VI. THE DANISH KINGS IN ENGLAND.[818] 1017–1042

VI. THE DANISH KINGS IN ENGLAND.[818] 1017–1042

I have thought it right to narrate the course of events by which the Danish power was established in England at nearly as great detail as I purpose to narrate the central events of my history. The Danish and Norman Conquests are so closely connected with one another as cause and effect that the history of the one is an essential part of the history of the other. I now come to a period of nineteen [Sidenote: Character of the reign of Cnut.] years of a widely different character. The reign of Cnut[819] was, as regards the isle of Britain, almost a repetition of the reign of Eadgar. Within the realm of England itself we do not hear of a single disturbance. And the forces of England had now but seldom to be employed against Celtic enemies within her own island. One Scottish invasion of England, one English invasion of Wales, make up nearly the whole of the warfare of this reign within our own seas. There was indeed warfare enough elsewhere, warfare in which Englishmen had their share. But the details of Cnut’s wars in the Scandinavian North are often not a little doubtful, and, even if they were far better ascertained, they would not call for any minute attention at the hands of an historian either of England or of Normandy. After Cnut’s power was once fully established in England, we have next to no purely English events to record. Still there are few periods of our history which call for more attentive study. We have to contemplate the wonderful character of the man himself, his almost unparalleled position, the general nature of his government and policy. A few particular events which directly connect English and Norman history will also need a special examination. Of one event, more important than all in its results, no man could discern the importance at the moment. While [Sidenote: 1027 or 1028.] Cnut sat on the throne of England, William the Bastard first saw the light at Falaise.

[Sidenote: Character of the reigns of the sons of Cnut.]

The remainder of the period contained in this Chapter, taking in the reigns of the two sons of Cnut, is of a different character. The reigns of those two worthless youths were short and troubled, and the accounts which we find in our best authorities are singularly contradictory. But the seven years between the death of Cnut and the election of Eadward are highly important in many ways. Several men who were to play the most important part in the times immediately following, men formed under Cnut, but who, while he lived, were overshadowed by their sovereign, now come forth into full prominence. Foremost among them all is the renowned name of Godwine, Earl of the West-Saxons. These reigns also prepared the way for the Norman Conquest in a most remarkable, though an indirect manner. The great scheme of Cnut, the establishment of an Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, fell to pieces after his death through the divisions and misgovernment of his sons. Harold and Harthacnut disgusted Englishmen with Danish rule, and led them to fall back on one of their own countrymen as their King. But the English King thus chosen proved to be, for all practical purposes, a Frenchman, and his French tendencies directly paved the way for the coming of William. Now it is not likely that any power whatever could have permanently kept all Cnut’s crowns upon the same head. But had his sons been at all worthy of him, a powerful dynasty, perhaps none the less English in feeling because Danish in blood, might well have been established in England. Under such a dynasty it is still possible that England might have been conquered in the open field. But it is quite impossible that the path of the Conqueror should have been made ready for him in the way that it actually was by the weakness of Eadward and the intrigues of the foreign favourites with whom he surrounded himself.

§ 1. The Reign of Cnut in England. 1017–1035.

[Sidenote: Cnut’s position at Eadmund’s death.]

The death of Eadmund left Cnut without a rival.[820] He had already been twice chosen to the English crown; once by the voice of the Danish host on the death of his father [Sidenote: February, 1014.] Swegen,[821] and a second time, more regularly, by the vote [Sidenote: April, 1016.] of the majority of the English Witan after the death of Æthelred.[822] He was also most likely entitled by the Treaty of Olney to succeed to the dominions of Eadmund. He was in actual possession of the larger half of the kingdom. But Cnut, if valiant, was also wary; it might be too much, especially at this stage of his life, to attribute to him any actual shrinking from bloodshed; but he at least fully understood the value of constitutional forms, and he had no wish to resort to violence when his purpose could be better accomplished by peaceful means. He was determined to be King of all England;[823] he was equally determined not to parade the right of conquest offensively before the eyes of his new subjects, but to rest his claim to the crown on an authority which no man [Sidenote: Witenagemót of London. Christmas, 1016–1017.] could gainsay. He accordingly assembled the Witan of all England in London,[824] no doubt at the usual Midwinter festival. Before this assembly the King of the Mercians [Sidenote: Cnut claims the crown by virtue of the Treaty of Olney.] and Northumbrians[825] set forth his claim to the kingdom of Wessex and East-Anglia, as the designated successor of Eadmund according to the Treaty of Olney. The danger lay from a possible competition, not so much on the part of the infant children of Eadmund as on that of his [Sidenote: Testimony of the witnesses to the treaty.] brothers.[826] The witnesses of the Olney compact were brought forward and questioned by Cnut. They affirmed that no portion of the kingdom had ever been assigned to the brothers of Eadmund; those princes had received no portion during his life, and they were entitled to no right or preference at his death. As for his sons, Cnut, the adopted brother of Eadmund, had been named by him as [Sidenote: Cnut chosen King of all England. January, 1017.] their guardian during their minority.[827] Cnut was then formally acknowledged as King of all England, his recognition, it would seem, being accompanied by a formal exclusion of the brothers and sons of Eadmund.[828] How far the electors acted under constraint, we know not; but it is certain that no act was ever more regular in point of form, and in no recorded transaction do the popular principles of the ancient English constitution stand forth more clearly. The usual compact[829] between King and people was gone through, with a further mutual promise on the part of Danes and English to forget all old grudges. Money was, as a matter of course, to be paid to the Danish army. The new King was crowned, no doubt in Saint Paul’s minster, by Archbishop Lyfing.[830] Measures [Sidenote: Outlawry of the two Eadwigs.] for the security of the new dynasty were taken. With regard to the Ætheling Eadwig, who is described as a prince of high character and the object of universal esteem, the jealousy of Cnut was not satisfied with his exclusion from the crown. A decree of outlawry was passed against him, as also against another Eadwig, who is unknown to us, except that he bears the strange title of King of the Churls.[831] This last Eadwig is said to have made his peace [Sidenote: Murder of the Ætheling Eadwig.] with the King; but Eadwig the Ætheling—so at least the rumour of the time said—was treacherously murdered by Cnut’s order before the year was out.

In this important Gemót a division of England was made which shows how thoroughly at home the new King [Sidenote: Cnut’s preference for England,] already felt in his new kingdom. It is clear from the whole course of Cnut’s reign that of all his dominions England was that which he most prized. In the midst of his most brilliant victories England was always his favourite dwelling-place, better loved than his native Denmark, better loved than any of the other lands which he brought under his power. In the roll-call of his titles England held the first place. England was his home; she was, as it were, the love of his youth; her crown was the prize which he had won with his own right hand, when he had as yet neither inherited the ancestral kingship of Denmark nor spread his dominion over Norwegians, Swedes, and [Sidenote: and for the Saxon part of England.] Wends. And he not only made himself at home in England; he made himself specially at home in the purely Saxon part of England. Already King of the Northumbrians and Mercians, it would not have been wonderful if he had fixed the seat of his rule in his own half-Danish realm, and had dealt with East-Anglia and the Saxon shires as conquered dependencies. And we may conceive that the future history of England might have been different in many ways, if York had been permanently established by Cnut as the capital of the kingdom. But Cnut, when once chosen King by the Witan of all England, was determined to fill in everything the place of the Kings of the English who had been before him. Those Kings were primarily Kings of the West-Saxons; the other English kingdoms were dependencies of the West-Saxon state. They had gradually been more or less closely incorporated with the dominant realm, but they still remained distinct governments, each with its own Ealdorman and its own Gemót. This form of administration was continued, and was more definitely [Sidenote: His fourfold division of the kingdom.] organized by Cnut. England was divided into four great governments, answering to the four most powerful and permanent among the seven ancient kingdoms.[832] For his [Sidenote: He retains Wessex in his own hands, and appoints Earls over Northumberland, Mercia,] own immediate share he kept, not Northumberland or Mercia, but Wessex, the cradle of the royal house which he had supplanted. Over the others he appointed Earls, a title which now throughout the kingdom displaces the more ancient name of Ealdormen.[833] Thurkill obtained or [Sidenote: and East-Anglia. January, 1017.] kept East-Anglia. Eric the King’s brother-in-law was confirmed in, or restored to, the government of Northumberland, with which he had been invested a year before.[834] Eadric, as the reward of his treasons and murders, was again appointed to his old earldom of Mercia. But the signatures to the charters show that the title of Earl was by no means confined to these three great [Sidenote: Other Earls.] viceroys. As before with the title of Ealdorman, so now its equivalent Earl was the title borne alike by the governor of an ancient kingdom and by the subordinate governor of one or more shires.[835] We can trace the names of several such Earls, both English and Danish, [Sidenote: First appearance of Earl GODWINE.] through the charters of Cnut’s reign. And among them we see, as filling a marked and special position, the name of one who was presently to become the first man in the English Empire—one who rose to power by the favour of strangers, only to become the champion of our land against strangers of every race—one who, never himself a King, was to be the maker, the kinsman, the father of Kings. From an early stage of the reign of Cnut we see a high and special place among the great men of the realm filled by the deathless name of Godwine the son of Wulfnoth.

We feel that we are at last drawing near to the real centre of our history when we bring in the name of the great champion of England against Norman influence, the father of the King who died as her champion against Norman invasion. The sudden and mysterious rise of this great man is one of the most striking features of our history, and his origin is perhaps the most obscure and difficult question of all the obscure and difficult questions [Sidenote: Sudden promotion of Godwine by Cnut.] which our history presents. With no certain explanation of so singular a promotion, we find, from the very beginning of the reign of Cnut, Godwine, an Englishman, whose parentage and whose rank by birth are utterly doubtful, holding high office under the Danish monarch, honoured with a connexion by marriage with the royal house, and before long distinctly marked out as the first [Sidenote: Different statements as to Godwine’s origin.] subject in the realm. One account makes him a kinsman of the traitor Eadric; another makes him the son of a churl, seemingly on the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, who won the favour of the Danish Earl Ulf by incidental services done to him after the battle of Sherstone.[836] But, whatever was his origin, it is clear that his advancement was one of the first acts of the reign of Cnut. [Sidenote: Godwine wins Cnut’s favour, and is raised to the rank of Earl. [Before 1018.]] Among the foremost men of his newly won kingdom, Godwine recommended himself to the discerning conqueror by his valour in war, his prudence in counsel, his diligence in business, his eloquence in speech, his agreeable discourse and equable temper.[837] I infer that Godwine had distinguished himself in the war on the side of Eadmund, but that he was early in offering his allegiance to the conqueror.[838] The rank of Earl—with what jurisdiction we know not—was the reward of these merits. We find him holding that dignity in the second year of Cnut’s reign,[839] and it is not unlikely to have been conferred upon him in the very Gemót of which we have just been speaking. He became a personal favourite with the King, high in his confidence, and he soon rose to greater power and dignity still.

[Sidenote: Cnut’s marriage with Ælfgifu-Emma.]

Cnut’s power now seemed firmly established; at the same time he thought it expedient to resort to more than one means of strengthening it. In the month of [Sidenote: July, 1017.] July in this year he contracted a marriage which is one of the most singular on record. The widow of Æthelred, Ælfgifu-Emma, was asked to share the English throne a second time. Nothing loth, she came over from Normandy, married the new King, and took up her old position as Lady of the English.[840] Fifteen years before, she had in her youth crossed the sea on the same errand; now, a mature widow, she gave herself to a man who was much younger than herself, who had overturned the throne of her first husband, and had driven her children [Sidenote: Motives for the marriage.] into banishment. Cnut’s motives for this singular marriage are not very clear, unless, as one historian suggests, it was part of his system of reconciliation. He wished, we are told, to win the hearts of the English, and to make as little change as possible in the appearance of the English court, by putting again in her old place a Lady to whom they were accustomed.[841] But this would seem to imply that Emma enjoyed a popularity among the English, which the foreign woman, the cause of so many evils, was not likely to have won. If a connexion with the ducal house of Normandy was all that Cnut aimed at, a marriage with one of Duke Richard’s daughters would have seemed a more natural alliance for the young conqueror than a marriage with their dowager aunt. But it is possible, after all, that personal preference may really have led to this strange match. There is some slight reason to think that Cnut and Emma may have met for the purposes of negotiation during the siege of London.[842] And Emma, though much older than Cnut, may still have kept much of the beauty which won her the title of the Gem of the Normans.[843] The marriage was, after all, less strange than one which had scandalized the West-Frankish court two generations earlier. Eadgifu, the daughter of Eadward, the sister of Æthelstan, the widow of Charles, the mother of Lewis, had, when already [Sidenote: 951.] a grandmother of some standing, eloped with the young and handsome Count Herbert, and had bestowed two half-brothers on her royal son.[844] At any rate, whatever may have been Cnut’s motive in his marriage with the royal widow, it is certain that at the time of his forming this more exalted connexion he was, like so many of the Norman Dukes, already hampered by an earlier connexion of that doubtful kind of which I have often spoken.[845] [Sidenote: Cnut’s relations with Ælfgifu of Northampton.] Cnut had already taken as his concubine or Danish wife, Ælfgifu of Northampton, the daughter of Ælfhelm the murdered Earl of the Northumbrians. By her Cnut believed himself to be the father of two sons, Harold and Swegen, who after his death succeeded to two of his kingdoms. But scandal affirmed that neither of them was really of kingly birth. The barren Ælfgifu successively passed off on her confiding husband or lover two children whom she affirmed to be their common offspring, but of whom Swegen was in truth the son of a priest and Harold the son of a shoemaker. Ælfgifu was certainly living at the time of Cnut’s marriage with her namesake; whether either of her supposed sons was born after that date is not so clear. But it was doubtless the existence of one or other of these children which made Emma stipulate, as she is said to have done, that the throne should pass to Cnut’s children by her, to the exclusion of those by any other wife. The King agreed, no doubt only so far as he constitutionally could; the marriage took place, and was blessed with the births of Harthacnut and Gunhild. Emma seems to have utterly forgotten, not only the memory of Æthelred, but the existence of her children by him; her whole love was transferred to the young Danish King and to the children whom she bore to him.

The marriages of Emma would seem to have needed a bloodbath as their necessary attendant. Her bridal with Æthelred was almost immediately followed by the great massacre of the Danes;[846] her second bridal with Cnut was followed in the like sort, if not by an actual massacre, yet by a considerable slaughter of Englishmen who were felt to be dangerous to the Danish monarch. The whole course of the year was marked by executions [Sidenote: Fate of the children of Æthelred.] and banishments. The Ætheling Eadwig, the most dangerous of Cnut’s possible competitors, was removed as we have seen.[847] The rumour of his assassination at least implies that he died during the year in some way or other. Of the other sons of Æthelred’s first marriage we can give no account, except of those who seem to have been already dead. His children by Emma were safe in Normandy, and they did not come back to England with their mother. The romantic marriage of Eadmund Ironside with Ealdgyth the widow of Sigeferth[848] had given him two sons, Eadmund and Eadward, who were of course mere babes, and who, from the date of their [Sidenote: The sons of Eadmund sent to Sweden, and thence to Hungary.] mother’s marriage, would seem to have been twins. These children were now sent out of the kingdom. The scandal of the time affirmed that Eadric, the common author of all evil, counselled their death.[849] Cnut shrank from the shame of slaying them in England; but—according to one version, by the advice of Emma[850]—he sought means to have them put out of the way in some distant land. His half-brother, Olaf or James, the son of his mother Sigrid,[851] now reigned over Sweden. To him he sent the babes, begging him to put them to death. The Swede, a zealous propagator of Christianity in his own dominions,[852] abhorred the crime, but stood in fear of his brother’s power. He therefore sent the children to the King of the Hungarians, the sainted Stephen,[853] to be saved alive and brought up. Both lived, and one will appear again in our history, to become the source through which the old kingly blood of Wessex found its way into the veins of the later rulers of England and Scotland.

[Sidenote: Executions at the Christmas Gemót of 1017–1018.]

The Ætheling Eadwig, whatever was his end, clearly did not die by any judicial sentence. But the Christmas Gemót of this year, held in London,[854] was marked by the deaths of several men of high rank, some of whom at least, whatever may have been their guilt or innocence, seem to have died in a more regular way by the hand of the executioner. These were Æthelweard, the son of Æthelmær distinguished as the Great;[855] Brihtric, the son of Ælfheah of Devonshire, and Northman, the son of the Ealdorman Leofwine. This last name introduces us to a family which was to play a most important part in the times immediately before and immediately after the Norman Conquest.[856] Of Leofwine personally we know nothing; the fate of his son Northman is in one of our accounts specially connected with the fate of Eadric.[857] One thing is plain, that Northman’s offence, whatever it was, was something wholly personal to himself and in no way touched the rest of his family.[858] This fact, together with the advancement of Godwine, should be carefully borne in mind. Whatever was the justice or injustice of these executions,[859] they were at least no part of any deliberate plan for exterminating the English nobility and substituting Danes in their place.[860] We shall soon see that the policy of Cnut led him to an exactly opposite course.

[Sidenote: Treatment of the sons-in-law of Æthelred.]

The new King however kept a careful eye on all who were in any way connected with the English royal family. The sons-in-law of Æthelred seem to have awakened the suspicions of Cnut almost as strongly as his sons. Of the daughters of Æthelred three were certainly married, to Eadric, to Uhtred, and to an unknown Æthelstan.[861] A fourth is said to have been the wife of Ulfcytel, and to have passed with his East-Anglian government to the Dane Thurkill. All these men were gradually got rid of by death or banishment. Æthelstan and Ulfcytel had had the good luck to die in open battle. We have already seen how easily Cnut was led to consent to the death of [Sidenote: Thurkill banished. 1021.] Uhtred,[862] and we shall presently see Thurkill himself, to whom Cnut in a great measure owed his crown, driven [Sidenote: Eadric put to death. Christmas, 1017.] into banishment. The remaining son-in-law of Æthelred, the infamous Eadric, met the reward of all his crimes in this same Christmas Gemót. So short a time had he enjoyed the dignity which he had kept or recovered by so many treasons. That he was put to death at this time is certain, but that is nearly all that can be said. The renown, or rather infamy, of his name drew special attention to his end, and the retributive justice which lighted on the traitor became a favourite subject of romance.[863] [Sidenote: Motives for his execution.] The immediate cause or pretext of his death can hardly be ascertained; but the feelings of Cnut towards him may easily be guessed. Eadric, notwithstanding all his crimes, was an Englishman of the highest rank; in the absence of available male heirs, his marriage made him in some sort the nearest representative of the royal house; the very success of his repeated crimes shows that he must, somehow or other, have obtained the lead of a considerable party. In all these characters he was dangerous; Cnut must have felt that a man who had so often betrayed his former masters would have as little scruple about betraying him;[864] he could hardly avoid confirming him in his earldom in the assembly of the former winter, but he had doubtless already made up his mind to seize on the first opportunity to destroy him. We may believe that Cnut, as we are told in most versions of the story, gave himself out as the avenger of his adopted brother; but the removal of the arch-traitor was a step which prudence, as prudence was understood by Cnut at that stage of his reign, called for fully as much as justice.

[Sidenote: Character and influence of Eadric.]

The character and career of Eadric, like those of Ælfric, his predecessor in office and in crime,[865] form one of the standing puzzles of history. It is hard to understand the motives for such constant and repeated treasons on the part of one who had, solely by royal favour, risen from nothing to the highest rank in the state. It is equally difficult to understand by what sort of fascination he could have found the means either to work his treasons or to blind the eyes of those who suffered by them. That both his crimes and his influence have been much exaggerated is highly probable. It is likely enough that he has been made the scape-goat for many of the sins both of other individuals and of the whole nation. A tendency of this kind to lay all blame upon some one man is not uncommon. Thus in our Norman history we have seen all the mischief that happened attributed at one time to Arnulf of Flanders, and at another to Theobald of Chartres.[866] But exaggeration of this kind must have had some substantial ground to go upon. Without necessarily believing that Eadric personally wrought all the countless and inexplicable treasons which are laid to his charge, it is impossible to doubt that he knew how to exercise an extraordinary influence over men’s minds, and that that [Sidenote: Two classes of treasons ascribed to Eadric.] influence was always exerted for evil. It may be observed that the crimes attributed to him fall into two classes. His treasons on the field of battle, at Sherstone and at Assandun, were wrought openly in the sight of two armies, and, asserted as they are by contemporary writers, we [Sidenote: Difference in the credibility of the two kinds of charges.] cannot do otherwise than accept them. But there is another class of charges which do not rest on the same firm ground. Such are his supposed share in the deaths of Eadmund and Eadwig, his advice to destroy the children of Eadmund, and other cases where his counsel is said to have led to various crimes and mischiefs, or to have thwarted the accomplishment of wise and manly purposes. Some of these charges are not found in our best authorities, and, of those which are, some may well be merely the surmises of the time, going on the general principle that, whenever any mischief was done, Eadric must needs be the doer of it. The annalists could not well be mistaken as to Eadric’s conduct on the field of Assandun; they might easily be mistaken as to any particular piece of advice said to have been given by him to Æthelred, to Eadmund, or to Cnut. In these last cases their statements prove little more than the universal belief that Eadric was capable of every wickedness. But that universal belief, though it proves little as to this or that particular action, proves everything as to Eadric’s general character. After making every needful deduction, enough is left, not only to brand the name of Eadric with infamy, but to brand it with infamy of a peculiar kind, which holds him up as a remarkable study of human character as well for the philosopher as for the historian. We have much more both of crime and of sorrow to go through in the course of our history; it is at least some comfort that no sinner of the peculiar type of Eadric will occur again.

