And Judith came to Bourne, and besought Alftruda to accompany her to Crowland, where she would visit the tomb of Waltheof, her husband.  And Alftruda went with her, taking a goodly company of knights to be her escort, while Hereward remained at Bourne with few to guard it.

And knowing this, to Bourne came Ascelin and Taillebois, Evermue, Raoul de Dol, and many another Norman, and burst in upon Hereward in some such fashion as he had done himself some ten years earlier.  “Felons,” he shouted, “your king has given me his truce!  Is this your French law?  Is this your French honour?  Come on, traitors all, and get what you can of a naked man; you will buy it dear.  Guard my back, Winter!”

And with his constant comrade at his back, he dashed right at the press of knights: 

    And when his lance did break in hand
    Full fell enough he smote with brand.

And now he is all wounded, and Winter, who fought at his back, is fallen on his face, and Hereward stands alone within a ring of eleven corpses.  A knight rushes in, to make a twelfth, cloven through the helm; but with the blow Hereward’s blade snaps short, and he hurls it away as his foes rush in.  With his shield he beat out the brains of two, but now Taillebois and Evermue are behind him, and with four lances through his back he falls, to rise no more.

So perished the last of the English.

* * * * *

Hypatia

In “Hypatia,” published in 1853, after passing through “Fraser’s Magazine,” Kingsley turned from social problems in England to life in Egypt in the fifth century, taking the same pains to give the historical facts of the old dying Roman world as he did to describe contemporary events at home.  The moral of “Hypatia,” according to its author, is that “the sins of these old Egyptians are yours, their errors yours, their doom yours, their deliverance yours.  There is nothing new under the sun.”

I.—­The Laura

In the 413th year of the Christian era, some 300 miles from Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.  Behind him the desert sand waste stretched, lifeless, interminable, reflecting its lurid blare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of blue.  Presently he rose and wandered along the cliffs in search of fuel for the monastery from whence he came, for Abbot Pambo’s laura at Scetis.

It lay pleasantly enough, that lonely laura, or lane of rude Cyclopean cells, under the perpetual shadow of the southern walls of crags, amid its grove of ancient date-trees.  And a simple, happy, gentle life was that of the laura, all portioned out by rules and methods.  Each man had food and raiment, shelter on earth, friends and counsellors, living trust in the continual care of Almighty God.  Thither had they fled out of cities, out of a rotten, dying world of tyrants and slaves, hypocrites and wantons, to ponder undisturbed on duty and on judgment, on death and eternity.