The Hunt for Hereward - Writing History in Twelfth-Century England
In a world of mist and water, a monk sets out to write the history of an English rebel
When the winds whip across the Fens, when the reeds murmer and the still water is driven into peaks, the coldness is inescapable. A great watery expanse of marshland that lies to the east of England, the Fens are a source of awe. By day this swaying calmness, pierced occassionally by the sharp trill of a bird, leaves a sense of unnerving vastness. By night, as the will-o’-the-wisps flicker in the darkness, you are left with an overwhelming feeling of desolation .
Through this mire, down the river Ouse, the monk Richard set out in a small boat. His cloak pulled tight around him to block out the cold winds, he clung to his bag of writing supplies. As his craft wended its way through the reeds and the fog, Richard passed by a group of young men. Knee-deep in the stagnant pools, their arms submerged beneath the water, they seemed to Richard to be searching. As he passed the men let out a great cry. In their arms they craddled a corpse, mottled and bloated beyond recognition, its sinews fraying away into the water. It wore a mail coat, by now long rusted into great clumps of iron, and its lifeless hand still grasped a sword. Richard shuddered, and carried on his way.
In the heart of the Fens lies the great Abbey of Ely. The brothers had been gossiping. Every one of them knew the recent history of the abbey, of how Ely had been placed under siege by King William following his conquest of England in 1066. But they talked now of a tale that had swirled throughout the Fens for years, caught in snippets and wisps. They talked of an Englishman called Hereward, of his campaign of rebellion against the coming of King William, and his role in the events at Ely. Had such a man ever existed? Had he really been able to disappear off into the reeds without a trace, as the stories suggested? Might he still be out there, among the pools? And so they had turned to one of their own, the brother Richard, and tasked him with finding out more.
Richard had been about his task for some time. By the light of his dying candle, he had leafed through the archives of the abbey: a great sea of vellum and dust and spindly handwriting. He had found there a rotten mansucript, mottled by the damp and gnawed by vermin, in an language with which he was unfamiliar. Through painstaking effort, Richard had managed to decipher the bare bones. The text claimed to have been written by one Leofric, Hereward’s own priest, and from its sparse pages rose the tale of a a young man, and his desire for revenge and retribution.
Scraps of rotted parchment we not enough. Richard had heard tell of a great tome, a full account of the deeds of Hereward. If such a book had ever existed, it escaped him. And so, driven by frustration and the inescapable curiosity of his fellow brothers, this bookish monk turned to his final resort. He turned to the people of the Fens.
As his boat pulled up to the small wooden jetty emerging from the murmuring banks, Richard became aware that he was being watched. Before him stood a tall figure, unmoving in the the cruel winds that unfurled his cloak around him. Weathered down by age and the sap of the Fens, he stood still tall and piercing among the mist. His right arm, severed below the elbow, lay lifeless by his side. It was to this man that Richard had come, for Leofric the Black had once been a companion of Hereward.
Hereward’s tale, as we know it today, is pieced together from a number of medieval sources, and not a little bit of modern fiction. The narrative here is drawn from the opening lines of a text now known as the Gesta Herwardi, which survives only in thirteenth-century copy.1 A great sprawl of epic proportions, this is a tale of bravery and of cunning, of resilience and of pride. Whether any of its content approximates the ‘truth’ is unclear: we shall see, in later articles, that much of its account is plainly fictional.
Richard, the inquisitive monk whose search for information lies at the heart of this tale, is not named in the Gesta. Instead the Liber Eliensis, a history of the Abbey written a in the mid to late twelfth century, talks of ‘a book about the deeds of Hereward himself, written some time ago by Richard of blessed memory’.2 This, it is widely assumed, is an allusion to the Gesta.
What interests me more than the tale of Hereward ‘the Wake’ itself, which has been told many times before by much better writer than me, is the (semi-fictional?) process by which his myth was cultivated by medieval people. Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore the story at length, foregrounding the diverse strands that come together to produce a myth.
Let us leave, for now, with the lines that close Richard’s introduction to the Gesta:
So I urge you to pay attention, especially you who are concerned to hear of the exploits of brave men; listen carefully to this accoung of so great a man who, trusting in himself rather than rampart or garrisson, alone with his men waged war againt kings and kingdoms, and fought aginst princes and tyrants, some of whom he conquered.3
Hereward will return.
This is the first part of the story of Hereward the Wake. If you would like to keep up to date with the tale, and other posts about the lost lives of other medieval people, please consider subscribing for free using the button below. If you particularly enjoyed this story, or you consider yourself a patron of the arts in best Renaissance style, consider a paid subscription or a donation here. Post-docs have to eat too!
You can find previous stories throughout the archives of this blog: the thieving monk Eadwine, and the prophetic Saint Ælfheah,
Image shared under Pixabay Content License: https://pixabay.com/photos/sunset-moor-venn-belgium-eifel-2847590/
The Latin text is printed in ‘Gesta Herwardi Incliti Exulis et Miltis’, in T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin (eds.), Lestorie des Engles Solum la Translacion Maistre Geoffrei Gaimar (2 vols., Cambridge, 1888-9), i. 339-404. A modern English translation is found in ‘The Deeds of Hereward’, ed. and trans. M. Swanton, in T. H. Ohlgren (ed.), Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English (Thrupp, 1998), 12-60. You can buy a copy here (affiliate link)
Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh to Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. J. Fairweather (Woodbridge, 2005), 222
‘Deeds’, ed. and trans Swanton, 20