Hereward the Wake: The Last Anglo-Saxon Rebellion

Written by Simon Williams

Hereward the Wake led the final armed English rebellion against William the Conqueror, making his stand on the Isle of Ely in 1071. Using the Fens as a natural fortress, he defeated a Norman causeway assault before Ely fell through betrayal, and he vanished into legend rather than into a Norman prison.

• Name: Hereward the Wake, also called Hereward the Exile or Hereward the Outlaw
• Lived: c.1035 to c.1072
• Base: The Isle of Ely, in the Cambridgeshire Fens
• Key event: The siege and fall of Ely, 1071
• Allies: Earl Morcar of Northumbria, and briefly a Danish fleet under King Sweyn II
• Primary sources: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Domesday Book, the Liber Eliensis, and the Gesta Herewardi

By the autumn of 1071, William the Conqueror had spent five years grinding down English resistance. He had crushed the south east within months of Hastings, burned his way through the north in the Harrying, and watched two of Harold's sons fail to reclaim the west. One flame still burned. Deep in the Cambridgeshire Fens, on an island surrounded by reed beds and treacherous marsh, a band of English fighters under a minor nobleman named Hereward had made the Isle of Ely into the last free patch of English ground in the kingdom.

What happened at Ely over the following months has since been buried under six centuries of embellishment, Victorian myth making, and outright invention. Strip away the legend of the shapeshifting outlaw and what remains is still remarkable: a genuine English lord who fought the Conqueror's army to a standstill using nothing but local knowledge and the geography of the Fens.

This is the story of who Hereward actually was, what happened when William's army finally reached Ely, and why the last Anglo-Saxon rebellion still resonates nearly a thousand years later.

Who Was Hereward the Wake?

Hereward was almost certainly a real, minor Anglo-Saxon landholder from the Lincolnshire or Northamptonshire fen edge, born around 1035. What survives of his early life is thin and unreliable. The twelfth century Gesta Herewardi, written at Ely within living memory of the events it describes, claims he was exiled as a young man for disruptive and disobedient conduct, and that he spent years as a mercenary in Cornwall, Ireland and Flanders before returning to England after the Conquest.

I find it telling that the earliest and most sober sources, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Domesday Book, say almost nothing about Hereward beyond confirming that he existed and that he was at Ely. Everything more colourful, the bear fight, the disguises, the rescued Cornish princess, comes from the Gesta, written decades later and shaped as much by storytelling convention as by memory. Later medieval genealogists went further still, with the Wake family of the fifteenth century claiming descent from Hereward and asserting he was the son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his wife Lady Godiva. This claim has no basis in the contemporary record and should be read as later invention rather than established fact.

What can be stated with confidence is that Hereward, whatever his exact origins, returned to a fen country transformed by dispossession. Norman lords and a Norman abbot had displaced the English landholding class around Peterborough and Ely, and it was this grievance, not romance, that drove him to arms.

Peterborough Abbey and the Road to Rebellion

Hereward's rebellion did not begin at Ely. In the summer of 1070, a Norman abbot named Turold arrived to take control of Peterborough Abbey, replacing its English predecessor. Hereward, who had close ties to the Fenland monasteries, joined forces with a Danish raiding fleet under Earl Osbjorn and moved against Peterborough before Turold could take possession.

The raid on Peterborough was not straightforwardly heroic. Hereward and his allies stripped the abbey of gold, silver and treasure, and the Peterborough Chronicle itself records the raiders committing considerable violence and looting against the very English community Hereward claimed to be protecting. The stated justification, preserved in the Gesta, was that the treasures were being saved from Norman hands rather than stolen outright. Whether that motive was genuine or a later gloss on an ugly raid is impossible to settle from the surviving evidence.

The Danish fleet soon made peace with William and sailed home with much of the plunder, leaving Hereward without his most powerful ally. It was in the aftermath of this setback that he withdrew to the Isle of Ely, a natural fortress formed by the fen waters, and began to gather the men who would make their last stand there.

Ely's isolation had made it a place of English refuge for generations, and it now drew a wave of the dispossessed. Chief among the new arrivals was Morcar, the former Earl of Northumbria, who had been stripped of his title and had fled William's custody. With Morcar's forces added to his own, Hereward commanded the closest thing England had left to an organised army of resistance.

