually they had deserted Thor and Odin for " the White Christ ; " had their own priests and bishops, and built their own minsters. The convents which the fathers had destroyed, the sons, or at least the grandsons, rebuilt; and often, casting away sword and axe, they entered them as monks themselves; and Peterborough, Ely, and above all Crowland, destroyed by them in Alfred's time with a horrible destruction, had become their holy places, where they decked the altars with gold and jewels, with silks from the far East, and furs from the far North; and where, as in sacred fortresses, they, and the liberty of England with them, made their last unavailing stand.

For a while they had been lords of all England. The Anglo-Saxon race was wearing out. The

1 For the distribution of Danish and Norwegian names in England and the prevalence, north of the Danelagh, from Tees to Forth, of names neither Scandinavian nor Celtic, but purely- Anglo-Saxon, consult the Rev. Isaac Taylor's book, " Words and Places." Bear in mind, meanwhile, that these names represent for the most part, if not altogether, the Danish and Norse settlement at the end of the ninth century : but that this Scandinavian element was further strengthened by the free men who conquered England under Sweyn and Canute, at the beginning of the eleventh century. These men seem to have become not so much settlers of great lands as an intrusive military aristocracy, who gave few or no names to estates, but amalgamated themselves rapidly by marriage with the remnants of that English nobility which was destroyed at the battle of Assingdon. This fact explains the number of purely Anglo-Saxon names to be met with among Hereward's companions. Some of them, like " Goderic of Corby," themselves with English names, held manors with Danish ones, even in that part of Lincolnshire where the Scandinavian element was strongest. In fact, the aristocracies and the two races had been thoroughly amalgamated, not merely in the Danelagh, but over the greater part of England, and must be called, as in the case of King Harold Godwinsson, neither Saxons nor Anglo-Saxons, but rather Anglo-Danes.

men of Wessex, priest-ridden, and enslaved by their own aristocracy, quailed before the free Norsemen, among whom was not a single serf. The God-descended line of Cerdic and Alfred was exhausted. Vain, incapable, profligate kings, the tools of such prelates as Odo and Dunstan, were no match for such wild heroes as Thorkill the Tall, or Olaf Trygvasson, or Swend Forkbeard. The Danes had gradually seized, not only their own Danelagh and Northumbria, but great part of Wessex. Vast sums of Danegelt were yearly sent out of the country to buy off the fresh invasions which were perpetually threatened. Then Ethelred the Unready, or rather Evil-counsel, advised himself to fulfil his name, and the curse which Dunstan had pronounced against him at the baptismal font. By his counsel the men of Wessex rose against the unsuspecting Danes; and on St. Brice's eve, A. D. 1002, murdered them all, or nearly all, man, woman, and child. It may be that they only did to the children as the fathers had done to them : but the deed was " worse than a crime ; it was a mistake." The Danes of the Danelagh and of Northumbria, their brothers of Denmark and Norway, the Orkneys and the east coast of Ireland, remained unharmed. A mighty host of Vikings poured from thence into England the very next year, under Swend Forkbeard and the great Canute ; and after thirteen fearful campaigns came the great battle of Assingdon in Essex — where " Canute had the victory ; and all the English nation fought against him ; and all the nobility of the English race was there destroyed." That same year saw the mysterious death of Edmund Ironside, the last man of Cerdic's race worthy of the name. For the next twenty-five years, Danish kings ruled from the Forth to the Land's End.

A noble figure he was, that great and wise Canute, the friend of the famous Godiva, and Leofric, Godiva's husband, and Godwin Ulfnothsson, and Siward Digre ; trying to expiate by justice and mercy the dark deeds of his blood-stained youth ; trying (and not in vain) to blend the two races over which he ruled ; rebuilding the churches and monasteries which his father had destroyed ; bringing back in state to Canterbury the body of Archbishop Elphege — not unjustly called by the Saxons martyr and saint — whom Tall Thorkill's men had murdered with beef bones and ox skulls, because he would not give up to them the money destined for God's poor ; rebuking, as every child has heard, his housecarles' flattery by setting his chair on the brink of the rising tide; and then laying his golden crown, in token of humility, on the high altar of Winchester, never to wear it more. In Winchester lie his bones, unto this day, or what of them the civil wars have left ; and by them lie the bones of his son Hardicanute, in whom, as in his half-brother Harold Harefoot, before him, the Danish power fell to swift decay, by insolence and drink and civil war; while with the Danish power England fell to pieces likewise.

Canute had divided England into four great Earldoms, each ruled, under him, by a jarl, or earl, a Danish, not a Saxon title.

