The folklore of primitive races is a great
storehouse whence a people can choose tales and heroic deeds to
glorify its own national hero, careless that the same tales and
deeds have done duty for other peoples and other heroes. Hence it
happens that Hereward the Saxon, a patriot hero as real and actual
as Nelson or George Washington, whose deeds were recorded in prose
and verse within forty years of his death, was even then
surrounded by a cloud of romance and mystery, which hid in
vagueness his family, his marriage, and even his death.
Briefly it may be stated that Hereward was a native of
Lincolnshire, and was in his prime about 1070. In that year he
joined a party of Danes who appeared in England, attacked
Peterborough and sacked the abbey there, and afterward took refuge
in the Isle of Ely. Here he was besieged by William the Conqueror,
and was finally forced to yield to the Norman. He thus came to
stand for the defeated Saxon race, and his name has been passed
down as that of the darling hero of the Saxons. For his splendid
defence of Ely they forgave his final surrender to Duke William;
they attributed to him all the virtues supposed to be inherent in
the free-born, and all the glorious valor on which the English
prided themselves; and, lastly, they surrounded his death with a
halo of desperate fighting, and made his last conflict as
wonderful as that of Roland at Roncesvalles.
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