credited with a regard for the holy place where he had been girt at a
solemn service with the sword and belt of knighthood; but upon Brando's
death the abbacy had been granted to a Norman, doubtless with the
intention of making the place available as a military centre. Hereward
joined the Danes, who had again begun to infest the district, in an
attack upon the abbey. The accounts vary as to the time at which this
attack was made. One says that it was before Turold, the Norman Abbot,
had entered upon possession: another says that Turold had in person
joined Ivo Taillebois in an attempt to surprise Hereward and his men in
the woods near Bourne, but had been taken prisoner and only released
after paying a large ransom. When dismissed there seems to have been
something in the nature of an undertaking that the Abbot would not again
fight against Hereward; but as soon as he was free he organised fresh
attacks, obliging all the tenants of the abbey to supply assistance. In
revenge for this Hereward went with his men to Burgh, and laid waste the
whole town with fire, plundered all the treasure of the church, and
destroyed all the buildings of the abbey except the church itself.

Though Hereward spared the church and went away, yet very soon
afterwards the monks, possibly sympathising more with Hereward than with
their Norman Abbot (who had left them for a time), allowed themselves to
indulge in a drunken revel; and while carousing, a fire seized upon the
church and other remaining buildings, from which Gunton says they
rescued only a few relics, and little else. But, as Mr Poole has well
observed[7], "we must receive such accounts with some allowance; and, in
fact, neither was the abbey so despoiled, nor the church so destroyed,
but that there was wealth enough to tempt robbers in the next abbacy,
and fuel enough for another conflagration." The robbers in question were
foreigners who got into the church by a ladder over the altar of SS.
Philip and James, one of them standing with a drawn sword over the