This is unusual in being a book-length biography of Hereward the Wake, a quasi-legendary Anglo-Saxon resistance leader after the Norman Conquest, who became the subject of a legendary life and a lively 19th century novel by Chrles Kingslake. ( )

Reminds me a little bit of, of all people, Nefertiti. She’s the subject of numerous books and movies and probably comes in ahead of Ma’atkare Hatshepsut and behind Kleopatra as the most famous ancient Egyptian woman, but the total contemporary written evidence for he life would probably easily fit on a single-spaced typewritten page (if you added reasonably sized pictures of inscriptions and reliefs showing her name or person, you might get up to 10 or 20 pages).


Hereward (later known as Hereward the Wake, apparently because of ironic confusion with a Norman nobleman also known as “The Wake”) was a sort of prototypical Robin Hood; he crops up with reasonably frequency in novels (particularly a 19th-century novel by Charles Kingsley), but the totality of what’s known about him for sure comes from a couple of lines in the Domesday Book and some ballads and chronicles of dubious authenticity. Hereward led a force of Saxons and Danes in a resistance movement against the Normans in 1080 or so (where was he in 1066?) which seems to have mostly involved looting churches and monasteries that had been taken over by Norman clerics and abbots. The ballads and chronicles make Hereward single-handedly slay 14 Normans who had taken over his home, have him wandering around the Continent in exile, returning to England and renewing the war with the Normans, escaping after a traitor revealed the way into his fen hideout, and eventually reconciling with William I.


Author Victor Head cheerfully acknowledges the information paucity, and thus turns his “biography” of Hereward into a general discussion of life in early Norman England, the plausibility of conducting a guerilla campaign in the Fenlands of East Anglia, and some comment on Englishmen who claimed descent from Hereward.


One question Head raises is: “Was William the Conqueror a good guy or a bad guy?” It’s generally assumed that if somebody from foreign lands invades your country, he’s the bad guy (I suppose that means I have some apologies to make to the Arapahoe) but the counter-argument is that Saxon England was stagnant and the Normans revitalized it. Head doesn’t take a position, just noting that Anglo-Saxon England had a not terribly stable government with a not very efficient taxation system, both of which were dramatically changed by the Normans. Seems like six of one and half a dozen of the other.


The discussion of lines of descent is in an appendix and is an intriguing insight into how important some people think their ancestors are. The particular protagonist in this search was Lieutenant General Thomas Netherton Harward, who in 1896 wrote a detailed analysis of Hereward’s life based on the presumption that he was a distant ancestor. (Head charitably describes the General’s work as “unfettered by facts”). It’s too bad Head doesn’t include a statistical discussion; after all, it’s likely that a random Englishman alive in 1100 AD is either the ancestor of every Englishman alive today or the ancestor of none of them. An amusing aside notes the possibility that John Harvard, founder of Harvard University (well, not actually the founder but he donated most of the money and books so the real founders named it after him) is a descendant of Hereward, with the even more amusing aside to this aside noting that the stained-glass window of John Harvard at Cambridge (the English one, not the Massachusetts one) is actually John Milton, since nobody knew what John Harvard looked like when it was made and the artist must have figured one John was as good as another.


Interesting – if you like this sort of thing – and useful as a reminder that a lot of our perceptions of “history” are based on fiction (one of the things that the deconstructionists have correct). ( )

An important historical topic; Hereward the Wake was the first great English outlaw-hero, whose legend includes some feats which came to be associated with Robin Hood and other heroes. Unlike Robin, Hereward seems to have been historical (although not really very important).
Sadly, this book is very confusing in the way it sifts the facts. Hereward exists on three levels: The actual historical person, the early legends, and the modern expansions by authors such as Charles Kingsley. A good book on Hereward would keep these three entirely separate; it would be much easier to understand. This book has a bad tendency to mix them all up, so that it is almost impossible to distinguish fact from legend from speculation from pure fiction. As a result, it is often easier to seek information in better-organized sources. ( )