The last of the English

It is 950 years since Hereward the Wake’s last stand against the Norman invasion, turning this Anglo-Saxon leader into a lowland hero

- ALLAN MALLINSON

The heroic deeds of Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve,” wrote the Reverend Charles Kingsley in his 1865 novel Hereward the Wake: Last of the English.

Critically, Kingsley, regius professor of history at Cambridge and better known perhaps for his children’s story The WaterBabies and the historical fiction Westward Ho!, then adds, “but we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and the Fen”.

Hereward ranks with Robin Hood in the pantheon of legendary lowland heroes, although rather more rooted in fact. His domain was the windswept wetlands of East Anglia in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings, and this year sees the 950th anniversary of his last stand against the Norman conquerors, in the summer of 1071 on the Isle of Ely.

The Fens had long been a place of refuge. Many an Iceni had hid from the Romans hereafter Boudicca’s rebellion and many a Christian hermit sought his solitude surrounded by the waters in that inundated landscape, before, with Dutch help, the Fens were drained in Cromwell’s day. Their hermitages begat many monasteries, too. The pre-Reformation Fens were known as the Holy Land of the English.