Harold, the last of the Saxon kings;

Preface

The “author of an able and learned article on Mabillon,* in the Edinburgh Review, has accurately described my aim in this worn.; although, with that generous courtesy which characterizes the true scholar, in referring to the labors of a contemporary, he has overrated my success. It was indeed my aim “to solve the problem how to produce the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense of historical truth," — I borrow the words of the Reviewer, since none other could so tersely express my design, or so clearly account for the leading characteristics in its conduct and completion.

There are two ways of employing the materials of History in the service of Romance : the one consists in lending to ideal personages, and to an imaginary fable, the additional interest, to be derived from historical groupings : the other in extracting the main interest of romantic narrative from History itself. Those who adopt the former mode are at

* The Edinburgh Review, No. CLXXIX. January, 1849. Art. I. “Correspondance in^dite, de Mabillon et de Montfaucon, aveo ritalie.” Par M. Valery. Paris, 1848.

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liberty to exclude all that does not contribute to theatrical effect or picturesque composition; their fidelity to the period they select is towards the manners and costume, not towards the precise order of events, the moral causes from which the events proceeded, and the physical agencies by which they were influenced and controlled. The plan thus adopted is unquestionably the more popular and attractive, and, being favored by the most illustrious writers of historical romance, there is presumptive reason for supposing it to be also that which is the more agreeable to the art of fiction.

But he who wishes to avoid the ground pre-occupied by others, and claim in the world of literature some spot, however humble, which he may “ plough with his own heifer,” will seek to establish himself not where the land is the most fertile, but where it is the least enclosed. So, when I first turned my attention to Historical Bomance, my main aim was to avoid as much as possible those fairer portions of the soil that had been appropriated by the first discoverers. The great author of Ivanhoe, and those amongst whom, abroad and at home, his mantle was divided, had employed History to aid Bomance ; I contented myself with the humbler task to employ Bomance in the aid of History — to extract from authentic but neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts to which the general historian is confined — construct my plot from the actual events themselves, and place

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the staple of such interest as I could create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of those who had been the living actors in the real drama. For the main materials cf the three Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if intending to write, not a fiction, but a history. And having formed the best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential attributes of the principal agents. Solely in that inward life which, not only as apart from the more public and historical, but which, as almost wholly unknown, becomes the fair domain of the poet, did I claim the legitimate privileges of fiction, and even here 1 employed the agency of the passions only so far a? they served to illustrate what I believed to be the genuine natures of the beings who had actually lived, and to restore the warmth of the human heart to the images recalled from the grave.

Thus, even had I the gifts of my most illustrious predecessors, I should be precluded the use of many of the more brilliant. I shut myself out from the wider scope permitted to their fancy, and denied myself the license to choose or select materials, alter dates, vary causes and effects according to the convenience of that more imperial fiction which invents th 3 Probable where it discards the Real. The mode I have adopted has pertaps only this merit, that it is viii

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my own — mine by discovery and mine by labor And if I can raise not the spirits that obeyed the great master of romance, nor gain the key to the fairy-land that opened to his spell — at least I have not rifled the tomb of the wizard to steal my art from the book that lies clasped on his breast.

In treating of an age with which the general reader is so unfamiliar as that preceding the Norman Conquest, it is impossible to avoid (especially in the earlier portions of my tale), those explanations of the very character of the time which would have been unnecessary if I had only sought in History the picturesque accompaniments to Eomance. I have to do more than present an amusing picture of national manners — detail the dress, and describe the banquet. According to the plan I adopt, I have to make the reader acquainted with the imperfect fusion of races in Saxon England, familiarize him with the contests of parties and the ambition of chiefs, show him the strength and the weakness of a kindly but ignorant church ; of a brave but turbulent aristocracy ; of a people partially free, and naturally energetic, but disunited by successive immigrations, and having lost much of the proud jealousies of national liberty by submission to the preceding conquests of the Dane ; acquiescent in the sway of fore ign kings, and with that bulwark against invasion which an hereditary order of aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very foundations by the copious admixture of foreign nobles. I have to present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate monk ; there, ix tne dark superstition that still consulted the deities of the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in contrast to these pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the coming conquerors — the stern will and deep guile of the Norman chief — the comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church — the nascent spirit of chivalry in the Norman vavasours ; a spirit destined to emancipate the very people it contributed to enslave, associated, as it imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom : disdainful, it is true, of the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits, the domination of the liege. In a word, I must place fully before the reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political and moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier attributes, and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book, why England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.

