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Read books online » Fiction » Hereward, the Last of the English by Charles Kingsley (i am reading a book .TXT) 📖

Book online «Hereward, the Last of the English by Charles Kingsley (i am reading a book .TXT) 📖». Author Charles Kingsley



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out that they were to be left alone by both sides, for it was an honorable duel, and, turning their horses, charged.

After which act they found themselves and their horses all four in a row, sitting on their hind-quarters on the ground, amid the fragments of their lances.

“Well ridden!” shouted they both at once, as they leaped up laughing and drew their swords.

After which they hammered away at each other merrily in “the devil’s smithy”; the sparks flew, and the iron rang, and all men stood still to see that gallant fight.

So they watched and cheered, till Hereward struck his man such a blow under the ear, that he dropped, and lay like a log.

“I think I can carry you,” quoth Hereward, and picking him up, he threw him over his shoulder, and walked toward his men.

“A bear! a bear!” shouted they in delight, laughing at the likeness between Hereward’s attitude, and that of a bear waddling off on his hind legs with his prey in his arms.

“He should have killed his bullock outright before he went to carry him. Look there!”

And the knight, awaking from his swoon, struggled violently (says Leofric) to escape.

But Hereward, though the smaller, was the stronger man; and crushing him in his arms, walked on steadily.

“Knights, to the rescue! Hoibricht is taken!” shouted they of Guisnes, galloping towards him.

“A bear! a bear! To me, Biornssons! To me, Vikings all!” shouted Hereward. And the Danes leapt up, and ran toward him, axe in hand.

The châtelain’s knights rode up likewise; and so it befell, that Hereward carried his prisoner safe into camp.

“And who are you, gallant knight?” asked he of his prisoner.

“Hoibricht, nephew of Eustace, Count of Guisnes.”

“So I suppose you will be ransomed. Till then—Armorer!”

And the hapless Hoibricht found himself chained and fettered, and sent off to Hereward’s tent, under the custody of Martin Lightfoot.

“The next day,” says the chronicler, “the Count of Guisnes, stupefied with grief at the loss of his nephew, sent the due honor and service to his prince, besides gifts and hostages.”

And so ended the troubles of Baldwin, and Eustace of Guisnes.







CHAPTER VIII. — HOW A FAIR LADY EXERCISED THE MECHANICAL ART TO WIN HEREWARD’S LOVE.

The fair Torfrida sat in an upper room of her mother’s house in St. Omer, alternately looking out of the window and at a book of mechanics. In the garden outside, the wryneck (as is his fashion in May) was calling Pi-pi-pi among the gooseberry bushes, till the cobwalls rang again. In the book was a Latin recipe for drying the poor wryneck, and using him as a philtre which should compel the love of any person desired. Mechanics, it must be understood, in those days were considered as identical with mathematics, and those again with astrology and magic; so that the old chronicler, who says that Torfrida was skilled in “the mechanic art,” uses the word in the same sense as does the author of the “History of Ramsey,” who tells us how a certain holy bishop of St. Dunstan’s party, riding down to Corfe through the forest, saw the wicked queen-mother Elfrida (her who had St. Edward stabbed at Corfe Gate) exercising her “mechanic art,” under a great tree; in plain English, performing heathen incantations; and how, when she saw that she was discovered, she tempted him to deadly sin: but when she found him proof against allurement, she had him into her bower; and there the enchantress and her ladies slew him by thrusting red-hot bodkins under his arms, so that the blessed man was martyred without any sign of wound. Of all which let every man believe as much as he list.

Torfrida had had peculiar opportunities of learning mechanics. The fairest and richest damsel in St. Omer, she had been left early by her father an orphan, to the care of a superstitious mother and of a learned uncle, the Abbot of St. Bertin. Her mother was a Provençale, one of those Arlesiennes whose dark Greek beauty still shines, like diamonds set in jet, in the doorways of the quaint old city. Gay enough in her youth, she had, like a true Southern woman, taken to superstition in her old age; and spent her days in the churches, leaving Torfrida to do and learn what she would. Her nurse, moreover, was a Lapp woman, carried off in some pirating foray, and skilled in all the sorceries for which the Lapps were famed throughout the North. Her uncle, partly from good-nature, partly from a pious hope that she might “enter religion,” and leave her wealth to the Church, had made her his pupil, and taught her the mysteries of books; and she had proved to be a strangely apt scholar. Grammar, rhetoric, Latin prose and poetry, such as were taught in those days, she mastered ere she was grown up. Then she fell upon romance, and Charlemagne and his Paladins, the heroes of Troy, Alexander and his generals, peopled her imagination. She had heard, too, of the great necromancer Virgilius (for into such the middle age transformed the poet), and, her fancy already excited by her Lapp nurse’s occult science, she began eagerly to court forbidden lore.

Forbidden, indeed, magic was by the Church in public; but as a reality, not as an imposture. Those whose consciences were tough and their faith weak, had little scruple in applying to a witch, and asking help from the powers below, when the saints above were slack to hear them. Churchmen, even, were bold enough to learn the mysteries of nature, Algebra, Judicial Astrology, and the occult powers of herbs, stones, and animals, from the Mussulman doctors of Cordova and Seville; and, like Pope Gerbert, mingle science and magic, in a fashion excusable enough in days when true inductive science did not exist.

Nature had her miraculous powers,—how far good, how far evil, who could tell? The belief that God was the sole maker and ruler of the universe was confused and darkened by the cross-belief, that the material world had fallen under the dominion of Satan and his demons; that millions of spirits, good and evil in every degree, exercised continually powers over crops and cattle, mines and wells, storms and lightning, health and disease. Riches, honors, and royalties, too, were under the command of the powers of darkness. For that generation, which was but too apt to take its Bible in hand upside down, had somehow a firm faith in the word of the Devil, and believed devoutly his somewhat startling assertion, that the kingdoms of the world were his, and the glory of them; for to him they were delivered, and to whomsoever he would he gave them: while it had a proportionally weak faith in our Lord’s answer, that they were to worship and serve the Lord God alone. How far these powers extended, how far they might be counteracted, how far lawfully employed, were questions which exercised the minds of men and produced a voluminous literature for several centuries, till the search died out, for very weariness of failure, at the end of the seventeenth century.

The Abbot of St. Bertin, therefore, did not

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