If you want to understand the wider machinery of dispossession that pushed men like Hereward to Ely, our article on the feudal system under the Normans sets out exactly how thoroughly William's land settlement replaced the English landholding class within a few short years.

The Siege of Ely

William could not ignore an armed English stronghold sitting in the heart of eastern England, particularly with the still live threat of further Danish intervention. In the summer of 1071 he mustered a two pronged assault: a fleet approaching from the Wash and down the River Ouse to seal off the island by water, and a land force pushing in from the south west to build a crossing through the marsh itself.

This is the detail that changes everything for me. William's engineers built a causeway roughly a mile long across the fen, using timber, stone and, according to the Gesta Herewardi, sheepskins inflated to help the structure float across the softest ground. It was an extraordinary feat of medieval military engineering, and it failed. The weight of armoured knights and horses was too much for the waterlogged foundations, and the causeway collapsed under the first assault, drowning a significant number of Norman soldiers in the fen.

Hereward's defenders, fighting on terrain they knew intimately and the Normans did not, held the island through a second failed crossing as well. The Gesta and the Liber Eliensis both preserve a striking, almost theatrical episode from this period: William reportedly employed a witch to curse the defenders from atop a wooden siege tower, only for Hereward's men to set fire to the reed bed beneath her and bring the tower down. This episode sits firmly in the category of legend rather than verified event, and should be read as part of the Gesta's storytelling tradition rather than a documented military action.

What finally broke the siege was not force but betrayal. William's forces, reportedly under a knight named Belasius, bribed the monks of Ely to reveal a safe route through the marsh that bypassed the rebels' defences. With their secret pathway compromised, the defenders' position collapsed, and Ely fell to the Normans in the autumn of 1071.

Aftermath: Betrayal, Imprisonment and Escape

The fall of Ely ended organised English resistance to the Conquest, but it did not end cleanly. Morcar surrendered on the understanding that William would pardon him and receive him back into royal favour. William did nothing of the sort. Morcar was handed to the custody of Roger de Beaumont and kept in close confinement in Normandy for the rest of William's reign, only released, briefly, on the Conqueror's deathbed in 1087 before being reimprisoned by William Rufus soon afterward.

Hereward's fate was different, and it is the part of the story that has done the most to secure his legend. Every one of the earliest surviving sources agrees that Hereward escaped the fall of Ely with a portion of his followers and vanished into the wild fen country. What happened next is genuinely unclear. Some later traditions suggest he made peace with William and was eventually restored to some of his land. Others have him continuing a guerrilla resistance from the Brunneswald forest for years afterward. No source gives a confirmed date or circumstance of his death, though the balance of scholarly opinion places it around 1072.

The absence of a documented ending is, I think, exactly why Hereward endured in English memory when so many other rebels of the period did not. A captured and executed rebel becomes a historical footnote. A rebel who simply disappears becomes a legend that later generations can shape to their own purposes, which is precisely what happened from the twelfth century Gesta onward, through medieval genealogical claims, and into Charles Kingsley's 1866 novel Hereward the Wake, which cemented him as a Victorian symbol of native English heroism. Some historians have also noted loose thematic parallels between the Hereward legend and the later Robin Hood tradition, though this connection remains speculative rather than an established line of literary descent.

For readers tracing the broader pattern of Norman consolidation that made rebellions like Hereward's increasingly unlikely to succeed, Norman Castles: How William I Used Stone to Control England explains the fortification network that closed the door on further large scale English uprisings after 1071.

From the Histories and Castles store

Go deeper into medieval history

Five Academy study guides and standalone investigations. Choose your starting point.

The Histories and Castles Academy: view all ↗

Study Guide

The Labour Machine

Survivors of the Black Death and the laws that tried to bind them back into serfdom. How labour became a battleground after plague.

Get the guide →

Study Guide

Servants of the Royal Chamber

How the Crown used a legal designation to control, exploit, and ultimately expel the Jewish community of medieval England.

Get the guide →

Study Guide

The King's Deer

Norman forest law and the system of punishment that made the king's animals worth more than a peasant's livelihood.

Get the guide →

Study Guide

The Neck Verse

The medieval loophole that let literate men escape the hangman's rope, and what it reveals about law, class, and the Church.