In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which the task itself raises up — objections to the labor it has cost ; to the information which the labor was undertaken in order to bestow ; objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but which in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the position of the persons whose characters it illustrates - — whose fate it involves ; objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact might be disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of Saxon words, for 1*

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which no accurate synonyms could he exchanged ; objections, in short, to the coloring, conduct, and composition of the whole work; objections to all that separate it from the common crowd of Eomances, and stamp on it, for good or for bad, a character peculiarly its own. Objections of this kind I cannot remove, though I have carefully weighed them all. And with regard to the objection most important to story-teller and novel-reader — viz., the dryness of some of the earlier portions, though I have thrice gone over those passages, with the stern determination to inflict summary justice upon every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that I have found but little which it was possible to omit without rendering the after narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more stirring interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general reader of Romance.

As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given either in the text or a foot-note. Such archaisms are much less numerous than certain critics would fain represent them to be; and they have rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have been employed without a glaring anachronism or a tedious periphrase. Would it indeed be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the customs and manners of our Saxon forefathers without employing words so mixed up with their daily usages and modes of thinking, as “ weregdd ” and “ niddzring ? ” Would any words from the

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x\ modern vocabulary suggest tbe same idea or embody tbe same meaning ?

One critic good-humoredly exclaims, “ We have a full attendance of thegns and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old friends and approved good masters, thanes and knights.” Nothing could be more apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted in censure ; nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of employing the Saxon words. For I should sadly indeed have misled the reader, if I had used the word knight in an age when knights were wholly unknown to the Anglo-Saxon ; and cneht no more means what we understand by knight, than a templar, in modern phrase, means a man in chain mail vowed to celibacy, and the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Mussulman. While, since thegn and thane are both archaisms, I prefer the former ; not only for the same reason that induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it, viz., because it is the more etymologically correct; but because we take from our neighbors the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in which we apply it, and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach to the various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo- Saxon comprehended in the title of thegn. It has been peremptorily said by more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the erudition of William, in permitting him to know Latin ; nay, to nave read the Comments of Caesar at the age of eight. Where these gentlemen find the authorities xii

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to confute my statement I know not ; all I know is, that in the statement I have followed the original authorities usually deemed the best. And I content myself with referring the disputants to a work not so difficult to procure as (and certainly more pleasant to read than) the old Chronicles. In Miss Stricklands “Lives of the Queens of England" (Matilda of Flanders), the same statement is made, and no doubt upon the same authorities.

More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in all matters of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that I have overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that which flourished in Normandy under his reign ; for I should have thought that the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most thriving period of that principality ; the rapidity of its growth ; the benefits it derived from Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from William, had been phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age, and in the history of literature, to have met with an incredulity which the most moderate amount of information would have sufficed to dispel. Not to refer such skeptics to graver authorities, historical and ecclesiastical, in order to justify my representations of that learning which, under William the Bastard, made the schools of Normandy the popular academies of Europe, a page or two in a book so accessible as Villemain’s “ Tableau de Moyen Age," will perhaps suffice to convince them of the hastiness of their censure, and the error of their impressions.

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It :s stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose authority on the merits of opera-singers I am far from contesting, but of whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of human industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, “ that I am much mistaken when I represent not merely the clergy, but the young soldiers and corn • tiers of the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with the literature of Greece and Rome.”

The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous. I have done no such thing. This general animadversion is only justified by a reference to the pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville — and it is expressly stated in the text that Mallet de Graville was originally intended for the Church, and that it was the peculiarity of his literary information, rare in a soldier (but for which his earlier studies for the ecclesiastical calling readily account, at a time when the Norman convent of Bee was already so famous for the erudition of its teachers, and the number of its scholars), that attracted towards him the notice of Lanfranc, and founded his fortunes. Pedantry is made one of his characteristics (as it generally was the characteristic of any man with some pretensions to scholarship, in the earlier ages) ; and if he indulges in a classical allusion, whether in taunting a courtier or conversing with a “Saxon from the wealds of Kent,” it is no more out of keeping with the pedantry ascribed to him, than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to rail at Meg Merrilies in Latin, or James the First to examine a young courtier in the same

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unfamiliar language. Nor should the critic in question, when inviting his readers' to condemn me for making Mallet de Graville quote Horace, have omitted to state that De Graville expressly laments that he had never read, nor could even procure a copy of the Eoman poet — judging only of the merits of Horace by an extract in some monkish author, who was equally likely to have picked up his quotation second-hand.

