called me yesterday'. Reidulf said: 'So art thou still, and so shalt thou be, while we are alive, the two of us'. Then he took off his mantle and packed the king in it on his back, and brought him safe away.
A story is told here in one of the versions of this which is significant, whether it is true or not.
A 'Bagling'—one of the Crosier party—chased a Birkibein along the street; the Birkibein tried to get to the church for safety. At the church corner he was cut down, and then the pursuer saw that he had killed his brother.
It reminds one of the formal scene in Henry VI—'enter, a Son who has killed his Father', 'enter, a Father who has killed his Son'—where the moral of the faction fights is expounded by King Henry as a sort of chorus.
Reading this story and others like it from the early part of the thirteenth century, one thinks of the country as fallen back into helpless misgovernment—gluttony, sloth, and selfishness, with flashes of energy through it, but all too undisciplined to do any good. What actually happened was better than expectation, to use an Icelandic way of speaking. The ideas of King Sverre and the results of his drill lived on, and that is what the life of Hacon has to show. The child Hacon was taken up by the Birkibeinar, the Old Guard of King Sverre, men with one idea, who would do anything for their cause, i. e. the right line of the kings of Norway, which Sverre had taught them to recognize as being the same thing as the Law of St. Olaf. In Sverre's contest with the Bishops and their allies he had made the Law of St. Olaf into a sort of watchword and emblem for his men, and Hacon, Sverre's grandson, was the king for them, the king whom the Law of St. Olaf required.