[Sidenote: Leofwine succeeds Eadric in Mercia. Christmas, 1017.]

By the death of Eadric his earldom of Mercia became vacant. It was most likely conferred on Leofwine, the father of the slain Northman, who had seemingly hitherto held the ealdormanship of the Hwiccas under the superior rule of Eadric.[867] And an earldom held by Northman, perhaps that of Chester, is said to have been conferred on his brother Leofric, who some years later succeeded his father in the government of all Mercia.

The next year we hear that a fleet of thirty pirate ships, seemingly coming to attack England, was cut off by Cnut. Thus, as a contemporary writer says, he who had once been the destroyer of the land had now become its [Sidenote: Payment of Danegeld. 1018.] defender.[868] In the same year a heavy Danegeld was paid, doubtless that which had been agreed upon in the treaty between Cnut and Eadmund at Olney.[869] London paid ten thousand five hundred[870] pounds, and the rest of England paid seventy-two thousand. This is something like a measure of the position which the great merchant city [Sidenote: Cnut dismisses the greater part of his fleet.] held in the kingdom. Cnut was thus able to satisfy the claims of his fleet, and he now kept only forty ships in his pay, sending the rest back to Denmark. The crews of these ships seem to have been the germ of the famous force of the Thingmen or Housecarls, of whom, and of the peculiar legislation which affected them, I shall presently have [Sidenote: Witenagemót of Oxford. 1018.] much to say. This same year a Witenagemót was held, which marks an æra in the reign of Cnut, and which may be looked upon as the winding up of the severities which almost necessarily followed upon the conquest. A large body of the chief men of both nations, Danish and English, assembled at Oxford, the town where a like assembly, [Sidenote: 1015.] three years before, had been dishonoured by the murder [Sidenote: Renewal of “Eadgar’s Law.”] of Sigeferth and Morkere.[871] Danes and English alike united in a decree for the observance of the laws of King Eadgar.[872] This is the first time that we have met with this formula in England, though we have already come across it in Norman history, when Cnut’s grandfather [Sidenote: Import of the phrase.] Harold is said to have restored the laws of Rolf.[873] It has here the same meaning which it has in earlier and in later examples. The renewal of the laws of Eadgar has the same meaning as the renewal of the laws of Rolf after the expulsion of the French from Normandy, as the renewal of the laws of Cnut after the expulsion of Tostig from Northumberland, as the often promised and often evaded renewal of the laws of Eadward in the days of the Norman Kings of England. It does not always imply that the princes spoken of were specially looked on as lawgivers. Eadgar and Cnut had undoubtedly some claim to that title, but we know not that Rolf had any, and Eadward certainly had none. But the demand does not refer to codes of law issued, or believed to be issued, by any of these princes. The cry is really, as an ancient writer explains it,[874] not for the laws which such a King enacted, but for the laws which such a King observed. It is in fact a demand for good government in a time of past or expected oppression or maladministration. It is, as in this case, a demand that a foreign King should take the best of his native predecessors as his model. The name of the last King who left behind him a name for just and mild government is taken as the embodiment of all just and mild government. The people in effect demand, and the King in effect promises, that his government shall be as good as that of the popular hero whose name is put forward. Now, with a foreign conqueror for their King, with the ancient kingly house cut down to a few exiled children, with the flower of the ancient nobility cut off in the carnage of Assandun, Englishmen looked back with yearning to the days of their native rulers. The reign of Æthelred was a time which the national memory would be [Sidenote: The memory of Eadgar acceptable both to the English and to the Danes.] glad to deal with as a blank. English imagination leaped back to the glorious and happy days of the peaceful Basileus, when Englishmen beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, when the mountains brought peace and the little hills righteousness, when the Lord of Wessex could boast that, within the four seas of Britain, all Kings fell down before him and all nations did him service. And the name of Eadgar was one which would be hardly less acceptable to the Danes than to the English themselves. When their King was more and more throwing off the feelings of a conqueror, when he was more and more closely making himself at one with the realm which he had won, when the Earls and Thegns of the conquered land stood around his throne on a perfect level with the proudest of their conquerors, when the mass of the victorious army had just been sent away to their own homes, the Danish followers of Cnut might well tremble, not only for their supremacy over the vanquished English, but almost for their equality with them. To them the name of Eadgar may well have represented a prince who was raised to the throne in a great measure by Danish swords, who, while he defended his island against Danish invasions, did full justice to the Dane within his own realm, who guaranteed to his Danish subjects every right that they could desire, and whose fondness for them, among other strangers, was the only fault with which Englishmen could reproach him.[875] Danes and Englishmen therefore joined in looking back to Eadgar as the ideal of kingship, and in demanding of their common sovereign that he should take that incomparable[876] example as the model of his government. Men of both nations looked back to the happy days of Eadgar, as in after days the Northumbrians, groaning under the tyranny of Tostig, looked back to the happy days of Cnut himself [Sidenote: Contrast between Cnut and the Norman Kings.] and demanded the renewal of his law. They looked back to them, as Englishmen under the Norman yoke looked back to the happy days of Eadward, and put forth the vain demand that their foreign lords should rule them, not merely according to the same formal enactments, but in the same spirit of justice and mercy in which the royal saint was held to have ruled. That prayer was not, and could not be, granted, till the swords of Robert Fitzwalter and Simon of Montfort had won back for us more than the laws of Eadward in another shape. The great Dane was more happily placed. With him the renewal of the ancient laws was neither an empty nor an impossible promise. If by renewing the laws of Eadgar was meant the establishment of a rule as strong and as just and as safe against foreign invasion as that of Eadgar, King Cnut fully kept his word.[877]

Cnut had now been absent from his native country for five years. He had stayed in England ever since his return [Sidenote: 1014–5.] thither after he had been driven out by the solitary military exploit of King Æthelred the Unready.[878] It was clearly his intention to make England the seat of his empire,[879] but as he was now, by the death or deposition of his brother Harold, sovereign of Denmark,[880] and as [Sidenote: Cnut visits Denmark. 1019.] England was perfectly quiet and reconciled to his government, he deemed it expedient to pay a visit to the land of [Sidenote: He is accompanied by Godwine, who is said to have distinguished] his birth.[881] He took with him Godwine, whose conduct in this foreign journey, perhaps in one of Cnut’s northern wars, procured him a still higher degree of his sovereign’s esteem.[882] According to one account, it was by a gallant [Sidenote: himself in a Wendish war.] action in an expedition against the Wends that the English Earl gained Cnut’s special favour. An English contingent under Godwine’s command served in the Danish army. The two armies lay near together, and a battle was expected the next day. Godwine, without the King’s knowledge, attacked the enemy by night at the head of his countrymen, routed them utterly, and occupied their camp. In the morning Cnut missed the English portion of his army, and hastily inferred that they had deserted, or even gone over to the enemy. He marched however to the Wendish camp, and there, to his surprise, found Godwine and the English in possession, and nothing left of the Wends but their dead bodies and their spoil. This exploit, we are told, greatly raised both Godwine and the English in general in the opinion of Cnut. The tale has a mythical sound; but, whatever may be the truth or falsehood of its details, that Godwine rose still higher from the time of this Danish expedition is beyond doubt. Cnut [Sidenote: Godwine marries Gytha, sister of Earl Ulf.] now admitted him to his most secret counsels, and gave him in marriage Gytha, the sister of the Danish Earl Ulf, the husband of his own sister Estrith. This Ulf, the son of Thurgils Sprakaleg, is one of the most famous characters in the Danish history or romance of the time. Like some other heroes of the North, his parentage was not wholly human. The father of Thurgils, Biorn, was the offspring of a bear, who carried off a human damsel.[883] Ulf himself is said to have served in Cnut’s English wars, and according to one version, it was to him that Godwine owed his earliest introduction to Cnut.[884] But in English history he plays hardly any part.[885] His marriage we shall have to speak of again as one of the events which connect England and Denmark and Normandy; but his real or imaginary exploits and treasons,[886] and his death by order of his brother-in-law, belong wholly to [Sidenote: Her long and chequered life.] Scandinavian history. But his sister Gytha, the wife of the greatest of living Englishmen, became thoroughly naturalized in England. She shared the momentary banishment of her husband in the days of Norman intrigue, and she lived to undergo an eternal banishment in the days of Norman dominion. No mother was ever surrounded by a fairer or more hopeful offspring; none ever underwent a longer series of hopeless bereavements. She saw a nephew on the throne of Denmark, a daughter and a son on the throne of England. She saw her other children and kinsfolk ruling as princes in England and allying themselves with princes in foreign lands. But she also saw her brother cut off by the hand of his kinsman and sovereign; she saw one son stained with the blood of a cousin, and another son stained with treason against his house and country. Of her remaining sons she saw three cut off in one day by the most glorious of deaths, while the sole survivor dragged on his weary days in a Norman prison. No tale of Grecian tragedy ever set forth a sadder and more striking record of human vicissitudes, of brighter hopes in youth, of more utter desolation in old age, than the long and chequered life of her whom our notices are at least enough to set her before us as a wife worthy of Godwine, a mother worthy of Harold.

[Sidenote: Cnut returns to England.]

The next year Cnut came back to England as his real home and abiding-place, the seat of his Anglo-Scandinavian Empire. At Easter a Witenagemót was held at Cirencester, at which took place the last recorded instance of [Sidenote: Witenagemót at Cirencester. April, 1020.] severity on Cnut’s part towards any Englishman. An [Sidenote: Æthelweard banished.] Ealdorman Æthelweard—which, among all the bearers of that name, we can only guess—was banished.[887] But it must have been at this same Gemót that an appointment was made which showed how thoroughly at home the stranger King had made himself in his new country. The last banishment of an Englishman by the Danish conqueror was accompanied by the exaltation of another Englishman to a place in the realm second only to kingship. [Sidenote: Godwine appointed Earl of the West-Saxons. [1020–1052.]] It was now that Godwine received a title and office which no man had borne before him, but which, saving the few months of his banishment, he bore for the thirty-two remaining years of his life, the title and office of Earl of the West-Saxons.[888] Cnut, it will be remembered, in his fourfold division of the kingdom, while he appointed Earls over Northumberland, Mercia, and East-Anglia, kept Wessex under his own immediate government. He was now already King of two kingdoms, and he had no doubt by this time began to meditate a further extension [Sidenote: Nature and import of the office.] of his dominion in the North. He found, it would seem, that the King of all England and all Denmark needed a tried helper in the administration of his most cherished possession, and a representative when his presence was needed in other parts of his dominions. Wessex then, the ancient hearth and home of English kingship, now for the first time received an immediate ruler of a rank inferior to that of King. Godwine became the first, and his son Harold was the second and last, of the Earls of the West-Saxons. To reduce the ancient kingdom to an earldom was not, as has been sometimes imagined, any badge of the insolence of a conqueror; the act was in no way analogous to the change of Northumberland from a kingdom to an earldom under Eadred. The case is simply that the King of all England and all Denmark, King in a special manner of the old West-Saxon realm, found the need of a special counsellor, and in absence of a viceroy, even in this his chosen and immediate dominion. No man of the kindred or nation of the conqueror, but Godwine, the native Englishman, was found worthy of this new and exalted post. Through the whole remainder of the reign of Cnut, the great Earl of the West-Saxons ruled in uninterrupted honour and influence. The wealth which he acquired, mainly, it may be supposed, by royal grant, was enormous. His possessions extended into nearly every shire of the south and centre of England. Whether the son of the churl or the great-nephew of the traitor, he was now, three years after the completion of the Danish Conquest, beyond all doubt the first subject in the realm.

[Sidenote: Consecration of the church on Assandun. 1020.]

The year of Cnut’s return and of Godwine’s great promotion beheld the King engaged in a remarkable solemnity on the spot which had witnessed his last battle, his only distinct victory, in his great struggle with English Eadmund. On the hill of Assandun, Cnut, in partnership with Thurkill, at once as Earl of the district and as his chief comrade in the battle, had reared a church, which was consecrated, in the presence of the King and the Earl, by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, and several other bishops. That the ceremony was performed by the Northern Metropolitan was probably owing to a vacancy in the see of Canterbury. Lyfing, who had crowned Cnut, died in the course of the year, and was succeeded by Æthelnoth the Good,[889] who had baptized or confirmed him.[890] The ceremony at Assandun doubtless took place between these two events. In Essex, a region rich in woods, but poor in good building stone, timber was largely used both in ecclesiastical and in domestic buildings for ages after this time. Cnut however employed the rarer material, and the fact that his church was built of stone and lime was looked on as something worthy of distinct record.[891] The stone church of Assandun was something remarkable in Essex, exactly as the wooden church of Glastonbury[892] was something remarkable in Somerset. But the building was small and mean, at least as compared with the stately pile which the next conqueror of England reared in memory of his victory. The foundation of Cnut and Thurkill, for a single priest,[893] was poor and scanty, compared with the lordly Abbey of Saint Martin of the Place of Battle.[894] But the minster of Battle simply spoke of the subjugation of a land by a foreign conqueror; the minster of Assandun told a nobler tale. It was reared as the hallowing of his victory, as the atonement for his earlier crimes, by a prince who, conqueror as he was, had learned to love the land which he had conquered, to feel himself one with its people, and to reign after the pattern of its noblest princes. The Abbot of Battle and his monks were strangers, brought from a foreign land to fatten on the [Sidenote: First appearance of STIGAND, [Priest of Assandun, 1020; Bishop of Elmham, 1044; of Winchester, 1047; Archbishop of Canterbury, 1052].] spoils of England.[895] The single priest of Assandun lived to show himself one of the stoutest of Englishmen. Stigand, the first priest of Cnut’s new minster, now the friend and chaplain of the Danish conqueror, in after years displaced a Norman intruder on the throne of Augustine, and was himself hurled therefrom at the bidding of a Norman King.[896]

The consecration on Assandun might pass as the formal act of reconciliation between the Danish King and his [Sidenote: Later years of Cnut. 1020–1035.] English subjects. From that day the internal history of England, for the remaining fifteen years of the reign of Cnut, becomes a blank. We now hear only of the King’s wars abroad, of his acts of piety at home, of several instances in which his hand was heavy upon his own countrymen; but, after the outlawry of Æthelweard, we find no record of the death or banishment of a single [Sidenote: Danes make way for Englishmen.] Englishman. In fact these years form a time of the gradual substitution of Englishmen for Danes in the highest offices, while no doubt Danes of lower degree were, like their sovereign, fast changing themselves into Englishmen. Nearly all the Danish holders of earldoms whom we find at the beginning of Cnut’s reign vanish [Sidenote: Thurkill banished from England. November, 1021.] one by one. Of the outlawry of the two greatest of their number we find distinct accounts. The year after the ceremony at Assandun, Thurkill, the co-founder with the King, who, in the account of their joint work, appears almost as the King’s peer, was driven into banishment.[897] With him his English wife Eadgyth had to leave her country; if she was the daughter of Æthelred, and the widow of either Ulfcytel or Eadric,[898] we are almost driven to infer that the marriage was contracted after the consecration on Assandun, that the connexion with the ancient royal family awakened Cnut’s jealousy, and was in fact the cause of Thurkill’s banishment. One cannot help feeling a certain interest in the fate of one who had so long played an important and, on the whole, not a dishonourable, part in English history. The savage pirate gradually changed into the civilized warrior; if at one time he was the enemy, he was at another the defender, of England. The heathen who had striven to save a Christian martyr from his persecutors had developed the good seed within him till he grew into a founder and restorer of Christian churches. With the banishment which I have just recorded the history of Thurkill, as far as England is concerned, comes to an end. But his banishment was merely local; he was held to be dangerous in England, and he was therefore removed from the country, but his removal was little more than an honourable ostracism. He kept, or soon won back, his sovereign’s favour; there is no evidence that he ever came back to England; but two years later he was formally [Sidenote: Thurkill made Viceroy of Denmark. 1023.] reconciled to Cnut; he was established as his viceroy in Denmark, seemingly as guardian to one of the King’s sons who was meant to succeed him in that kingdom.[899] The only sign of suspicion shown on Cnut’s part was his bringing back the son of Thurkill with him to England, [Sidenote: Eric banished. 1023?] evidently as a hostage. Eric also, the Danish Earl of the Northumbrians, was banished a few years later than Thurkill, on what occasion, and at what exact time, is [Sidenote: Hakon banished. 1029.] unknown.[900] Somewhat later again we find the banishment of Eric’s son Hakon, “the doughty Earl.” Hakon was doubly the King’s nephew, as the son of his sister and as the husband of his niece Gunhild, the daughter of another sister and of Wyrtgeorn King of the Wends.[901] We have no details, but we are told that Cnut feared to be deprived by him of his life or kingdom.[902] Hakon seems however not to have been formally outlawed, but to have been merely sent away to fill the post which his father had held as viceroy in Norway.[903] This fact, coupled with Thurkill’s similar viceroyalty in Denmark, shows that Cnut could trust men in other countries whom he thought [Sidenote: His death. 1030.] dangerous in England. The year after his removal from England Hakon died at sea, or, according to another account, was killed in Orkney.[904] His widow seems to have stayed in England; she married another Danish [Sidenote: 1046.] Earl, Harold,[905] and was herself, in her second widowhood, banished from England when England had again a native [Sidenote: Ulf put to death. After 1025.] King.[906] Cnut’s brother-in-law Ulf came to a worse end still; that he died by the command of Cnut there is no reason to doubt, but we have no certain information as to the circumstances. According to our Danish historian it was a perfectly righteous execution, while the romantic tale of the Norwegian saga represents it as a singularly [Sidenote: The banished Danish chiefs succeeded by Englishmen.] base and cold-blooded assassination.[907] The point of importance for us is that these eminent Danes had no successors of their own nation in their English offices. There remained plenty of Danish Thegns and some Danish Earls; but in the later years of Cnut the highest places were all filled by Englishmen. Ranig retained the subordinate earldom of the Magesætas; Thored was Staller, and, at least in Harthacnut’s reign, he held the earldom of the Middle-Angles.[908] But Godwine and Leofric held the first rank in southern and in central England, and, on the banishment of Eric, the government of Northumberland went back to the family of its ancient Earls.[909] It is most remarkable, in tracing the signatures to the charters, to trace how the Danish names gradually disappear, and are succeeded by English names.[910] The Danes who remain seem to have been all in quite secondary rank. No doubt Cnut had largely rewarded his followers with grants of land, and we can well believe that some of these new Danish thegns often behaved with great insolence to their English neighbours.[911] But the general principle of Cnut’s government is not affected by any local wrongs of this kind. Cnut, from the very beginning, admitted Englishmen to high office; still, in the earlier years of his reign he appears mainly as a foreign conqueror surrounded by those whose arms had won his crown for him. He gradually changes into a prince, English in all but actual birth, who could afford to dispense with the dangerous support of the chieftains of his own nation, who could venture to throw himself on the loyalty of those whom he had subdued, and to surround himself with the natural leaders of those whom he had learned to look on as his own people.

[Sidenote: Character of Cnut.]

