season did not suit Duke William, certain at least it is that he fell sick of a fever and ague, and thereupon took a hurried departure from Cam-Bridge and travelled towards London, having first sent to call from Stamford town Ivo Taille-Bois to take the command of the great army. Now, when Ivo came to Cam-Bridge, and when Duke William was away in London, matters went far worse with the Normans than before, for the Viscomte was not a great captain, as the Duke assuredly was. Moreover, many of the troops took the ague, and others were so unmanned by their fears that they could never be made to stand their ground; and, in fine, all vowed that they would not venture among the woods and bulrushes, nor attempt any feat of arms whatever until the great witch should arrive from Normandy to countervail the black arts of the Salernitan and the other wizards and witches they falsely believed to be employed by the pious Lord of Brunn. At last a terrible Norman witch[203] arrived at Cam-Bridge, and she was received in the entrenched camp and in the castle with transports of exceeding great joy. Loathsome and wicked at the same time were it to describe the person and features, the attire and demeanour, the spells and incantations of this frightful and detestable portentum. Her years far exceeded the ordinary length of human life, and they had all been spent in sin and in the practise of infernal arts: in sin and actual devilry had she been conceived and born, for her mortal father was none other than that arch-heresiarch and enemy to the saints, Leutarde of Vertus, in the bishopric of Chalons, who went about with a sledge-hammer breaking the images of God’s saints, and preaching that God’s prophets had not always prophesied the truth, and that God-living servants and ministers of the altar had no right to their tithes! Since the day when her sire, pursued by his bishop, cast himself head foremost into a deep well and was drowned (for the devils, in their compact with him, had only agreed that he should never be burned), this foul strega, his only daughter, had wandered over the face of the wide earth doing mischief, and dwelling most in those forsaken, accursed parts of the earth where witchcraft does most flourish. It was said that she had been as far north as that dread isle which is covered with snow, and which yet is for ever vomiting smoke and flames; even to that northern isle[204] which pious men believe to be one of the entrances into hell, and which has been notoriously inhabited at all times by devils and devil-worshippers; that she had lived among the Laps, who call up demons by beat of drum; and that she had dwelt in the Orcades,[205] where the devil’s dam and her handmaidens use to raise great storms, and to sell wind foul or fair. Of a surety was there no witch of all that congregated round the witch-tree of Beneventum more known than this! It was known, too, how she came by that broken leg which made her limp in her gait.