Hereward, The Last of the English | Page 3

of the Eastern Counties; for they proved it by their deeds.
When the men of Wessex, the once conquering 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, or hands and feet cut
off, or took to the wild wood as strong outlaws, like their successors
and representatives, Robin Hood, Scarlet, and 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 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), and the
eastern lowlands of Scotland likewise. 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 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
worn out. 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
colonized, 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, Ethelred 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 with tortures, 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 Assingdown 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