Hereward the Wake (c. 1035 – 1072), known in his own times Hereward the Outlaw as or Hereward the Exile, was an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon leader involved in resistance to the Norman conquest of England. According to legend, Hereward's base was in the Isle of Ely, and he roamed The Fens, covering North Cambridgeshire, Southern Lincolnshire and West Norfolk, leading popular opposition to William the Conqueror. The name Hereward is composed of Old English roots here = army, and weard = guard[1], and is cognate with Old High German Heriwart and modern German Heerwart. The title "the Wake" (meaning "watcher") was popularly assigned to him many years after his death.
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There is a wide variety of secondary sources of information but the complexity of his story, as it has come down to us has led to flights of fancy on the one hand and deep scepticism on the other. One of the difficulties is that most of the people who know the story have learned it from fictionalized versions; usually that of Charles Kingsley.[2] Another is the fact that the early writers were living in a culture which was in many respects, very different from ours. In some instances, by applying modern rules of living to things described more than nine hundred years ago, modern writers baffle themselves. For example, in the part of England in which Hereward originated, the old Danish Law then applicable permitted bigamy.
Primary sources exist but are either brief or a little enigmatic. They are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (ASC), the Domesday Book (DB), the rather less brief Liber Eliensis (Book of Ely), and much the most detailed, the Gesta Herwardi (Gesta). To a small extent, they are sometimes mutually contradictory.[3] This probably arises principally from partisan bias in the early writers. For example, the ASC version was written some fifty years after the events described, in a monastery which he was said to have sacked and well after his enemies had taken control.[4] On the other hand, the original version of the Gesta was written explicitly as a eulogy,[5] by a former colleague in arms and member of his father's former household.[6] Nonetheless, the enigmatic aspect arises largely from two things: firstly, the old ways of thinking combined with the inflexibility of modern minds and secondly, the eulogistic nature of the work: it was not intended as a history.
These primary sources have each been published more than once, with one form or another of commentary. The form in which they are generally available is therefore a secondary source. This has to be taken with care especially where they are published as a translation of the original Latin or Old English into modern language, without a transcription of the original. The further one gets from the original texts, the greater is the chance of mistakes and misunderstandings.
Hereward's birth is conventionally dated as 1035/6 because the Gesta Herwardi indicates that he was first exiled in 1054 in his 18th year. However, since the account in the Gesta of the early part of his exile (in Scotland, Cornwall and Ireland) appears to some to be largely fictitious, it is hard to know if we can trust this.[7] Peter Rex, in his 2005 biography of Hereward, points out that the campaigns he is reported to have fought in the neighbourhood of Flanders seem to have begun around 1063, and suggests that Hereward in fact went to Flanders - meaning that, if he was 18 at the time of his exile, he was born in 1044/5.[8] But this would be based on the assumption that the early part of the story is largely fictitious.
Partly because of the sketchiness of evidence for his existence, his life has become a magnet for speculators and amateur scholars. The earliest references to his parentage make him the son of Edith and Leofric of Bourne. Alternatively, it has also been argued that Leofric, Earl of Mercia and his wife Lady Godiva were Hereward's real parents. There is no evidence for this - and Abbot Brand of Peterborough, stated to have been Hereward's uncle, does not appear to have been related to either Leofric or Godiva. Some modern research suggests him to have been Anglo-Danish with a Danish father, Asketil: since Brand is also a Danish name it makes sense that the Abbot may have been Asketil's brother.[9]
His place of birth is supposed to be in or near Bourne in Lincolnshire. It is claimed that he was a tenant of Peterborough Abbey, from there he held lands in the parishes of Witham on the Hill and Barholm with Stow in the south-western corner of Lincolnshire, and of Croyland Abbey at Crowland, eight miles east of Market Deeping in the neighbouring fenland. In those times it used to be a boggy and marshy area. Since the holdings of abbeys could be widely dispersed across parishes, the precise location of his personal holdings are uncertain, but were certainly somewhere in south Lincolnshire.
It is thought that he had already rebelled against Edward the Confessor before 1066, whom he saw as already aligning England with the Normans, and that he was declared an outlaw as a result. It has been suggested that, at the time of the Norman invasion of England, he was in exile in Europe, working as a successful mercenary for the Count of Flanders, Baldwin V, and that he then returned to England.
In 1069 or 1070 the Danish king Sweyn Estrithson sent a small army to try to establish a camp on the Isle of Ely. They were joined by many, including Hereward. His first act was to storm and sack Peterborough Abbey in 1070, in company with local men and Swein's Danes:[10] his justification is said to have been that he wished to save the Abbey's treasures and relics from the Normans.
In 1071 he and many others made a desperate stand on the Isle of Ely against the Conqueror's rule. Some say that the Normans made a frontal assault, aided by a huge mile-long timber causeway, but that this sank under the weight of armour and horses. It is said that the Normans, probably led by one of William's knights named Belasius (Belsar), then bribed the monks of the island to reveal a safe route across the marshes, resulting in Ely's capture. Hereward is said to have escaped with some of his followers into the wild fenland, and to have continued his resistance.
There is extant evidence for an ancient earthwork south of Aldreth at the junction of the old fen causeway and Iram Drove. This circular feature, known as Belsar's Hill at roughly 53.800651,-4.064941 is a potential site for a fort built by William to attack Ely and Hereward. There were possibly as few as four causeways onto the Isle itself with this being the southerly route from London, and the likely route of William's army. In Kingsley's 1865 work Hereward the Wake the name of the knight who bribed the monks to gain access to the isle is given as Belasius, and the feature is noted in Lysons' Magna Britannia (1808 vol2, pt1, Cambridgeshire).
Details of Hereward's life after the fall of Ely are as inconclusive as most of his life prior to the siege. The 12th century chronicle, Gesta Herewardi, (of unknown authorship: first published by Thomas Wright in 1839 and translated by W. Sweeting for the 1895 edition), says Hereward was eventually pardoned by William and lived the rest of his life in relative peace. Geoffrey Gaimar, in his Estoire des Angleis puts a slightly different slant on things, he suggests that after his pardon he moved to France where he was murdered by a group of Normans.[11] The other possibility is Hereward received no such pardon and went into exile never to be heard from again. As this was the fate of a lot of prominent English men after the Conquest it is a distinct possibility.[12]
The epithet "the Wake" is first attested in the late fourteenth-century Chronicon Angliae Petriburgense, ascribed by its first editor J. Sparke to the otherwise unknown John of Peterborough.[13] There are two main theories as to the origin of the tag. Popular legend interprets it as meaning "the watchful", and supposes that Hereward acquired it when, with the help of his servant Martin Lightfoot, he foiled an assassination attempt during a hunting party by a group of knights jealous of his popularity.[14] However, it appears more likely that the name was given to him by the Wake family, the Norman landowners who gained Hereward's land in Bourne (Lincolnshire) after his death, in order to imply a family connection and therefore legitimise their claim to the land.[15]
   | BBC documentary on Hereward - BBC - Radio 4 The Long View - The Search for Hereward the Wake. |
| | Hereward the Wake" - Edric the Wild |
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