“I fought in that battle,” quoth Hereward, “and know that it was a mixed army of Danes and Norwegians, even like most of the armies that, for two hundred years and more, devastated this land and the kingdom of Scotland. But let that pass. Those armies came as open enemies: let us see the conduct of an army that came as friends. Only last year the good Saxon people from the Tyne to the York Ouse were deserted in the hour of success and victory by an army of Danes, commanded by the brothers of the King of Danemarck, who had been invited into the country by the suffering Saxons, and who had sworn upon the relics of saints not to leave this land until it was clear of the Normans. The two royal Danes took the gold of the son of Robert the Devil and the harlot of Falaise, and thereupon took their departure in their ships, and left the Saxons, with their plan all betrayed, to be slaughtered in heaps, and the whole north country to be turned into a solitude and desert, a Golgotha, or place of skulls.” “This is too true,” said the Bishop of Durham; “and terrible is all this truth!” “But,” said the Bishop of Lindisfarne, “the King of Danemarck’s brothers are not the King of Danemarck himself. We hear that the king is incensed at what those brothers did, and that he hath banished them from his presence and from the land of Danemarck, and that he hath sworn by the rood[163] that he will send four hundred keels across the ocean, and take himself the command of the army.” “Yet even if he come,” quoth the Lord of Brunn, “he may prove as faithless and as greedy for gold as his brothers; or he may set up his pretended right to the throne of King Harold, our absent but not lost lord, and in that case we shall find that the Saxon people will fall from our side; for if they are to be cursed with a new and foreign master, they will not overmuch care whether his name be William of Normandie or Svend of Danemarck.” “Assuredly not quite so,” said the Prior of Ely, who opposed Hereward the more because the Lord Abbat Thurstan was disposed to agree with him; “assuredly not quite so, my Lord of Brunn, for there hath been large admixture of Danish blood in our Anglo-Saxon race,[164] and Danes and English sprang, _ab origine_, from nearly one and the same great hive of nations in the north.”