“If it be so,” said Elfric, the novice from Spalding, “I would advise every true Saxon monk, novice, and lay-brother, to keep their eyes upon the cellarer and the prior!” “That shall be done,” said an old lay-brother. “Aye, we will all watch their outgoings and their comings in,” said several of the gossips; “for the prior is a hard-dealing, peremptory man, and cunning and crafty at the same time, never looking one in the face; and ever since last pasque the cellarer hath shown an evil habit of stinting us underlings and loaf-eaters in our meat and drink.” “He hath ever been given too little to drink himself to be a true Saxon,” said another; “we will watch him well!” And they all said that they would watch the cellarer and eke the prior; that they would for ever love, honour, and obey Thurstan their good and bountiful Lord Abbat; and that they would all die with swords or spears in their hands rather than see the Normans enter the Camp of Refuge. So one-hearted was the community at this time. Shortly after finishing the chapter in the usual manner, and coming out with his chaplains, singing _Verba Mea_, Lord Thurstan went into his own hall, and there assembled all the high and noble guests of the house, whether laics, or priests, or monks, and all the obedientiarii and cloistered brothers of the abbey, except the prior and the cellarer, who had gone to their several cells with faces yet paler than they were when they came forth from the chapter-house. In my Lord Abbat’s hall no business was discussed that appertained exclusively to the house or order: the deliberations all turned upon the general interests of the country, or upon the means of prolonging the struggle for national independence. Thurstan, after reminding the assembly that the Saxon heroes of the Camp of Refuge had foiled the Normans in two attempts they had made to penetrate into the Isle of Ely—the one in the summer of the present year, and the other in the summer of the preceding year, one thousand and sixty-nine—and that it was four good years since the battle of Hastings, which William the Norman had bruited on the continent as a victory which had given him possession of all England, frankly made it known to all present that he had certain intelligence that the Normans were making vast preparations at Cam-Bridge, at Bury, at Stamford, at Huntingdon, and even at Brunn, in order to invade the whole fenny country, and to press upon the Isle of Ely and the Camp of Refuge from many opposite quarters. My Lord Abbat further made it known that the duke had called to this service all his bravest and most expert captains, and a body of troops that had been trained to war in Brittanie and in other parts wherein there were fens and rivers and meres, and thick-growing forests of willow and alder, even as in the country of East Anglia. He also told them how Duke William had sworn by the splendour of God’s face that another year