Always a rich and always a bountiful man had been the uncle of Lord Hereward; and while yet a cloister monk and one of the obedientiarii, he had given to the monastery many lands, as in Muscham, Schotter, Scalthorp, Yolthorp, Messingham, Riseby, Normanby, Althorp, and many other parts. Judge ye, therefore, whether the brothers of Peterborough were not largely indebted to Abbat Brand,[159] and whether Abbat Brand was not the proper man to confer Saxon knighthood on his nephew. After the disastrous journey of Ivo Taille-Bois and his brother to Ey, the news of which was rumoured all over the country, Brand had dispatched an intelligencer to his bold nephew, and had sent other messengers to his neighbours, and to all the good Saxon people that dwelt between Peterborough and Stamford. He had beseeched Hereward to march to his rescue, and to the rescue of his house; and Hereward, like a duteous nephew and loving kinsman, had sent to promise that he would be with him with good two hundred armed men on the octave of the Epiphany. But, before going for Peterborough, the young Lord of Brunn had much to do in the way of collecting men and arms, strengthening the house at Ey and the house at Brunn, and the abbey of Crowland, and the succursal cell at Spalding; and much time he spent with Girolamo of Salerno in devising war stratagems, and in planning the means by which the whole fen country might be rendered still more defensible than it was, as by the cutting of new ditches, the making of sluices and flood-gates, movable bridges, and the like. The men-at-arms, left by Ivo Taille-Bois to guard the manor-house near to Spalding, becoming sorely alarmed, and despairing of finding their way across the fens, sent a Saxon messenger to the returned Prior of Spalding, with an offer to surrender the house to the soldiers of Lord Hereward, if the good prior would only secure them in their lives by extending over them the shield of the church. The conditions were immediately agreed to: a garrison of armed Saxons took possession of the moated and battlemented house, and the Normans were sent as war prisoners to Ely. Hereward gave orders that all due respect should be paid to the house, and to all other the goods and chattels of the Ladie Lucia; for albeit that ladie was forcibly the wife of Ivo, she was cousin to Alftrude and relative to King Harold, and her heart was believed to be wholly Saxon. As Brunn was a house of greater strength, and farther removed from that skirt or boundary of the fen country upon which the Normans were expected to collect their strength, Hereward removed his bride to Brunn, and there he left her in the midst of friends and defenders; for his followers were now so numerous that he could keep his promise with his uncle Brand without leaving his bride exposed to danger, and without weakening one of the sundry posts he had occupied, as well along other rivers as upon the banks of the Welland.