Hereward the Wake

By 1071, five years after Hastings, Hereward of Bourne was the last English lord still holding out against William the Conqueror, dug into the natural fortress of the Isle of Ely — then a true island, ringed by reed-choked fen and reachable only by boat or causeway. According to the chroniclers' tales, William's engineers built a vast timber causeway nearly a mile long to carry his army across the marsh, only for it to sink under the weight of mailed knights and horses, swallowing men and equipment into the bog. When that failed, the Normans are said to have brought in a witch to curse the English defenders from atop a wooden siege tower — but Hereward slipped past their lines by night, set the tower alight, and burned the curse-worker inside it.

Later medieval romance dressed Hereward in the full trappings of a folk hero: a magic sword nicknamed 'Brainbiter', uncanny luck in combat, and the ability to cut down a dozen attackers single-handed. Some accounts even have him fighting a giant bear in Northumbria and outwitting Norman lords through disguise and trickery long before Ely fell — material that reads more like outlaw legend than history, and helped make him England's first Robin Hood figure.

Ely itself eventually fell, betrayed (so the story goes) by the monks of its own abbey, who showed the Normans a secret path through the marshes in exchange for their lands. What became of Hereward afterwards is where the record dissolves into legend entirely: one tradition has William pardoning him and restoring his estates, another has him ambushed and killed by jealous Norman knights, and a third simply lets him vanish back into the fens. That very uncertainty has kept Hereward 'the Wake' — a nickname attached centuries later — alive as East Anglia's great symbol of resistance, still commemorated in Ely's statue, street names, and the long-distance Hereward Way that crosses the fens he once defended.