Yet the bountiful Abbat Thurstan, who had given the best feasts of all that the house had ever known, and who loved as much as any man to see the drinking-horn go round, kept up his good spirit without wine—it was sustained by his generous love of country and liberty!—and he reasoned well with those he heard murmur, and yet held out to them the prospect of better times when corn should come in from the upland country in abundance, and good wine from beyond-sea. If want began to be felt among the monks of Ely, it is not to be believed but that it was felt still more sharply among the Saxon fighting men collected in the Camp of Refuge. But the stomachs of these warriors were not so dainty as the stomachs of the monks, and the commonalty of them, being accustomed to fare hard before now, made no complaint. Alas, no! It was not through the malecontent of these rude men, nor through these lay stomachs, but through the malice and gluttony of cloister-monks, that the sanctuary was violated. The Lord of Brunn having emptied his own granaries and cellars for the behoof of the house at Ely, made sundry very desperate forays, breaking through the Norman chain of posts, and going far in the upland country in search of supplies, and risking his noble life, more than once, for nought but a sack of wheat, or a cask of ale, or a firkin of mead. While the blockade was as yet young, a few devout pilgrims, who would not be shut out from the shrines of the Saxon saints at Ely, nor fail to offer up their little annual offerings, and a few sturdy friends who knew the straits to which the monks were about to be reduced, eluded the vigilance of the Normans, and found their way, through those mazes of waters and labyrinths of woods, to the abbey, and carried with them some small supplies: but as time went on and the force of the Normans increased as well by land as by water, these hazardous journeys were stopped, and divers of the poor Saxons were caught, and were then pitilessly hanged as rebels and traitors; and then a law was banded that every man, woman, or child, that attempted to go through the Fen-country, either to Ely Abbey or the Camp of Refuge, would be hanged or crucified. But, alack! real traitors to their country were afterwards allowed to pass the Norman posts, and go on to Ely Abbey, and it was through their agency and the representations of some of the Normans that were taken prisoners in war and carried to the monastery, that the envious prior, and the chamberlain, and the cellarer, and the rest of that foul faction were emboldened to raise their voice publicly against the good Abbat, and to lay snares in the path of the Lord of Brunn. Now the same troubles arose out of the same causes in Crowland Abbey, where sundry of the cloister monks began to say that since they could get no bread and wine it were best to make terms with the Norman Abbat of Peterborough (that Torauld of Fescamp who had been released