‘Drowned Lands’ 83
female fen dwellers.^40 Torfrida’s warring spirit – inherited from her grandmother
- dissipates under the infl uence of her pacifying husband and the novel’s end
departs radically from its hectic beginning as Richard and Torfrida discuss the
tomb epitaphs for the new monument they plan to raise to the legendary Here-
ward and his wife. Torfrida wonders what inscription would best suit the couple:
‘And what shall we write thereon?’
‘What but that which is there already: “Here lies the last of the English.”’
‘Not so. We will write – “Here lies the last of the old English.” But upon thy
tomb, when thy time comes, the monks of Crowland shall write, –
“Here lies the fi rst of the New English, who, by the inspiration of God, began to
drain the Fens.”’^41Torfrida monumentalizes her husband’s achievement and foregrounds the
Norman basis of modern Englishness at the expense of the Anglo-Saxon and
Anglo-Danish infl uence. Th e novel suddenly shift s from a celebration of Eng-
lishness – in the sense agreed by historical novelists from Scott to Disraeli – to
a defence of the Norman invader. In doing so, it also becomes less a paean to the
past and more a consideration of – and appreciation for – the present.
Michael Young has discussed the apparent ambivalence towards the binary of
romance and civilization that Kingsley establishes in Hereward the Wake, a binary
that can be mapped onto Hereward’s Anglo-Danish brigade – the romance –
and Norman incumbents like Richard de Rulos – the civilization. Romance may
be heroic but it is also lawless and chaotic. Equally, civilization fosters respect-
ability and hard work but engenders greed and cowardice in equal measures.
While Kingsley appears to chart the civilizing of the formerly romantic Fens – a
trajectory that also allows readers to recall this romantic inheritance from the
comfort of their civilized existence – Young suggests that this trajectory is, in
actual fact, reversible. Civilization does not follow romance. Rather, romance
is a direct response to civilization, a necessary fantasy to satisfy the yearnings
of a conformist society: ‘the relationship between the romance sphere and the
civilized sphere is exposed not as one of opposition but as one of complicity, in
fact, of symbiosis’.^42 Young’s interpretation explains Kingsley’s dramatic about-
face; the romance of Hereward’s adventuring shores up, rather than gives way
to, the novel’s ‘civilized’ fi nale. Th e ambivalence shown by historical novelists
to their heroic protagonists has long been recognized but the idea that romance
follows civilization, rather than vice versa, points to the artifi ciality of historical
fi ction. In Kingsley’s case, I would suggest that this romantic artifi ce is self-con-
sciously expressed, so much so that it satirizes the genre it inhabits. Kingsley, like
so many historical novelists before him, provides extra-textual material – mostly
in the form of footnotes but also including genealogical data – to support his
historical claims. But his antiquarian discourse is set alongside his literary bor-