Hereward, for a very short time, made a noise in the world, and gave William the Conqueror quite a few sleepless nights. Centuries after he died, he became an icon of Resistance to Tyranny. But we cannot know much about what this mysterious man was like, not even where he was born or where and when he died: he comes out of shadows and returns to them. This book explores the turbulent world he lived in, and what it would have been like to have lived through events that reverberate right down to today. It also explores how people remembered Hereward, how they made a myth of him, and how he became a symbol of Englishness.