Now, we have said it, William the Norman was a great and cunning commander (ye might have searched through the world at that time, and have found none greater!), and being thus skilled, and having a fearless heart withal, and a sort of lion magnanimity, he was proper to judge of the skill of other captains, and not incapable of admiring and lauding that skill even in an enemy. And as from his causeway (even as from a ship in the midst of the waters) he watched the defences which Hereward raised, and all the rapid and wise movements he made, he ofttimes exclaimed, “By the splendour! this Saxon is a right cunning captain! It were worth half a realm could I win him over to my service. But, O Hereward, since thou wilt not submit, thou must perish in thy pride through hunger, or in the meshes which I am spreading for thee.” CHAPTER XXI. THE MONKS OF ELY COMPLAIN AND PLOT. As no corn came, and no wine could be had, the tribulations and murmurings in the monastery grew louder and louder. Certain of the monks had never looked with a friendly eye upon Girolamo the Salernitan, but now there was suddenly raised an almost universal clamour among them that that dark-visaged and thin-bodied alien was, and ever had been, a necromancer. Unmindful of the many services he had done, and forgetting how many times they had, when the drinking-horns could be well filled, rejoiced and jubilated at his successes, and _specialiter_ on that not far by-gone day when he had burned the Norman witch, in the midst of her incantations, with the reeds and grass of the fen, the monks now called him by the foulest and most horrible of all names, and some of them even called out for his death. These men said that if Girolamo were brought to the stake and burned as he had burned the Norman witch, the wrath of Heaven would be appeased, and matters would go much better with the house of St. Etheldreda, and with all the English people. Albeit they all knew how innocently those devils had been made; and, albeit they had seen with their own eyes, that Girolamo was constant at prayers, mass, and confession, and that he never prepared his mixtures and compounds until after prayer and long fasting (to say nothing of his frequently partaking in the Sacrament of our Lord’s Supper), they rumoured, even like the Normans, that he had raised devils, and employed fen-fiends, and incubuses, and succubuses, and had lit hell-fires upon the pools and within the holy house at Crowland; that he was ever attended by a demon, called by him Chemeia;[212] that he had been a Jew, and next a follower of Mahound;[213] that he had sold his soul to the devil of devils at Jerusalem or Mecca: that he did not eat and drink like Saxons and Christians, only because he went to graves and charnel-houses at the dead of night, and feasted upon the bodies of the dead with his fiends and hell-hounds—with a great deal more too horrible and obscene to mention.[214]