Quoth the Salernitan, “It was to do strange things that I came hither, and it was because I could do them that the brave and pious Lord of Brunn brought me with him to bear part in a contest which was desperate before we came. But I tell thee, oh monk, that all of even the strangest things I have done have been done by legitimate and natural means, and by that science which I have acquired by long study and much fasting, and much travelling in far-off countries, where many things are known which are as yet unknown in these thy boreal regions. To speak not of the marvels I have witnessed in the East, I tell thee, Saxon, that I have seen the doctors who teach, or who used to teach, in the schools of my native town before the Norman barbarians came among us, do things that would make thy dull eyes start out of their sockets, and the hair stand erect round thy tonsure; and yet these doctors and teachers were members of that Christian Church to which thou, and I, and all of us belong—were doctors in divinity, and priests, and confessors, and men of holy lives; and it never passed through their bright and pure minds that what the ignorant could not understand should be imputed to them or to their scholars as a crime. Saxon, I say, take the beam of ignorance out of thine eye, and then wilt thou see that man can do marvellous things without magic or the aid of the devil. The real wizard or witch is the lowest and most benighted of mankind, and necromancy can be employed only for the working out of wicked and detestable ends. But what was and what is the end I have in view? Is it wicked to defend this house and the shrines of your national saints from violence and spoliation? Is it detestable in one who hath known in his own person and in his own country the woes of foreign conquest, to devote his sword and his life, his science, and all the little that is his, to the cause of a generous people struggling against fearful odds for their independence, and fighting for their own against these Norman invaders!”