This gradual change in the disposition of Cnut makes him one of the most remarkable, and, to an Englishman, one of the most interesting, characters in history. There is no other instance—unless Rolf in Normandy be admitted as a forerunner on a smaller scale—of a barbarian conqueror, entering a country simply as a ruthless pirate, plundering, burning, mutilating, slaughtering, without remorse, and then, as soon as he is firmly seated on the throne of the invaded land, changing into a beneficent ruler and lawgiver, and winning for himself a place side by side with the best and greatest of its native sovereigns. Cnut never became a perfect prince like Ælfred. An insatiable ambition possessed him throughout life, and occasional acts of both craft and violence disfigure the whole of his career. No man could charge him with that amiable weakness through which Eadmund lent so ready an ear to protestations of repentance and promises of amendment even from the lips of Eadric. Cnut, on the other hand, always found some means, by death, by banishment, by distant promotion, of getting rid of any one who had once awakened his suspicions. Reasons of state were as powerful with him, and led him into as many unscrupulous actions, as any more civilized despot of later times. But Englishmen were not disposed to canvass the justice of wars in which they won fame and plunder, while no enemy ever set foot on their own shores. They were as little disposed to canvass the justice of banishments and executions, when, for many years, it was invariably a Dane, never an Englishman, who was [Sidenote: Cnut’s position typical of that of the Danes in England.] the victim. The law by which the Dane settled in England presently became an Englishman received its highest carrying out in the person of the illustrious Danish King. As far as England and Englishmen were concerned, Cnut might seem to have acted on the principle of the Greek poet, that unrighteousness might be fittingly done in order to win a crown, but that righteousness should be done in all other times and places.[912] The throne of Cnut, established by wasting wars, by unrighteous executions, perhaps even by treacherous assassinations, was, when once established, emphatically the throne of righteousness and peace. As an English King, he fairly ranks beside [Sidenote: Cnut’s letter from Rome. 1027.] the noblest of his predecessors. His best epitaph is his famous letter to his people on his Roman pilgrimage.[913] Such a pilgrimage was an ordinary devotional observance according to the creed of those times. But in the eyes of Cnut it was clearly much more than a mere perfunctory ceremony. The sight of the holy places stirred him to good resolves in matters both public and private, and, as a patriotic King, he employed his meeting with the Pope, the Emperor, and the Burgundian King, to win from all of them favours which were profitable to the people of his various realms. No man could have written in the style in which Cnut writes to all classes of his English subjects, unless he were fully convinced that he possessed and deserved the love of his people. The tone of the letter is that of an absent father writing to his children. In all simplicity and confidence, he tells them the events of his journey; he tells them with what honours he had been received, and with what presents he had been loaded, by the two chiefs of Christendom, and what privileges for his subjects, both English and Danish, he had obtained at their hands. He confesses the errors of his youth, and promises reformation of anything which may still be amiss. All grievances shall be redressed; no extortions shall be allowed; King Cnut needs no money raised by injustice. These are surely no mere formal or hypocritical professions; every word plainly comes from the heart. England had more than led captive her conqueror; she had changed him into her King and father.

[Sidenote: The Laws of Cnut. 1028–1035.]

The same spirit which breathes in Cnut’s letter breathes also in the opening of his laws.[914] The precept to fear God and honour the King here takes a more personal and affectionate form. First above all things are men one God ever to love and worship, and one Christendom with one mind to hold, and Cnut King to love with right truthfulness.[915] The laws themselves deal with the usual subjects, the reformation of manners, the administration of justice, the strict discharge of all ecclesiastical duties and the strict payment of all ecclesiastical dues. The feasts of the two new national saints, Eadward the King and Dunstan the Primate, are again ordered to be kept, and the observance of the former is again made to rest in a marked way on the authority of the Witan.[916] The observance of the Lord’s day is also strongly insisted on; on that day there is to be no marketing, no hunting; even the holding of folkmotes is forbidden, except in cases of absolute necessity.[917] All heathen superstition is to be forsaken,[918] and the slave-trade is again denounced.[919] The whole fabric of English society is strictly preserved. The King legislates only with the consent of his Witan.[920] The old assemblies, the old tribunals, the old magistrates, keep all their rights and powers. The Bishop and the Ealdorman[921] still fill their place as joint presidents of the Scirgemót, and joint expounders of the laws, ecclesiastical and secular.[922] The King, as well as all inferior lords,[923] is to enjoy all that is due to him; the royal rights, differing somewhat in the West-Saxon and the Danish portions of the kingdom, are to be carefully preserved, and neither extended nor diminished in either country.[924] No distinction, except the old local one, is made between Danes and Englishmen. The local rights and customs of the Danish and English portions of the kingdom are to be strictly observed.[925] But this is only what we have already seen in the legislation of Eadgar.[926] The Danes spoken of in Cnut’s laws, as in Eadgar’s, are the long-settled Danish inhabitants of Northumberland and the other countries of the Denalagu; no kind of preference is made in favour of Cnut’s own Danish followers; we cannot doubt that a Dane who held lands in Wessex had to submit to English law, just as a West-Saxon who held lands in Northumberland must, under Eadgar no less than under Cnut, have had to submit to Danish law. On one point the legislation of the great Dane is distinctly more rational and liberal than the legislation of our own day. Trespasses on the King’s forests are strictly forbidden; but the natural right of every man to hunt on his own land is emphatically asserted.[927] And as Cnut’s theory was, so was his practice. No King was more active in what was then held to be the first duty of kingship, that of constantly going through every portion of his realm to see with his own eyes whether the laws which he enacted were duly put in force.[928] In short, after Cnut’s power was once fully established, we hear no complaint against his government [Sidenote: Personal traditions of Cnut.] from any trustworthy English source.[929] His hold upon the popular affection is shown by the number of personal anecdotes of which he is the hero. The man who is said, in the traditions of other lands, to have ordered the cold-blooded murder of his brother-in-law, and that in a church at the holy season of Christmas,[930] appears in English tradition as a prince whose main characteristic is devotion mingled with good humour.[931] In the best known tale of all, he rebukes the impious flattery of his courtiers, and hangs his crown on the image of the crucified Saviour.[932] He bursts into song as he hears the chant of the monks of Ely,[933] and rejoices to keep the festivals of the Church among them. He bountifully rewards the sturdy peasant who proves the thickness of the ice over which the royal sledge has to pass.[934] One tale alone sets him before us in a somewhat different light. He mocks at the supposed sanctity of Eadgyth the daughter of Eadgar; he will not believe in the holiness of any child of a father so given up to lust and tyranny. It is needless to add that the offended saint brings the blasphemer to a better mind by summary means.[935] This tale is worth noting, as it illustrates the twofold conception of the character of Eadgar which was afloat. Cnut is represented as accepting the Eadgar of the minstrels, not the Eadgar of the monks, nor yet the Eadgar of history, who is somewhat different from either. But even in this tale Cnut is described as showing something of the spirit which breathes in his Roman letter. The King who loathed the supposed tyranny of Eadgar could hardly have been conscious of any tyranny of his own.

[Sidenote: Cnut’s ecclesiastical policy.]

In ecclesiastical matters Cnut mainly, though not exclusively, favoured the monks. His ecclesiastical appointments, [Sidenote: 1020.] especially that of good Archbishop Æthelnoth;[936] who had baptized or confirmed him, do him high honour. [Sidenote: His ecclesiastical foundations.] He was also, after the custom of the age, a liberal benefactor to various ecclesiastical foundations. According to one account, not Assandun only, but all his battle-fields were marked by commemorative churches.[937] But as Assandun was Cnut’s only undoubted victory on English soil, and as men do not usually commemorate their defeats, we may conclude that, in England at least, Assandun was his only foundation of that kind. That church, as we have seen, was a secular foundation, seemingly for one priest only. A more splendid object of Cnut’s munificence throws an interesting light on the workings of his mind. The special object of his reverence was Eadmund, the sainted King of the East-Angles, a King martyred by heathen Danes, a saint who was the marked object of his father’s hatred, and by whose vengeance his father was held to have come to his untimely end.[938] The Christian Dane, King of all England, was eager to wipe away the stain from his house and nation. He made provision for the restoration of all the holy places which had in any way suffered during his own or his father’s wars.[939] But the first rank among them was given to the great foundation which boasted of the resting-place of the royal martyr. [Sidenote: Saint Eadmund’s Bury rebuilt and the foundation changed. 1020–1032.] The minster of Saint Eadmund was rebuilt, and, in conformity with the fashionable notions of reformation, its secular canons had to make way for an Abbot and monks. Some of the new inmates came from Saint Benet at Holm,[940] another foundation which was enriched by Cnut’s bounty.[941] One hardly knows whether Cnut most avoided or incurred suspicion by his special devotion to the resting-place of [Sidenote: Cnut’s visit to Glastonbury. 1032.] another Eadmund. He visited Glastonbury in company with Archbishop Æthelnoth, once a monk of that house. There, in the building which tradition points to as the first Christian temple raised in these islands, the building which history recognizes as the one famous holy place of the conquered Briton which lived unhurt through the storm of English Conquest, in the “wooden basilica” hallowed by the memory of so many real and legendary saints, did the Danish King confirm every gift and privilege which his English predecessors had granted to the great Celtic sanctuary.[942] A hundred and fifty years after the visit of Cnut, the wooden basilica, which had beheld so many revolutions, gave way to the more powerful influence of a change of taste and feeling, and on its site arose one of the most exquisite specimens of the latest Romanesque art, now in its state of desolation forming one of the loveliest of monastic ruins.[943] At some distance to the east of this primæval sanctuary stood the larger minster of stone reared by Saint Dunstan. In Cnut’s days it was doubtless still deemed a wonder of art, though it was doomed before the end of the century to give way to the vaster conceptions of the Norman architects. The invention and translation of the legendary Arthur were as yet distant events, and the new tomb of King Eadmund Ironside still kept the place of honour before the high altar.[944] There the conqueror knelt and prayed, and covered the tomb of his murdered brother with a splendid robe on which the gorgeous plumage of the peacock was reproduced [Sidenote: Translation of Saint Ælfheah. June, 1023.] by the skilful needles of English embroideresses.[945] Equal honours were paid by Cnut to another victim of the late wars, in his devotion to whom he was expiating the crimes of his nation, though not his own or those of his father’s house. The body of the martyred Ælfheah was translated from Saint Paul’s minster in London to his own metropolitan church, in the presence, and with the personal help, of the King and of all the chief men of the realm, lay and clerical. The ceremony was further adorned with the presence of the Lady Emma and her [Sidenote: His gifts to Winchester, Ely, and Ramsey.] “kingly bairn” Harthacnut.[946] That the two monasteries of the royal city of Winchester came in for their share of royal bounty it is almost needless to mention. But towards them the devotion of Emma, who claimed the city as her morning-gift, seems to have been more fervent than that of her husband.[947] Cnut’s personal tastes seem to have led him to the great religious houses of the fen country, where the dead of Maldon and Assandun reposed in the choirs of Ely and Ramsey.[948] Nowhere was his memory more fondly cherished than in the great minster which boasted of the tomb of Brihtnoth. There he was not so much a formal benefactor as a personal friend. But he was held in no less honour at Ramsey, the resting-place of Æthelweard. There he built a second church,[949] and designed the foundation of a society of nuns, which he did not bring to perfection. The local historian of the house rewards his bounty with a splendid panegyric, which however is fully borne out by his recorded acts.[950] Nor was his bounty confined to England, or even to his own [Sidenote: Cnut plants English Bishops in Denmark.] dominions. In his native Denmark he showed himself a diligent nursing-father to the infant Church, largely providing it with bishops and other ecclesiastics from [Sidenote: His gifts to foreign churches, &c.] England.[951] On his Roman pilgrimage, the poor and the churches of every land through which he passed shared his bountiful alms. It is also said that, by the counsel of Archbishop Æthelnoth, he gave gifts to many foreign churches. One special object of his favour was the church of Chartres, then flourishing under its famous Bishop Fulbert.[952] Emma too, the foreign Lady, was not backward in her gifts to churches, both English and foreign. She gave to the metropolitan church of Canterbury an arm of the Apostle Bartholomew, bought of an Archbishop of Beneventum whom the fame of the wealth of England had led hither to dispose of his holy treasure.[953] She had also a great share in rebuilding the famous minster of Saint Hilary at Poitiers, where a large portion of her work still remains.[954]

Such then was Cnut’s internal government of England. The conqueror had indeed changed into a home-born King. At no earlier time had the land ever enjoyed so long a term of such unmixed prosperity. We have now to behold the great King in his relations to foreign lands. And, if a series of ambitious wars and aggressions forms a less pleasing picture than a tale of peaceful and beneficent government, we shall at least see England raised to a higher position in the general system of Christendom than she held at any earlier, perhaps at any later time.

§ 2. The foreign Relations of Cnut. 1018–1035.

Cnut had come into England as a conqueror and destroyer; but his reign, as far as the internal state of England [Sidenote: Unparalleled internal peace during the reign of Cnut.] is concerned, was a time of perfect peace.[955] No invasion from beyond sea, no revolt, no civil war, is recorded during the eighteen years of his government. A single Scottish inroad and victory of which we shall presently hear was wiped out by the more complete submission of the northern vassal of England. Within England itself we read of no district being ravaged either by rebels or by royal command; we read of no city undergoing, or even being threatened with, military chastisement. This is more than can be said of the reign either of Eadgar the Peaceful or of Eadward the Saint. No doubt the whole nation was weary of warfare; after a struggle of thirty-six years, England would have been glad of a season of repose, even under a far worse government than that of Cnut. But a period of seventeen years in which we cannot see that a sword was drawn within the borders of England was something altogether unparalleled in those warlike ages, something which speaks volumes in favour of the King who bestowed such a blessing on our land. It is true that the old enemies of England were now the fellow-subjects of Englishmen, and that the first attempt of her new enemies came to nought without a blow being struck. Danish invasions ceased when Denmark and England had the same King, and the first Norman invasion, as we shall presently see, ignominiously failed. But a great deal is proved by the absence of any recorded attempt on the part of any Englishman to get rid of the foreign King. No one thought of taking advantage of Cnut’s frequent absences from England in the way in which men did take advantage of the similar absences of William the Norman. It is quite impossible that England and all Cnut’s other kingdoms should have been kept down against their will by the King’s [Sidenote: The Housecarls or Thingmen.] Housecarls. It is now that we first hear of this famous force, the name of which will be often heard during the following reigns, even after the Norman Conquest. Hitherto England had possessed nothing that could be called a standing army. When a war had to be waged, the King or Ealdorman called on his personal followers, attached to him by the ancient tie of the comitatus, and on the general levy, the fyrd or militia, either of the whole kingdom or of some particular part of it. But no English King or Ealdorman had hitherto kept a standing military force in his pay. But Cnut now organized a regular paid force, kept constantly under arms, and ready to march at a moment’s notice.[956] These were the famous Thingmen, the Housecarls, of whom we hear so much under Cnut and under his successors. This permanent body of soldiers in the King’s personal service seems to have had its origin in the crews of the forty Danish ships which were kept by Cnut when he sent back the greater part of his fleet in the second year of his reign. In his time the force consisted of three thousand, or at most of six thousand, men, gathered from all nations. For the power and fame of Cnut drew volunteers to his [Sidenote: A revival of the Comitatus.] banner from all parts of Northern Europe. The force was in fact a revival of the earliest form of the comitatus, only more thoroughly and permanently organized. The immediate followers, the hearth company, of earlier Kings and Ealdormen had been attached to them by a special tie, and were bound to bear to them a special fidelity in the day of battle.[957] The Housecarls or Thingmen of Cnut were a force of this kind, larger in number, kept more constantly under arms, and subjected to a more regular discipline than had hitherto been usual. Receiving regular pay, and reinforced by volunteers of all kinds and of all nations, they doubtless gradually departed a good deal from the higher type of the comitatus, and came nearer to the level of ordinary mercenaries. So far as the force consisted of foreigners, they were mercenaries in the strictest sense; so far as it consisted of Englishmen, they were mercenaries in no other sense than that in which all paid soldiers are mercenaries. The housecarls were in fact a standing army, and a standing army was an institution which later Kings and great Earls, English as well as Danish, found it to be their interest to continue. Under Cnut they formed a kind of military guild with [Sidenote: The military laws of Cnut.] the King at their head. A set of most elaborate articles of war determined the minutest points of their duty.[958] Fitting punishments were decreed for all offences great and small, punishments to be awarded by tribunals formed among the members of the guild. But all the provisions of the code relate wholly to the internal discipline of the force and to the relations of its members to one another. Of the position in which they stood to the community at large we hear absolutely nothing. And it should be remembered that all our details come from Danish writers and those not contemporary. Our English authorities tell us nothing directly about the matter. [Sidenote: The institution continued by later Kings.] From them we could at most have inferred that some institution of the sort arose about this time; we never read of housecarls before the reign of Cnut, while we often read of them afterwards. That a body of soldiers, many of them foreigners, were guilty of occasional acts of wrong and insolence, we may take for granted even without direct evidence. That under a bad King they might sometimes be sent on oppressive errands we shall presently see on the best of evidence. But that under the great Cnut they were the instruments of any general system of oppression, that they held the nation in unwilling submission to a yoke which it was anxious to throw off, is proved by no evidence whatever. And when England was again ruled by Kings of her own blood, the housecarls became simply a national standing army, and an army of which England might well be proud. The name of the housecarls of King Harold became a name of fear in the most warlike regions of the North,[959] and it was this brave and faithful force which was ever foremost in fight and nearest to the royal person alike in the hour of victory and in the hour of overthrow.

[Sidenote: Foreign policy of Cnut.]

We have still to speak of Cnut’s relations with lands beyond the bounds of England. This subject starts several important points in the history of foreign lands; but, as far as English history is concerned, most of them may be passed by in a few words. Within our own island, we hear little of Wales, and out of it, Cnut’s wars with the other Scandinavian powers and his relations to the Empire, though highly important, have hardly any bearing on English history. The case is different with his dealings both with Scotland and with Normandy, both of which, the latter especially, call for a somewhat fuller examination.

Cnut, as King of all England, alike by formal election and by the power of the sword, of course assumed the same Imperial claims and Imperial style which had been borne by the Kings who had gone before him. As King of all England, he was also Emperor of all Britain, Lord [Sidenote: Relations with Wales.] of all Kings and all nations within his own island. Of his relations with his Welsh vassals we are driven to pick up what accounts we can from their own scanty annals. Early in Cnut’s reign, on what provocation we know not, [Sidenote: Eglaf plunders Saint David’s. 1022?] the exploit of Eadric Streona[960] was repeated. Wales was invaded by Eglaf, a Danish Earl in Cnut’s service, probably the same who had joined in Thurkill’s invasion of England, and who, according to some accounts, was brother of that more famous chief.[961] He ravaged the land of Dyfed and destroyed Saint David’s.[962] This is our sole [Sidenote: 1035?] fact, except that in one of the last years of Cnut’s reign, a Welsh prince, Caradoc son of Rhydderch, was slain by the English.[963] Our own Chroniclers do not look on these matters as worthy of any mention. With Scotland the case is somewhat different, especially as the affairs of that kingdom are closely mixed up with those of the great [Sidenote: Affairs of Northumberland and Scotland.] earldom of Northumberland. We have seen that, on the fourfold division of England, the great Northern government was entrusted to the Dane Eric, who seems however [Sidenote: Earldom of Eric;] not to have disturbed the actual English possessors.[964] He most likely kept a superiority over them till his own banishment,[965] after which it is clear that the family of the [Sidenote: of Eadwulf Cutel.] former Earls remained in possession. The reigning Earl, Eadwulf, the son of the elder Waltheof and brother of Uhtred, is spoken of as a timid and cowardly man, who, according to one account, now surrendered Lothian to King Malcolm for fear that he might avenge the victories won over him by his brother.[966] But if any cession was made to the Scots at this time, it was most likely [Sidenote: Battle of Carham. 1018.] extorted by Malcolm by force of arms. For the second year of Cnut was marked by a Scottish invasion and a Scottish victory of unusual importance.[967] King Malcolm entered England, accompanied by Eogan or Eugenius, seemingly an Under-king of Strathclyde. A great battle took place at Carham on the Tweed, not far from the scene of the more famous fight of Flodden, in which the Scots gained a decisive victory over the whole force of the Bernician earldom. The slaughter, as usual, fell most heavily upon the English nobility. Bishop Ealdhun is said to have fallen sick on hearing the news, and to have died in a few days. His great work was all but done. The height of Durham was now crowned by a church, stately doubtless after the standard of those times, of which only a single tower lacked completion.[968] It was doubtless owing to the confusion which followed the Scottish inroad that three years passed between the death of Ealdhun and the succession of the next Bishop Eadmund.[969] According to one theory, which I shall discuss elsewhere,[970] the annexation of Lothian to the Scottish kingdom was the result of this battle. It is equally strange that a prince like Cnut should have consented to the cession of any part of his dominions, and that he should have allowed a Scottish victory to pass unrevenged. But we do not, in our English authorities, find any mention of Scottish [Sidenote: Affairs of Cumberland.] affairs till a much later stage of his reign. According to the Scottish account, Duncan, the grandson of Malcolm through his daughter Beatrice, who now held the under-kingdom of Cumberland or Strathclyde, refused, though often summoned, to do homage to Cnut.[971] His refusal was cloked under a show of feudal loyalty; his homage was due only to the lawful King of the English; he would do no kind of service to a Danish usurper. Cnut, after his return from his Roman pilgrimage, marched against his refractory vassal, with the intention of incorporating [Sidenote: Submission of Duncan.] his dominions with the English kingdom. Certain Bishops and other chief men stepped in to preserve peace, and a compromise was brought about. Duncan withdrew his claim to independence; Cnut relinquished his design of complete incorporation; the Under-king of Cumberland was again to hold his kingdom on the old terms of vassalage. Such is the Scottish story, which characteristically puts Cumberland in the foreground, and leaves out all mention both of Scotland proper and of Lothian. It may very likely be true in what it asserts; it is eminently false in what it conceals. For there is no doubt that Cnut’s dealings with his northern neighbours were by no means confined to Cumberland, but touched Scotland itself quite as nearly. It is just conceivable that both Duncan and his grandfather Malcolm refused homage to Cnut on the ground that the Dane was an usurper of the English kingdom. If so, they were perhaps brought to reason at an earlier time than would appear from our own Chronicles only. According to a French historian, an expedition of Cnut against the Scots was hindered, and peace was restored, by the intercession of the Lady Emma and her brother Duke Richard. According to a Norwegian saga, two Scottish Kings, probably Malcolm and Duncan, submitted to [Sidenote: Submission of Scotland. 1031.] Cnut in the early years of his reign. However all this may be, it is certain, on the highest of all authorities, that the whole kingdom of Scotland did in the end submit to his claims. Cnut, like William after him, was not minded to give up any right of the crown which he had won. The more famous ceremony of Abernethy forty [Sidenote: [1073.]] years later was now forestalled. As the younger Malcolm then became the man of the Norman, so now the elder Malcolm became the man of the Dane.[972] Cnut, after his return from Rome—in the very year of his return, according to those who give the later date to that event—marched into Scotland, meeting, it would seem, with no [Sidenote: Malcolm, Jehmarc, and Macbeth do homage to Cnut. 1031.] opposition. Malcolm now, if not before, rendered the long-delayed homage, and he was joined in his submission by two other Scottish chiefs, the lords of Argyle and of Moray, on both of whom our Chronicles bestow the title of King. With the otherwise obscure Jehmarc is coupled a name which holds no small place in history, but which is far more famous in romance. Along with the homage of the elder Malcolm King Cnut received also the homage of Macbeth.

