Harvest-work and farm-work in general in the Fens is in some ways peculiar to this part of the country, for farm-holdings are large and farmsteads far between. The practice, under these conditions, arose of the work being done by gangs; the hands assembling at break of day in the farmyard and being despatched in parties to their distant day's work in hoeing, weeding, or picking in the flat and almost boundless fields; returning only when the day's labour is ended. Men, women, and children gathered thus in the raw morning make a picture--and in some ways a pitiful picture--of farming and rustic life, worthy of a Millet. But our Millet has not yet come; and the gangs grow fewer. If he does not hasten, they will be quite gone, and something characteristic in Fenland-life quite lost. A Fenland farm-lass may wear petticoats, or she may not. Sometimes she acts as carter, and it is precisely in such cases that she sheds her feminine skirts and dons the odd costume that astonishes the inquisitive stranger new to these parts, who sees, with doubt as to whether he sees aright, a creature with the boots and trousers of a man, a nondescript garment, half bodice and half coat with skirts, considerably above the knees, and a sun-bonnet on her head, working in the rick-yards, or squashing heavily through the farmyard muck. Skirts are out of place in farmyards and in cattle-byres, and the milkmaid, too, of these parts is dressed in like guise. If you were to show a milkmaid in the Fens a picture illustrating "Where are you going to, my pretty maid?" in the conventional fashion, she would criticise very severely, as quite incorrect, the skirted figure of a poet's dream usually presented. She saves her skirts and her flower-trimmed hat for Sundays.
AND now we must come from the general to the especial; from Fens and Fen-folk in the mass to a bright particular star.
The greatest historical figure along the whole course of this road is that of Hereward the Wake, the "last of the English," as he has been called. "Hereward," it has been said, means "the guard of the army," while "the Wake" is almost self-explanatory, signifying literally the Wide Awake, or the Watchful. He is thought to have been the eldest son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and of the famous Godiva, and to have been banished by his father and outlawed. Like objects dimly glimpsed in a fog, the figure of Hereward looms gigantic and uncertain through the mists of history, and how much of him is real and how much legendary no one can say. When Hereward was born, in the mild reign of Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxons who six hundred and fifty years before had conquered Britain, and, driving a poor remnant of the enervated race of Romanised Britons to the uttermost verge of the island, changed the very name of the country from Britain to England, had themselves degenerated. The Saxons were originally among the fiercest of savages, and derived their name from the "sæxe," or short sword, with which they came to close and murderous combat; but the growth of civilisation and the security in which they had long dwelt in the conquered island undermined their original combativeness, and for long before the invasion of England by William the Conqueror they had been hard put to it to hold their own against the even more savage Danes. Yet at the last, at Hastings under Harold, they made a gallant stand against the Normans, and if courage alone could have won the day, why then no Norman dynasty had ever occupied the English throne. The Battle of Hastings was only won by superior military dispositions on the part of William. His archers gained him the victory, and by their disconcerting arrow-flights broke the advance of the Saxons armed with sword and battle-axe.
