"For this Richard de Rulos," says Ingulf, or whoever wrote in his name,
"who had married the daughter and heiress of Hugh of Evermue, Lord of
Bourne and Deeping, being a man of agricultural pursuits, got permission
from the monks of Crowland, for twenty marks of silver, to enclose as much
as he would of the common marshes. So he shut out the Welland by a strong
embankment, and building thereon numerous tenements and cottages, in a
short time he formed a large 'vill,' marked out gardens, and cultivated
fields; while, by shutting out the river, he found in the meadow land,
which had been lately deep lakes and impassable marshes (wherefore the
place was called Deeping, the deep meadow), most fertile fields and
desirable lands, and out of sloughs and bogs accursed made quiet a garden
of pleasaunce."
So there the good man, the beginner of the good work of centuries, sat
looking out over the fen, and listening to the music which came on the
southern breeze--above the low of the kine, and the clang of the wild-fowl
settling down to rest--from the bells of Crowland minster far away.
They were not the same bells which tolled for Hereward and Torfrida. Those
had run down in molten streams upon that fatal night when Abbot Ingulf
leaped out of bed to see the vast wooden sanctuary wrapt in one sheet of
roaring flame, from the carelessness of a plumber who had raked the ashes
over his fire in the bell-tower, and left it to smoulder through the
night.
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