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Some of them remain legends to this day. On the fen island of Ely, an English landowner named Hereward resisted the Normans for years, building up an army of rebels, calling for assistance from the Danish king and, when Guillaume personally intervened in order to try and crush his rebellion, frustrating the king for years with tactics including the sacking of abbeys, the destruction of causeways and even the burning of the fens themselves. Over on the Welsh borders, an outlaw known as Eadric the Wild (or Eadric Silvaticus) refused to submit to the conqueror, and raised a rebel army which burned down Shrewsbury.
There would have been many more such rebels, forgotten now, who tried to hold back the tide of history. What do we remember of them today? Perhaps the English archetype of the outlaw in the greenwood, of whom Robin Hood is the best-known exemplar, began in the 1060s, with the rise of the rebels in the forests, fighting for their land. And perhaps we still see the green men in, of all places, our old Norman churches. It could be that those carved stone faces peering out from their haloes of leaves are more politically charged than we think.
