5

eral preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill and the plain-born could meet on a conciliating level, and lay down their less important differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered with anguish the thought that came over me: "Perhaps he will never come here again." He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand which I have already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused with a resistance amounting to rigor, when my aunt, an 10 old Lincolnian, who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of season, uttered the following memorable application: "Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said 15 nothing at the time, but he took occasion in the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it, "Woman, you are superannuated!" John Billet did not sur-20 vive long after the digesting of this affront; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored; and, if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint (Anno 1781), where he had long held what he accounted a comfortable independence; and with five pounds fourteen shillings and a penny, which were found in his escritoire after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was-a Poor Relation.

25

XXV.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR AT ELY.

BY CHARLES KINGSLEY.'

WHEN William' heard that the Danes were gone, he marched on Ely, as on an easy prey.

Ivo Taillebois came with him, hungry after those Spalding lands, the rents whereof Hereward had been taking for his men for now twelve months. William de Warrenne was there, vowed to revenge the death of Sir Frederic, his brother; Ralph Guader was there, flushed with his success at Norwich; and with them all the Frenchmen of the east, who had been either expelled from their lands, or were in fear of expulsion.

10

With them, too, was a great army of mercenaries, ruffians from all France and Flanders, hired to fight for a certain term, on the chance of plunder or of fiefs in land. Their brains were all aflame with the tales of inestimable riches hidden in Ely. There were there the 15 jewels of all the monasteries around; there were the treasures of all the fugitive English nobles; there were there—what was there not? And they grumbled when William halted them and hutted them at Cambridge, and began to feel cautiously the strength of the placewhich must be strong, or Hereward and the English 21 would not have made it their camp of refuge.

Perhaps he rode up to Madingley windmill, and saw fifteen miles away, clear against the sky, the long line of what seemed naught but a low upland park, with the 25 minster tower among the trees; and between him and

them a rich champaign of grass, over which it was easy enough to march all the armies of Europe, and thought Ely an easy place to take. But men told him that between him and those trees lay a black abyss of mud and peat and reeds, Haddenham fen and Smithy fen, with the deep sullen West water, or "Ald-reche,” of the Ouse winding through them. The old Roman road was sunk and gone long since, under the bog, whether by English neglect, or whether (as some think) by actual and bodily sinking of the whole land. The narrowest 10 space between dry land and dry land was a full halfmile; and how to cross that half-mile no man knew.

What were the approaches on the west? There were none. Beyond Earith, where now run the great washes of the Bedford Level, was a howling wilderness of 15 meres, seas, reed-ronds, and floating alder-beds, through which only the fen-men wandered, with leaping-pole and log canoe.

What in the east? The dry land neared the island on that side. And it may be that William rowed round 20 by Burwell to Fordham and Soham, and thought of attempting the island by way of Barraway, and saw beneath him a labyrinth of islands, meres, fens, with the Ouse, lying deep and broad between Barraway and Thetford-in-the-Isle; and saw, too, that a disaster in that 25 labyrinth might be a destruction.

So he determined on the near and straight path through Long Stratton and Willingham, down the old bridle-way from Willingham ploughed field—every village there, and in the isle likewise, had and has still its 30 "field," or ancient clearing of ploughed land—and then to try that terrible half-mile, with the courage and wit of a general to whom human lives were as those of the gnats under the hedge.

5

So all his host camped themselves in Willingham field, by the old earthwork which men now call Belsar's Hills; and down the bridle-way poured countless men, bearing timber and fagots cut from all the hills, that they might bridge the black half-mile.

They made a narrow, firm path through the reeds, and down to the brink of the Ouse, if brink it could be called, where the water, rising and falling a foot or two each tide, covered the floating peat for many yards before it sunk into a brown depth of bottomless slime.10 They would make a bottom for themselves by driving piles.

The piles would not hold; and they began to make a floating bridge with long beams, says Leofric, and blown-up cattle-hides to float them.

3

Soon they made a floating sow, and thrust it on before them as they worked across the stream; for they were getting under shot from the island.

15

Meanwhile the besieged had not been idle. They had thrown up, says Leofric, a turf rampart on the isl-20 and shore, and "antemuralia et propugnacula," doubtless overhanging "hoardings," or scaffolds, through the floor of which they could shower down missiles. And so they awaited the attack, contenting themselves with gliding in and out of the reeds in their canoes, and an-25 noying the builders with arrows and cross-bow bolts.

At last the bridge was finished, and the sow safe across the West water, and thrust in, as far as it would float, among the reeds on the high tide. They in the fort could touch it with a pole.

The English would have destroyed it if they could. But Hereward bade them leave it alone. He had watched all their work, and made up his mind to the event.

30

5

"The rats have set a trap for themselves," he said to his men "and we shall be fools to break it

rats are safe inside."

up till the

So there the huge sow lay, black and silent, showing nothing to the enemy but a side of strong plank, cov- 5 ered with hide to prevent its being burned. It lay there for three hours, and Hereward let it lie.

He had never been so cheerful, so confident. "Play the man this day, every one of you, and ere nightfall you will have taught the Norman once more the lesson 10 of York. He seems to have forgotten that. It is me to remind him of it."

And he looked to his bow and to his arrows, and prepared to play the man himself-as was the fashion in those old days, when a general proved his worth by hit-15 ting harder and more surely than any of his men.

At last the army was in motion, and Willingham field opposite was like a crawling ants'-nest. Brigade after brigade moved down to the reed - beds, and the assault began.

20

And now advanced along the causeway and along the bridge a dark column of men, surmounted by glittering steel; knights in complete mail, footmen in leather coats; at first orderly enough, each under the banner of his lord; but more and more mingled and 25 crowded as they hurried forward, each eager for his selfish share of the inestimable treasures of Ely. They pushed along the bridge. The mass became more and more crowded; men stumbled over each other, and fell off into the mire and the water, calling vainly for help, while their comrades hurried on, unheeding, in the mad thirst for spoil. On they came in thousands; and fresh thousands streamed out of the fields, as if the whole army intended to pour itself into the isle at once.

30