The Conquest and its Aftermath

Page 11 of 16

• 1. Collaboration
• 2. Odo and the Bayeux Tapestry
• 3. Orderic Vitalis
• 4. Robert D'Oilly
• 5. Land seizure
• 6. The Sheriff of Cambridge
• 7. The Rebellion of 1069
• 8. Retribution
• 9. Consolidation in the north
• 10. Treachery of the Earls
• 11. Hereward and the Isle of Ely
• 12. The taking of Ely
• 13. English exiles: the Varangian story
• 14. Domesday Book
• 15. Defending the Conquest
• 16. Find out more
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Hereward and the Isle of Ely

Waltheof was the last of the English Earls. In the wake of 1069, Earls Edwin and Morcar had gone on the run. Edwin was murdered by his own men, but Morcar, accompanied by Bishop Aethelwine of Durham took refuge with Hereward the Wake on the Isle of Ely in 1071. Hereward is one of the better known figures to come out of the Norman Conquest, because a chronicle of his life survives in a collection of documents preserved by the Abbey of Ely . The son of a King's Thegn called Leofric, he was exiled at the request of his father by Edward the Confessor. He travelled around Europe for a time, but returned to England after the Conquest, probably in 1069. There, he was horrified to find his father and his brother murdered, and his lands stolen. We shall let the Gesta Herewardi take up the story:

Certain men seized his inheritance with the consent of the king and took it for themselves, destroying the son and heir of our lord, while he was protecting his widowed mother from them as they were demanding from her his father's riches and treasures- and because he slew two of those who had dishonourably abused her. By way of revenge... they cut off his head and set it up over the gate of the house, where it still is.

Outraged at the murder of his younger brother and the abuse inflicted on his mother, Hereward entered the manor in disguise, where its new lord and his men were celebrating their good fortune, and slew all fourteen of them single-handed. He then fled into the fens, where he was harboured by Abbot Thurstan of Ely, who was afraid that William was about to replace him with a Norman prelate.

'...sailed off with the loot and weren't heard from again'

Hereward and his family seem to have been the traditional protectors of the religious houses in the area. So in 1069, following the death of Abbot Brand of Peterborough, he led a band of the abbey's men into Peterborough Cathedral to rescue the abbey treasures before they could fall into the clutches of the new Norman abbot, Turold, on his way to take over the see with 50 men. Needless to say, the Norman sources see this as an act of outlawry, and they are helped in their case by the fact that Hereward seems to have used the treasure to try and buy Danish support - who promptly sailed off with the loot and weren't heard from again.

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Published: 2001-05-01