urch. It is the sailor, the warrior,
the leader of men one sees through all the troubled years of his
royal friend's life. Now the Danish fleet is caught in the inland
sea before Stettin, unable to make its way out, and already the
heathen hosts are shouting their triumph on shore. It is Absalon,
then, who finds the way and, as one would expect, he forces it. The
captains wail over the trap and abuse him for getting them into it.
Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads his ships in single file
straight for the gap where the Wendish fleet lies waiting, and gets
the King to attack with his horsemen on shore. Between them the
enemy is routed, and the cowards are shamed. But when they come to
make amends, he is as unmoved as ever and will have none of it.
Again, when he is leading his men to the attack on a walled town, a
bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and it is the bishop who saves
his comrades from drowning, swimming ashore with them in full armor.

Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he
built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his
bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the
Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills
their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and
they merely got their deserts. In the pursuit his archers "pinned
the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows" and crippled
them, so skilful had much practice made them. Turn the leaf of
Saxo's chronicle, and we find him under Ruegen with his fleet,
protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn
herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended. Of such stuff was
made the bishop who

"Used his trusty Danish sword
As the Pope his staff in Rome."

Wherever danger threatens Valdemar and Absalon, Esbern is found,
too, earning the name of the Fleet (Snare), which the people had
fondly given to their favorite. Where the fighting was hardest, he
was sure to be. The King's son had ventured too far and was caught
in a tight place by an overwhelming force, when Esbern pushed his
ship in between him and the enemy and bore the brunt of a fight that
came near to making an end of him. He had at last only a single man
left, but the two made a stand against a hundred. "When the heathen
saw his face they fled in terror." At last they knocked him
senseless with a stone and would have killed him, but in the nick of
time the K