d animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire
was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough
and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells
how the savage heart of the Danish king Cnut was softened by the singing
of the monks in Ely.

Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by;
Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land.
And here we thes muneches sang.

Merrily sung the monks in Ely
When King Canute rowed by.
'Row boys, nearer the land,
And let us hear these monks' song.'

It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold
outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years
against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burgh or
Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead), that the
chronicle was continued nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking
off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death. Peterborough had
received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern man," and the entry
in the chronicle for 1070 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his
Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which
were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and
sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this
Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away
more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical
Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some
passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of
William the Conquerer put down in the year of his death (1086) by one
who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court." "He
who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of
all his land but a piece of seven feet....Likewise he was a very stark
man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will....
Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in
this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full
of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws
therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded. As
greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father."

With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history
written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of
the nation's