In no time had there been at the house of Ely so great and glorious a festival of the Nativity as that holden in the year of Grace one thousand and seventy, the day after the return of the Saxon commander Hereward, Lord of Brunn. Learned brothers of the house have written upon it, and even to this day the monks of Ely talk about it. On the day next after the feast, several hours before sunrise, the mariners in the unloaded bark were getting all ready to drop down the Ouse to the good town of Lynn, and Lord Hereward was communing with the Abbat Thurstan, the Abbat of Crowland, and the Prior of Spalding, in my Lord Abbat’s bedchamber. The rest of the prelates and lay lords were sleeping soundly in their several apartments, having taken their leave of Hereward in a full carouse the night before. Many things had been settled touching correspondence or communication, and a general co-operation and union of all the Saxons in the Camp of Refuge and all that dwelt in the fen country, whether in the isle of Ely, or in the isle of Thorney, or in Lindsey, or in Holland, or in other parts. Fresh assurances were given that the chiefs and fighting men would all acknowledge Hereward as their supreme commander, undertaking nothing but at his bidding, and looking to none but him for their orders and instructions. Abbat Thurstan agreed to keep the score of men that had been brought up to Ely in the bark, but he demurred about receiving and entertaining, as the commander of these men, the dark stranger with the hooked nose and sharp eye. Hereward said that the stranger was a man remarkably skilled in the science of war, and in the art of defending places. Thurstan asked whether he were sure that he was not a spy of the Normans, or one that would sell himself to the Normans for gold? Then the Lord of Brunn told what he knew, or that which he had been told, concerning the dark stranger. He was from Italie, from a region not very far removed from Rome and the patrimony of Saint Peter; from the name of his town he was hight[118] Girolamo of Salerno. His country has been all invaded, and devastated, and conquered by Norman tribes, from the same evil hive which had sent these depredators into merry England to make it a land of woe. Robert Guiscard, one of twelve brothers that were all conquerors and spoilers, had driven Girolamo from his home and had seized upon his houses and lands, and had abused the tombs of his ancestors, even as the followers of William the Bastard were now doing foul things with the graves of our forefathers. After enduring wounds, and bonds, and chains, Girolamo of Salerno had fled from his native land for ever, leaving all that was his in the hands of the Normans, and had gone over into Sicilie to seek a new home and settlement among strangers. But the Normans, who thought they had never robbed enough so long as there were more countries before them which they could rob and conquer, crossed the sea into Sicilie[119]