[Sidenote: Import of the homage of the Under-kings.]

This fact that the Under-kings, or princes of whatever rank, within the kingdom of Scotland, did homage to Cnut is worthy of special notice. It seems to be a step beyond the terms of the original commendation to Eadward the Elder. It seems to be a step towards the more complete submission made by William the Lion to Henry the Second and to the homage done by all Scotland to the Lord Paramount Edward. The choice of the English King as Father and Lord over the King and people of the Scots did not make this or that Scot his “man.”[973] But now, not only King Malcolm, but Jehmarc and Macbeth became the “men” of the King of all England. Yet the fact may perhaps be explained another way. When we remember the later history, we shall perhaps be inclined to look for the cause of this change in the slight authority possessed by Malcolm over the lesser Scottish princes. His legendary character paints him as a King who granted away all his domains, and left himself nothing but the hill of Scone, the holy place of the Scottish monarchy.[974] And more authentic history shows that Jehmarc and Macbeth, princes ruling on the western and eastern shores of the island, were so far independent of the King of Scots that the homage of Malcolm alone would have been no sufficient guaranty for the retention of the Scottish kingdom in its proper submission to the Imperial crown. Macbeth indeed was the representative of a line which had claims on the Scottish crown itself. Cnut therefore prudently exacted the homage of Malcolm’s dangerous vassals as well as that of Malcolm himself. [Sidenote: Death of Malcolm. 1034.] Malcolm, already an old man, survived the ceremony only three years, and died in the year before the death of his far younger over-lord.[975] He was succeeded by his grandson Duncan, whose son Malcolm, surnamed Canmore, afterwards so famous, received, as usual, the apanage of Cumberland.[976]

[Sidenote: Cnut’s Northern wars.]

Cnut’s wars in the North of Europe have but little connexion with English history, and there are few events for [Sidenote: Authorities for their history.] which our historical materials are more unsatisfactory. Our own Chronicles help us to the dates of some of the more prominent events; the Norwegian sagas[977] and the rhetorical Latin of the Danish historian help us to abundance of details, if we could only accept them as authentic; the Danish chronicles are meagre beyond words. Happily, to unravel the difficulties and contradictions of their various statements is no part of the business of an English historian. It may be enough for our purpose to keep ourselves to those events which the contemporary chroniclers of England thought worthy of a place in our own [Sidenote: Revolutions of Norway.] national annals. The most important among them is the loss and reconquest of Norway by Cnut, and his wars with its renowned King Olaf the Saint.[978] Norway had, after [Sidenote: 1000.] the death of Olaf Tryggvesson,[979] formed part of the dominions of Swegen, and it was entrusted to the government of his son-in-law Eric, who afterwards held the [Sidenote: 1015.] earldom of Northumberland.[980] When Eric went to England with Cnut, Hakon the son of Eric remained as Earl in Norway, but was soon driven out by Olaf Haraldsson. Of this prince, afterwards canonized as a saint and martyr, we have heard somewhat already;[981] but the part assigned to him in English affairs evidently belongs to romance and not to history. His career in his own country is more [Sidenote: Reign of Saint Olaf. 1015–1028.] authentic and more important. The rule of Olaf was at first acceptable to the country; but both his virtues and his faults gradually raised up enemies against him. He was preeminently a reformer. His strictness in the administration of justice, the first of virtues in a prince of those times, is highly praised.[982] He was moreover a zealous Christian; his whole soul was devoted to spreading throughout his kingdom the blessings of religion and civilization, and to reforming the manners and morals of his people in every way. He brought bishops and other churchmen from England, and, not satisfied with the evangelization of his own kingdom, he employed them as missionaries in Sweden, Gothland, and the neighbouring islands.[983] But, just like the elder Olaf, his choice of means was often less praiseworthy than the excellence of his objects. The reformer tried by harshness and violence to force on a rude people manners and institutions for which they were not ready, and the Christian missionary sank into a persecutor of those who clave to the creed of their fathers. In his lofty ideas of kingly power, Olaf set little store by the rights either of the ancient chiefs or of the free peasantry of the land, and, in dealing with these enemies, he did not shrink from acts of merciless cruelty.[984] Meanwhile Cnut was keeping as careful an eye on Norway as his father had kept on England; but, like his father, he knew how to bide his time. A summons to Olaf to hold the crown of Norway as his vassal was rejected;[985] war followed, [Sidenote: Cnut’s defeat at the Helga. 1025.] and Cnut’s first expedition was unsuccessful. Olaf allied himself with the Swedish King Omund, and their joint forces inflicted a defeat on Cnut’s combined Danish [Sidenote: Cnut’s intrigues in Norway. 1027.] and English army at the river Helga in Scania.[986] Two years later, by dint of bribes and promises and by studiously taking advantage of Olaf’s growing unpopularity, Cnut contrived to raise up a powerful party in Norway which was prepared to accept his own pretensions.[987] In the next year, when Cnut sailed to Norway with fifty ships, Olaf was completely forsaken by his people, and [Sidenote: Cnut expels Olaf, and is chosen King of all Norway. 1028.] had to take refuge in Russia. Cnut was everywhere welcomed, and he was chosen King of all Norway by the Thing at Trondhjem, just as he had been, eleven years before, chosen King of all England by the Gemót at London.[988] A later attempt of Olaf to recover his kingdom [Sidenote: Olaf killed at Stikkelstad. 1030.] was resisted by the Norwegians themselves; he fell in the fight of Stikkelstad, and the Church looked on him as a martyr.[989]

[Sidenote: Cnut’s friendly relations with the Empire.]

Cnut, King of five or, as some reckon, six kingdoms, seems to have looked upon himself as Emperor of the North, and to have held himself in all respects as the peer of his Roman brother.[990] Earlier and later Danish Kings were fain to own themselves the vassals of Cæsar; but before the power of Cnut the Roman Terminus himself had to give way. With the Frankish Emperor Conrad the mighty ruler of Northern Europe was on the best terms. Cnut, as we have seen, made his acquaintance and friendship in his Imperial capital, and bore a part in the splendours of his Imperial consecration. The alliance was cemented by a treaty of marriage between their children, and by a cession of territory on the part of the potentate [Sidenote: Marriage of Gunhild to King Henry of Germany. 1036.] higher in formal rank. Gunhild, the daughter of Cnut and Emma, was betrothed to Conrad’s son King Henry, afterwards the renowned Emperor Henry the Third. The marriage however did not take place till after the death of the bride’s father, and Gunhild, like her predecessor Eadgyth, was destined to be neither the wife nor the mother of an Emperor. Gunhild, like Eadgyth, died before her husband succeeded to the Empire, and his successor was the offspring of his second and better known marriage with Agnes of Poitiers.[991]

[Sidenote: Cnut recovers the frontier of the Eider.]

The more strictly political result of the friendship between Cnut and Conrad was the restoration of the ancient frontier between Denmark and Germany. After the victorious expedition of Otto the Second into Denmark, a German mark had been established beyond the Eider, extending from that river to the Dannewirk, the great bulwark which Gorm and Thyra had reared against the Southern invader. This was the first step in that process which has gradually Germanized a part of Southern Jutland, [Sidenote: 1864–6.] and which has at last handed over an unwilling Scandinavian population as the victims of Prussian greed of territorial aggrandizement. Cnut, by treaty with the Emperor, and seemingly as the price of his daughter, recovered the ancient frontier with which Charles the Great had been content, and which remained the boundary of the two realms till that general removing of ancient landmarks which belongs only to the more refined diplomacy of modern times.

[Sidenote: Affairs of Normandy.]

We have now, last of all, to look to the position of Cnut with reference to the Duchy of Normandy. I have already, in speaking of Cnut’s ecclesiastical policy, had occasion to mention the close connexion which he kept up with more than one part of Gaul. He was the special friend of Duke William of Aquitaine, surnamed the Great, a prince whose tastes were in many respects congenial with his own. He sent him embassies and gifts, among them a splendid book of devotions in golden letters.[992] But Cnut’s most important relations among the states of Gaul were with the great duchy which lay opposite to his southern shores, and where his banished stepsons were being brought up as his possible rivals. The last event in the internal history of Normandy which I recorded was the [Sidenote: [997.]] great revolt of the Norman peasantry at the beginning of the reign of Richard the Good. The new Duke was, in the full sense of the word, a Frenchman. Whatever had become of the original homage of Rolf, the commendation of Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great[993] was still in [Sidenote: Friendly relations with France. 996–1031.] full force. Richard was the loyal vassal and faithful ally of the Parisian King; his friendship with Robert, the second King of that house, seems to have always remained unbroken, and the two princes acted together in various expeditions. The Normans were by this time thoroughly naturalized in their Gaulish possessions. In the records of the time they appear as recognized and honoured members of the French monarchy. The memory of their foreign and heathen descent is forgotten; their prince is no longer the mere Duke of Pirates,[994] whom a loyal Frenchman spoke of as seldom as he could; the cherished ally of the Parisian King is now spoken of with every respect as the Duke of Rouen.[995] The chief French historian of the time is as ready to exaggerate the external power and influence of the second Richard as ever his own Dudo was to exaggerate those of his father.[996] Richard, on the other hand, did not hesitate to have his gifts to his own Fécamp confirmed by his over-lord,[997] and he dated his public acts by the regnal years of the King.[998] And no wonder; for it is plain that the Norman Duke [Sidenote: Strict alliance between King Robert and Duke Richard.] was the mainstay of the French kingdom. Robert, though the most pious of men, could not avoid either temporal warfare, ecclesiastical censures, or domestic oppression.[999] In the last two classes of afflictions Norman help could hardly avail him, but in all Robert’s wars Richard proved a steady and valuable ally. The help of the Norman [Sidenote: 1003.] Duke enabled his over-lord to maintain his claims over the ducal Burgundy,[1000] and Norman troops served along with those both of the French King and of the German Cæsar in a war against their common vassal of Flanders. The [Sidenote: 1006.] Imperial and royal saints united their forces against the city of Valenciennes, and the more purely temporal help of [Sidenote: Friendly relations with Britanny.] the Norman Duke was arrayed on the same side.[1001] With his Breton neighbours or vassals Richard was on good terms. The friendship between him and the Breton Count Geoffrey was cemented by an exchange of sisters between [Sidenote: 1008.] the two princes. Richard married Judith of Britanny,[1002] and Hadwisa of Normandy became the wife of Geoffrey, on whose death her sons, Alan and Odo, were placed under the guardianship of their uncle and lord.[1003] With another neighbour and brother-in-law Richard found it less easy to remain on friendly terms. His sister Matilda had married Odo the Second, Count of Chartres, the grandson of the old enemy Theobald. The town and part of the district of Dreux had been given to Odo as her marriage [Sidenote: War with Odo of Chartres.] portion,[1004] and this, on her death, he refused to give back. A war followed, which was made conspicuous by the foundation of the famous castle of Tillières,[1005] which long remained a border fortress of Normandy. Of course every effort of Odo to take or surprise the Norman outpost was rendered hopeless by Norman valour, and yet we are told that Richard found it expedient to resort to help of a very questionable kind to support him against his enemy. The Normans were now Frenchmen; Duke Richard and his court of gentlemen[1006] had doubtless quite forgotten their Scandinavian mother-tongue; some traces of the old nationality may still have lingered at Bayeux, but, as a whole, Normandy was now French in language, feeling, and religion. But the old connexion with the North was still cherished. We have already seen how the friendly reception which the Danish invaders of England met with in the Norman ports had led to hostile relations between Normandy and England.[1007] So now we have the old story of Harold Blaatand over again.[1008] Richard, like his father, does not scruple to bring heathen invaders into Gaul to help him against his Christian enemies. And, just as in the second appearance of Harold Blaatand, this shameful help is called in at a time when there seems to be no need for if, at a time when the Norman arms are completely victorious. Odo could surely have been crushed by the combined forces of Normandy and Britanny,[1009] even if King Robert was not disposed to repay [Sidenote: Brittany ravaged by two heathen Kings, Lacman and Olaf. 1013?] in kind the services of his loyal vassal. The tale however, as we find it, represents the Norman Duke as entering into a league with two heathen Kings, who were engaged in inflicting the most cruel ravages on his own vassals and allies of Britanny, having just taken and burned the frontier city of Dol.[1010] These Kings are described as Lacman of Sweden and Olaf of Norway. With regard to the former there must be a mistake of some kind, as no King bearing any such name occurs in Swedish [Sidenote: Identity of this Olaf with Saint Olaf Haraldsson.] history. But we are given to understand that the Olaf spoken of was no other than the famous Olaf Haraldsson the Saint.[1011] One story of the early life of Olaf seems to be about as mythical as another; but something is proved when two independent narratives agree. Of the busy career in England which the Northern legend assigns to Olaf not a trace is to be found in any English writer. But the presence of Olaf in Normandy is asserted alike [Sidenote: Richard allies himself with them.] by Norman and by Norwegian tradition. According to the Norman tale, the ravagers of Britanny left their prey, sailed to Rouen in answer to the Duke’s summons, [Sidenote: Mediation of King Robert.] and were there honourably received by him. But if Duke Richard did not shrink from such guests at Rouen, King Robert was naturally afraid of their appearance at Paris. After the treatment which the Bretons had received, all Gaul was endangered by their presence.[1012] The King then held, what is so rare in the history of France, so common in that of England and Germany, an assembly of the Princes of his realm.[1013] The royal summons was obeyed both by the Duke of the Normans and by the Count of Chartres. Peace was made by the mediation of the King; Count Odo kept his town of Dreux, and Duke Richard kept his new fortress of Tillières. The heathen Kings were to be got rid of as they might. Duke Richard persuaded them by rich gifts to go away then, and to promise to come again if they were wanted. One of them, Olaf, was converted to Christianity with many of his comrades. He was baptized by Archbishop Robert, and his career of sanctity begins forthwith.[1014]

[Sidenote: Amount of truth to be found in these stories.]

Stories of this kind can hardly be admitted into history without a certain amount of dread lest the historian may prove to have opened his text for the reception of a mere piece of romance. They are stories which we cannot venture unhesitatingly to accept, but which we are not at all in a position unhesitatingly to deny. They are stories of which it is safest to say that the details are sure to be mythical, but that there is likely to be some groundwork of truth at the bottom. It is impossible to read this tale of the alliance of Richard the Good with Olaf and Lacman, without a lurking feeling that it may be the tale of Richard the Fearless and Harold Blaatand moved from its old place and fitted with a new set of names. If we get thus far, it is hardly possible to avoid going a step further, and asking whether the mythical element is not strong in the tale of Harold Blaatand himself. And it is hardly less difficult to read the story of the two heathen Kings, of whom one is converted, while the other seemingly goes away stiffnecked in his old errors, without asking whether the tale is not merely a repetition of the history of the dealings of Æthelred with Swegen and Olaf Tryggvesson twenty years before.[1015] Still we are hardly justified in altogether rejecting stories which we cannot disprove, and which rest on authority, certainly not first-rate, but still such as we are generally content to accept for statements which have no inherent [Sidenote: Their witness to the abiding connexion between Normandy and the North.] unlikelihood about them. And after all, in this particular case, the mere existence of the stories proves something of more importance than the particular facts which they profess to relate. Whether the tales either of Harold or of Olaf be historically true or not, the fact that such tales could obtain belief, and could find a place in recognized Norman history, shows that a strong feeling of connexion between Normandy and the Scandinavian mother-land must have lived on, even after all outward traces of Scandinavian descent had passed away.

[Sidenote: Foreign expeditions and conquests of the Normans.]

Another feature in Norman history, which has its beginning in the reign of Richard the Good, is still more closely connected with our immediate subject. It was in the days of this prince that the Normans of the Norman duchy began to play an independent part beyond their own borders, and to enter on that series of foreign expeditions and foreign conquests of which the Norman Conquest of England was the last and greatest example.[1016] The earlier Dukes had founded the duchy; they had enlarged its borders; they had defended it against aggression from without, and had developed its resources within. The alliance between Richard the Good and King Robert had caused the Norman arms to be felt and dreaded throughout the length and breadth of Gaul. But now the limits both of the Norman duchy and of the French kingdom became too narrow for the energies both of the sovereigns of Normandy and of their subjects. The part played by the Normans in Europe had hitherto been partly defensive and partly secondary. They had withstood French, English, and German invasions, and they had aided their lords, ducal and royal, at Paris in a variety of military adventures. But now that no invader was to be feared, now that the Norman state held a fully established position in France and in Europe, the old Scandinavian spirit of distant enterprise and distant conquest awoke again. The Christian and French-speaking Norman was now as ready to jeopard his life and fortune in distant lands as ever his heathen and Scandinavian forefathers had been. The days of the actual crusades had not yet come, but already, while warfare of all kinds had charms, warfare against misbelievers was beginning to be clothed with a special charm in the eyes of the Christian chivalry of Normandy. As yet no distant conquest had been undertaken by any Norman Duke. Yet even under Richard the Good we find the power of Normandy employed beyond the bounds of the French kingdom, and in a cause which was not that of any immediate interest [Sidenote: Burgundian War. 1024.] of the Norman duchy. Besides the campaign in which Duke Richard vindicated the claim of his over-lord over the ducal Burgundy, he carried his arms beyond the frontier of the Western Kingdom into that further Burgundy which still kept its own line of Kings, and which was soon to return to its allegiance to Cæsar. Reginald, Count of the Burgundian Palatinate, had married Richard’s daughter Adeliza. Towards the end of Richard’s reign, this prince fell into the hands of his turbulent neighbour, Hugh, Count of Challon[1017] and Bishop of Auxerre. Hugh was a vassal of France, while Reginald’s dominions were held in fief of the last Burgundian King, the feeble Rudolf, himself little better than a vassal of the Emperor. But neither King nor Cæsar stepped forward to chastise the wrong-doer or to set free the captive. It was a Norman army, under the young Richard, son of the Duke, which presently taught the Count-prelate that a son-in-law of the Duke of the Normans could not be wronged with impunity.[1018]

But far greater and more enduring exploits than these were wrought during the reign of Richard, not by the public force of the Norman duchy, but by the restless energy of private Norman adventurers. An attempt to establish a Norman settlement in Spain came to nought; but in this period were laid the foundations of that great Norman settlement in Southern Italy which had such an [Sidenote: Exploits of Roger of Toesny in Spain. 1018.] important effect on the future history of Europe. Roger of Toesny was the first to carry the Norman arms into the Spanish peninsula. Spain had long before attracted the attention of a Norman sovereign; it was to Spain, as a heathen land, to which Richard the Fearless had persuaded the unbelieving portion of his Scandinavian allies to depart.[1019] It was in Spain, as the battle-ground of Christian and Saracen, that Roger now sought at once to wage warfare against the misbeliever and to carve out a dominion for himself. Roger was of the noblest blood of Normandy, boasting a descent from Malahulc, uncle of Rolf,[1020] and he may well have looked down upon the upstart gentlemen whose nobility had no higher source than the tardy bridal of their kinswoman Gunnor.[1021] Roger fought manfully against the infidels, and marvellous tales are told of his daring, his hard-won victories, his deeds of cannibal ferocity.[1022] He married the daughter of the widowed Countess of Barcelona, a princess whose dominions were practically Spanish, though her formal allegiance was due to the Parisian King. This marriage was doubtless designed as the beginning of a Norman principality in Spain; but the scheme failed to take any lasting root.

