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At last, just as the English were being beaten slowly back, Havelok and Godrich came face to face with each other. Bitterly the earl then rued the day when he had married Goldborough to the strongest man in the world, scullion though he were!
The cook liked Havelok so much that he bought him new clothes, with shoes and hose; and when Havelok put them on, no man in the kingdom seemed his peer for strength and beauty. He was the tallest man in Lincoln, and the strongest in England. Earl Godrich assembled a Parliament in Lincoln, and afterward held games. Strong men and youths came to try for mastery at the game of putting the stone.
I have neither bread nor sauce, and no clothes but one old coat. These clothes even that I wear are the cook's, and I am his knave." At that Godrich shook with wrath. Up he sprang and began to beat Havelok without mercy. "And said, 'Unless thou her take, That I well ween thee to make, I shall hangen thee full high Or I shall thrusten out thine eye."
So thought Godrich; but far back in his heart he knew that once Goldborough was wedded to a scullion there would be small chance of her becoming queen. Next morning a knight mounted on a big bay horse, and attended by two men-at-arms, might have been seen riding southwards through the fair county of Lincoln, and in twenty days' time he returned, bringing with him the princess.
But when Earl Godrich understood that Havelok and his wife were come to England, he gathered together a great army at Lincoln on the 17th of March, and came to Grimsby to fight with Havelok and his knights. It was a great battle, wherein more than a thousand knights were slain. The field was covered with pools of blood.
Godrich greeted her with tokens of great joy, and told her that, as her father had bidden him, he had found at last the fairest and strongest man in the world, and he should be her husband. Goldborough listened quietly to his words, and when he had ended she looked at him. 'Let him be as strong and fair as he may, she said, 'but if he is not a king or a king's son he is no husband for me.
At this Godrich waxed wrath, and his whole body trembled with anger. 'Your father bade me swear to him when he was dying that you should marry the strongest man in the world, and none other, cried he, 'and, by the Rood, it is he you seek to disobey, and not me. The man who is to be your husband is the servant of my cook, and to-morrow we will have the wedding.
'That he be laid on an ass and burned at the stake, cried they. And this was done also. After this, Havelok gave his two foster-sisters in marriage to great lords, and made the cook to whom he had owed his good fortune earl of Cornwall in place of the wicked Godrich.
All night the princess had wept and pondered how to escape so dreadful a doom, but at last she took comfort in the thought that in accepting this husband, however lowly born he might be, she would be fulfilling her father's wishes. So as soon as Godrich gave her a chance to speak she said she would resist him no longer.
Then the King sent for a fair linen cloth, and thereon having laid the mass-book and the chalice and the paton, he made Earl Godrich swear upon the holy bread and wine to be a true and faithful guardian of his child, without blame or reproach, tenderly to entreat her, and justly to govern the realm till she should be twenty winters old; then to seek out the best, the bravest, and the strongest man as husband for her and deliver up the kingdom to her hand.
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