CHAPTER 32When the news came about Brand, we were celebrating (the first feast I had managed to attend from beginning to end since the birth of young Hereward, whom his proud father insisted on addressing as Prune) because our Danish allies were back in York, seizing their second opportunity while William dealt with Edric the Wild. And Edric himself, who had refused our help in this, remained defeated but untamed with a sizeable army still in the field. So we had plenty to celebrate, with the warm, slightly wild gaiety that seems to come with the longer, colder nights.
As far as poetry went, Hereward would only permit comic verse and riddles, none of the heroic epics so beloved by his people — the poetry he called maudlin drivel — yet he dismissed it in a way that only added to the hilari
