death and ruin, were nothing compared with
it. In melancholy songs, and doleful stories, it was still sung and told
by cottage fires on winter evenings, a hundred years afterwards, how, in
those dreadful days of the Normans, there was not, from the River Humber
to the River Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated
field--how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creatures
and the beasts lay dead together.

The outlaws had, at this time, what they called a Camp of Refuge, in the
midst of the fens of Cambridgeshire. Protected by those marshy grounds
which were difficult of approach, they lay among the reeds and rushes,
and were hidden by the mists that rose up from the watery earth. Now,
there also was, at that time, over the sea in Flanders, an Englishman
named HEREWARD, whose father had died in his absence, and whose property
had been given to a Norman. When he heard of this wrong that had been
done him (from such of the exiled English as chanced to wander into that
country), he longed for revenge; and joining the outlaws in their camp of
refuge, became their commander. He was so good a soldier, that the
Normans supposed him to be aided by enchantment. William, even after he
had made a road three miles in length across the Cambridgeshire marshes,
on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter, thought it necessary to
engage an old lady, who pretended to be a sorceress, to come and do a
little enchantment in the royal cause. For this purpose she was pushed
on before the troops in a wooden tower; but Hereward very soon disposed
of this unfortunate sorceress, by burning her, tower and all. The monks
of the convent of Ely near at hand, however, who were fond of good
living, and who found it very uncomfortable to have the country blockaded
and their supplies of meat and drink cut off, showed the King a secret
way of surprising the camp. So Hereward was soon defeated. Whether he
afterwards died quietly, or whether he was killed after killing sixteen
of the men who attacked him (as some old rhymes relate that he did), I
cannot say. His defeat put an end to the Camp of Refuge; and, very soon
afterwards, the King, victorious both in Scotland and in England, quelled
the last rebellious English noble. He then surrounded himself with
Norman lords, enriched by the property of English nobles; had a great
survey made of all the land in England, which was entered as the property
of its new owners, on