So, when a reference is made either by Graville, or by any one else in the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone through the ordinary education of an English gentleman, would never thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems of Homer themselves — he would have known that Homeric fables, or personages, though not the Homeric poems, were made familiar, by quaint travesties,* even to the most illiterate audience of the Gothic age. It was scarcely more necessary to know Homer then than now, in order to have heard of Ulysses. The writer in the Athenaeum is acquainted with Homeric personages, but who on earth would ever presume to assert that he is acquainted with Homer ?

Some doubt has been thrown upon my accuracy in ascribing to the Anglo-Saxons the enjoyments of certain luxuries (gold and silver plate — the use of

* And long before the date of the travesty known to us, and most popular amongst our mediaeval ancestors, it might be shown that some rude notion of Homer’s fable and personages had crept into the North.

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XV glass, &c.) which were extremely rare in an age much more recent. There is no ground for that doubt ; nor is there a single article of such luxury named in the text, for the mention of which I have not ample authority.

I have indeed devoted to this work a degree of research which, if unusual to romance, I cannot consider superfluous when illustrating an age so remote, and events unparalleled in their influence over the destinies of England. Nor am I without the hope, that what the romance-reader at first regards as a defect, he may ultimately acknowledge as a merit; — forgiving me that strain on his attention by which alone I could leave distinct in his memory the action and the actors in that solemn tragedy which closed on the field of Hastings, over the corpse of the Last Saxon King.

THE LAST OF THE SAXON KINGS.

Chapter I

Merry was the month of May, in the year of our Lord 1052. Few were the boys, and few the lasses, who overslept themselves on the first of that buxom month. Long ere the dawn, the crowds had sought mead and woodland, to cut poles and wreathe flowers. Many a mead then lay fair and green beyond the village of Charing, and behind the isle of Thorney (amidst the brakes and briars of which were then rising fast and fair the Hall and Abbey of Westminster) many a wood lay dark in the star-light, along the higher ground that sloped from the dank Strand, with its numerous canals or dykes; — and on either side of the great road into Kent: — flutes and horns sounded far and near through the green places, and laughter and song, and the crash of breaking boughs,

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As the dawn came grey up the east, arch and blooming faces bowed down to bathe in the May dew. Patient oxen stood dozing by the hedge-rows, all fragrant with blossoms, till the gay spoilers of the May came forth from the woods with lusty poles, followed by girls with laps full of flowers, which they had caught asleep. The poles were pranked with nosegays, and a chaplet was hung round the horns of every ox. Then towards day-break, the processions streamed back into the city, through all its gates ; boys with their May-gads (peeled willow wands twined with cowslips) going before ; and clear through the lively din of the horns and flutes, and amidst the moving grove of branches, choral voices, singing some early Saxon stave, precursor of the later song —

“We have brought the summer home.”

Often in the good old days before the Monx-king reigned, kings and ealdermen had thus gone forth a-maying; but these merriments, savoring of heathenesse, that good prince misliked : nevertheless the song was as blithe, and the boughs were as green, as if king and ealderman had walked in the train.

On the great Kent road, the fairest meads for the cowslip, and the greenest woods for the bough, surrounded a large building that had once belonged to some voluptuous Roman, now all defaced and despoiled ; but the boys and lasses shunned those demesnes ; and even in their mirth, as they passed homeward along the road, and saw near the ruined walls, and timbered out-buildings.

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grey Druid stones (that spoke of an age before either Saxon or Roman invader,) gleaming through the dawn — the song was hushed — the very youngest crossed themselves ; and the elder, in solemn whispers, suggested the precaution of changing the song into a psalm. For in that old building dwelt Hilda, of famous and dark repute ; Hilda, who, despite all law and canon, was still believed to practise the dismal arts of the Wicca and Morthwyrtha (the witch and worshipper of the dead). But once out of sight of those fearful precincts, the psalm was forgotten, and again broke, loud, clear, and silvery, the joyful chorus.

