Eagerness of Robert.
- mediately above him, a height which looks on the flat
land, the open sea, the estuary now crowned on the other side by Conwy with its diadem of towers, over the inland hills, and on the Orm's Head itself rising in the full view to the northward. He saw beneath him a sight which might have stirred a more sluggish soul. As King Henry had looked down on the slaughter of his troops at Varaville,[1] so Robert, from his fortified post of Dwyganwy, saw his men carried off in bonds and thrown into the ships along with the sheep.[2] He sent forth orders for a general gathering, and made ready for an attack on the plunderers at the head of such men as were with him at the moment. They were few; they were unarmed; but he called on them to make their way down the steep hillside and to fall on the plunderers on the shore before the returning tide enabled them to carry off their booty.[3] The appeal met with no hearty answer; the followers of the valiant Marquess pleaded their small numbers and the hard task
- [Footnote: classis piratarum stetit. Grithfridus autem cum suis per maritima discurrit,
homines et armenta rapuit, et ad naves exsiccatas festine remeavit."]
- ↑ See N. C. vol. iii. p. 176.
- ↑ Ord. Vit. u. s. "Clamor vulgi Robertum meridie dormitantem excitavit, eique hostilem discursum per terram suam nuntiavit. Ille vero, ut jacebat, impiger surrexit, et mox præcones ad congregandum agmen armatorum per totam regionem direxit. Porro ipse cum paucis bellatoribus imparatus Guallos prosecutus est, et de vertice montis Hormohevæ, qui nimis arduus est, captivos a piratis ligari, et in naves cum pecoribus præcipitari speculatus est." Orderic must surely have confounded the Orm's Head itself with the lower hill of Dwyganwy. It is there, in or near his own castle, that we must conceive Robert sleeping, not on the Orm's Head itself, or on any casual point of the flat ground between the two. To climb the higher of the two peaks of Dwyganwy would be perfectly natural, and would give him a wide enough view over the whole country. But to conceive him first crossing the flat, and then climbing a huge mountain for no particular object, seems quite out of the question.
- ↑ Ib. "Marchisus audax, ut leo nobilis, vehementer infremuit, hominesque paucos qui secum inermes erant, ut, antequam æstus maris rediret, super Guallos in sicco litore irruerent, admonuit.
