Once in flying through the air to the hellish sabbat at Beneventum she came too near to the cross of Saint Peter’s Church at Rome, and so fell to the earth. Ivo Taille-Bois,[206] profane man as he was, would have turned with horror from the witch, but in his sinful ignorance he believed that the devil’s arts might be employed against the devil, and he saw that all the soldiery, nay, and all the chivalry put under his command, believed that without witchcraft they could never cope with the Lord of Brunn, nor make any way in the Fen-country. As for the witch herself, she promised the men immediate and most marvellous victories. Therefore it was agreed that she should go forth with the troops and the working parties and penetrate into the fens, and that she should take her station on a high wooden tower, and thence give her directions as well to the working men as to the fighting men. Now Lord Hereward and Girolamo of Salerno, being advised of the arrival of the hag and of the plans of the Normans, took counsel together, and trusted, with the aid of the saints, to break the spell and sortilege, and consume the witch while in the very act of her witchcraft. Calling in his merry men from all their outposts, and posting them behind a river, Lord Hereward allowed the Normans to advance a good way into the fens, and he offered them no molestation while they were building a lofty wooden tower in the midst of an open plain. But when the tower was finished and the witch was at her incantations, and when the Norman band was gathered round the foot of the tower in that open plain, Hereward and Girolamo, aided only by Elfric and a few other alert Saxons, came round unseen to the edge of the plain and set fire to the dense reeds and rushes that grew upon it. It is the custom of the fenners to burn their reeds and stubble in the month of November of every year in order to fertilize the soil with the ashes thereof; and at this season one sees all this moorish country in a flame, to his great wonder and surprise, if he be a stranger in these parts. It was now the burning-time, and owing to the exceeding dryness of the summer and of the autumn likewise, the reeds and junci in this plain were all as dry as matches: add to this that the Saleritan had brought with him and had sprinkled over the plain some of his marvellous compounds which made a raging and inextinguishable fire, and that the wind was blowing keenly from the north-east right across the plain and towards the tall wooden tower, and then it may be, to some degree, imagined, how rapidly and awfully the flames, once lit, rolled over that broad open field, crackling, and hissing, and then roaring in the wind, while columns of thick, pungent, suffocating smoke rolled after them, darkening the sun and sky and making visible the horrible red glare. At the first glimpse of the mighty blaze the hag stopped her incantation and let the hell-broth she