[Footnote: See the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle".]
On these mitred tyrants the outlaw had no mercy, as far as their purses
were concerned. Their persons, as consecrated, were even to him sacred and
inviolable,--at least, from wounds and death; and one may suppose Hereward
himself to have been the first author of the laws afterward attributed to
Robin Hood. As for "robbing and reving, beting and bynding," free warren
was allowed against the Norman.
"'Thereof no fors,' said Robyn,
'We shall do well enow.
But look ye do no housbonde harme,
That tilleth wyth his plough.
"'No more ye shall no good yeman,
That walketh by grene wood shawe;
Ne no knyght, ne no squyer,
That will be good felawe.
"'These bysshoppes, and these archbysshoppes,
Ye shall them bete and binde;
The hye sheryff of Nottingham,
Hym holde in your mynde.'
"Robyn loved our dere Ladye,
For doubt of dedely synne,
Wolde he never do company harme
That any woman was ynne."
And even so it was with Hereward in the Bruneswald, if the old
chroniclers, Leofric especially, are to be believed.
And now Torfrida was astonished. She had given way utterly at Ely, from
woman's fear, and woman's disappointment. All was over. All was lost. What
was left, save to die?
But--and it was a new and unexpected fact to one of her excitable Southern
blood, easily raised, and easily depressed--she discovered that neither
her husband, nor Winter, nor Geri, nor Wenoch, nor Ranald of Ramsey, nor
even the romancing harping Leofric, thought that all was lost.
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