and avoid their fury; and when the echoes of that true Saxon voice died away, the thick growing oaks seemed to speak, for there came voices from the woods on either side the road, shouting, “Hail! all hail! Lord Frithric, our true Lord Abbat! If every Saxon lord had been true as he, Harold would now be king!” Quoth Duke William, in an angered voice, “Is the spirituality of England of such power? If I may live and enjoy that which I have gotten, I will make their power less; and especially I mind to begin with thee, proud Abbat of Saint Albans!” And how behaved Abbat Frithric when his domains were seized, and ill-shaven foreign monks thrust into his house, and savage foreign soldiers?—when, after that the conqueror had sworn upon all the relics of the church of Saint Albans, and by the Holy Gospels, to respect the abbey and all churches, and to preserve inviolate the good and ancient laws which had been established by the pious kings of England, and more especially by King Edward the Confessor, he allowed his Normans to kill the Saxon people without bot or compensation, plundered every church in the land, oppressed and despoiled all the abbeys, ploughed with ploughshares of red hot iron over the faces of all Saxons, and yet demanded from Frithric and his compeers a new oath of allegiance, and fuller securities for his obedience—what then did the Lord Abbat of Saint Albans? He assembled all his monks and novices in the hall of the chapter, and taking a tender farewell of them, he said, “My brothers, my children, the time is come when, according to Scripture, I must flee from city to city before the face of our persecutors—_Fugiendum est a facie persequentium a civitate in civitatem_.” And rather than be forsworn, or desert the good cause, or witness without the power of remedying them the sufferings and humiliations and forcible expulsions of his monks, he went forth and became a wanderer as aforesaid, until he crossed the land of willows and many waters, and came unto Ely, a lone man, with nought but his missal and his breviary under his arm. Now the Abbat Frithric was old when these years of trouble began; and constant grief and toil, and the discomforts of his long journey on foot from the dry sunny hill of Saint Albans to the fens and morasses of Ely, had given many a rude shake to the hour-glass of his life. Since his arrival at Ely he had wasted away daily: every time that he appeared in the hall or refectory he seemed more and more haggard and worn: most men saw that he was dying, but none saw it so clearly as himself. When the young and hopeful would say to him, “Lord Frithric, these evil days will pass away, the Saxons will get their own again, and thou wilt get back as a true Saxon to thine own abbey,” he would reply, “Young men, England will be England again, but not in my day; my next move is to the grave: Saint Albans is a heavenly place, but it is still upon earth, and, save the one hope that my country may revive,