“Well done, Ralph of Spalding,” said Hereward, who rushed into the house followed by the score of armed men. But those who had descended from above by the spiral staircase had left nothing to be done by those who ascended from below. The false prior and all his false fraternity had been seized, and had been bound with their own girdles, and had all been thrown in a corner, where they all lay sprawling the one on the top of the other, and screaming and begging for Misericorde. The brother of Wybert the wright had given a bloody coxcomb to the prior, and one of Hereward’s soldiers had slit the nose of a French monk that had aimed at him with a pike; but otherwise little blood had been shed, and no great harm done, save that all the stoups of wine and all the wine-cups had been upset in the scuffle. The brother of Wybert begged as a favour that he might be allowed to cut the throats of two of the false monks; but the Lord of Brunn, so fierce in battle, was aye merciful in the hour of victory, and never would allow the slaying of prisoners, and so he told the good man of Spalding town that the monks must not be slain; but that, before he had done with them, they should be made to pay the price of his brother’s blood; nay, three times the price that the Saxon laws put upon the life of a man of Wybert’s degree. “I would give up that bot for a little of their blood!” said Wybert’s brother. But, nevertheless, he was obliged to rest satisfied; for who should dare gainsay the young Lord of Brunn? Girolamo of Salerno, who understood nought of the debate between Hereward and the brother of Wybert, thought that the intrusive monks ought to be put into sacks and thrown into the river, inasmuch as that the Normans, when they conquered Salerno, threw a score of good monks of that town and vicinity into the sea; but when he delivered this thought unto the Lord Hereward, that bold-hearted and kind-hearted Saxon said that it was not the right way to correct cruelties by committing cruelties, and that it was not in the true English nature to be prone to revenge. All this while, and a little longer, the false alien monks, with their hands tied behind them, lay sprawling and crying Misericorde: howbeit, when they saw and understood that death was not intended, they plucked up their courage and began to complain and reprove. “This is a foul deed,” said one of them, “a very foul deed, to disturb and break in upon, and smite with the edge of the sword, the servants of the Lord.” “Not half so foul a deed,” quoth Hereward, “as that done by Ivo Taille-Bois, the cousin of ye all, and the man who put ye here, and thrust out the Saxon brotherhood at the dead of night, slaying their cook. Ye may or may not have been servants of the Lord in the countries from which ye came, but here are ye nought but intruders and usurpers, and the devourers of better men’s goods.”