Having nothing else upon hand for that present, William sent another great army to try their fortunes in the fen country; and (grieves me to say!) many of these soldiers were native English, and some few of them men from the Isle of Ely, who had experience in fen-warfare. Now was the manor-house of Brunn retaken, and now was Lord Hereward compelled to abandon Spalding, and to get him gone into the heart of Lincolnshire with his family and his people, and all his friends, and his Norman prisoners; but he drove off his cattle with him, and he found other herds where he went; and he found, moreover, subjugated townships and Norman town-governors unprepared to resist him. Some men do say that he had with him scant three hundred fighting men; but he flitted so rapidly from place to place, and so multiplied his attacks, that the Normans ever thought he had many thousands. And when the great Norman army marched against him in Lindsey in the north, Hereward doubled them, and marched back to the south into Kesteven; and when they came to look for him in Kesteven, either he was back in Lindsey, or continuing his course to the south, he got him into Hoiland and that flooded country near the Wash, where the Normans never could penetrate, and where every man that lived and went upon tall stilts was his liege man. Here, in Hoiland, and in perfect safety, chiefly abided the Ladie Alftrude, and the women and children, and the Norman prisoners. The name of the Lord of Brunn was more than ever sounded throughout broad England, and from the Wash to the Humber it was a name of dread to all Normans and friends of Normans. Every feat of arms or skilful stratagem inspired some new song or tale; and the gleemen were never idle, and were never unhonoured. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HAPPY END.