“Siward Barn, as they call him, the boy Orgar, and Thurkill Barn. Those are the knights. Egelwin, bishop of Durham, is there too; and besides them all, and above them all, Hereward. The like of that knight I may have seen. His better saw I never.” “Sir fool!” said Earl Warrenne, who had not yet--small blame to him--forgotten his brother’s death. “They have soused thy brains with their muddy ale, till thou knowest not friend from foe. What! hast thou to come hither praising up to the King’s Majesty such an outlawed villain as that, with whom no honest knight would keep company?” “If you, Earl Warrenne, ever found Dade drunk or lying, it is more than the King here has done.” “Let him speak, Earl,” said William. “I have not an honester man in my camp; and he speaks for my information, not for yours.” “Then for yours will I speak, Sir King. These men treated me knightly, and sent me away without ransom.” “They had an eye to their own profit, it seems,” grumbled the Earl. “But force me they did to swear on the holy Gospels that I should tell your Majesty the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And I keep my oath,” quoth Dade. “Go on, then, without fear or favor. Are there any other men of note in the island!” “No.” “Are they in want of provisions?” “Look how they have fattened me.” “What do they complain of?” “I will tell you, Sir King. The monks, like many more, took fright at the coming over of our French men of God to set right all their filthy, barbarous ways; and that is why they threw Ely open to the rebels.” “I will be even with the sots,” quoth William. “However, they think that danger blown over just now; for they have a story among them, which, as my Lord the King never heard before, he may as well hear now.” “Eh?” “How your Majesty should have sent across the sea a whole shipload of French monks.” “That have I, and will more, till I reduce these swine into something like obedience to his Holiness of Rome.” “Ah, but your Majesty has not heard how one Bruman, a valiant English knight, was sailing on the sea and caught those monks. Whereon he tied a great sack to the ship’s head, and cut the bottom out, and made every one of those monks get into that sack and so fall through into the sea; whereby he rid the monks of Ely of their rivals.” “Pish! why tell me such an old-wives’ fable, knight?” “Because the monks believe that old-wives’ fable, and are stout-hearted and stiff-necked accordingly.” “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” said William’s chaplain, a pupil and friend of Lanfranc; “and if these men of Belial drowned every man of God in Normandy, ten would spring up in their places to convert this benighted and besotted land of Simonites and Balaamites, whose priests, like the brutes which perish, scruple not to defile themselves and the service of the altar with things which they impudently call their wives.”