He withdrew Torfrida and his men into the heart of the forest,--no hint of
the place is given by the chronicler,--cut down trees, formed an abattis
of trunks and branches, and awaited the enemy.
CHAPTER XXXV.
HOW ABBOT THOROLD WAS PUT TO RANSOM.
Though Hereward had as yet no feud against "Bysshoppes and
Archbysshoppes," save Egelsin of Selsey, who had excommunicated him, but
who was at the other end of England, he had feud, as may be supposed,
against Thorold, Abbot of Peterborough, and Thorold feud likewise against
him. When Thorold had entered the "Golden Borough," hoping to fatten
himself with all its treasures, he had found it a smoking ruin, and its
treasures gone to Ely to pay Sweyn and his Danes. And such a "sacrilege,"
especially when he was the loser thereby, was the unpardonable sin itself
in the eyes of Thorold, as he hoped it might be in the eyes of St. Peter.
Joyfully therefore he joined his friend Ivo Taillebois; when, "with his
usual pompous verbosity," saith Peter of Blois, writing on this very
matter, he asked him to join in destroying Hereward.
Nevertheless, with all the Norman chivalry at their back, it behoved them
to move with caution; for (so says the chronicler) "Hereward had in these
days very many foreigners, as well as landsfolk, who had come to him to
practise and learn war, and fled from their masters and friends when they
heard of his fame; and some of them the king's courtiers, who had come to
see whether those things which they heard were true, whom Hereward
nevertheless received cautiously, on plighted troth and oath.
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