been obliged, besides their
intolerable scarcity of food, to thatch their bodies from the cold with
whatever covering could be got, and their legs especially with birch
bark; sad species of fleecy hosiery; whence their nickname),--his
Birkebeins I guess always to have been a kind of Norse _Jacquerie_:
desperate rising of thralls and indigent people, driven mad by their
unendurable sufferings and famishings,--theirs the _deepest_ stratum
of misery, and the densest and heaviest, in this the general misery of
Norway, which had lasted towards the third generation and looked as if
it would last forever:--whereupon they had risen proclaiming, in this
furious dumb manner, unintelligible except to Heaven, that the same
could not, nor would not, be endured any longer! And, by their Sverrir,
strange to say, they did attain a kind of permanent success; and, from
being a dismal laughing-stock in Norway, came to be important, and for
a time all-important there. Their opposition nicknames, "_Baglers_ (from
Bagall, _baculus_, bishop's staff; Bishop Nicholas being chief Leader),"
"_Gold-legs_," and the like obscure terms (for there was still a
considerable course of counter-fighting ahead, and especially of
counter-nicknaming), I take to have meant in Norse prefigurement seven
centuries ago, "bloated Aristocracy," "tyrannous-_Bourgeoisie_,"--till,
in the next century, these rents were closed again!

King Sverrir, not himself bred to comb-making, had, in his fifth year,
gone to an uncle, Bishop in the Faroe Islands; and got some considerable
education from him, with a view to Priesthood on the part of Sverrir.
But, not liking that career, Sverrir had fled and smuggled himself
over to the Birkebeins; who, noticing the learned tongue, and other
miraculous qualities of the man, proposed to make him Captain of them;
and even threatened to kill him if he would not accept,--which thus at
the sword's point, as Sverrir says, he was obliged to do. It was after
this that he thought of becoming son of Wry-Mouth and other higher
things.

His Birkebeins and he had certainly a talent of campaigning which has
hardly ever been equalled. They fought like devils against any odds
of number; and before battle they have been known to march six days
together without food, except, perhaps, the inner barks of trees, and in
such clothing and shoeing as mere birch bark:--at one time, somewhere in
the Dovrefjeld, there was serious counsel held among them whethe