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![[Picture: And then began a murder, grim and great]](https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Various-GoodWords-1865/pages/412-murder/412-murder-500x333.jpg "[Picture: And then began a murder, grim and great]")
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And then began a murder, grim and great more
murder, attack, anglo-saxons, warriors, weapons, swords, interiors, people, men, socked feet, costumes, death
Hereward the Wake is about to kill his brother, who pleads for mercy but to no avail. The scene is set inside an Anglo-Saxon hall (although the stone pillar in the backgroundmakes it a rather fancy one, perhaps a castle). There’s a discarded shield in the foreground, overturned wine cups and tables, and people lying on the floor. The hall is smoke-filled. A man with an axe guards the door.
This is from chapter nineteen of “Hereward, The Last of the English” by Charles Kingsley, serialized in the magazine “Good Words” in 1865.
And then began a murder, grim and great. They fought with alec-cups, with knives, with benches: but, drunken and unarmed, they were hewn down like sheep. Fourteen Normans, says the chronicler, were in the hall when Hereward burst in. When the sunb rose there were fourteen heads upon the gable. Escape had been impossible. Martin had laid the ladder across the door; and the few who escaped the master’s terrible sword, stumbled over it, to be brained by the man’s not less terrible axe.
Then Hereward took up his brother’s head, and went in to his mother.
(p. 412)
