They
were the first-fruits of William's vengeance; thrust into that boat, to
tell the rest of the fen-men what those had to expect who dared oppose the
Norman. And they were going, by some by-stream, to Crowland, to the
sanctuary of the Danish fen-men, that they might cast themselves down
before St. Guthlac, and ask of him that mercy for their souls which the
conqueror had denied to their bodies. Alas for them! they were but a
handful among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mutilated cripples, who
swarmed all over England, and especially in the north and east, throughout
the reign of the Norman conquerors. They told their comrades' fate,
slaughtered in the first attack, or hanged afterwards as rebels and
traitors to a foreigner whom they had never seen, and to whom they owed no
fealty by law of God or man.
"And Ranald Sigtrygsson?"
None knew aught of him. He never got home again to his Irish princess.
"And the poor women?" asked Torfrida.
But she received no answer.
And the men swore a great oath, and kept it, never to give quarter to a
Norman, as long as there was one left on English ground.
Neither were the monks of Ely in jesting humor, when they came to count up
the price of their own baseness. They had (as was in that day the cant of
all cowardly English churchmen, as well as of the more crafty Normans)
"obeyed the apostolic injunction, to submit to the powers that be, because
they are ordained," &c.
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