Читать книгу The Conquerors: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 14

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William had to lead two armies as far as Cumberland and even to the Roman Wall before stamping out resistance in the north, but by the end of the year 1070 the task had been accomplished. When the last Saxon had hidden his ax or his brown-bill under the thatch of his cottage and given in, the country was subjected to systematic ravaging. The Normans, who had proved masters of the art of theft and murder and rape, outdid themselves here. A French historian says that more than one hundred thousand died of want in York and thereabouts after William was through and that those who survived had to live on the bodies of dead Norman horses, even on human flesh. From the Humber north, not a farmhouse stood except in charred ruins. For nine years thereafter no effort was made to till the land. Wild beasts had sole possession of what had once been thriving towns and villages.

All England had given in by this time save for the Isle of Ely, where a brave Englishman named Hereward, sometimes called the Wake, was holding out with a comparatively small band of followers. It may not seem at first thought that the flat fen lands along the eastern coast were as well suited for defense as, say, the rugged mountains of Wales or the highlands of Scotland, where so often successful stands had been made against invasion. But beyond the wolds of the fen country were marshy stretches which developed into a crisscross of open water where horsemen could not ride and which stopped armed men in their tracks, even when equipped with special aids called “leaping poles.” The vikings had sometimes been called “creekers” because of their liking for fighting on this kind of terrain. Hereward, a trained soldier, knew how to take full advantage of the sometimes lovely, sometimes ghostly country which surrounded the Isle of Ely.

A word about Hereward. If a fraction of what has been written about this stout fighter were true, he must have been a greater warrior even than any of the three strong men who contested the throne of England. He had been living in France in exile, having been led by youthful high spirits into certain excesses, and had married a Frenchwoman named Torfrida, who is charged with practicing witchcraft by some chronicles of the period. They came back to England after Hastings. It was a custom with the fighters of that day to find names for their weapons as they would for their horses and dogs. Hereward’s name for his great sword was Brain-biter; and as he plunged ashore Brain-biter flapped against his thighs with what might have seemed an eagerness to be at the task of cutting through Norman skulls. It did not take Hereward long to see how serious was the plight of the land of his birth, and he proceeded to break the war arrow and send pieces of it around, up and down the land of Ermine Street, as far west as the Welsh Marches, and even down into Kent, where the Norman hold was tight and hard. Men answered the summons with a willingness which made it clear they had been waiting for such a signal. They came trooping in, dispossessed men, sons who had lost fathers, fathers who had lost families, desperate men, all of them, who had lost the right to call themselves free. They built as the core of their operations a wooden fort on Ely, which was a small island rising well above the fens but not high enough to escape the misty exhalations which come up from the rank water in the fall and in which the people of the lowlands believed they could read the future.

Here they stayed for five years, playing hide-and-seek with the Normans all through the fen country, issuing out to attack a castle, disappearing, flashing out again to strike at a land convoy or to harry the estates of the interlopers. Brain-biter was often red with Norman blood when the resourceful leader of the little band holding the Camp of Refuge returned from their forays. He was such a thorn in the flesh of the Mamzer that it became necessary for the latter to make a major effort to end the resistance. William, in fact, was so determined to stamp out the last embers of rebellion that he himself directed the shrewd scheme decided upon. He began to build a causeway across the quaking sands and the interminable bogs, getting closer daily to Ely, where the defenders, their ranks sharply thinned, waited the inevitable assault.

Finally the Normans thought they were near enough to begin storming operations and they shoved forward a wooden tower of the kind used to screen attacking forces and which for some reason is called a sow. Not content with his vastly superior strength, William allowed himself to be persuaded into stationing a very old witch atop the sow who was to check resistance by the use of incantations and the casting of spells. Hereward waited until the tower had been shoved well out over the last bit of water and then set fire to the dry reeds along the banks of the stream. The blaze soon swept over the tower, and hundreds of Norman soldiers were trapped and died in the flames. The gibbering old witch had no chance of escaping from her elevated post on the top of the sow and she abandoned her absurd ritual to heap maledictions on the Normans who had brought her to such an unpleasant end.

After this fiasco William decided to depend on engineering principles without any further effort to benefit by abracadabra, and the land was cleared before the causeway was shoved out over the stagnant waters. Soon it was close enough to the beleaguered isle for an attack in force. The struggle which ensued was a desperate one, but in the end numbers told and the Camp of Refuge was overrun by the Norman mercenaries. The defenders were killed or captured almost to a man. Some records have it that Hereward the Wake was killed; in others it is asserted that he escaped and later made his submission and that he lived peacefully at his home in Bourne until his death.

All resistance was over. The leopards of Normandy floated above every keep in England, over the gates of the towns, on the ships of the royal navy. The conquest was complete.