NEMESIS OF THE NORMANS
Looming over the land from her perch atop Norman siegeworks, a witch chanted an evil spell. Employed by supporters of William the Conqueror, she had been charged with helping to smoke out a band of rebels secreted nearby on the Isle of Ely – at the time, a spit of land surrounded by swampy fens in what’s now Cambridgeshire – in an attempt to quell an English uprising.
Cursing the inhabitants of the isle, she turned her back before repeating her incantation twice more. Suddenly a deafening crack rang out – not, though, the result of the witch’s spell taking effect but instead the sound of a fire set by the rebels, hidden in the marshes surrounding the Norman troops. As the heat and noise intensified, panic spread among the besiegers and the witch tumbled to her death: “smitten by fear as if by a whirlwind, she fell from on high”, reported a 12th-century English chronicle, the Liber Eliensis. “And thus she who had come for the infliction of death upon other people, herself perished first, dead from a broken neck.”
The version of this particular episode in the English rebellion of 1070-71 is, no doubt, heavily embellished. But there’s one fact that’s beyond dispute: such a setback was an unfamiliar experience for William the Conqueror. Just a few years earlier, the Norman duke had won the crown of England in battle. He
