Hereward: The Last Englishman (Paperback)

So, what does it mean, beyond a vague sensation that it might have some distant historical significance? OK, concentrate at the back...

Hereward, very likely the exiled son of a powerful Lincolnshire thegn, and nephew to Abbot Brand of Peterborough, was sent from England prior to the Norman invasion of 1066 and fought in a series of conflicts as a soldier of fortune in Western Flanders. It is on his return to England, post-Hastings, post-Harrying of the North, that he discovers his country overrun and his estates confiscated. Attempting to gather together survivors of William's cruel policies, Hereward goes on the rampage, starting with the violent attack on the monastery at Peterborough, where he tries to frustrate the man who seeks to take over from his uncle, the vicious Turold, by removing the monastery's treasures. After this, he barricades himself on the Isle of Ely.

Ely in the Eleventh Century was, genuinely, an island, surrounded by a mass of sedge, swamp, fen, and a dizzyingly complex network of rivers and tributaries. Even today, approached from almost any angle, the hill that Ely sits on is visible for miles around. In the 1060s and 1070s, afloat a 'desolate, waterlogged hell full of stagnant pools and deadly bogs', it must have seemed the most impregnable fortress imaginable. From this centre of operatons, Hereward set about creating as much nuisance as he could possibly manage. Reinforced by Earls coming in from the North, his actions soon caught the attention of King William himself.

William's initial efforts to take control of the situation were little short of disastrous, and the perilous marshland took its toll on his knights. It was only when Thurstan, the abbot of Ely, decided to seek the King's clemency, and made a deal that helped William gain access to the Isle, that Hereward - or, more accurately, his fellow rebels, for Hereward seems to have given the Normans the slip - was vanquished and the fight for liberty brought to an end.

It was the great Oxford scholar Charles Plummer who said that Hereward had 'a brief life in history and a long one in romance', so what chance does Rex have in giving us the facts? Well, facts are all that he deals in, and anyone who read his earlier The English Resistance will know that everything other than fact is signposted 'surmise' and generously highlighted. Rescuing Hereward from both near-obscurity and the fug of lazy myth, "Hereward: The Last Englishman" provides us with a satisfying and intelligent tale gleaned from the documents that matter, the primary sources, manuscripts and chronicles written at or just after the time. Sifting, filtering and cross-referencing the data he has produced a clear and definitive work that shows a man who was not a gifted politician, nor a supernaturally-gifted adventurer, but an able soldier and battle-hardened rebel. The research here is exemplary, every aspect of Hereward's familial connections, his lands, his associations, his activities, is picked over in minute detail. Where surmise is the only way forward it is done with clear-sighted logic with nothing assumed. When Charles Kingsley - yes, that Charles Kingsley - wrote a popular fictional account of the story in 1867 he may have done Hereward a great service in reinvigorating the tale for a new audience, but this is the real deal. You're in good hands here and the final picture is well worth the effort it requires to understand the alien world of England, one thousand years ago.

And the name, 'the Wake'? Well, it would seem that this first appeared more than 200 years after the events at Ely, when the Wakes, a family owning much of the land that Hereward had been associated with, claimed descent from him, adopting him as their ancestor.