abbot,--let antiquaries decide),--of Dunkeld, and of Duncan, and of
Siward, and of the outraged Sibilla. He may have helped himself to bring
Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, "on the day of the Seven Sleepers," and heard
Siward, when his son Asbiorn's corpse was carried into camp, [Footnote:
Shakespeare makes young Siward his son. He, too, was slain in the battle:
but he was Siward's nephew.] ask only, "Has he all his wounds in front?"
He may have seen old Siward, after Macbeth's defeat (not death, as
Shakespeare relates the story), go back to Northumbria "with such booty as
no man had obtained before,"--a proof, if the fact be fact, that the
Scotch lowlands were not, in the eleventh century, the poor and barbarous
country which some have reported them to have been.

All this is not only possible, but probable enough, the dates considered:
the chroniclers, however, are silent. They only say that Hereward was in
those days beyond Northumberland with Gisebert of Ghent.

Gisebert, Gislebert, Gilbert, Guibert, Goisbricht, of Ghent, who
afterwards owned, by chance of war, many a fair manor about Lincoln city,
was one of those valiant Flemings who settled along the east and northeast
coast of Scotland in the eleventh century. They fought with the Celtic
princes, and then married with their daughters; got to themselves lands
"by the title-deed of the sword"; and so became--the famous "Freskin the
Fleming" especially--the ancestors of the finest aristocracy, both
physically and intellectually, in the world. They had their connections,
moreover, with the Norman court of Rouen, through the Duchess Matilda,
daughter of their old Seigneur, Baldwin, Marquis of Flanders; their
connections, too, with the English Court, through Countess Judith, wife of
Earl Tosti Godwinsson, another daughter of Baldwin's. Their friendship was
sought, their enmity feared, far and wide throughout the north. They seem
to have been civilizers and cultivators and traders,--with the instinct of