Hereward the Wake: fact, fiction and romance – Mike Lynch

Speaker: Mike Lynch

Hereward the Wake, hero of resistance to the Norman conquest in Ely and the fens, was a figure to which stories of romantic entanglements and even semi-magical powers quickly became attached.

By 1866 however, Charles Kingsley found that very little of him ‘was left standing out from beneath the dust of ages’. Kingsley re-created Hereward as ‘the Last of the English’ to suit the mood of the time, but by 2007 Mike Ripley depicted him as an arsonist, bigamist and drug-addict.

Is his memory now fading? This lecture deals with our need to create legendary figures, and their subsequent fate.

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