FEW PEOPLE TODAY have heard of Eadgar ?theling, Wild Eadric and the other leaders who instigated the series of rebellions during the years immediately following the Normans’ arrival in England. One name that continues to resonate, however, is that of the outlaw Hereward, later known by the epithet ‘the Wake’, whose stand in the Fens against the invaders has become the stuff of legend.
Much mystery surrounds Hereward, who first appears in the historical record in late 1070, when his sack of the monastery at Peterborough is mentioned in the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for that year. Of his life and deeds, there is little that is reliably known. The Chronicle’s only other reference to him is in the following year, when it records his courageous escape from Ely, together with ‘all who could flee away with him’, even as the rebellion around him was crumbling. As David Roffe suggests in his entry on Hereward in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004), the brevity of this mention might imply that, at the time this passage was composed, the tale of Hereward and his exploits was so well known that no further explanation was needed.
Due to the lack of information given in contemporary accounts about Hereward and the Ely rising, we are largely reliant on later, twelfth-century sources, including the Liber Eliensis (Book of Ely), the Gesta Herewardi (Deeds of Hereward), and Geoffrey Gaimar’s L’estoire des Engleis (The History of the English People). All three appear to have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent by a now-lost chanson cycle about the life of Hereward. Their versions of events incorporate a significant dose of romance, and draw heavily on contemporary heroic tropes and literary devices, and, furthermore, contradict each other on several crucial aspects, all of which means it is difficult to reconstruct a coherent narrative of Hereward’s life and the siege of Ely. In writing Knights of the Hawk, I have been selective in my use of these sources, borrowing certain elements while at the same time choosing to reject others.
What seems likely is that Hereward was not in overall command of the rebellion, or at least if he was, only for a short while. While his role in Ely’s defence was obviously significant enough that his name was remembered in legend, he was certainly not the highest-ranking individual present, and it seems more likely that if the rebels looked to anyone for leadership, it would have been Earl Morcar. However, given that we do not know whether the rebels all shared the same cause, or were ever anything more than a loose coalition, it might be that no single person was in charge.
Regarding the events of the siege and the reasons for the rebellion’s eventual downfall, the sources disagree. It is possibly significant that the historian Orderic Vitalis, also writing in the early twelfth century but whose account of these early years of the Norman Conquest is generally considered reliable, does not mention Hereward at all in his short summation of the siege of Ely. Instead he records only that ‘crafty messengers’ proposed ‘treacherous terms’ to Morcar, in order to deceive him with false promises into surrendering to the king. Around the mention of these anonymous messengers, I have woven the fictional tale of Tancred’s capture of Godric, and his use as a go-between and hostage in the exchanges of information between King William (Guillaume) and Earl Morcar.