It is England, AD 1066: William, Duke of Normandy, is now William the Conqueror and determined to hold on to his rich new kingdom with an iron fist. It is not long before his greedy eye strays to the wealthy Anglo-Saxon monasteries and religious houses in the East of England, but the abbey of Ely, almost hidden in the flooded and mysterious Fens, finds itself an unlikely champion in the brave but unpredictable Hereward. Yet who was this Hereward, whose resistance to the Norman invaders soon leads to murder, deceit, robbery, rebellion and finally open war? More than a century after the siege of the Isle of Ely and the end of Anglo-Saxon England, a learned monk finds himself writing a family history for a minor nobleman and in doing so discovers the truth about Hereward as well as the legend. Where truth and legend conflict, he has to decide which to turn into history.