What can we learn about Hereward the Wake?

What can we learn about Hereward the Wake? Author Charles Moseley shares his thoughts on searching for Hereward: Mayhem, Man, Myth

So what is there that one can say about him? Actually, quite a lot: what sort of world he lived in, what the undrained fenland he knew and used was like; how he did become the Local Hero he still is. How and why the tangled situation of 1066-1070 had developed as it did over the previous decades is not without interest and is certainly relevant to understanding not only the radical instability of Hereward’s world but also why his Resistance was serious for William. Looking at the family interrelationships reminds one of how much mediaeval European history was a bloody series of family quarrels. Almost every major player in the events of 1066 was cousin to other major players. Harold,  half Danish himself, was cousin to Harold Hardrada, defeated and killed at Stamford Bridge. Swein II could be argued to have had a better claim than anyone to the throne of England (setting to one side, as his uncle Edward the Confessor did, the unfortunate Edgar Atheling). We can marvel at William’s extraordinary luck (and conversely, the unquestionably able Harold Godwinsson’s rotten luck), which leads on to the recognition of the profound importance of mere accident –‘for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want a shoe the horse was lost…’ - in the history we see, with hindsight, as inevitable: it did not ‘have to’ happen like that. A change of wind in 1066, another in 1688, changed world history.

 Alas, some people do unthinkingly regard the past as full of people just like ourselves but in funny clothes, and smelly. I have met them. (You could even be rude about how, for example, the magazine of English Heritage, that utterly indispensable body, presents everything as if it were a nice day out for clean and smiling children to a theme park. It wasn’t like that…what about the stink, for a start?) Hereward, and William, and Harald Hardrada, and Harold Godwinsson, and all the others in this turbulent century, lived in a world where most of the things we take for granted, from rabbits in the countryside to potatoes on our tables, from loo paper to soap, are simply not there. We can glimpse how differently people thought about their world, their past and present, and themselves – but knowing that, and many other things, even in great detail, is not the same as feeling it, for you cannot un-be the centuries that have made us what we are. Literally, they saw things differently.

 Against the sort of background I wanted to try to colour in, those patchy, annoyingly indirect, early records did begin to become twopence coloured rather than penny plain. Our hero was able to begin to be thought of a bit more in the round, as a man who got colds, went hungry, made mistakes and suffered for them, had loyalties, loved, died. But we still – I still - cannot know him.