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CHAPTER XI.
HOW THE HOLLANDERS TOOK HEREWARD FOR A MAGICIAN.
Of this weary Holland war which dragged itself on, campaign after
campaign, for several years, what need to tell? There was, doubtless, the
due amount of murder, plunder, burning, and worse; and the final event was
certain from the beginning. It was a struggle between civilized and
disciplined men, armed to the teeth, well furnished with ships and
military engines, against poor simple folk in "felt coats stiffened with
tar or turpentine, or in very short jackets of hide," says the chronicler,
"who fought by threes, two with a crooked lance and three darts each, and
between them a man with a sword or an axe, who held his shield before
those two;--a very great multitude, but in composition utterly
undisciplined," who came down to the sea-coast, with carts and wagons, to
carry off the spoils of the Flemings, and bade them all surrender at
discretion, and go home again after giving up Count Robert and Hereward,
with the "tribunes of the brigades," to be put to death, as valiant South
Sea islanders might have done; and then found themselves as sheep to the
slaughter before the cunning Hereward, whom they esteemed a magician on
account of his craft and his invulnerable armor.
So at least says Leofric's paraphrast, who tells long, confused stories of
battles and campaigns, some of them without due regard to chronology; for
it is certain that the brave Frisians could not on Robert's first landing
have "feared lest they should be conquered by foreigners, as they had
heard the English were by the French," because that event had not then
happened.
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