An outlawed Englishman, Hereward by name, fortified the Isle of Ely and attracted a number of desperate spirits to his side; amongst others came Morcar, formerly earl of Northumbria, who had been disappointed in the hopes which he based on William's personal favour.
The Hereward legend has been fully dealt with by him and by Professor Freeman, who observed that "with no name has fiction been more busy."
Before it was known that the chronicle ascribed to Ingulf of Croyland is really a fiction of the 13th or 14th century, the knighting of Heward or Hereward by Brand, abbot of Burgh 1 Comparative Politics, p. 74.
The county offered no active resistance to the Conqueror, and though Hereward appears in the Domesday Survey as a dispossessed under-tenant of the abbot of Peterborough at Witham-on-the-Hill, the legends surrounding his name do not belong to this county.
All parties united under the banner of the age's most famous outlaw, Hereward the Wake.