'Why are you here, Eadgyth?'

'I'm hiding.'

'From the Normans?'

'From the Normans, and my parents.'

'Why your parents?'

She shivered in her hole. 'I want to give my life to God. They want to give it to the Conqueror.'

He glanced around. The other troopers were busy with something they had found on the far side of the village, a cache of money, or a woman still alive. There was nobody near Orm, nobody watching. Orm squatted down, stiff in his grimy mail coat. 'Tell me.'

It was a familiar story. Under Harold and his predecessors Eadgyth's family had been land-owners, well-to-do. But more than three years after the Conquest, any vague intentions King William might have had for rapprochement with the old English aristocracy had been burned away by rebellion. All over the country there were wildmen operating from the woods and hills and marshland, places the heavily armoured Normans could not follow. The sons of dead King Harold had been raiding from Ireland. The Scottish King Malcolm had married his sister to Edgar the Atheling, the relative of Edward the Confessor who some argued had a better claim to the throne than even Harold had. And so on. As one rebellion after another was put down, very few of the native English nobility retained their positions.

Eadgyth's parents' intention was to survive under the new regime. And their main asset, as they saw it, was their only daughter.

'They brought me back from my convent. I was told I must marry the son of the Norman lord who now owns us. I met the boy. No more than seventeen. He tried to rape me before I told him my name. He's a bishop now.' She laughed, not bitter.

'So you ran away.'

'I've travelled from safe-house to safe-house, sheltered by the clergy and by the people of places like this.'

Orm had heard of this. For peasants stripped of custom and English law, hermits like Eadgyth were a reminder of the old days, the old English ways.