Get the guide →

Investigated Histories

The Price of Survival

The Black Death killed half of England. What happened to the survivors, and who tried to make sure they paid for their escape.

Get the download →

Book

No Law for the Poor

Justice and power in medieval England and Wales. Simon A. Williams's full-length investigation into who the law was actually written for.

Buy now on Amazon →

This article is part of the Norman England series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/medieval-england/norman-england-conquest.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Norman England: The Conquest That Remade a Nation: The hub article for this cluster, covering the full sweep of the Conquest and its aftermath from Hastings to the Domesday survey.

→ The Feudal System Under the Normans: Explains the land settlement that dispossessed the English nobility and drove men like Hereward to rebellion.

→ Norman Castles: How William I Used Stone to Control England: Shows how the Conqueror's fortification programme made further rebellions after Ely increasingly difficult to sustain.

→ The Battle of Hastings: Harold Left a Review: The battle that began the Conquest Hereward spent the next five years resisting.

→ William the Conqueror: A full profile of the king Hereward fought against.

People Also Ask

Was Hereward the Wake a real person?

Yes. Hereward is confirmed as a historical figure by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Domesday Book of 1086, both considered reliable contemporary sources. He is recorded leading English resistance at the Isle of Ely in 1071. The more elaborate stories about his early life and adventures come from the later Gesta Herewardi and should be treated as embellished legend rather than verified biography.

What happened to Hereward the Wake after the fall of Ely?

Every early source agrees that Hereward escaped the fall of Ely with some of his followers rather than being captured. What happened afterward is genuinely disputed. Some traditions suggest he was eventually reconciled with William and recovered some of his lands. Others describe continued guerrilla resistance from the Brunneswald forest. No source records a confirmed date or manner of his death, which most historians place around 1072.

Why did the Isle of Ely become a centre of English resistance?

Ely sat within the Cambridgeshire Fens, surrounded by marsh and reed beds that made conventional military approach almost impossible. This natural isolation had long made it a refuge, and it drew displaced English nobles including Earl Morcar after the Conquest. The terrain gave Hereward's forces a defensive advantage that neutralised William's numerical superiority for over a year.

How did William the Conqueror eventually capture Ely?

William's forces built a mile long timber causeway across the fen to reach the island, which initially collapsed under the weight of armoured troops. The siege was ultimately decided not by force but by bribery: Norman forces paid the monks of Ely to reveal a safe route through the marsh, bypassing the rebels' defences and allowing the final assault to succeed in 1071.

Is the story of Hereward and the witch at Ely true?

The tale of William employing a witch to curse the defenders from a wooden tower, only for Hereward's men to burn the tower down, appears in the twelfth century Gesta Herewardi and the Liber Eliensis. Historians generally treat this episode as legendary embellishment rather than a documented historical event, consistent with the Gesta's broader tendency toward dramatic storytelling.

Did Hereward the Wake inspire the Robin Hood legend?

Some historians have noted loose thematic similarities between the Hereward tradition and the later Robin Hood legend, both featuring an outlawed English hero resisting Norman authority from a wild landscape. This remains a matter of scholarly speculation rather than an established or documented line of literary influence.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Peterborough manuscript (E): the closest surviving contemporary record of the Ely rebellion, compiled at Peterborough Abbey itself.
• Van Houts, Elizabeth (2000): The Normans in Europe, Manchester University Press — situates the Ely rebellion within the wider pattern of Norman consolidation across England.
• Domesday Book (1086), The National Archives: confirms Hereward's landholding and existence in the official Norman survey. nationalarchives.gov.uk
• English Heritage, "William the Conqueror and the Ely Rebellion": a clear modern narrative account of the military campaign against Ely, drawing on the primary chronicle sources. english-heritage.org.uk

Note: the fantastical episodes recorded in the Gesta Herewardi, including the witch on the tower and several of Hereward's disguises, are widely regarded by historians as literary embellishment rather than established historical fact. The characterisation of these episodes in this article reflects that scholarly consensus rather than presenting them as settled events. Similarly, the fifteenth century Wake family claim of descent from Leofric and Lady Godiva is a later genealogical invention with no contemporary support.

Regular podcasts by Histories and Castles to help you get a deep dive understanding of histories events and figures.