Hereward, The Last of the English | Page 8

went in East Anglia by the name of Leofric, Lord of Bourne;
that, as Domesday Book testifies, his son Alfgar, and his grandson
Morcar, held large lands there and thereabout. Alfgar's name, indeed,
still lives in the village of Algar-Kirk; and Lady Godiva, and Algar
after her, enriched with great gifts Crowland, the island sanctuary, and
Peterborough, where Brand, either her brother or Leofric's, was a monk,
and in due time an abbot.
The house of Bourne, as far as it can be reconstructed by imagination,
was altogether unlike one of the tall and gloomy Norman castles which
twenty years later reared their evil donjons over England. It was much
more like a house in a Chinese painting; an irregular group of low
buildings, almost all of one story, stone below and timber above, with
high-peaked roofs,--at least in the more Danish country,--affording a
separate room, or rather house, for each different need of the family.
Such a one may be seen in the illuminations of the century. In the
centre of the building is the hall, with door or doors opening out into
the court; and sitting thereat, at the top of a flight of steps, the lord and
lady, dealing clothes to the naked and bread to the hungry. On one side
of the hall is a chapel; by it a large room or "bower" for the ladies;
behind the hall a round tower, seemingly the strong place of the whole
house; on the other side a kitchen; and stuck on to bower, kitchen, and
every other principal building, lean-to after lean-to, the uses of which it
is impossible now to discover. The house had grown with the wants of
the family,--as many good old English houses have done to this day.
Round it would be scattered barns and stables, in which grooms and

herdsmen slept side by side with their own horses and cattle; and
outside all, the "yard," "garth," or garden-fence, high earth-bank with
palisades on top, which formed a strong defence in time of war. Such
was most probably the "villa," "ton," or "town" of Earl Leofric, the
Lord of Bourne, the favorite residence of Godiva,--once most beautiful,
and still most holy, according to the holiness of those old times.
Now on a day--about the year 1054--while Earl Siward was helping to
bring Birnam wood to Dunsinane, to avenge his murdered
brother-in-law, Lady Godiva sat, not at her hall door, dealing food and
clothing to her thirteen poor folk, but in her bower, with her youngest
son, a two-years' boy, at her knee. She was listening with a face of
shame and horror to the complaint of Herluin, Steward of Peterborough,
who had fallen in that afternoon with Hereward and his crew of
"housecarles."
To keep a following of stout housecarles, or men-at-arms, was the pride
as well as the duty of an Anglo-Danish Lord, as it was, till lately, of a
Scoto-Danish Highland Laird. And Hereward, in imitation of his father
and his elder brother, must needs have his following from the time he
was but fifteen years old. All the unruly youths of the neighborhood,
sons of free "holders," who owed some sort of military service to Earl
Leofric; Geri, his cousin; Winter, whom he called his brother-in-arms;
the Wulfrics, the Wulfards, the Azers, and many another wild blade,
had banded themselves round a young nobleman more unruly than
themselves. Their names were already a terror to all decent folk, at
wakes and fairs, alehouses and village sports. They atoned, be it
remembered, for their early sins by making those names in after years a
terror to the invaders of their native land: but as yet their prowess was
limited to drunken brawls and faction-fights; to upsetting old women at
their work, levying blackmail from quiet chapmen on the high road, or
bringing back in triumph, sword in hand and club on shoulder, their
leader Hereward from some duel which his insolence had provoked.
But this time, if the story of the sub-prior was to be believed, Hereward
and his housecarles had taken an ugly stride forward toward the pit.
They had met him riding along, intent upon his psalter, in a lonely path

of the Bruneswald,--"Whereon your son, most gracious lady, bade me
stand, saying that his men were thirsty and he had no money to buy ale
withal, and none so likely to help him thereto as a fat priest,--for so he
scandalously termed me, who, as your ladyship knows, am leaner than
the minster bell-ropes, with fasting Wednesdays and Fridays
throughout the year, beside the vigils of the saints, and the former and
latter Lents.
"But when he saw who I was, as if inspired by a malignant spirit, he
shouted out my name, and bade his companions throw me to the