So, entering London about sunrise, doors and windows were duly wreathed with garlands ; and every village in the suburbs had its May-pole, which stood in its place all the year. On that happy day, labor rested ; ceorl and theowe had alike a holiday to dance, and tumble round the May-pole; and thus, on the first of May, — Youth, and Mirth, and Music, “ brought the summer home.”

The next day, you might still see where the buxom bands had been ; you might track their way by fallen flowers, and green leaves, and the deep ruts made by oxen (yoked often in teams from twenty to forty, in the wains that carried home the poles) ; and fair and frequent throughout the land, from any eminence, you might behold the hamlet swards still crowned with the May trees, and the air still seemed fragrant with their garlands.

It is on that second day of May, 1052, that my story :>pens, at the House of Hilda, the reputed Morthwyrttia

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It tood upon a gentle and verdant height; and even through all the barbarous mutilation it had undergone from barbarian hands, enough was left strikingly to contrast the ordinary abodes of the Saxon.

The remains of Roman art were indeed still numerous throughout England, but it happened rarely that the Saxon had chosen his home amidst the villas of those noble and primal conquerors. Our first forefathers were more inclined to destroy than to adapt.

By what chance this building became an exception to the ordinary rule, it is now impossible to conjecture, but from a very remote period it had sheltered successive races of Teuton lords.

The changes wrought in the edifice were mournful and grotesque. What was now the Hall, had evidently been the atrium ; the round shield, with its pointed boss, the spear, sword, and small curved saex of the early Teuton, were suspended from the columns on which once had been wreathed the flowers ; in the centre of the floor, where fragments of the old mosaic still glistened from the hardpressed paving of clay and lime, what now was the fireplace, had been the impluvium, and the smoke went sullenly through the aperture in the roof, made of old to receive the rains of heaven. Around the Hall were still left the old cubicola or dormitories (small, high, and lighted but from the doors), which now served for the sleeping-rooms of the humbler guest or the housenold servant ; while at the farther end of the Hall, the w’ide space between the columns, which had once given ample

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2\ rista from graceful awnings into tablinum and viridarium. was filled up with rude rubble and Roman bricks, leaving but a low, round, arched door, that still led into the tablinum. But that tablinum, formerly the gayest state-room of the Roman lord, was now filled with various lumber, piles of faggots, and farming utensils. On either side 01 this desecrated apartment, stretched to the right, the old lararium, stripped of its ancient images of ancestor and god ; to the left, what had been the gynoecium (women’s apartment).

One side of the ancient peristyle, which was of vast extent, was now converted into stabling, sties for swine, and stalls for oxen. On the other side was constructed a Christian chapel, made of rough oak planks, fastened by plates at the top, and with a roof of thatched reeds. The columns and wall at the extreme end of the peristyle were a mass of ruins, through the gigantic rents of which loomed a grassy hillock, its sides partially covered with clumps of furze. On this hillock were the mutilated remains of an ancient Druidical crommel, in the centre of which (near a funeral mound, or barrow, with the bautastean, or grave-stone, of some early Saxon chief at one end) had been sacrilegiously placed an altar to Thor, as was apparent both from the shape, from a rude, halfobliterated, sculptured relief of the god, with his lifted hammer, and a few Runic letters. Amidst the temple of the Briton the Saxon had reared the shrine of his triumphant war-god.

Now still, amidst the ruins of that extreme side of the

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peristyle which opened to this hillock were left, first, an ancient Roman fountain, that now served to water the swine, and next, a small sacellum, or fane to Bacchus (as relief and frieze, yet spared, betokened) : thus the eye, at one survey, beheld the shrines of four creeds ; the Druid, mystical and symbolical; the Roman, sensual, but humane ; the Teutonic, ruthless and destroying ; and, latest risen and surviving all, though as yet with but little of its gentler influence over the deeds of men, the edifice of the Faith of Peace.

Across the peristyle, theowes and swineherds passed to and fro : — in the atrium, men of a higher class, half armed, were, some drinking, some at dice, some playing with huge hounds, or caressing the hawks that stood grave and solemn on their perches.