[Sidenote: Norman Conquest of Apulia and Sicily. 1016–1090.]

The exploits of the Normans in Italy, which began in the reign of Richard, form a theme of the highest interest, but one on which it is dangerous to enter, lest I should be drawn too far away both from my central subject and from those which directly bear upon it. On English, and even on Norman, affairs the influence of these great events was [Sidenote: The Conquest of England perhaps partly suggested by it.] merely indirect. One can hardly doubt that the wonderful successes of their countrymen in the South of Europe did much to suggest to the minds of those Normans who stayed at home that a still greater conquest nearer home was not wholly hopeless. The unsuccessful attempt of Duke Robert, which we shall presently have to mention, and the successful attempt of his greater son, may well have been partly suggested by the exploits of the sons of Tancred in Apulia. When private adventurers thus grew into sovereigns, what might not be done by the sovereign of Normandy himself, wielding the whole force of the land which gave birth to men like them? For it must be remembered that the Norman conquest of Apulia was no national enterprise, no conquest made in regular warfare waged by the Duke of the Normans against any other potentate. Private Norman adventurers, pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, Norman subjects under the displeasure of their own Duke,[1023] gentlemen of small estate whom the paternal acres could no longer maintain, gradually deprived the Roman Empire of the East[1024] of the remnant of its Western possessions, and won back the greatest of Mediterranean islands from the dominion of Mahomet to that of Christ. The sons of Tancred of Hauteville began as wikings who had changed their element; they gradually grew into Counts, Dukes, Kings, and Emperors. And, when the first horrors of conquest were over, no conquerors, not even Cnut himself, ever deserved better of the conquered. The noble island of Sicily, so long the battle-field of Europe and Africa, the land which Greece, Rome, Byzantium, had so long striven to guard or to recover from the incursions of the Carthaginian and the Arab, became, under her Norman Kings, the one example of really equal and tolerant government which the world could then show. Under the Norman sceptre the two most civilized races of the world,[1025] the Greek and the Saracen, could live together in peace, and could enrich their common country with the results of skill [Sidenote: Conquest of Sicily by Henry the Sixth. 1194–5.] and industry such as no Northern realm could rival. For once we are driven to blush for our common Teutonic blood, when we see how this favoured portion of the world, the one spot where contending creeds and races could display their best qualities under the sway of a common and impartial ruler, was enslaved and devastated and trodden under foot by the selfish ambition of a Teutonic invader.

The relations of Richard with England, his war with Æthelred,[1026] his dealings with Swegen,[1027] his reception of his fugitive brother-in-law and his children,[1028] have been already [Sidenote: Unbroken peace between Richard and Cnut.] spoken of. With Cnut he seems to have maintained perfect peace. His nephews, the sons of Æthelred and Emma, found shelter at his court, but only shelter. Of any attempt on their behalf, of any interference in the internal affairs of England, the wary Duke seems never to have thought. We must hasten on to the reign of another Norman prince, whose relations to our island were widely different.

[Sidenote: Death of Richard. 1026.]

Richard died after a reign of thirty years. Before his death he assembled the chief men of his duchy, and by their advice he settled the duchy itself on his eldest son Richard, and the county of Hiesmes on his second son [Sidenote: Reign of Richard the Third.] Robert as his brother’s vassal.[1029] Disputes arose between the brothers; Robert was besieged in his castle of Falaise, and when peace was made by the submission of Robert, the Duke did not long survive his success. After a reign of two years he died by poison,[1030] as was generally believed, [Sidenote: Robert succeeds. 1028.] and was succeeded by his brother.[1031] Robert, known as the Magnificent,[1032] is most familiar to us in English history as the father of the Conqueror. But he has no small claims on our notice on his own account. What the son carried out, the father had already attempted. Robert was in will, though not in deed, the first Norman conqueror of England.[1033] In the early part of his reign he had to struggle against several revolts in his own dominions. [Sidenote: He suppresses revolts at home.] We are not directly told what were the grounds of opposition to his government; but we are at least not surprised to hear of revolts against a prince who had attained to his sovereignty under circumstances so suspicious. But Robert overthrew all his domestic enemies,[1034] and he is at least not charged with any special cruelty in the reestablishment [Sidenote: He reduces Britanny to submission.] of his authority. With Britanny he did not remain on the same friendly terms as his father. His cousin Alan refused his homage, but he was brought to submission.[1035] In this warfare Neal of Saint-Saviour, who had so valiantly beaten off the English in their invasion of the Côtentin, appears side by side with a warrior whose name of Ælfred raises the strongest presumption of his English birth. The banishments of the earlier days of Cnut will easily account for so rare an event as that of an Englishman taking service under a foreign prince.[1036] But it was as the protector of unfortunate princes that Robert seems to have been most anxious to appear before the [Sidenote: He restores Baldwin of Flanders.] world. Baldwin of Flanders, driven from his dominions by his rebellious son, was restored by the power of the Norman Duke.[1037] A still more exalted suppliant presently implored his help. His liege lord, Henry, King of the French, was driven to claim the support of the mightiest of his vassals against foes who were of his own household. [Sidenote: King Robert and his sons.] King Robert had at first designed the royal succession for his eldest son Hugh, whom, according to a custom common in France, though unusual in England, he caused [Sidenote: Hugh is crowned and dies before him.] to be crowned in his lifetime.[1038] Hugh, a prince whose merits, we are told, were such that a party in Italy looked to him as a candidate for the Imperial crown,[1039] was, after some disputes with his father, reconciled to him, and died before him. Robert then chose as his successor his second son Henry, who was already invested with the [Sidenote: Henry crowned in his father’s lifetime.] duchy of Burgundy. Henry was accordingly accepted and crowned at Rheims.[1040] But the arrangement displeased Queen Constance, who was bent on the promotion of her [Sidenote: Death of King Robert.] third son Richard. On King Robert’s death, Constance and Richard expelled Henry, who took refuge with his [Sidenote: Henry expelled, and restored] Norman vassal, and was restored by his help, Richard being allowed to receive his brother’s duchy of Burgundy.[1041] [Sidenote: by Duke Robert. 1031.] The policy of Hugh the Great had indeed won for his house a mighty protector in the descendant of the pirates.

[Sidenote: The English Æthelings in Normandy.]

But there were other banished princes who had a nearer claim upon Duke Robert than his Flemish neighbour, a nearer personal claim than even his lord at Paris. The English Æthelings, his cousins Eadward and Ælfred, were still at his court, banished from the land of their fathers, while the Danish invader filled the throne of their fathers. Their mother had wholly forgotten them; their uncle had made no effort on their behalf; Robert, their cousin, was the first kinsman who deemed it any part of his business to assert their right to a crown which seemed to [Sidenote: Contradictory evidence as to the relations between Cnut and Robert.] have hopelessly passed away from their house. That Robert did make an attempt to restore them, that the relations between him and Cnut were unfriendly on other grounds, there seems no reason to doubt. But when we ask for dates and details, we are at once plunged into every kind of confusion and contradiction. The English writers are silent; from the German writers we learn next to nothing; the Scandinavian history of this age is still at least half mythical; the Norman writers never held truth to be of any moment when the relations of Normandy and England were concerned. That Robert provoked Cnut by threats or attempts to restore the Æthelings, and also by ill-treating and repudiating Cnut’s sister, seem to be facts which we may accept in the bare outline, whatever we say as to their minuter details. That Cnut retaliated by an invasion of Normandy, or that the threat of such an invasion had an effect on the conduct of the sovereigns of Normandy, are positions which are strongly asserted by various authorities. But their stories are accompanied by circumstances which directly contradict the witness of authorities which are far more trustworthy. In fact, the moment we get beyond the range of the sober contemporary Chronicles of our own land, we find ourselves in a region in which the mythical and romantic elements outweigh the historical, and moreover, in whatever comes from Norman sources, we have to be on our guard against interested invention as well as against honest error.

[Sidenote: Marriages of Estrith with Ulf and Robert.]

We have seen that Estrith, a sister of Cnut, was married to the Danish Earl Ulf, the brother-in-law of Godwine, to whom she bore the famous Swegen Estrithson, afterwards King of the Danes, one of the most renowned princes in Danish history. We are told by a crowd of authorities that, besides her marriage with Ulf, Estrith was married to the Duke of the Normans, that she was ill-treated by him in various ways, and was finally sent back with ignominy to her brother. Most of the writers who tell this story place this marriage before her marriage with Ulf, and make the Danish Earl take the divorced [Sidenote: Supposed wars between Cnut and Robert.] wife of the Norman Duke. With this story several writers connect another story of an invasion, or threatened invasion, of Normandy undertaken by Cnut in order to redress his sister’s wrongs. The most popular Danish writer even makes Cnut die, in contradiction to all authentic history, while besieging Rouen. We read also how the Norman Duke fled to Jerusalem or elsewhere for fear of the anger of the lord of six Northern kingdoms. Details of this kind are plainly mythical; but they point to some real quarrel, to some war, threatened if not actually waged, between Cnut and Robert. And chronology, as well as the tone of the legends, shows that the whole of these events must be placed quite late in Cnut’s reign. [Sidenote: Robert probably married Estrith.] The natural inference is that the marriage between Robert and Estrith took place, not before Estrith’s marriage with Ulf, but after Ulf’s death. The widow was richly [Sidenote: after Ulf’s death. c. 1026.] endowed; her brother had atoned for the slaughter of her husband by territorial grants which might well have moved the greed of the Norman. A superior attraction nearer his own castle may easily account for Robert’s neglect of his Scandinavian bride, a bride no doubt many years older than the young Count of Hièsmes. Within three years after Estrith’s widowhood, Robert became the father of him who was preeminently the Bastard.[1042]

[Sidenote: Robert’s intervention on behalf of the Æthelings. 1028–1035.]

It seems impossible to doubt that Robert’s intervention on behalf of his English cousins was connected with these events. The reign of Robert coincides with the last seven years of the reign of Cnut, so that any intervention of Robert in English affairs must have been in Cnut’s later days. Each prince would doubtless seize every opportunity of annoying the other; the tale clearly sets Robert before us as the aggressor; but as to the order of events we are left to guess. It would be perfectly natural, in a man of Robert’s character, if the repudiation of Estrith was accompanied, or presently followed, by the assertion of the claims of the Æthelings to her brother’s crown. The date then of the first contemplated Norman invasion of England can be fixed only within a few years; but the story, as we read it in the Norman accounts, seems credible enough in its general outline.[1043] The Duke sends an embassy to Cnut, demanding, it would seem, the cession of the whole kingdom of England to the rightful heir. That Cnut refused to surrender his crown is nothing wonderful, though the Norman writer seems shocked that the exhortation of the Norman ambassadors did not at once bring conviction to [Sidenote: Robert’s unsuccessful attempt] the mind of the usurper.[1044] The Duke then, in great wrath, determines to assert the claims of his kinsmen by force of [Sidenote: to invade England.] arms. An assembly of the Normans is held, a forerunner of the more famous assembly at Lillebonne, in which the invasion of England is determined on. A fleet is made ready with all haste, and Duke Robert and the Ætheling Eadward embark at Fécamp. But the wind was contrary; instead of being carried safely to Pevensey, the fleet was carried round the Côtentin and found itself on the coast of Jersey.[1045] All attempts were vain; the historian piously adds that they were frustrated by a special Providence, because God had determined that his servant Eadward should make his way to the English crown without the shedding of blood.[1046] The Duke accordingly gave up his enterprise on behalf of his cousin of England, and employed his fleet in a further harrying of the dominions of his cousin of Britanny.[1047] At last Robert, Archbishop of Rouen, the common uncle of Robert and Alan,[1048] reconciled the two princes, and the fleet seems now to have sailed to Rouen.[1049] Thus far we have a story, somewhat heightened in its details, but which may be taken as evidence that Robert, who had restored the fugitive sovereigns of France and Flanders, really thought of carrying on his calling of King-maker beyond the sea. Robert, a thorough knight-errant, doubtless designed the restoration of his cousin in perfect good faith, and with no more intention of any gain to himself than he had shown in the [Sidenote: Probable results of the success of such an invasion.] restorations of Baldwin and Henry. But if a Norman army had once landed in England, it would not have been so easy to bring it home again as it was to bring home an army which had simply marched into France or Flanders. Cnut, with no Tostig, no Harold Hardrada, to divert him from the main danger, and with the force of his other kingdoms ready to back him, would most likely have speedily crushed the invader. But had it been otherwise, one can hardly fancy that the results of the English expedition would have been of as little moment as the results of the French and the Flemish expedition. In France and Flanders Robert had simply turned the scale between two princes of the same house. But if a Norman army had set one of the sons of Æthelred on the English throne, the result would have been something more than a mere personal change of sovereign. Had Eadward held his crown by virtue of a victory won by Norman troops over Cnut’s Danes and Englishmen, the practical aspect of such a revolution could have hardly differed at all from the revolution which did take place under William. The prince thus established in his kingdom would have been, according to formal pedigrees, the cyne-hlaford, the descendant of Ælfred, Cerdic, and Woden. But half-Norman by birth, wholly Norman in feeling, raised to his throne by Norman swords, Eadward would have reigned still more thoroughly as a Frenchman than he did reign when, a few years later, he came to the crown in a more peaceable way. The storm, or whatever it was, which kept back Duke Robert from his invasion of England, put off the chances of a Norman Conquest for nearly forty years.

[Sidenote: Cnut said to have offered the succession of Wessex to the Æthelings.]

The Norman writers wind up their story with an assertion which is much less credible than their account of the expedition itself. Robert, on his return from his Breton expedition, was met in the very nick of time[1050] by ambassadors from Cnut offering half of the kingdom of England to the sons of Æthelred. The lord of Northern Europe was sick, and felt himself near his end; he therefore wished for peace during the remnant of his days.[1051] Of course this is not to be understood as an offer of an immediate surrender of any part of his dominions. What is meant is that Cnut offered to secure peace with Normandy by acknowledging Eadward as his successor in the kingdom of Wessex. The Norman and the Danish accounts may be set one against another. Any number of embassies may have passed between the two princes; any amount of mutual threatenings may have been exchanged; but Cnut’s fear of Robert and Robert’s fear of Cnut may [Sidenote: Improbability of the story.] be set aside as equally mythical. The Norman story is utterly improbable. Nothing could be more unlikely than a disposition made by Cnut in favour of either of his stepsons. He could have no personal motive for alienating any portion of his dominions from his own children. In almost any other case the influence of his wife would supply a natural and sufficient motive for such an arrangement. But all that we hear of Emma leads us to believe that her whole heart was set on Harthacnut and Gunhild, and that she was not at all likely to use her influence on behalf of her sons by Æthelred. And had Cnut made any such disposition in favour of Eadward or Ælfred, it could hardly have failed to leave some trace in English history. But among all the disputes which followed on the death of Cnut, we hear not a word of the claims of the Æthelings, we hear nothing of any single voice raised in their favour.[1052] Still that tale may have been the distortion of something which really happened. We must not forget that Harthacnut was Robert’s cousin no less than Eadward. It may be that some announcement or confirmation of Cnut’s intentions in his favour, as opposed to the succession of Harold or Swegen, may have been made by Cnut to the Norman Duke. Such an announcement might easily have been mistaken by Norman writers, ill informed about English affairs, for a disposition in favour of another son of Emma.

[Sidenote: Deaths of Cnut and Robert.]

Whatever the relations between Cnut and Robert may have been, the two princes died in the same year.[1053] When Cnut made his pilgrimage to Rome, religious motives were doubtless the leading cause of his journey. But the politic King knew how to make use of the errand which was to profit his soul in order to advance at once his own power and credit and the interests of the many nations over which he ruled. A fit of purer religious enthusiasm, a fierce impulse of penitence for past sins, carried Robert of Normandy on the more distant pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[1054] On his return he died at the [Sidenote: Robert dies at Nikaia. July 2, 1035.] Bithynian Nikaia; some say by the same fate by which he was suspected of having made away with his own brother.[1055] In his lifetime he had begun to rear the noble abbey of Cerisy, where, after many changes and mutilations, some parts still remain to witness to the severe grandeur of the taste of Robert and his age.[1056] But the bones of its founder were not destined to rest among its massive pillars or beneath the bold arches which span the width of its stately nave. The relics which he had collected in the East were borne by his chamberlain Toustain to the sanctuary which he had founded,[1057] but the great Duke of the Normans[1058] himself found his last home in the lands beyond the Hellespont, beneath the spreading cupolas of a Byzantine basilica at Nikaia.[1059] The Norman thus died a stranger and a pilgrim in a land of another tongue [Sidenote: Cnut dies at Shaftesbury. November 12, 1035.] and another worship. The Dane too ended his days in a land which was not his by birth; but it was in a land in which, if he had entered it as a destroyer, he had truly reigned as a father. Cnut, Emperor of six kingdoms, but in a special manner King of the old West-Saxon realm, died within the West-Saxon border, at a spot hallowed by memories of Ælfred, beneath the shadow of his minster at Shaftesbury.[1060] As an English King by adoption, if not by birth, he found a grave among the English Kings who had gone before him, in the Old Minster of his West-Saxon capital. The two rivals, if rivals they were, passed from the Western world almost at the same moment; the death of Cnut happened about the time when the death of Robert must have become known in England and in Normandy. The dominions of both rulers passed away to their spurious or doubtful offspring. The son of Herleva succeeded in Normandy; the supposed son of “the other Ælfgifu” succeeded in [Sidenote: Contrast between their successors.] England. But if there be a wide difference between the fame of the two fathers, it is far more than overbalanced by the difference between the fame of their sons. A reign of a few obscure years of crime and confusion forms the sole memory of the Bastard of Northampton, while the world has ever since rung, and while it lasts it can hardly ever fail to ring, with the mighty name of the Bastard of Falaise.

§ 3. The Reign of Harold the Son of Cnut. 1035–1040.

[Sidenote: Extent of Cnut’s Empire.]

The good fortune of Cnut had raised him up an Empire in Northern Europe to which there was no parallel before or after him. Setting aside descriptions of his power which are manifestly gross exaggerations, he united the kingdom of England and its dependencies with the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway. As to his intentions with regard to the disposition of these vast dominions after his death our information is unfortunately most [Sidenote: Comparison between the partition of the Empire of Cnut and that of Charles.] meagre. It seems clear that, like Charles the Great, he designed a partition among his children; it is not clear whether, like Charles, he designed to keep up any kind of connexion among his various kingdoms, by the investiture of one among his sons with any Imperial superiority over the others.[1061] Like Charles, he had established his sons as kings during his lifetime in his subordinate [Sidenote: England the centre of Cnut’s Empire.] kingdoms. I say subordinate kingdoms, because nothing can be plainer than that, in Cnut’s eyes, Denmark and Norway were little more than dependencies of England. [Sidenote: The Scandinavian States ruled by Under-kings.] England was the seat of his own dominion, while the Scandinavian kingdoms were entrusted to viceroys or Under-kings. Swegen, with his mother Ælfgifu, had reigned in Norway; Denmark, it would seem, had been placed at one time under Harold and at another under Harthacnut. In both countries we see signs of disaffection towards Cnut’s government, while we see none such in England. The rule of Swegen and his mother is said to have been highly oppressive in Norway. In Denmark we even hear of an attempt, headed by Earl Ulf and said to be favoured by Queen Emma, to displace Cnut in favour of Harthacnut. The reason assigned is the preference shown [Sidenote: Impossibility of retaining the connexion between England and Scandinavia.] by Cnut to England and Englishmen. If then Cnut had any idea of permanently annexing his Scandinavian possessions to his English Empire, any idea, in short, of reducing Denmark and Norway to the condition of Wales and Scotland, such schemes had very little chance of any lasting success. Wales and Scotland were part of the same island with England, yet to keep them in any lasting subjection was always hard; to keep countries so remote as [Sidenote: Ephemeral nature of such] Denmark and Norway was hopelessly impossible. Empires like those of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut are in their own [Sidenote: Empires in general.] nature ephemeral. The process of their formation may, as in the cases of Alexander and Charles, leave results behind it which affect the whole later history of the world; but the Empires themselves are ephemeral. As united dominions, swayed by a single will, they last only as long as there is an Alexander or a Charles at their head; they fall to pieces as soon as the sceptre of the great conqueror passes into weaker hands. So it was with the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire of the great Cnut. With our scanty knowledge, we cannot positively either assert or deny that he dreamed of preserving any kind of union [Sidenote: Cnut’s designs not carried out.] among his vast and widely severed dominions. If he did entertain such thoughts, his designs were scattered to the winds immediately upon his own death. When he died, Swegen was in possession of Norway, and Harthacnut in possession of Denmark. It appears that England also was designed for the son of Emma, Cnut’s specially royal offspring, the one son who was the child of a crowned King and his Lady. What provision, if any, was made for Harold by his father’s last dispositions does not appear. But things turned out far otherwise than Cnut had [Sidenote: Swegen expelled from Norway. 1036.] intended. Swegen was almost immediately driven out of Norway, and Magnus, the son of Saint Olaf, was received as King. In Denmark Harthacnut kept possession, though the aspect of Magnus was threatening. In England, as usual, all attempts to influence the free choice of the Witan before the vacancy came to nothing. If Cnut tried to do more than exercise that vague power of recommending a successor which the law vested in him, his bequest went for as little as the older bequest of Æthelwulf had gone.[1062]

[Sidenote: State of England on the death of Cnut.]

