After a brilliant career abroad, Hereward married a Flemish lady, and was settled on her estates when the tidings reached him that his father was dead, and that his aged mother had been despoiled of her property, and cruelly treated, by a Norman to whom William the Conqueror had presented the estate of Bourn. No sooner did he receive this intelligence, than he set off with his wife, and, arriving in Lincolnshire, communicated in secret with his old friends at Bourn, collected a small band, attacked the Norman, drove him away, and re-instated Ediva in his paternal home.
But this exploit only exposed him to further perils. Normans were in possession of every castle around; his cousins, the young Earls Edwin find Morkar, had submitted to the Conqueror; Edwin was betrothed to Agatha, William’s daughter; and their sister Lucy was married to an Angevin named Ivo Taillebois bringing him a portion of their lands, in right of which he called himself Viscount of Spalding. Their submission had availed them little; they, as well as Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon (son of Siward, and husband of the Conqueror’s niece, Judith), were feeling that a hand of iron was over them, and regretting every day that he had not made common cause against the enemy before he had fully established his power. Selfishness, jealousy, and wavering, had overthrown and ruined the Saxons. Each had sought to secure his own lands and life, careless of his neighbors. No one had the spirit of Frithric, Abbot of St. Alban’s, who blocked up the Conqueror’s march with trunks of trees, and when asked by William why he had injured his woods for the sake of making an unavailing resistance, replied, “I did my duty. If every one had done as much, you would not be here.” According to their own tradition, the men of Kent, coming forward, each carrying a branch of a tree, so that they advanced unperceived, “a moving wood,” so encumbered William’s passage that he could not proceed till he had taken an oath to respect their privileges. London, too, preserved its rights, owing to the management of a burgess, called Ansgard, who conducted the treaty with the Normans and would not admit them into the city till its liberties were secured.