'Valiant hero!' he said, 'hast thou no wrongs to complain of at the hands of the man who has conquered thy country, and robbed its princes and nobles of their birthrights? who has murdered or driven into exile the lawful heirs of its broad acres? Hast thou no revenge to take on him who harried thy patrimony, and made it a barren waste, where even the wild beasts starve? Art thou appeased because he gave thee back thy father's lands in such sorry plight?' Waltheof rose to his feet like a giant newly awakened, magnificent in his slowly aroused wrath, his sinewy chest expanded, the muscles in his splendid neck knotted like whipcord, and his blue eyes sparkling with anger, so that he looked as if he were verily that Thor, God of Battles, whom his Danish forefathers worshipped, come down to earth. He tossed his mantle back from his brawny arms, and his hands worked involuntarily, till the left sought the hilt of the jewelled hunting-knife in his baldric, and the right was extended towards the sky. His long golden moustache bristled till it stood almost straightly from either cheek, and he shook his yellow mane like a lion. 'By St. John of Beverley, no!' he cried. 'The blood of starved women and children cries for justice! The spirits of men whose flesh was eaten by their fellows, after every horse and dog and cat had been devoured, call for vengeance on the harrier of Northumberland! Slaves rattle their chains who through him sold their freedom for food! The sated crows and ravens alone croak his praises from full maws, for they grew fat on the unburied corses of those whose dwellings he had burned and whose homesteads he had laid waste! It would be a sin to hold myself under bond to the tyrant!' The Saxon thegns received this speech with wild acclaim. 'Ay,' cried one from Hampshire, 'and as in the north so in the south! Other kings have hunted wild beasts that their subjects might not be torn with them. This scourge of God maims and slaughters his subjects that the wild beasts may live for his hunting! May his New Forest prove a bane to him and his children!' 'Noble Waltheof,' cried Ralph, 'the time is come to avenge our wrongs. William is beyond the sea with the flower of his chivalry, and hard beset by rebellions and feuds in the bosom of his family, for such a tyrant is he that his own kinsfolk hate him! It is little likely that he will come back, but if he does, it will be at a disadvantage. Join us, thou whose stalwart arm struck one Norman head after another from its shoulders at the gates of York!--thou who firedst the wood wherein one hundred Normans sheltered, and slew them as they ventured forth like rats from a burning house! Join thy twelve men's strength to ours! We three earls might be again as Siward, Leofric, and Godwin. As if the Norman had not conquered, Godwin's son would have held the throne, so shall Siward's son be king when we in turn have laid the Norman low!'