CHAPTER XLI.
HOW EARL WALTHEOF WAS MADE A SAINT.
A few months after, there sat in Abbot Thorold's lodgings inPeterborough a select company of Normans, talking over affairs of stateafter their supper.
"Well, earls and gentlemen," said the Abbot, as he sipped his wine, "thecause of our good king, which is happily the cause of Holy Church, goeswell, I think. We have much to be thankful for when we review the eventsof the past year. We have finished the rebels; Roger de Breteuil issafe in prison, Ralph Guader unsafe in Brittany, and Waltheof more thanunsafe in--the place to which traitors descend. We have not a manor leftwhich is not in loyal Norman hands; we have not an English monk left whohas not been scourged and starved into holy obedience; not an Englishsaint for whom any man cares a jot, since Guerin de Lire preached downSt. Adhelm, the admirable primate disposed of St. Alphege's martyrdom,and some other wise man--I am ashamed to say that I forget who--provedthat St. Edmund of Suffolk was merely a barbarian knight, who was killedfighting with Danes only a little more heathen than himself. We have hadgreat labors and great sufferings since we landed in this barbarousisle upon our holy errand ten years since; but, under the shadow ofthe gonfalon of St. Peter, we have conquered, and may sing 'Dominusilluminatio mea' with humble and thankful hearts."
"I don't know that," said Ascelin, "my Lord Uncle; I shall never sing'Dominus Illuminatio' till I see your coffers illuminated once more bythose thirty thousand marks."
"Or I," said Oger le Breton, "till I see myself safe in that bit of landwhich Hereward holds wrongfully of me in Locton."
"Or I," said Ivo Taillebois, "till I see Hereward's head on Bournegable, where he stuck up those Norman's heads seven years ago. But whatthe Lord Abbot means by saying that we have done with English saints Ido not see, for the villains of Crowland have just made a new one forthemselves."
"A new one?"
"I tell you truth and fact; I will tell you all, Lord Abbot; and youshall judge whether it is not enough to drive an honest man mad to seesuch things going on under his nose. Men say of me that I am rough, andswear and blaspheme. I put it to you, Lord Abbot, if Job would not havecursed if he had been Lord of Spalding? You know that the king let theseCrowland monks have Waltheof's body?"
"Yes, I thought it an unwise act of grace. It would have been wiser toleave him, as he desired, out on the down, in ground unconsecrate."
"Of course, of course; for what has happened?"
"That old traitor, Ulfketyl, and his monks bring the body to Crowland,and bury it as if it had been the Pope's. In a week they begin tospread their lies,--that Waltheof was innocent; that Archbishop Lanfranchimself said so."
"That was the only act of human weakness which I have ever known thevenerable prelate commit," said Thorold.
"That these Normans at Winchester were so in the traitor's favor, thatthe king had to have him out and cut off his head in the gray of themorning, ere folks were up and about; that the fellow was so holy thathe passed all his time in prison in weeping and praying, and said over thewhole Psalter every day, because his mother had taught it him,--I wishshe had taught him to be an honest man;--and that when his head wason the block he said all the Paternoster, as far as 'Lead us not intotemptation,' and then off went his head; whereon, his head being off,finished the prayer with--you know best what comes next, Abbot?"
"Deliver us from evil, Amen! What a manifest lie! The traitor was notpermitted, it is plain, to ask for that which could never be granted tohim; but his soul, unworthy to be delivered from evil, entered insteadinto evil, and howls forever in the pit."
"But all the rest may be true," said Oger; "and yet that be no reasonwhy these monks should say it."
"So I told them, and threatened them too; for, not content with makinghim a martyr, they are making him a saint."
"Impious! Who can do that, save the Holy Father?" said Thorold.
"You had best get your bishop to look to them, then, for they arecarrying blind beggars and mad girls by the dozen to be cured at theman's tomb, that is all. Their fellows in the cell at Spalding wentabout to take a girl that had fits off one of my manors, to cure her;but that I stopped with a good horse-whip."
"And rightly."
"And gave the monks a piece of my mind, and drove them clean out oftheir cell home to Crowland."
What a piece of Ivo's mind on this occasion might be, let Ingulfdescribe.
"Against our monastery and all the people of Crowland he was, by theinstigation of the Devil, raised to such an extreme pitch of fury, thathe would follow their animals in the marshes with his dogs, drive themto a great distance down in the lakes, mutilate some in the tails,others in the ears, while often, by breaking the backs and legs of thebeasts of burden, he rendered them utterly useless. Against our cellalso (at Spalding) and our brethren, his neighbors, the prior and monks,who dwelt all day within his presence, he rages with tyrannical andfrantic fury, lamed their oxen and horses, daily impounded their sheepand poultry, striking down, killing, and slaying their swine and pigs;while at the same time the servants of the prior were oppressed in theEarl's court with insupportable exactions, were often assaulted in thehighways with swords and staves, and sometimes killed."
"Well," went on the injured Earl, "this Hereward gets news of me,--andnews too, I don't know whence, but true enough it is,--that I had swornto drive Ulfketyl out of Crowland by writ from king and bishop, and lockhim up as a minister at the other end of England."
"You will do but right. I will send a knight off to the king this day,telling him all, and begging him to send us up a trusty Norman as abbotof Crowland, that we may have one more gentleman in the land fit for ourcompany."
"You must kill Hereward first. For, as I was going to say, he sent wordto me 'that the monks of Crowland were as the apple of his eye, andAbbot Ulfketyl to him as more than a father; and that if I dared to laya finger on them or their property, he would cut my head off.'"
"He has promised to cut my head off likewise," said Ascelin. "Earl,knights, and gentlemen, do you not think it wiser that we should lay ourwits together once and for all, and cut off his."
"But who will catch the Wake sleeping?" said Ivo, laughing.
"That will I. I have my plans, and my intelligencers."
And so those wicked men took counsel together to slay Hereward.