The events which immediately followed the death of Cnut are told with much contradiction and confusion; but, by closely attending to the most trustworthy authorities, it is not very hard to make out the general order [Sidenote: The West-Saxons for Harthacnut.] of events.[1063] It appears that the will of the late King in favour of Harthacnut was upheld by the West-Saxons with Godwine their Earl at their head. That the English were divided, some being for Harthacnut and some for one of the sons of Æthelred, is a statement which seems hardly to rest on sufficient authority.[1064] On the other hand, Harold, the supposed son of Cnut and of Ælfgifu of Northampton, also appeared as a candidate. [Sidenote: Northumberland, Mercia, and London for Harold.] He seems to have been supported by Earl Leofric of Mercia, by the great body of the thegns north of the Thames, and by the “lithsmen,” the sea-faring folk, of London. It would even seem that he ventured on a daring act, whether we call it an act of sovereignty or [Sidenote: Harold spoils Emma.] of violence, before the election was held. He sent to Winchester and despoiled the Lady Ælfgifu-Emma of the treasures which had been left her by Cnut.[1065] Personally, as the event proved, both candidates were equally worthless; but each had strong political motives on his side, and it is clear that men’s passions were deeply stirred by the struggle. As far as we can see, Harold was the candidate of the North, Harthacnut of the South; Harold was the candidate of the Danes, Harthacnut of [Sidenote: Apparent motives of the two parties.] the English. At first sight this division of parties seems exactly opposite to what might have been expected. Harthacnut, the son of a Danish father and a Norman mother, had not a drop of English blood in his veins. Harold, if he was what he professed to be, the son of Cnut by the other Ælfgifu, was English at least by the mother’s side; if he was what scandal asserted him to be, the son of a shoemaker by some nameless mother, he was doubtless English on both sides. The election of Harthacnut involved the continuation of the connexion with Denmark; the election of Harold would again make England an independent and isolated kingdom. Yet English feeling lay with Harthacnut, Danish feeling lay [Sidenote: Attachment of the West-Saxons to Harthacnut as the legatee of Cnut.] with Harold. The explanation is probably to be found in the personal position of Cnut towards his West-Saxon subjects. He had lived more habitually among them than among the people of any other part of his dominions; the greatest of living Englishmen had been his minister and representative; he had in every way made Wessex his home, and Wessex had flourished under his government as it had never flourished before. It was no wonder then if the wishes of Cnut with regard to the succession or to anything else were looked on by the West-Saxon people as a sacred law. Harthacnut too, if not the descendant of their ancient rulers, was at least a kingly bairn, the son of a crowned King and his Lady. Who was Harold the bastard, whose parents no one knew for certain, that he should rule over them? If Harthacnut was at this moment in Denmark, his earliest days had been spent in England, while we have seen reason to believe that the earliest days of Harold had been spent in [Sidenote: Aspect of the connexion with Denmark.] Denmark. The continued connexion with Denmark which was implied in the choice of Harthacnut might even appear to patriotic Englishmen as an argument in favour of the Danish King.[1066] In the later days of Cnut the connexion with Denmark had taken a form which must have been distinctly gratifying to English, and above all to West-Saxon, national feeling. The lord of all Northern Europe had worn his Imperial crown in the old West-Saxon capital; he had thence sent forth his earls and his sons to govern his dependent realms of Denmark and Norway. As it had been in the days of Cnut, so men deemed that it would be in the days of Harthacnut. Denmark, like Mercia or Northumberland, would be only another earldom whence homage, and perhaps tribute, would be paid to the Imperial court and the Imperial treasure-house at Winchester. The sons of Æthelred were strangers; no man in England had seen them since their childhood; their claims had been made the pretext for a threatened foreign invasion; no sentiment attaching to their remoter ancestry could at all counterbalance the sentiment which attached to the undoubted, the royal, the chosen, son of the King who had given England eighteen years of peace, prosperity, and foreign dominion. West-Saxon feeling therefore took the shape of loyalty to the undoubted son of the late King, of obedience to his declared wishes as to the succession. Earl Godwine and all the men of his earldom were for Harthacnut.

[Sidenote: Motives in favour of Harold among the Danes and Northern English.]

On the other hand, it is not hard to see how Harold might appeal to a very intelligible line of feeling in the minds of the Danish and half-Danish inhabitants of Northern England. His bastardy would in their eyes be no objection. Whether we look on his mother as a mere concubine or as bound to Cnut by an irregular or uncanonical marriage, her children would, according to Danish notions, be as fit to reign as the children of the Norman Lady. Indeed a powerful vein of Northumbrian sentiment might not unnaturally attach to the grandson of the murdered Earl Ælfhelm. Harold’s election might seem to be the overthrow of the West-Saxon dominion over Danes and Angles; a day might seem to be coming in which Winchester would have to bow to York. And if the son of Ælfgifu thus had a local connexion with Northumberland, he had also a local connexion with Mercia. Whether by birth, by residence, or by maternal descent, the daughter of Ælfhelm was in some way Ælfgifu of Northampton, and her son might call on Mercian local feeling to support the claims of a countryman. Again, if Harold, after having been designed for the crown of Denmark and brought up in Denmark as a future Danish King, had been deprived by his father’s later arrangements of any share in either England or Denmark, Danish and Northumbrian feelings would centre round him still more strongly. He would become the embodiment of any jealousies which had been called forth by Cnut’s open preference of England to Denmark, by his preference of the Saxon part of England to the Anglian and Danish lands. It was better to have a King who should reign over England without Denmark, better to have a King who should reign over Northumberland and Mercia without Wessex, than for a West-Saxon King, of whatever ancestry, to hold both Northumberland and Denmark as dependencies. The old provincial feelings, often concealed but never completely stifled, ever ready to break out on any strong provocation, now broke out in their fulness. The Danish provinces sided with Harold. And with them we find a new element, the “lithsmen,” the nautic multitude [Sidenote: Danish settlement in London.] of London. The great city still kept her voice in the election of Kings, but that voice would almost seem to have been handed over to a new class among her population. We hear now, not of the citizens, but of the sea-faring men.[1067] Every invasion, every foreign settlement of any kind within the kingdom, has in every age added a new element to the population of London. As a Norman colony settled in London later in the century, so a Danish colony settled there now. Some accounts tell us, doubtless with great exaggeration, that London had now almost become a Danish city.[1068] But it is certain that the Danish element in the city was numerous and powerful, and that its voice strongly helped to swell the cry in favour of Harold. Northumberland, Mercia, and London thus demanded that the son of Ælfgifu of Northampton should, if possible, be King over all England; in the worst case they would have him, like Eadgar and like Cnut, for King over all Northumberland and Mercia.

There was perhaps no country except England in which such a question could have been settled in that age otherwise than at the cost of a civil war. But the firmly rooted principles of English law, the habit of constant meeting and discussion, had already produced some germs of the feeling to which the great English historian of Greece has [Sidenote: The controversy peacefully decided in the Witenagemót.] given the name of “constitutional morality.”[1069] The controversy was a sharp one; but it was decided, not on the field of battle, but in the debates of the Witenagemót. The usual midwinter meeting may, or may not, have been [Sidenote: Gemót of Oxford. Christmas, 1035?] forestalled by a few weeks; certain it is that, soon after the death of Cnut, the Witan of all England met in full Gemót at Oxford. That town was, no doubt, on this as on other occasions, recommended for the purpose by its position on the frontiers of the two great divisions of the kingdom. The national council proceeded to debate [Sidenote: Godwine maintains the claims of Harthacnut.] the claims of the two candidates. The great Earl of the West-Saxons, supported by the whole force of his earldom, strove to play the same part which Dunstan had played in the last recorded debate of the kind in a full and free Assembly of the Wise.[1070] His eloquent tongue set forth the claims of Harthacnut, the candidate recommended alike by undoubted kingly birth and by the wishes of the glorious sovereign whom they had lost. But this time the charmer charmed in vain. All that Godwine could gain for the son of the Lady was a portion of his father’s [Sidenote: The division of the kingdom proposed by Leofric,] kingdom. The proposal of a division seems to have come from Leofric, now Earl over all Mercia,[1071] who on all occasions appears as a mediator between the extreme parties of the North and the South. To this course he was prompted alike by his personal temper and by the geographical position of his earldom. Godwine and his party withstood for a while even this proposal; but the majority [Sidenote: and voted by the assembly.] was against them; the assembly decreed the division of England between the two candidates.[1072] Once more, but now for the last time in English history, the land had two [Sidenote: Harthacnut reigns in Wessex; Harold reigns north of Thames,] acknowledged Kings. Harold reigned to the north of the Thames and Harthacnut to the south. We are not distinctly told whether the two Kings were to be perfectly independent of each other, or whether, as in the case of Cnut and Eadmund, any Imperial supremacy was reserved [Sidenote: seemingly as superior lord.] to either of the half-brothers.[1073] But several indications seem to show that such a supremacy was reserved to Harold, and this supposition may perhaps help to explain some of the difficulties in the narrative which follows. Nor are we told of any stipulations as to the succession. It would follow, almost as a matter of course, that, if either of the brothers died childless, the survivor would be elected to [Sidenote: Rumoured refusal of Archbishop Æthelnoth to crown Harold.] his share of the kingdom. According to one account, Archbishop Æthelnoth, the friend of Cnut, still refused to consecrate Harold as King. He placed the crown and sceptre on the altar; Harold might seize them if he dared; but while a son of Emma lived, he, Æthelnoth, would crown no King but a son of Emma, and every Bishop of his province was equally forbidden to perform the rite. If this tale be true, it was an assertion of independence on the part of the ecclesiastical power for which we might in vain seek a parallel in the English history of those times. Æthelnoth, as a member of the Gemót, might give his vote for whichever candidate he thought good; but when the election was once made, he had clearly no right as Archbishop to refuse to consecrate the King chosen by the majority. But the tale is most likely a fiction. There seems to be little doubt that Harold was regularly crowned at Oxford by Æthelnoth, either now or after his later election to the whole kingdom.[1074] But, if the tale be true, and if it belongs to this time, it plainly implies the Imperial supremacy of Harold. With a mere King of the Mercians and Northumbrians, whether an Under-king or an altogether independent sovereign, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a West-Saxon subject, could have nothing to do.

[Sidenote: Harthacnut remains in Denmark.]

The kingdom was thus divided. The King-elect of the West-Saxons was in no hurry—the affairs of his Northern kingdom did not allow him to be in a hurry—to take personal possession of the fragment of a realm which was [Sidenote: Regency of Emma and Godwine in Wessex. 1035–1037.] all that Godwine had been able to keep for him. Emma appears to have been invested with a kind of regency in her son’s name, while Godwine still held his office as Earl, and with it the administration of the West-Saxon kingdom. It is specially mentioned that Harthacnut’s housecarls remained with Emma.[1075] The housecarls of Harthacnut had doubtless been the housecarls of Cnut; their loyalty was personal to their master, and it would naturally pass to his widow and her son. But that their presence was allowed in the West-Saxon kingdom and capital under the administration of Godwine clearly shows that they had not been employed during the late reign as instruments of oppression, and that they were not looked on with any general hatred by the people at large.

It was in the course of the next year that an event happened of which advantage has ever since been taken by hostile tongues and pens to stain the character of the great Earl of the West-Saxons with a charge of the blackest treachery. But even in the period on which we are now entering, a period in which we have at every step to weigh the conflicting statements of national and political partizanship, there is no event as to which the various versions of the tale are more utterly at variance with each other. The story is told with every conceivable variety of time, place, and person, and even our earliest and best authorities contain statements which cannot be reconciled [Sidenote: Attempt in favour of the Æthelings. 1036.] with one another. Thus much seems certain; first, that, about this time, one or both of the sons of Æthelred and Emma made an attempt to recover their father’s kingdom; secondly, that Ælfred, the younger of the two Æthelings, fell into the power of Harold and was cruelly put to death; thirdly, that Godwine was suspected of being an accomplice. [Sidenote: Conflicting versions of the story.] But beyond this, there is hardly a detail of the story which can be asserted with any confidence.[1076] The first point, that the attempt, whatever was its nature, took place soon after the death of Cnut and the first election of Harold, is placed beyond all doubt by the complete agreement of the best authorities. But very respectable secondary authorities have altogether misplaced the date, and they have thus given occasion for a lower class of compilers to load the story with endless mythical and [Sidenote: Norman Version.] calumnious details. According to the Norman account, both the Æthelings had a share in the attempt. As soon as the death of Cnut was known in Normandy, Eadward [Sidenote: Invasion of England by Eadward.] set sail with forty ships and landed at Southampton. But the English, whether for love or for fear[1077] of their Danish King Harold, met them as enemies. Eadward fought a battle and defeated the English with great slaughter. But, reflecting how great was the strength of England and how small was the force which he had brought with him, he presently sailed away, taking with him great plunder. Soon after Eadward’s return, Ælfred set sail from Wissant[1078] and landed at Dover. As he went onwards into the country, Godwine met him, received him friendly, and seemingly did homage to him.[1079] The Earl and the Ætheling supped together, and talked over their plans. But in the night Godwine seized Ælfred, tied his hands behind his back, and thus sent him and some of his companions to London to King Harold. Others he put in prison, others he embowelled.[1080] Among those who were sent to London, Harold caused Ælfred’s chief companions to be beheaded, and the Ætheling himself to be blinded. In that state he was sent to Ely, naked and with his legs tied under his horse’s belly. He had not been long at Ely when he died, as the weapon with which his eyes had been cut out had wounded the brain.[1081]

[Sidenote: In this version his coming is hostile.]

In this Norman version the coming of Ælfred is simply part of a Norman invasion. Eadward had come with a force large enough to fight a battle; Ælfred’s force, we [Sidenote: Version in two of the Chronicles.] are told, was still larger.[1082] The oldest English version, which it must not be forgotten takes the form of a ballad, knows nothing of any warlike expedition, and speaks of [Sidenote: Ælfred’s companions slain [by Godwine].] Ælfred only. According to this account, Ælfred came to England, whence or under what circumstances we are not told, and wished to go to his mother at Winchester. In this purpose he was hindered by men who were powerful at the time, and who unjustly favoured Harold. In one version these men are nameless; in another Godwine is named as their chief.[1083] Then the Ætheling and his companions are seized; some are killed outright, some are put in bonds, some sold as slaves, others blinded or put to various tortures and horrible deaths.[1084] No worse deed had ever been done since the Danes came into the land.[1085] All this was done, according to one version, by Godwine, according to the other, by Harold. The Ætheling still lived; so he was taken to Ely in a ship, blinded while still on board, given thus blinded to the monks, with whom he lived till he died soon after, and then was buried honourably in the minster.[1086]

There is yet quite another version, that of the special panegyrist of Emma, according to whom, it must be remembered, Eadward and Ælfred are not sons of Æthelred, but younger sons of Cnut and Emma, sent over to Normandy [Sidenote: Harold forges a letter from Emma to the Æthelings.] for education.[1087] Harold, anxious to destroy his half-brothers, forges a letter to them in the name of their mother. She tells them that she is Lady, only in name; Harold has usurped the kingdom and is daily strengthening himself; he is winning over the chief men by gifts, threats, and prayers. Yet the feeling of the nation is still in their favour rather than in that of Harold. Let one of her sons come over to her quickly and secretly; she can then consult with him what is to be done.[1088] The Æthelings fell into the snare; Ælfred, the younger of the brothers, went with a few comrades into Flanders; there he stayed a short time with the Marquess Baldwin, and increased his company by some adventurers from Boulogne.[1089] He then set sail, and came near to some point of the English coast which is not further described. But, as the inhabitants came down to the shore with evidently hostile intentions, he changed his course to another point equally undetermined. There he landed, and tried to go to his mother; on the way he was met by Godwine, who swore oaths to him and became his man.[1090] By the Earl’s advice he turned [Sidenote: Ælfred received by Godwine,] aside from London,[1091] and lodged at Guildford. There Godwine quartered Ælfred’s comrades in different houses in the town, leaving a few only to attend on the Ætheling himself. He feasted Ælfred and his companions, and withdrew to his own house, evidently in or near Guildford, promising to return in the morning to do his due service [Sidenote: but seized by the agents of Harold.] to his lord.[1092] But in the night the emissaries of Harold suddenly appeared in the town, seized the comrades of Ælfred, and sold, slew, or tortured them according to the usual story. The Ætheling was taken to Ely; there he was first mocked by the soldiers, then loaded with heavy fetters, brought before some kind of tribunal, and, by its sentence, blinded and finally put to death.[1093] The monks of Ely took his body and buried it, and miracles were of course wrought at his tomb.

[Sidenote: Estimate of the evidence.]

These are the main versions of the tale, the details of which, as well as some other accounts, I shall discuss elsewhere. Now when we come to compare them with one another, what is the judgement to which we ought to come? That Ælfred landed, that he and his comrades were cruelly put to death, there can be no doubt; but had Godwine any share in the deed? Before we examine the evidence, we must first try and understand what the real state of the case was. The unhappy fate of Ælfred caused him, according to the universal English instinct, to be looked on as a martyr; his tale became a piece of hagiology, to which, as to other pieces of hagiology, ordinary ways of thinking were not to be applied. This way of looking at the matter began very early; but, in order really to get to the bottom of the question, we must try and understand how things must have looked at the moment of Ælfred’s landing.

[Sidenote: Statement of the case.]

First of all, whatever was the crime either of Godwine or of Harold, we must remember that, in any case, it was not the kind of crime which the exaggerated language of some of our narratives would lead us to think. Godwine might be a traitor in the sense of one who betrays any fellow-creature to his ruin; on the worst showing, he was not a traitor in the sense of one who betrays or rebels against his lawful sovereign. Ælfred was not, as the legends of his martyrdom might seem to imply, a lawful King driven from his throne. Harold was not an usurper, keeping the lawful heir out of his lawful possession. Godwine was not a rebel, conspiring to betray a prince to whom his allegiance was lawfully due. According to any version of the story, Ælfred appeared in England as the enemy of a settled government, established by a regular vote of the legislature. As such it was the part and duty of the King, of the Earl, and of the whole people, to resist him. He was a pretender to the crown entering the kingdom at the head of a foreign force, whether great or small. There has never been any time or place in which such a pretender would not have been at once arrested; there have been few times and places in which such a pretender would not have been speedily put to death. Against the arrest of Ælfred not a word can be said in any age; his execution was perhaps more deeply offensive to the public feeling of the eleventh century, a time when the shedding of blood by the sentence of law was singularly rare,[1094] than it would have been to the public feeling of the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. The real question is whether either the arrest or the execution was accompanied with any circumstances of [Sidenote: Ælfred’s position analogous to that of the Stewart Pretenders.] treachery or needless cruelty. The sons of Æthelred were very much in the position of the elder and younger Pretenders in the reigns of George the First and Second. In both cases the power which had a right to dispose of the crown had disposed of it, and had not disposed of it in their favour. Now no man could have blamed any officer, civil or military, in the service of King George, for arresting either James or Charles Edward Stewart. In so doing he would simply have been doing his duty to his King and country. If either Pretender had been arrested, his execution would doubtless have been a very harsh measure; but it would have been a perfectly legal measure; he was attainted, and he might have been as regularly executed as Monmouth was. Nay, the letter of the law, as the law stood till the reign of George the Third, as it was actually enforced as late as the reign of Charles the Second, would have condemned the pretended Prince of Wales to indignities and torments quite as cruel as any that Harold Harefoot inflicted on the Ætheling and his companions.[1095] To have put James or Charles Stewart to death in the horrible form which the law decreed for the traitor would doubtless have called forth as fierce a storm of righteous indignation as was called forth by the death of the Ætheling Ælfred. Still the act would have been legal; it might have inflicted undying shame on the King and his counsellors who ordered it, but it would have been no ground of blame whatever against the gaoler, the sheriff, or the executioner. So it was with the case of Ælfred. According to one account, first Eadward and then Ælfred entered the land at the head of a foreign army; they tried, in short, to repeat the exploit of Cnut, to forestall the exploit of William. In banished men, eager for a restoration to their country on any terms, such conduct may admit of many excuses. Still, on the face of it, they put themselves in the position of open enemies of their country. If Eadward really landed at the head of a Norman army, if he really fought a battle against an English force at Southampton, those who withstood him were as plainly doing their simple duty as the men who fought at Maldon or on Senlac. Even if we reject this version, if we believe that Ælfred entered the country, not with an army but with a mere escort of strangers, still he was coming, seemingly without any invitation from any party in the country, to disturb a settlement which the legislature of the kingdom had established, and which he was not likely to upset except by force of arms. Men who run such desperate risks must take the consequences. [Sidenote: The real question as to Godwine; Was he guilty of treachery or needless cruelty?] If Godwine, as a military commander, fought against Eadward, if, as a civil magistrate, he arrested Ælfred, he simply did his duty and nothing else. The only question would be, as I before put it, Was there any treachery or needless cruelty in the matter? Now cruelty is perhaps of all charges that which most needs to be looked at with reference to the habits and feelings of the age. What one age looks on as mildness another age looks on as barbarity. But it is clear that the cruelties which were wrought by Harold on his captives deeply revolted the public opinion of the time in which he lived. As for deliberate treachery, that is a crime in all ages alike. If then we set aside accusations which rest on mere misconception of the case, the question remains whether the evidence is enough to convict Godwine either of personal treachery towards the Ætheling or of any share in the savage cruelties of Harold.

