WILLIAM, even after he had made a road three miles in length across the Cambridgeshire marshes, on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter, thought it necessary to engage an old lady, who pretended* to be a sorceress, to come and do a little enchantment in the royal cause. For this purpose she was pushed on before the troops in a wooden tower; but Hereward very soon disposed of this unfortunate sorceress, by burning her, tower and all.
The monks of the convent of Ely near at hand, however, who were fond of good living, and who found it very uncomfortable to have the country blockaded and their supplies of meat and drink cut off, showed the King a secret way of surprising the camp.* So Hereward was soon defeated, whether he afterwards died quietly, or whether he was killed after killing sixteen of the men who attacked him (as some old rhymes relate that he did), I cannot say. His defeat put an end to the Camp of Refuge; and, very soon afterwards, the King, victorious both in Scotland and in England, quelled the last rebellious English noble.
* Perhaps meant in the now rare sense of ‘claimed’, i.e. without any sense of deliberate deception.
* It was only some of the monks who betrayed Hereward; hitherto, the monks there and at Peterborough had actively helped them, only too aware that the new Norman abbots appointed by William behaved abominably to the English under their authority. At Malmesbury, Charlotte Yonge tells us, abbot Guerin de Lire “disinterred and threw away the bones of his Saxon predecessors, and took all the treasure in the coffers of the convent, in order that he might display his riches in the eyes of those who had seen him poor”. See also Forgotten Melodies.