"
"I thank you for those words, Sir Harold," said the good Abbot, while the
boy went on abashed, and Hereward himself was startled at his own saying,
and rode silent till they crossed the drawbridge of St. Bertin, and
entered that ancient fortress, so strong that it was the hiding-place in
war time for all the treasures of the country, and so sacred withal that
no woman, dead or alive, was allowed to defile it by her presence; so that
the wife of Baldwin the Bold, ancestor of Arnulf, wishing to lie by her
husband, had to remove his corpse from St. Bertin to the Abbey of
Blandigni, where the Counts of Flanders lay in glory for many a
generation.
The pirates entered, not without gloomy distrust, the gates of that
consecrated fortress; while the monks in their turn were (and with some
reason) considerably frightened when they were asked to entertain as
guests forty Norse rovers. Loudly did the elder among them bewail (in
Latin, lest their guests should understand too much) the present weakness
of their monastery, where St. Bertin was left to defend himself and his
monks all alone against the wicked world outside. Far different had been
their case some hundred and seventy years before. Then St. Valeri and St.
Riquier of Ponthieu, transported thither from their own resting-places in
France for fear of the invading Northmen, had joined their suffrages and
merits to those of St.
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