[Sidenote: Inconsistency of the ordinary story with the fact of the division of the Kingdom.]

Now in reading any version of the story one great difficulty at once presents itself. Godwine is always described as acting a part which, in his real position at the time, he cannot have acted. Not one of the versions of the tale takes any notice of the division of the kingdom. They all seem to look on Harold as sole King and to look on Godwine as his minister, or at least as his subject. Yet we know that, at this time, Godwine was neither Harold’s minister nor Harold’s subject. Harthacnut was still the acknowledged King, at all events King-elect, of the West-Saxons; Emma was still sitting at Winchester as regent in his name; Godwine, who had secured for them this remnant of dominion, was the chief minister and general of the Lady and her son. If Godwine acted in any way in the interest of Harold, it could only have been because Harold was, as I suggested above, the superior lord of his own sovereign—because the invasion, or attempt of whatever kind, made by the Æthelings threatened not only the rights of the King of the West-Saxons, but also the rights of the Emperor of Britain. This is certainly possible, but it is rather straining a point; nothing of the sort is at all implied in the language of any of the writers who tell the tale. They all, even the best informed, seem to know nothing of the kingship of Harthacnut and the regency of Emma. This seeming ignorance of writers, some of them contemporary, on such a point shows in the most remarkable way how soon and how completely the first ephemeral reign of Harthacnut was forgotten. But their forgetfulness certainly goes a good way to lessen the trustworthiness of their own tale. In fact the story as it stands cannot be made to agree with the known facts of the history. Godwine cannot have played the part attributed to him by his enemies while the arrangement decreed by the Witenagemót of Oxford was still in force. But the historical character of that arrangement is undoubted. That the kingdom really was divided, that Godwine really was at this time not the minister of Harold but the minister of Harthacnut, are facts which cannot be gain-sayed. The details of the story of Ælfred cannot have happened in the manner and at the time in which they are said to have happened. It was perhaps a feeling of this inconsistency which led several later writers to shift the story to a later time, to the time immediately following the death, not of Cnut, but of either Harold or Harthacnut. But the part played by Harold is the most essential part of the story; the tale cannot be fitted in to a later time except by a complete change of its circumstances. [Sidenote: The direct evidence against Godwine fails.] Altogether I think it must be allowed that the direct evidence brought to implicate Godwine in any guilty share in the business altogether breaks down.

[Sidenote: Early suspicions against Godwine.]

On the other hand, we have to explain the fact that Godwine was suspected, that the suspicion arose early and prevailed extensively, and that it was not confined to Godwine’s foreign enemies and slanderers. Godwine indeed was not the only person who was suspected. One tale or legend accused Emma herself; another laid the guilt to the charge of Lyfing, Bishop of Devonshire, a prelate who often appears as a powerful supporter of Godwine’s policy; in another version, if Godwine was the instigator, the English people in general seem to have been his accomplices.[1096] Still Godwine was specially suspected, and suspected while the memory of the event was still fresh. His own special apologist and panegyrist seems to imply that the charge against him was a mere invention of the Norman Archbishop Robert.[1097] This however was not the case; Godwine was formally accused and formally acquitted [Sidenote: [1040.]] of the crime soon after the accession of Harthacnut, four years after the event. He was acquitted, as we shall presently see,[1098] by the solemn judgement of the highest court in the realm, and he is fully entitled to the benefit of that acquittal. Still the mere fact of his accusation has to be explained. The charge, brought at such a time and in such a shape, could not have been a mere Norman slander. Godwine’s accuser, in fact, was an Englishman of the highest rank. Nor would a mere Norman slander ever have been embodied in popular songs, or have found [Sidenote: Some ground for the suspicion must be supposed.] a place in any version of the English Chronicles. Such a suspicion—strong, early, native—proves something. Godwine, guilty or innocent, must have done some act which, to say the least, was capable of an unlucky misconstruction. By putting together one or two hints in the different accounts, we may perhaps come to a probable conjecture as to what his share in the matter really was. There is one version, and only one, which, while consistent with Godwine’s innocence, explains the early and prevalent suspicion as to his guilt. Let us look how things stood. [Sidenote: Probable state of the case.] It seems that the feeling which broke out openly in the next year was already beginning to show itself; men were beginning, even in Wessex, to be weary of the absent Harthacnut. Well they might; to wait so long for an absent King, who, still uncrowned, unsworn, unanointed, could not be looked on as full King, was something of which no man had seen the like. It was not wonderful if popular feeling was, as we are told, veering round, whether wrongfully or not, in favour of Harold.[1099] At such a moment, a son of Æthelred, either knowing the state of the kingdom or eager to try his chance in any case, lands in England. We of course dismiss the story which speaks of actual invasion and warfare, which is probably a mere repetition of the attempted invasion by Duke Robert. [Sidenote: Godwine probably met Ælfred.] But the Ætheling was in England; if Godwine really wished to preserve the settlement which gave Wessex to a son of Emma, it might well occur to him to ask whether the game could not be better played with the present son of Æthelred than with the absent son of Cnut. He may have sought an interview with the Ætheling; he may even have pledged himself to his cause. But if a son of Æthelred was at large in England, the throne of Harold would be endangered as well as the throne of Harthacnut. Harold and his emissaries would be on the alert. The prince who had, perhaps before his election, seized on Emma’s treasures at Winchester, would not, in such a case, be very scrupulous about respecting the frontiers of his brother’s kingdom. Perhaps, if he were superior lord, he might have a real right to interfere in a matter which [Sidenote: Ælfred probably seized by Harold without Godwine’s connivance.] clearly touched the interests of the whole Empire. At any rate, if the Ætheling and his companions were known to be lodged in a West-Saxon town not very far from the borders of the Northern kingdom, it is perfectly conceivable that they might be seized by the agents of Harold, against the will or without the knowledge of Godwine. When the Ætheling was once seized and carried off, Godwine might well think that the game was up, that the star of Harold was fairly in the ascendant, and that neither interest nor duty called on him to plunge Wessex into a war with Northumberland and Mercia either to deliver Ælfred or to revenge his wrongs. Such conduct would not be that of a sentimental and impulsive hero; it would be that of a wary and hard-headed statesman. Such conduct would involve no real treachery; but it might easily give rise to the suspicion of treachery. If Godwine received the Ætheling, if Harold’s agents afterwards seized him, it would be an easy inference that Godwine betrayed him to Harold. As soon as the tale had once got afloat, mythical details would, as ever, gather round it. When Godwine was once believed to have betrayed Ælfred, it would be an obvious improvement on the story to make him a personal agent in the barbarities to which his supposed treason had given occasion. It is clear that the ordinary narrative, as it stands, cannot be received; but in some such explanation as this we may discern the probable kernel of truth on which the fabulous details gradually fastened themselves.[1100]

[Sidenote: Probable innocence of Godwine.]

On the whole then I incline to the belief that the great Earl, every other recorded deed of whose life is the deed of an English patriot, who on every other occasion appears as conciliatory and law-abiding, who is always as strongly opposed to everything like wrong or violence as the rude age in which he lived would let him be, did not, on this one occasion, act in a manner so contrary to his whole character as to resort to fraud or needless violence to compass the destruction of a man of English birth and kingly descent. The innocence of Godwine seems to me to be most likely in itself, most consistent with the circumstances of the time, and not inconsistent with such parts of our evidence as seem most trustworthy. But in any case, even if, while casting aside palpable fables and contradictions, we take the evidence, so far as it is credible, at the worst, even then it seems to me that the great Earl is at least entitled to a verdict of Not Proven, if not of Not Guilty.

[Sidenote: Disappointment of the hopes]

The next year after the unlucky attempt of Ælfred[1101] was marked by the breaking down of the short-lived arrangement [Sidenote: of the West-Saxons.] which had been made between the two sons of Cnut. The West-Saxons had seemingly supported Harthacnut as the representative of that policy of his father which had raised Wessex, not only to the headship of England and of all Britain, but to the practical headship of all Northern Europe. No hope on the part of any people was ever more grievously disappointed. No contrast could be greater than the contrast between Wessex in the days of Cnut and [Sidenote: Degrading position of Wessex.] Wessex in these two years of Harthacnut. Wessex was no longer the chosen dominion, Winchester was no longer the chosen capital, of an Emperor of the North, whose name was dreaded on the Baltic and reverenced on the Tiber. The old Imperial kingdom had sunk to be, what it had never been before, a dependent province ruled by representatives of an absent sovereign. A King of the Danes, who did not think England worthy of his presence, held the West-Saxon kingdom, seemingly as a vassal of the King of the Mercians and Northumbrians, and entrusted it to the government of his Norman mother. It would doubtless be no excuse in English eyes that Denmark was now threatened by Magnus of Norway,[1102] and that Harthacnut’s first duty was to provide for its defence. To the West-Saxon people it would simply seem that they had chosen a King whom no entreaties on the part of his English subjects could persuade to come and take personal possession of his English kingdom. Being absent, he must have remained uncrowned, and his lack of the consecrating rite would alone, in the ideas of those times, be enough to make his government altogether uncertain and provisional. Even the influence of Godwine could not prolong—most likely it was not exerted to prolong—a state of things so essentially offensive to all patriotic feeling. It was felt that to accept the rule of Harold would be a far less evil than to keep a nominal independence which was practically a degrading bondage. Popular feeling therefore set strongly in favour of union with Mercia and Northumberland, even under the doubtful son of Ælfgifu of [Sidenote: Harthacnut deposed in Wessex, and Harold chosen King over all England. 1037.] Northampton. “Man chose Harold over all to King, and forsook Harthacnut, for that he was too long in Denmark.”[1103] That is, I conceive, the Witan of Wessex, in discharge of their undoubted constitutional right,[1104] deposed their King Harthacnut, and elected the King of the Mercians and Northumbrians as their immediate sovereign, the election being, as it would seem, confirmed by a vote of the Witan of all England. Harold was thus called by the universal voice of the nation to be King over the whole realm. The southern kingdom, just as at the final election of his father,[1105] was again joined to the northern. England again became one kingdom under one King, an union which since that day has never been broken.

The reign of the new King of the English was short and troubled. His first act was the banishment of the Lady [Sidenote: Banishment of Emma. 1037.] Emma, who was sent out of the land at the beginning of winter.[1106] She did not return to Normandy, as that country was now in all the confusion attendant on the minority of its new sovereign, the future Conqueror. She betook herself to the court of Baldwin of Flanders, which we shall henceforth find serving as the general place of refuge for English exiles. She was received with all honour by Baldwin and his Countess Adela.[1107] Two of the near kinswomen of Baldwin will play a prominent part in our future history; one of them indeed, his daughter Matilda, the wife of the great William, was destined, within thirty years, to fill the place from which Emma herself had been driven.

[Sidenote: Character of Harold.]

Of the administration of Harold himself we hear hardly anything. The tale which affirms that he reigned without the usual consecrating rite charges him also with entire neglect of Christian worship, and of choosing the hour of mass for his hunting or other amusements.[1108] Other accounts however imply that he was not wanting in the conventional piety of the age.[1109] He at least, like other Kings, kept chaplains in his personal service, so that he can hardly have been the avowed heathen or infidel which he appears in the hostile picture. Ecclesiastical affairs however do not seem to have been in a flourishing [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical appointments.] state under his government. We read, as to be sure we read in the reigns of Kings of greater claims to sanctity, of bishoprics being held in plurality and [Sidenote: Death of Archbishop Æthelnoth. 1038.] being sold for money. Good Archbishop Æthelnoth died [Sidenote: Eadsige succeeds.] in the second year of Harold’s sole reign, and was succeeded by Eadsige, who appears at once in the threefold character of a royal chaplain, a monk, and a suffragan Bishop in Kent.[1110] We also find another royal chaplain, [Sidenote: Promotion of Stigand and Lyfing.] Stigand, the priest of Assandun, appointed to a bishopric, deposed, seemingly before consecration, because another competitor was ready with a larger sum, and finally reinstated, whether by dint of the same prevailing arguments we are not told.[1111] Lyfing, Bishop of Devonshire, also received the see of Worcester in plurality.[1112] These appointments are worthy of notice, as throwing some light on the otherwise utterly obscure politics of this reign. Stigand, the old chaplain of Cnut, was the firm friend and [Sidenote: Reconciliation between Harold and the party of Godwine.] counsellor of his widow.[1113] Lyfing was the right hand man of Earl Godwine. That these men shared in the promotions of which Harold had an unusual number to distribute, that Lyfing especially became the King’s personal friend,[1114] seems to show that a perfect reconciliation was now brought about between Harold and the party which had opposed his original election. We may infer that Emma was sacrificed to the King’s personal dislike, a dislike which, it seems to be implied, was shared by the mass of the people.[1115] But there seems to have been no disposition on Harold’s part to bear hard in any other way on his former antagonists. A certain amount either of generosity or of policy must have found a place in his character.

It is probably a sign of degeneracy and weakness on the part of Harold’s government that the vassal kingdoms no longer remained in the same state of submission to which they had been brought during at least the later days of Cnut. North Wales was now gathering strength [Sidenote: Inroad of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn; battle of Rhyd-y-Groes and death of Eadwine. 1039.] under the famous Gruffydd son of Llywelyn. His first exploit was an inroad in which he reached as far as the Severn, and fought a battle at Rhyd-y-Groes, near Upton-on-Severn, a place which, perhaps owing to this event, still retains its British name. In that fight several eminent Englishmen were killed, and among them Eadwine, a brother of Earl Leofric.[1116] In the next year, the last year of [Sidenote: Duncan’s siege of Durham and his defeat. 1040.] the reign of Harold,[1117] Duncan, King of Scots, on what occasion we are not told, repeated the exploit of his grandfather, and with much the same success.[1118] He crossed the frontier and besieged Durham. The strength and prosperity of the city, though probably thrown back by the defeat of Carham,[1119] had vastly increased since its first [Sidenote: Bishop Eadmund of Durham. 1020–1042.] creation by Ealdhun. Ealdhun’s successor Eadmund, called to the see, as the story went, by a miraculous voice,[1120] had finished the work of his predecessor. The minster of Durham had been brought to perfection,[1121] and the city of Durham had gained strength and population enough to withstand an attack by its own efforts. In the invasion of Malcolm the infant settlement had been delivered by the intervention of Earl Uhtred; the invasion of Duncan was driven back by the valour of the citizens themselves. The Scots were put to flight; of the chief men of the army the greater part were killed in the battle; the remainder owed their escape to their horses. The soldiers of meaner degree, who had suffered less in the actual combat, were slaughtered without mercy in the pursuit.[1122] Northumbriam barbarism showed itself now as on the former occasion. The bloody trophies of victory were collected in the market-place of Durham, and a garland of Scottish heads again adorned the battlements of the rescued city.[1123]

[Sidenote: Harthacnut prepares to assert his claims. 1039.]

The reign and life of Harold were now drawing to an end. Harthacnut was not at all disposed to acquiesce in the arrangements which had wholly shut him out from England. His Northern possessions were now safe. A treaty had been concluded with Magnus, according to which, as in some other instances of which we have heard, each King, in case of the other dying childless, was to succeed to his kingdom.[1124] Harthacnut therefore was now able to turn his thoughts in the direction of England, and a message from his mother in Flanders is said to have further worked upon his mind.[1125] He began to make great preparations for an invasion of England,[1126] but for the present he merely sailed to Flanders with ten ships,[1127] and there passed the winter with his mother. The time however was not spent in idleness. His preparations were busily carried on, and in the course of the next year he found himself at the head of a considerable fleet.[1128] No invasion however was needed, as an event which was probably not unexpected[1129] opened the way for his accession [Sidenote: Death of Harold. March 17, 1040.] without difficulty or bloodshed. King Harold, who had been for some time lying sick at Oxford, died in that town in the month of March.[1130] He was buried at Westminster, a spot which is now mentioned in our Chronicles for the first time.[1131] Its mention however seems to show that the smaller monastery which preceded the great foundation of Eadward enjoyed a greater amount of reputation than we might otherwise have been led to think. Harold, who could not have been above two or three and twenty years old, left no recorded posterity. We hear nothing of wives, mistresses, or children of any kind.

§ 4. The Reign of Harthacnut. 1040–2.

[Sidenote: Harthacnut unanimously chosen]

Immediately on the burial of Harold, probably at the Easter festival, the Witan of all England, English and Danish, unanimously chose Harthacnut to the kingdom.[1132] [Sidenote: King. Easter? 1040.] The only undoubted, and now the only surviving, son of Cnut united all claims. No attempt seems to have been made on behalf of Eadward the surviving son of Æthelred, and the events of the last reign were not likely to have prejudiced men in his favour. The universal belief of the moment was that the choice of Harthacnut was the right and wise course.[1133] An embassy, of which Ælfweard, Bishop of London and Abbot of Evesham, was a leading member,[1134] was sent to Bruges, to invite the newly-chosen [Sidenote: Harthacnut lands. June 17.] King to take possession of his crown. He and his mother accordingly set sail for England in the course of June; he landed at Sandwich, and was presently crowned at Canterbury by Archbishop Eadsige.[1135]

[Sidenote: His character.]

The expectations which had been formed of Harthacnut were grievously disappointed. One worthless youth had made way for another equally worthless. Writers in the Norman interest, and members of foundations to which he was lavish, try to clothe him with various virtues.[1136] But the utmost that can be claimed for him is an easy species of munificence which showed itself on the one hand in bounty to monasteries and to the poor,[1137] and on the other in providing four meals daily for his courtiers.[1138] But all his recorded public acts set him before us as a rapacious, brutal, and bloodthirsty tyrant. His short reign is merely a repetition of the first and worst days of his father, while he could not, like his father, invoke even the tyrant’s plea of necessity in palliation of his evil deeds. Harthacnut had been unanimously chosen King; he had been received with universal joy; there was no sedition within the country, and no foreign enemy threatened it. But his conduct was that of a conqueror in a hostile land. His first act was to wring a heavy contribution from his new subjects for an object which in no way concerned them. We now learn incidentally that the standing navy of England, both under Cnut and under Harold, had consisted of sixteen ships, and eight marks were paid, seemingly yearly, either to each rower singly or to some group of rowers.[1139] [Sidenote: Harthacnut’s first Danegeld.] Harthacnut had come over with sixty ships, manned by Danish soldiers, and his first act was to demand eight marks for each man of their crews, a piece of extortion which at once destroyed his newly gained popularity.[1140] He then began to revenge himself on his enemies alive [Sidenote: Harold’s body disinterred.] and dead. His first act in this way was an act of senseless brutality towards the dead body of his half-brother the late King. The dead Harold, the Chronicles tell us, was dragged up and shot into a fen. Other writers tell the story with more detail.[1141] Some of the officers of his household, Stir his Mayor of the Palace,[1142] Eadric his dispenser, Thrond his executioner, all, we are told, men of great dignity, were sent to Westminster to dig up the body, and in their company we are surprised to find Earl Godwine and Ælfric Archbishop of York. Westminster was neither in Godwine’s earldom nor in Ælfric’s diocese, so that both these chiefs of Church and State seem out of place on such an occasion. We are however told that Ælfric was something more than an instrument in the matter; it was specially at his advice that Harthacnut was guilty of this cowardly piece of spite, one which, like the brutalities of Harold himself towards the comrades of Ælfred, did not [Sidenote: and buried again.] go without imitators in more polished times. The body of Harold was treated on the restoration of Harthacnut much as the body of Oliver Cromwell was treated on the restoration of Charles the Second. The late King was dug up, beheaded, and thrown, according to this account, into the Thames. The body was afterwards brought up by a fisherman, and received a second burial. The large Danish population of London had a burial-place of their own without the walls of the city, the memory of which is still retained in the name of the church of Saint Clement Danes. There Harold’s body was again buried, secretly, we may suppose, though the act is spoken of as a tribute of honour paid by the Danes of London to the King whose accession to the throne had been so largely their own doing.

