The strangest part of the story has yet to be told. An old oak was pointed out as the tree of the martyrdom until very recent years. Sceptics, of course, doubted the fact; but when the tree was blown down in a violent storm, a Danish arrowhead was found embedded in the very centre of the trunk, grown over, and concealed for nearly a thousand years--the silent witness to the agonies of a martyr. The martyrdom took place A.D. 870, the year before Alfred ascended the throne. In the churches of Norfolk and Suffolk the picture of St. Edmund, pierced with arrows, is often seen on old rood screens. xiv Norman Torture Chamber. We read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the barons in Stephen's days. "They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at their castles, and when the castles were finished they filled them with devils and evil men. Then they took those whom they suspected to have any goods, by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable. They hung some up by their feet, and smoked them with foul smoke; some by their thumbs, or by the head, and they hung burning things on their feet. They put a knotted string about their heads, and twisted it till it went into their brain. They put them into dungeons, wherein were adders and snakes and toads, and thus wore them out. Some they put into a crucet house--that is, into a chest that was short and narrow, and not deep, and they put sharp stones in it, and crushed the man therein so that they broke all his limbs. There were hateful and grim things called Sachenteges in many of the castles, and which two or three men had enough to do to carry. The sachentege was made thus: it was fastened to a beam having a sharp iron to go round a man's throat and neck, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but must bear all the iron. Many thousands they exhausted with hunger. I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and all the tortures they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land." This awful description of the cruelty of the Norman barons under the grandson of the Conqueror may partially apply to the barons of an earlier period, such as Hugo de Malville. xv Destruction of Norman Forces by Fire. We read that at the instigation of Ivo Taille-Bois (see Note), William had the weakness to employ a sorceress to curse the English in the Camp of Refuge, and by her spells to defeat those of the supposed English magicians. She was placed in a wooden turret at the head of the road, which the Conqueror was labouring to make across the fens, to get at the refugees; but Hereward, watching his opportunity, set fire to the flags and reeds; the wind rapidly spread the conflagration; and the witch, her guards, the turret, and the workmen, all alike perished in the flames, even as in our story, Hugo de Malville in the Dismal Swamp. xvi State of England in 1069.