The lararium was deserted ; the gyncecium was still, as m the Roman time, the favored apartment of the female portion of the household, and indeed bore the same name,* — and with the group there assembled we have now to do.

The appliances of the chamber showed the rank and wealth of the owner. At that period the domestic luxury of the rich was infinitely greater than has been generally supposed. The industry of the women decorated wall and furniture with needlework and hangings: and as a Thegn forfeited his rank if he lost his lands, so the higher orders of an aristocracy rather of wealth than

* “The apartment in which the Anglo-Saxon women lived, was tailed Gynecium.” — Fosbrooke, vol. ii. p. 570.

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birth, had, usually, a certain portion of superfluous riches, which served to flow towards the bazaars of the East and the nearer markets of Flanders and Saracenic Spain.

In this room the walls were draped with silken hangings richly embroidered. The single window was glazed with a dull grey glass.* On a beaufet were ranged horns tipped with silver, and a few vessels of pure gold. A small circular table in the centre was supported by symbolical monsters quaintly carved. At one side of the wall, on a long settle, some half-a-dozen handmaids were employed in spinning ; remote from them, and near the window, sat a woman advanced in years, and of a mien and aspect singularly majestic. Upon a small tripod before her was a Runic manuscript, and an inkstand of elegant form, with a silver graphium, or pen. At her feet reclined a girl somewhat about the age of sixteen, her long fair hair parted across her forehead and falling far down her shoulders. Her dress wTas a linen under tunic, with long sleeves, rising high to the throat, and without one of the modern artificial restraints of the shape, the simple belt sufficed to show the slender proportions and

* Glass, introduced about the time of Bede, was more common then in the houses of the wealthy, whether for vessels or windows, than in the much later age of the gorgeous Plantagenets. Alfred, In one of his poems, introduces glass as a familiar illustration : —

“So oft the mild sea With south wind As grey glass clear Becomes grimly troubled-"

Sharon Turner.

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delicate outline of the wearer. The color of the dresa was of the purest white, but its hems, or borders, were richly embroidered. This girl’s beauty was something marvellous. In a land proverbial for fair women, it had already obtained her the name of “the fair.” In that beauty were blended, not as yet without a struggle fomastery, the two expressions seldom united in one countenance, the soft and the noble ; indeed in the whole aspect there was the evidence of some internal struggle ; the intelligence was not yet complete ; the soul and heart were not yet united : and Edith the Christian maid dwelt in the home of Hilda the heathen prophetess. The girl’s blue eyes, rendered dark by the shade of their long lashes, were fixed intently upon the stern and troubled countenance which was bent upon her own, but bent with that abstract gaze which shows that the soul is absent from the sight. So sate Hilda, and so reclined her grandchild Edith.

“Grandma,” said the girl in. a low voice and after a long pause ; and the sound of her voice so startled the handmaids, that every spindle stopped for a moment and then plied with renewed activity ; “ Grandma, what troubles you — are you not thinking of the great Earl and his fair sons, now outlawed far over the wide seas ?”

As the girl spoke, Hilda started slightly, like one awakened from a dream; and when Edith had concluded her question, she rose slowly to the height of a statue, unbowed by her years, and far toweriug above even the ordinary standard of men ; and turning from the child,

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her eye fell upon the* row of silent maids, each at her rapid, uoiseless, stealthy work. “Ho!” said she; hev cold and haughty eye gleaming as she spoke; “yesterday, they brought home the summer — to-day, ye aid to bring home the winter. Weave well — heed well warf and w’oof; Skulda* is amongst ye, and her pale fingers guide the web ! ”

The maidens lifted not their eyes, though in every cheek the color paled at the words of the mistress. The spindles revolved, the thread shot, and again there was silence more freezing than before.

“Askest thou,” said Hilda at length, passing to the child, as if the question so long addressed to her ear had only just reached her mind; “askest thou if I thought of the Earl and his fair sous? — yea, I heard the smith welding arms on the anvii, and the hammer of the shipwright shaping strong ribs for the horses of the sea. Ere the reaper has bound his sheaves, Earl Godwin will scare the Normans in the halls of the Monk King, as the hawk scares the brood in the dove-cot. Weave well, heed well warf and woof, nimble maidens — strong be the texture, for biting is the worm.”