That night a hapless churchwarden, Ywar was his name, might have been seen galloping through Milton and Castor Hanglands, and on by Barnack quarries over Southorpe heath, with saddlebags of huge size stuffed with “gospels, mass-robes, cassocks, and other garments, and such other small things as he could carry away.” And he came before day to Stamford, where Abbot Thorold lay at his ease in his inn with his _hommes d’armes_ asleep in the hall.
And the churchwarden knocked them up, and drew Abbot Thorold’s curtains with a face such as his who
“drew Priam’s curtains in the dead of night, And would have told him, half his Troy was burned”;
and told Abbot Thorold that the monks of Peterborough had sent him; and that unless he saddled and rode his best that night, with his meinie of men-at-arms, his Golden Borough would be even as Troy town by morning light.
“A moi, hommes d’armes!” shouted Thorold, as he used to shout whenever he wanted to scourge his wretched English monks at Malmesbury into some French fashion.
The men leaped up, and poured in, growling.
“Take me this monk, and kick him into the street for waking me with such news.”
“But, gracious lord, the outlaws will surely burn Peterborough; and folks said that you were a mighty man of war.”
“So I am; but if I were Roland, Oliver, and Turpin rolled into one, how am I to fight Hereward and the Danes with forty men-at-arms? Answer me that, thou dunder-headed English porker. Kick him out.”
And Ywar was kicked into the cold, while Thorold raged up and down his chamber in mantle and slippers, wringing his hands over the treasure of the Golden Borough, snatched from his fingers just as he was closing them upon it.
That night the monks of Peterborough prayed in the minster till the long hours passed into the short. The poor corrodiers, and other servants of the monastery, fled from the town outside into the Milton woods. The monks prayed on inside till an hour after matin. When the first flush of the summer’s dawn began to show in the northeastern sky, they heard mingling with their own chant another chant, which Peterborough had not heard since it was Medehampstead, three hundred years ago,--the terrible Yuch-hey-saa-saa-saa,--the war-song of the Vikings of the north.