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"Yea, verily," insisted the groom; "but it is somewhat to thee," and he knocked the tools together in his hands at a great rate. "I did come by the Isle of Axholme. And the other king's man did accuse me of drunkenness and revellings when I did begin to have speech with him of the matter, but he did change his mind, and give me a coin.
For he was but small and fierce and hath met sorrow, or his horse had not come back riderless." Richard Wood smiled contemptuously at this reference to Walter Skinner. Then he said: "Thou didst come by the Isle of Axholme. What sawest thou there?" "Why, thou canst talk like an advocate," said the foolish groom, who had never seen an advocate in his life.
And thou, Richard Wood, who didst say, 'We hunt no more in company, what wouldst thou give to know of this place in the Isle of Axholme? And thou mayst have thy men-at-arms to bear thee company, and to pay for when thou art done with them. They cost thee more than a bow and some arrows cost me, nor will they do thee one half the good."
I wish you good night, ma'am! Good night, sirs!" In a corner of the Isle of Axholme, in Lincolnshire, and on the eastern slope of a knoll a few feet above the desolate fenland, six sisters were seated. The eldest, a woman of thirty-three, held a book open in her lap and was reading aloud from it; reading with admirable expression and a voice almost masculine, rich as a deep-mouthed bell.
And I have been planted in a miry pool. And I have lost my horse and my way also; and have floundered into more bogs and out of them than can be found in all Robert Sadler's Ireland. Were I king, I would have no Isle of Axholme in all my dominions. Could I do no better, I would pull down the hill of Lincoln and cart it hither to fill these vile water-holes. Do but see my doublet and hose.
How they sent for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St.
The Danes added holm the Danish word for island to the Saxon name, and modern English influences have corrupted Axeyholme into Axelholme, and contracted it into Axholme, and have finally prefixed the English word Isle." The North Girvii and the South Girvii were two peoples that formed districts of the East Anglian kingdom.
I have been so shaken up this morn over thy rough roads and by thy vile beast of a horse that thou and thy master shall pay for it. What! is the servant of the king to be sent into the Isle of Axholme by an idiot groom at the Green Dragon? And, being there, is he to be planted in the mire like a rush by a Saxon serving-man?
We have met with difficulties, and what were they but the king's men? They be now behind us, and success is to be ours. But come thou to breakfast now. To-morrow morn we set forth again." On this, their last day in the Isle of Axholme, Hugo and Humphrey took up the occupation of the day before, but with more deliberation. And they went in a different direction, southeast, toward the Trent.
These rivers carried down a great deal of mud with them to the Humber, and the tides of the Humber washed up a great deal of sea-sand into the mouths of the rivers; so that the waters could not for some time flow freely, and were at last prevented from flowing away at all: they sank into the ground, and made a swamp of it a swamp of many miles round the hilly part of the Isle of Axholme.
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