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Updated: June 9, 2025
Then Heregar woke, and saw the maiden, and rose up at her side. "Dear lady," he asked, "what is this?" "Ranald thought me a Valkyria, friend; and I come on a Valkyria's errand." "I had a strange dream but now," Heregar said, as if it dwelt in his mind, so that he hardly heeded what Etheldreda answered him.
There being no hope of recovering the fourth, Bishop Ethelwold and the abbot resolved to find a substitute in the body of S. Withburga, the youngest sister of S. Etheldreda. Her youth had been spent at Holkham, in Norfolk, where the church is now said to be dedicated to her, and afterwards founded a nunnery at Dereham, in the same county, where she died and was buried.
So I comforted her, and bade her ask more of Etheldreda, who would gladly teach her; and the matter passed by in gladness, as a trouble put away, for she and I were at one in this. I will say that I had half feared that she whom I loved would have been angry with me.
After remaining about a year at Coldingham, the queen found it necessary to move away. The king began to regret the permission he had given her, and, following the advice of some of his courtiers, made his way to the religious house where Etheldreda was settled, with the intention of forcibly compelling her return to his Court.
The monastery would be ruined! Without this manor, without that wood, without that stone quarry, that fishery, what would become of them? But mingled with those words were other words, unfortunately more intelligible to this day, those of superstition. What would St. Etheldreda say? How dare they provoke her wrath? Would she submit to lose her lands? She might do, what might she not do?
The names of these monasteries are, Crowland, Thorney, Ramsey, Hamstede, now called Burgh S. Peter, with the Isle of Ely, and that once very famous house of nuns, wherein the holy Virgin and Queen Etheldreda laudably discharged the office of abbess for many years."
As I prayed I looked out over the fen; and St. Etheldreda put a thought into my heart. But it is so terrible a one, that I fear to tell it to you. And yet it seems our only chance." Hereward threw himself at her feet, and prayed her to tell. At last she spoke, as one half afraid of her own words, "Will the reeds burn, Hereward?"
Etheldreda had inspired her, at the terrible resource which she had hinted to her husband, and which she knew well he would carry out with terrible success. Pictures of agony and death floated before her eyes, and kept her awake at night.
She watched long hours in the church in prayer; she fasted; she disciplined her tender body with sharp pains; she tried, after the fashion of those times, to atone for her sin, if sin it was. At last she had worked herself up into a religious frenzy. She saw St. Etheldreda in the clouds, towering over the isle, menacing the French host with her virgin palm-branch.
Etheldreda the holy virgin, beneath whose roof they stood, to defend against Frenchmen the saints of England whom they despised and blasphemed, whose servants they cast out, thrust into prison, and murdered, that they might bring in Frenchmen from Normandy, Italians from the Pope of Rome.
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