At his death in 1036, the earldoms of Northumbria and East Anglia — the more strictly Danish parts — were held by a true Danish hero, Siward Biorn, alias Digre, "the Stout," conqueror of

Macbeth, and son of the fairy bear ; proving his descent, men said, by his pointed and hairy ears.

Mercia, the great central plateau of England, was held by Earl Leofric, husband of the famous Lady Godiva.

Wessex, which Canute had at first kept in his own hands, had passed into those of the famous Earl Godwin, the then ablest man in England. Possessed of boundless tact and cunning, gifted with an eloquence, which seems from the accounts remaining of it to have been rather that of a Greek than an Englishman; and married to Canute's niece,^ he was fitted, alike by fortunes and by talents, to be the king-maker which he became.

Such a system may have worked well as long as the brain of a hero was there to overlook it all. But when that brain was turned to dust, the history of England became, till the Norman Conquest, little more than the history of the rivalries of the two great houses of Godwin and Leofric.

Leofric had the first success in king-making. He, though bearing a Saxon name, seems to have been the champion of the Danish party, and of Canute's son or reputed son, Harold Harefoot; and he succeeded, by the help of the Thanes north of Thames, and the lithsmen of London, which city was more than half Danish in those days, in

1 The Archaeological Journal, in vol. xi. and vol. xii., contains two excellent Articles on the Life and Death of Earl Godwin, from the pen of that able antiquary E. A. Freeman, Esq. By him the facts of Godwin's life have been more carefully investigated, and his character more fully judged, than by any author of whom I am aware; and I am the more bound to draw attention to these articles, because, some years since, I had a little paper controversy with Mr. Freeman on this very subject. I have now the pleasure of saying that he has proved himself to have been in the right, while I was in the wrong.

setting his puppet on the throne. But the blood of Canute had exhausted itself. Within seven years Harold Harefoot, and Hardicanute, who succeeded him, had died as foully as they lived; and Godwin's turn had come.

He, though married to a Danish princess, and acknowledging his Danish connection by the Norse names which were borne by his three most famous sons, Harold, Sweyn, and Tostig, constituted himself (with a sound patriotic instinct) the champion of the men of Wessex, and the house of Cerdic, He had probably caused, or at least allowed, to be murdered, Alfred, the Etheling, King Ethelred's son and heir-apparent, when he was supporting the claims of Hardicanute against Harefoot; he now tried to atone for that crime (if indeed he actually committed it), by placing Alfred's younger brother on the throne, to become at once his king, his son-in-law, and his puppet.

It had been well, perhaps, for England, had Godwin's power over Edward been even more complete than it actually was. The " Confessor " was, if we are to believe the monks, unmixed virtue and piety, meekness and magnanimity; a model ruler of men. No wonder, therefore, that (according to William of Malmesbury) the happiness of his times (famed as he was both for miracles and the spirit of prophecy) was revealed in a dream to Brithwin, bishop of Wilton, who made it public ; for, meditating in King Canute's time on the near extinction of the royal race of the English, he was rapt up on high, and saw St. Peter consecrating Edward King. " His chaste life also was pointed out, and the exact period of his reign (twenty-four years) determined ; and

Of the Fens ii

when he inquired about his posterity, it was answered, ' The kingdom of the English belongs to God. After Edward, He will provide a king according to His pleasure.' " But the conduct which earned him the title of Confessor was the direct cause of the Norman Conquest and the ruin of his people ; while those who will look at facts will see in the holy king's character little but what is pitiable, and in his reign little but

what is tragical.

Civil wars, invasions, outlawry of Godwin and his sons by the Danish and French parties ; then of Alfgar, Leofric's son, by the Saxon party ; the outlaws on either side attacking and plundering the English shores by the help of Norsemen, Welshmen, Irish and Danes — any mercenaries who could be got together; and then — "In the same year Bishop Aldred consecrated the minister at Gloucester to the glory of God and of St. Peter, and then went to Jerusalem with such splendour as no man had displayed before him ; " and so forth. The sum and substance of what was done in those " happy times " may be well described in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler for the year 1058. "This year Alfgar the earl was banished : but he came in again with violence, through aid of Griffin (the king of North Wales, his brother-in-law). And this year came a fleet from Norway. It is tedious to tell how

these matters went." These were the normal

phenomena of a reign which seemed, to the eyes of chroniclers, a holy and a happy one ; because the king refused, whether from spite or superstition, to leave an heir to the house of Cerdic, and spent his time between prayer, hunting, the seeing of fancied visions, the uttering of fancied prophecies, and the performance of fancied miracles.

