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Do you not know that they have been driven out of York, after defending the city street by street, house by house? Do you not know that there is not an old man or a child in arms left in York; and that your nephews, and the few fighting men who were left, went down the Humber in boats, and north to Scotland, to Gospatrick and Waltheof?
"The anointed of Gospatrick and two or three boys!" said Hereward. "Knights! Turn your horses' heads. Right about face, all! We are going back to the Bruneswold, to live and die free Danes." And to Waltheof's astonishment, who had never before seen discipline, the knights wheeled round; the men-at-arms followed them; and Waltheof and the Atheling were left to themselves on Lincoln Heath.
Gospatrick and the earls retreated to Durham; the Atheling, more cautious, to Scotland. Then came a strange story, worthy of the grown children who, in those old times, bore the hearts of boys with the ferocity and intellect of men. A great fog fell on the Frenchmen as they struggled over the Durham moors. The doomed city was close beneath them; they heard Wear roaring in his wooded gorge.
But old Gospatrick came down to Westminster, to demand law for his grandnephew's blood." "A silly thing of the old Thane, to walk into the wolf's den." "And so he found. He was stabbed there, three days after Christmas-tide, and men say that Queen Edith did it, for love of Tosti, her brother.
Gospatrick got back his ancestral earldom from Tees to Tyne; and paid down for it much hard money and treasure; bought it, in fact, he said. Waltheof got back his earldom, and much of Morcar's. From the fens to the Tees was to be his province.
The old walls the Roman walls on which had floated the flag of Constantine the Great were surely strong enough to keep out men without battering-rams, balistas, or artillery of any kind. What mattered Osbiorn's two hundred and forty ships, and their crews of some ten or fifteen thousand men? What mattered the tens of thousands of Northern men, with Gospatrick at their head?
Know you that Gospatrick has been driven from his earldom on charge of treason, and that Waltheof has Northumbria in his place, as well as the parts round you? And that Gospatrick is fled to Scotland again, with his sons, my man among them? And now the report comes, that my man is slain in battle on the Border; and that I am to be given away, as I have been given away twice before, to Ascelin.
"Let him purge himself of the murder of Ulf, the boy, son of my friend Dolfin; and after that, of Gamel, son of Orm; and after that, again, of Gospatrick, my father's friend, whom his sister slew for his sake; and then an honest man may talk with him.
Would he not forget Alftruda, and King William, and all the world, and go up with her into Sherwood, and then north to Scotland and Gospatrick, and be a man once more? No. He would go with her to the Baltic or the Mediterranean. Constantinople and the Varangers would be the place and the men. Ay, there to escape out of that charmed ring into a new life! No.
It is a pity that there is no lady of the house of Godwin, whom we could honor by offering her to one of your nephews, in return for their nobleness in giving Aldytha to my Harold. But this foolish girl here refuses to wed " "And is past forty," thought Hereward to himself. "However, some plan to join the families more closely together might be thought of. "And Gospatrick?"
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