Ivo Taille-Bois, whom some did call the devil of the fens, was not in the manor-house of the Ladie Lucia, near unto Spalding, when Hereward first came to claim his own, and to turn out his false monks. Being weary with living among bogs and marshes, and having occasion to consult with the Norman vicomte who held command at Stamford, Ivo had gone to that town, some few days before the feast of the Nativity, and had carried with him his Saxon wife and her infant child, leaving none in the moated and battlemented house save a few servants, and some ten or twelve armed Normans. The house was strong and difficult of access; but if it had not been for the respect due to the Lady Lucia, the kinswoman of his own Ladie Alftrude, Hereward, on his gaining possession of Spalding, would have made a rough attempt upon it: and such was the temper of the Saxons within the house, that doubtlessly they would have played into his hands. For several days the Normans remained wholly ignorant of the great things which had been done in the succursal cell, at Brunn and at Crowland, for they could not venture outside the walls of the manor-house, and even if there had been no danger in their so doing, the inundated state of the country, and the cold wintry weather, offered few temptations to rambling. At length the passing of many skerries across the fens, and the frequent passage of larger boats, crowded with people, on the broad and not distant Welland, and the triumphant shouts that were occasionally heard from the banks of the river, caused the men-at-arms to suspect that some insurrection was a-foot. They thanked their stars that the moat was so broad, the house so strong, and the store-house so well stored, and they went on sleeping like dormice, or like squirrels, in the topmost hollow of an oak, whose root is deep under the wintry waters. They could not trust any Saxon messenger to Stamford; and therefore it was not from his garrison in the manor-house, but directly from Alain of Beauvais and others of that unholy crew, that the fierce Ivo learned all that had happened upon or round about his wife’s domains. Some of the herd were seized with fever and delirium—the effects of fear and fatigue and wet clothes—and they did not recover their senses for many a week; but Alain and such of them as could talk and reason, related all the horrible circumstances of their expulsion and flight, of the onset of the devils of Crowland, and of the close and self-evident league existing between Beelzebub and the Saxons. All this was horrible to hear; but Alain of Beauvais pronounced a name which was more horrible or odious to Ivo Taille-Bois than that of Lucifer himself:—this was the name of Hereward the Saxon—of Hereward the Lord of Brunn, which the men of Crowland town had shouted in their ears as the Norman monks were flying along the causeway. Partly through the tattle of some serving-women, and more through the confidence of his