But there were excuses for him. An Englishman only in name, a Norman, not only by his mother's descent (she was aunt of William the Conqueror), but by his early education on the Continent, he loved the Norman better than the Englishman; Norman knights and clerks filled his court, and often the high dignities of his provinces, and returned as often as they were expelled ; the Norman- French language became fashionable; Norman customs and manners the signs of civilization ; and thus all was preparing steadily for the great catastrophe, by which, within a year of Edward's death, the Norman became master of the land.

We have gained, doubtless, by that calamity. By it England and Scotland, and in due time Ireland, became integral parts of the comity of Christendom, and partakers of that classic civilization and learning, the fount whereof, for good or for evil, was Rome and the Pope of Rome : but the method was at least wicked ; the actors in it tyrannous, brutal, treacherous, hypocritical : and to say that so it must have been, that by no other method could the result (or some far better result) have been obtained, — is it not to say that men's crimes are not merely overruled by, but necessary to the gracious designs of Providence ; and that — to speak plainly — the Deity has made this world so ill, that He is forced at times to do ill that good may come?

Against the new tyranny the free men of the Danelagh and of Northumbria rose. If Edward the descendant of Cerdic had been little to them, William the descendant of Rollo was still less. That French-speaking knights should expel them from their homes, French-chanting monks from their convents, because Edward had promised the crown of England to William, his foreign cousin, or because Harold Godwinsson of Wessex had sworn on the relics of all the saints to be William's man, was contrary to their common-sense of right and reason.

So they rose, and fought ; too late, it may be, and without unity or purpose ; and they were worsted by an enemy who had both unity and purpose; whom superstition, greed, and feudal discipline kept together, at least in England, in one compact body of unscrupulous and terrible confederates.

And theirs was a land worth fighting for — a good land and large : from Humbermouth inland to the Trent and merry Sherwood, across to Chester and the Dee, round by Leicester and the five burghs of the Danes; eastward again to Huntingdon and Cambridge (then a poor village on the site of an old Roman town) ; and then northward again into the wide fens, the land of the Girvii, where the great central plateau of England slides into the sea, to form, from the rain and river washings of eight shires, lowlands of a fertility inexhaustible, because ever-growing to this day.

Into those fens, as into a natural fortress, the Anglo-Danish noblemen crowded down instinctively from the inland, to make their last stand against the French. Children of the old Vikings, or " Creekers," they took, in their great need, to the seaward and the estuaries, as other conquered races take to the mountains, and died like their forefathers, within scent of the salt sea from whence they came.

They have a beauty of their own, these great fens, even now when they are dyked and drained, tilled and fenced — a beauty as of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Much more had they that beauty eight hundred years ago, when they were still, for the most part, as God had made them, or rather was making them even then. The low rolling uplands were clothed in primeval forest; oak and ash, beech and elm, with here and there, perhaps, a group of ancient pines, ragged and decayed, and fast dying out in England even then, though lingering still in the forests of the Scotch Highlands.

Between the forests were open wolds, dotted with white sheep and golden gorse ; rolling plains of rich though ragged turf, whether cleared by the hand of man or by the wild fires which often swept over the hills. And between the wood and the wold stood many a Danish " town," with its clusters of low straggling buildings round the holder's house, of stone or mud below, and of wood above; its high dykes round tiny fields ; its flocks of sheep ranging on the wold; its herds of swine in the forest; and below, a more precious possession still — its herds of mares and colts, which fed with the cattle and the geese in the rich grass-fen.

For always, from the foot of the wolds, the green flat stretched away, illimitable, to an horizon where, from the roundness of the earth, the distant trees and islands were hulled down Hke ships at sea. The firm horse-fen lay, bright green, along the foot of the wold ; beyond it, the browner peat, or deep fen ; and among that, dark velvet alder beds, long lines of reed-rond, emerald in spring, and golden under the autumn sun ; shining " eas," or river-reaches ; broad meres dotted with a million fowl, while the cattle waded along their edges afler the rich sedge-grass, or wallowed in the mire through the hot summer's day. Here and there, too, upon the far horizon, rose a tall line of ashen trees, marking some island of firm rich soil. In some of them, as at Ramsey and Crowland, the huge ashes had disappeared before the axes of the monks; and a minster tower rose over the fen, amid orchards, gardens, cornfields, pastures, with here and there a tree left standing for shade. "Painted with flowers in the spring," with "pleasant shores embosomed in still lakes," as the monkchronicler of Ramsey has it, those islands seemed to such as the monk terrestrial paradises.