Such were our refugees in the Dismal Swamp.

xi See “Alfgar the Dane.”

xii “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink:  for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.”

xiii Martyrdom of St. Edmund, King of East Anglia.

This saintly king fought against the Danes, under Hinguar and Hubba, in defence of his country.  Being defeated, he was taken prisoner by the enemy, who offered him his life, and restoration to his kingdom, if he would renounce Christianity, and become tributary.  Upon his refusal he was tied naked to a tree, cruelly scourged, and then shot slowly to death with arrows, calling upon the name of Christ throughout his protracted martyrdom, Who doubtless did not fail His servant in his hour of extreme need.

The strangest part of the story has yet to be told.  An old oak was pointed out as the tree of the martyrdom until very recent years.  Sceptics, of course, doubted the fact; but when the tree was blown down in a violent storm, a Danish arrowhead was found embedded in the very centre of the trunk, grown over, and concealed for nearly a thousand years—­the silent witness to the agonies of a martyr.  The martyrdom took place A.D. 870, the year before Alfred ascended the throne.  In the churches of Norfolk and Suffolk the picture of St. Edmund, pierced with arrows, is often seen on old rood screens.

xiv Norman Torture Chamber.

We read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the barons in Stephen’s days.

“They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at their castles, and when the castles were finished they filled them with devils and evil men.  Then they took those whom they suspected to have any goods, by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable.  They hung some up by their feet, and smoked them with foul smoke; some by their thumbs, or by the head, and they hung burning things on their feet.  They put a knotted string about their heads, and twisted it till it went into their brain.  They put them into dungeons, wherein were adders and snakes and toads, and thus wore them out.  Some they put into a crucet house—­that is, into a chest that was short and narrow, and not deep, and they put sharp stones in it, and crushed the man therein so that they broke all his limbs.  There were hateful and grim things called Sachenteges in many of the castles, and which two or three men had enough to do to carry.  The sachentege was made thus:  it was fastened to a beam having a sharp iron to go round a man’s throat and neck, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but must bear all the iron.  Many thousands they exhausted with hunger.  I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and all the tortures they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land.”

This awful description of the cruelty of the Norman barons under the grandson of the Conqueror may partially apply to the barons of an earlier period, such as Hugo de Malville.