No act could have been more offensive to the Danes settled in England than these insults offered to the body [Sidenote: Harthacnut’s second Danegeld. 1040–1.] of their own chosen prince. Harthacnut’s next act was to enrage all his subjects, English and Danish, by laying on them another enormous Danegeld of about twenty-two thousand pounds, with another sum of more than eleven thousand pounds for thirty-two ships, probably a fresh contingent which had just come from Denmark.[1143] He was now, before he had been a year on the throne, thoroughly [Sidenote: Godwine and Lyfing accused of the death of Ælfred. 1040.] hated.[1144] As if on purpose to increase his unpopularity, he next attacked the two leaders of the national party, Earl Godwine and Bishop Lyfing. Archbishop Ælfric, who appears almost in the character of a spiritual Eadric, is said to have accused them to the King of being concerned in the death of his brother Ælfred. Some other persons unnamed joined with him in bringing the charge.[1145] Of the two defendants the Bishop was the easier victim. Lyfing lost his bishopric of Worcester, which was given to his accuser to hold in plurality,[1146] as it was held by several Archbishops of York before and after. Lyfing however recovered Worcester in the course of the next year, as the [Sidenote: Trial and acquittal of Godwine.] price, we are told, of money paid to the King.[1147] Whether the deposition of Lyfing was effected with any legal forms we are not told; but the Earl of the West-Saxons certainly underwent a regular trial before the Witan. The proceedings form a curious illustration of the jurisprudence of the age. The functions of witness, judge, and juror were not yet accurately distinguished, and compurgation,[1148] whenever compurgation could be had, was looked on as the surest proof of innocence. Godwine asserted his own innocence on oath, and his solemn plea of Not Guilty was confirmed by the oaths of most of the Earls and chief thegns[1149] of England. We must not judge of the value of such an acquittal by the ideas of our own time. In a modern trial, some of Godwine’s compurgators would have had to act as his judges; some would have been examined as witnesses to the facts; others might, at least in the case of a less illustrious defendant, have appeared as witnesses to character. In the rude state of the law in those times, these distinctions were not thought of. But it does not follow that substantial justice was not done. Godwine’s acquittal was as solemn as any acquittal could be. All the chief men of England swore to their belief in his innocence. The only difference between such an acquittal and a modern acquittal on a trial before the House of Lords is that, in the ancient mode of procedure, the voices of those who of their own knowledge affirmed Godwine to be innocent, and the voices of those who accepted his innocence [Sidenote: Value of the acquittal.] on their witness, were all reckoned together. Godwine then was acquitted, after the most solemn trial which the jurisprudence of his own time could provide. He is in fairness entitled to the full benefit of that acquittal. The judgement of a competent tribunal is always worth something, though its worth may be overbalanced by facts or probabilities the other way. There are those who hold, in defiance of all fact and all reason, that Sir Thomas More and Anne Boleyn must have been guilty, because English courts of justice pronounced them to be guilty. I am surely asking much less if I ask that Godwine may be held to be innocent, because an English court of justice, whose verdict is outweighed by no facts or probabilities the other way, solemnly pronounced him to be innocent.[1150]

[Sidenote: Godwine purchases the favour of Harthacnut by a magnificent ship.]

One circumstance which in our days would at once throw suspicion upon the verdict proves nothing at all according to the ideas of those days. Ages after the time of Harthacnut, in times which by comparison seem as yesterday, English judges did not scruple to receive presents from their suitors, and English sovereigns did not scruple to receive presents from their subjects. It is always possible that such presents may be bribes in a guilty sense; it is always equally possible that they may not. It therefore proves nothing either way when we read that the Earl of the West-Saxons, solemnly acquitted by his peers, had still to buy his full restoration to the friendship of his highest judge at the cost of a magnificent gift. We have already seen how dear a possession a ship was in Danish eyes;[1151] we have seen how acceptable a gift it might be in English eyes.[1152] We have seen too what an astonishing amount of adornment the warriors of the North lavished upon these cherished instruments, almost companions, of their warfare.[1153] Though we hear nothing of any warlike exploits of Harthacnut,[1154] he had enough of the wiking in him for a well-equipped ship to be the most acceptable of all gifts.[1155] Godwine therefore gave Harthacnut a ship with a beak of gold, manned with eighty chosen warriors armed with all the magnificence of the full panoply of [Sidenote: Arms of the soldiers.] the time. Each man had on each arm a golden bracelet of sixteen ounces weight; each was clad in a triple coat of mail; each bore on his head a helmet partly gilded; each was armed with all the weapons which could be needed in warfare of any kind.[1156] Each bore on his left arm a shield with gilded boss and studs; his right hand bore the javelin, the English ategar, for the distant skirmishing at the beginning of a battle. But each too was ready for the closest and most deadly fight. Each was girded with a sword with a gilded handle, and from each man’s left shoulder hung, also adorned with [Sidenote: The Danish axe.] gold and silver, the most fearful weapon of all, the Danish battle-axe.[1157] This is our first mention[1158] of the weapon [Sidenote: 1066.] which Englishmen were, twenty-six years later, to wield with such deadly prowess upon the height of Senlac, and [Sidenote: 1203–4.] which, after the lapse of a hundred and forty years, the descendants of English exiles were still found wielding in defence of the throne of Constantine and Justinian.[1159]

[Sidenote: The Danegeld levied by the housecarls. 1041.]

Meanwhile all England was astir at the imposition of the Danegeld. Men had deemed that such imposts had passed away for ever in that Witenagemót of Oxford where Cnut the Danish conqueror changed into Cnut the English King. No enemy was in the land; Denmark, the old foe, was a sister kingdom; Normandy, the new foe, was hindered by her domestic troubles from threatening any of her neighbours; the overthrow of Duncan before Durham had taught Scotland to respect the frontiers of the Imperial state.[1160] But here was a tax such as had been heard of only in the darkest and saddest hours of the reign of Æthelred. Taxes of this kind always came in slowly,[1161] and this particular tax came in with special slowness. Military force was needed to extort payment; the housecarls, who do not seem to have been sent on such errands in the days of Cnut, were now turned into tax-gatherers, and were sent into every shire in England to collect the King’s tribute.[1162] That soldiers entrusted with such a duty behaved with insolence and violence we might take for granted in any age. In their conduct we may probably find the historical groundwork for those wonderful tales of Danish oppression in which later and rhetorical writers indulge.[1163] No doubt this collection of the Danegeld was accompanied by much oppression; but there is no evidence that it was oppression inflicted by Danes as Danes on Englishmen as Englishmen. As far as we can see, the state of things under Harthacnut must have been something like the state of England under John and Henry the Third. The natives, of whatever race, and the settlers who were fairly naturalized in the country, were all alike taxed for the sake of the mere strangers who had come in the King’s train.[1164] We cannot suppose that a Danish citizen of London, or a Danish thegn who had received a grant of lands from Cnut, was let off his share of the tribute on proof of his Danish birth. The discontent which was doubtless common to the whole kingdom at [Sidenote: The housecarls killed at Worcester. May 4, 1041.] last broke out in one particular quarter. The citizens of Worcester and the men of Worcestershire generally rose in revolt and attacked the housecarls. Two of their number, Feader and Thurstan, fled, like the Danes at Oxford,[1165] to a tower of the minster.[1166] The people followed them to their hiding-place, and slew them. The murder deserved legal punishment, but Harthacnut preferred a form of chastisement for which unluckily he could find precedents in the reigns of better princes than himself.[1167] He is said to have been further stirred up to vengeance by one who ought to have been the first to counsel mercy. Archbishop Ælfric had, as we have seen, received the bishopric of Worcester on the deposition of Lyfing;[1168] it would seem that the citizens refused to receive him.[1169] They were doubtless attached to their own patriotic pastor, and they may well have been unwilling to be again made an appendage to the Northumbrian metropolis. In revenge for this injury, Ælfric, we are told, counselled the terrible punishment which Harthacnut now decreed for his flock. The offending city and shire were to feel the full extremity of military vengeance; the town was to be burned, the country harried, and the inhabitants, [Sidenote: The Earls sent against Worcester.] as far as might be, killed. For this purpose Harthacnut sent nearly all his housecarls—unhappily we are not told their numbers—under the command of all the chief men of England. The three great Earls, Godwine of Wessex, Leofric of Mercia, Siward of Northumberland,[1170] and their subordinate Earls, among whom Thored of the Middle-Angles or Eastern part of Mercia,[1171] and Ranig of the Magesætas or Herefordshire[1172], are specially mentioned, were all sent against the one city of Worcester. Ten [Sidenote: [1051.]] years later, when Eadward the Confessor required the like chastisement to be inflicted on the town of Dover, Godwine utterly refused to have any hand in such a business, and distinctly asserted the right of every Englishman to a legal trial. But in that case the alleged crime had been done in Godwine’s own earldom, and no doubt Godwine’s power was much less under Harthacnut than it became under Eadward, most likely much less than it had been under Cnut. As things now stood, it was hardly possible to disobey, unless the Earls had been prepared for [Sidenote: The housecarls.] the extreme measure of deposing the King. England in fact in this age felt for the first time both the good and the bad consequences of the existence of a standing army. We shall hereafter see what the housecarls could do for England under a patriotic King; we now see what they could do against Englishmen at the bidding of a rapacious tyrant. It was not at the head of the forces of their several governments that the Earls were bidden to attack the offending city. Those forces would have taken some time to bring together, and, when they were brought together, they would doubtless have sympathized with their intended victims. The King had now at his command a body of Janissaries, who could march at a moment’s notice, a force bound to him by a personal tie, and ready to carry out his personal will in all things. It was no doubt deemed a great stroke of policy to implicate in the deed all the chief men of the land, English and Danish, by putting them at the head of the King’s personal force. But it seems plain that the Earls showed little zeal in the bloody errand on which they were sent. Placed as they were, they could hardly avoid doing much mischief to property, but they were evidently determined to shed as little blood as might be. [Sidenote: Worcester burned and the shire ravaged.] Their approach was well known[1173]—most likely they took care that it should be well known—to those against whom they were coming. The inhabitants of the shire took shelter in various places, while the men of the city itself entrenched[1174] themselves in an island of the Severn, whose name of Beverege reminds us of one of the losses which our national fauna has undergone.[1175] They held out for four days; on the fifth peace was made, and they were allowed to go where they would. But the city was burned, and the army marched away with great plunder.[1176] The vengeance of Harthacnut and Ælfric was thus partly satisfied, and the Archbishop, having thus witnessed the harrying of the diocese upon which he had been forced, seems to have been not unwilling to give back the see to its earlier possessor. As Ælfric still held it at the time of the burning of the city,[1177] it seems to follow that Lyfing’s reappointment [Sidenote: Patriotic Bishops of Worcester.] happened soon after this conclusion of peace. And it is a natural conjecture that the restoration of the popular prelate and the exclusion of the Northumbrian Metropolitan was one of the articles agreed on between the Earls and the citizens. Worcester has been happy in its Bishops in more than one great crisis of our history. Side by side with Godwine we find Lyfing; side by side with Harold we find Wulfstan; and in later times, when the part of Godwine is played again by Simon of Montfort, we find Walter of Cantelupe walking in the steps of Lyfing, and [Sidenote: [1265.]] saying mass and hearing the confession of the martyred Earl on the morning of the fight of Evesham.[1178]

Harthacnut had still another great crime in store; but the burning of Worcester seems to have set the final seal to the shame and hatred which he had drawn upon himself [Sidenote: Harthacnut recalls Eadward from Normandy. 1041.] among all classes of his people.[1179] It may have been a desperate effort to win back some measure of popularity which now led him to send for his half-brother Eadward out of Normandy.[1180] He could have had no personal affection for a brother whom he had never seen, and the influence of Emma would hardly have been exercised in Eadward’s favour. But the events of the next year showed that popular feeling was now veering round towards the ancient royal family. The memory of Cnut had secured the throne to two of his sons in succession; but this feeling could hardly have survived the evil deeds of Harold and Harthacnut. Harthacnut himself was childless; he was also, young as he was,[1181] in failing health.[1182] The recall of Eadward at once provided him with a successor in case of his death, and with one whose presence would be some support to him while he lived. Foreign writers tell us that he associated Eadward with him in the kingdom.[1183] For this statement there is no English authority, and it is not according to English customs. But to have given Eadward the government of a part of the kingdom, whether as Earl or as Under-king, would have been in no way wonderful. We do not however hear anything of such an arrangement; Eadward is set before us as living in great honour at his brother’s court, but no English writer describes him as holding any administrative office.[1184]

One thing however Eadward did, which, had men’s eyes been open to the future, would have seemed to them a sure sign of the evil to come. Emma had brought with her Hugh the French churl, who betrayed Exeter to the Dane.[1185] So her son, even when coming back as a private man, brought with him the advanced guard of that second swarm of strangers who were finally to bring the land into bondage. Among other Frenchmen, Eadward brought with him to England his nephew Ralph, the son of his sister Godgifu by her first husband Drogo of Mantes.[1186] He must now have been a mere youth; but he lived to be gorged with English wealth and honours, to bring his feeble force to oppose the champions of England, and to be branded in our history as “the timid Earl,”[1187] who sought to work improvements in English warfare, and himself turned and fled at the first sight of an armed enemy.

[Sidenote: The Northumbrian Earls.]

The latest internal events of the reign of Harthacnut call our thoughts once more to the great Northumbrian earldom. They set vividly before us the unrestrained barbarism of that part of the kingdom. I have already described the strange career of Uhtred, and how he at last died, by the connivance of Cnut in his early days, but by the personal vengeance of an enemy whom he had himself unwisely omitted to slay.[1188] A fate almost literally the same now overtook one of his descendants and successors, whose story introduces us more directly to one of the great actors [Sidenote: Eadwulf Cutel.] of the next reign. Uhtred, as we have seen, was succeeded by his brother Eadwulf Cutel, at first, it would seem, under the superiority of the Danish Eric.[1189] The reign of Eadwulf was both short and inglorious; he did not long survive the defeat of the forces of his earldom at Carham.[1190] He was succeeded, but in the Bernician earldom only, by his nephew Ealdred, son of Uhtred by the daughter [Sidenote: Ealdred of Bernicia puts Thurbrand to death,] of Bishop Ealdhun.[1191] The new Earl presently put to death Thurbrand the murderer of his father. Whether this was done by way of public justice or of private assassination does not appear, and the savage manners of the Northumbrian Danes most likely drew no very wide distinction between the two. But at all events the deadly feud went on from generation to generation. A bitter enmity raged between Ealdred and Thurbrand’s son Carl, evidently a powerful thegn.[1192] The two, we are told, were constantly seeking each other’s lives.[1193] Common friends contrived to reconcile them, and, like Cnut and Eadmund, they were more than reconciled; they became sworn brethren. In this character they undertook to go together on a pilgrimage to Rome; but this pious undertaking, like so many other undertakings of that age, was hindered by stress of weather.[1194] They returned to Northumberland together. The reconciliation on Ealdred’s part had been [Sidenote: and is murdered by Carl.] made in good faith; not so on the part of Carl. He invited the Earl to his house; he received and feasted him splendidly, and then, we are told, slew him in a wood, according to the most approved formula of assassination.[1195] [Sidenote: Eadwulf of Bernicia. 1038?] Ealdred was succeeded in Bernicia by his brother Eadwulf. The succession of the Earls of Yorkshire or Deira is less easy to trace, but, at some time before this year, the [Sidenote: Siward of Deira.] Southern earldom must have come into possession of the famous Siward, whom we have already seen acting as its Earl at the burning of Worcester.[1196] Siward, surnamed Digera or the Strong,[1197] was a Dane by birth. His gigantic stature, his vast strength and personal prowess, made him a favourite hero of romance. He boasted of the same marvellous pedigree as Ulf; perhaps indeed Siward and Ulf might claim a common forefather on the non-human side. His name is attached to several charters of the reign of Cnut, but he does not seem to have risen to Earl’s rank in his time. He married Æthelflæd,[1198] a daughter of Earl Ealdred, a marriage which seems to have been his only connexion with the house of the Northumbrian Earls. Whether he laid any claim to the Bernician earldom in right of his wife it is hard to say; he was at any rate ready to abet the criminal designs of Harthacnut against its present possessor. Eadwulf seems to have been a ruler of more vigour than his uncle of the same name; at least we hear, though rather darkly, of a devastating campaign carried on by him against the Britons, a name which here can mean only the inhabitants of Strathclyde.[1199] He was however in ill odour at the court of Harthacnut; probably he and the men of his earldom had been among the foremost in pressing the claims of Harold. He now came to make his peace with the King, and was received by him to full friendship.[1200] But Harthacnut was as little bound by his plighted faith as Carl. As Cnut had allowed or [Sidenote: Eadwulf murdered by Siward, who obtains all Northumberland. 1041.] commanded the slaughter of Uhtred at the hands of Thurbrand, Harthacnut now allowed or commanded the slaughter of Eadwulf at the hands of Siward the husband of his niece. The murderer forthwith obtained the whole earldom of Northumberland from the Humber to the Tweed, but it would seem from the words of a local writer that he obtained [Sidenote: Oswulf son of Eadwulf.] possession of it only by force.[1201] Oswulf, the young son of Eadwulf, did not obtain any share of the ancient heritage of his house, till he was invested with a subordinate [Sidenote: 1065.] government on the very eve of the Norman Conquest.

[Sidenote: Death of Bishop Eadmund.]

The Bernician earldom was thus disposed of. Early in the next year Harthacnut had also the disposal of the [Sidenote: Harthacnut sells the see of Durham to Eadred. 1041–2.] Bernician bishopric. The King was, it would seem, keeping the Midwinter festival at Gloucester,[1202] and Bishop Eadmund was in attendance. He died while at the court, and his body was taken to Durham for burial. Harthacnut presently sold the see to one Eadred, who seems to have given nearly equal offence by his simony and by the fact of his being a secular priest.[1203] It is set down as a mark of divine vengeance that he did not like to take full possession of the see. At the time appointed for his [Sidenote: Death of Eadred. 1042.] installation, he fell suddenly ill, and died in the tenth month from his nomination.[1204]

The reign of Harthacnut was now drawing to an end. [Sidenote: War with Magnus; defeat of Swegen Estrithson. 1042.] As far as it is possible to make out anything from the tangled mazes of Scandinavian history and legend, it would seem that he was engaged in another war with Magnus after he had fixed himself in England.[1205] He had left as his lieutenant in Denmark his cousin Swegen, the son of Ulf and Estrith. Swegen came to England for help against Magnus,[1206] and was despatched to Denmark a second time with a fleet. He was defeated by the Norwegian King, and came back to England.[1207] But he [Sidenote: Death of Harthacnut. June 8, 1042.] found his royal cousin no more. Harthacnut died during his absence, by a death most befitting a prince whose chief merit was to have provided four meals a day for his courtiers. “This year,” say the Chronicles, “died Harthacnut as he at his drink stood.”[1208] It was at the marriage-feast of Tofig the Proud, a great Danish Thegn, who held the office of standard-bearer,[1209] with Gytha, the daughter of Osgod Clapa, a man who fills a considerable space in the annals of the next reign.[1210] Tofig is chiefly memorable as the first beginner of that great foundation at Waltham which is so inseparably connected with the memory of our last native King. He held large estates in Somerset, Essex, and elsewhere. According to the legend, a miraculous crucifix was found on his lordship of Lutgaresbury in Somerset, on the top of the peaked hill from which the place in later times took its name of Montacute. For the reception of this revered relic he built a church on his estate of Waltham in Essex, and made a foundation for two priests. The place was then a mere wilderness, unmarked by any town, village, or church; Tofig had only a hunting-seat in the forest. But along with the building of the church, he gathered a certain number of inhabitants on the spot, and thus, like Ealdhun at Durham, founded the town as well as the minster of Waltham.[1211] This was in the days of Cnut. Tofig must have been an elderly man at the time of his marriage with Gytha,—his eulogist indeed tells us that his youth was renewed like that of the eagle.[1212] His son Æthelstan was of an age to take a share in public affairs, and his grandson Ansgar was able to hold great offices a few years later. Gytha then can hardly fail to have been his second wife, and he seems not to have long survived his marriage. But the bridal, held at the house of Gytha’s father at Lambeth, was honoured with the presence of the King. As Harthacnut arose at the wedding-feast to propose the health of the bride,[1213] he fell to the ground in a fit accompanied by frightful struggles,[1214] and was carried out speechless by those who were near him. He died, and his body was carried to Winchester and buried by that of his father Cnut in the Old Minster.[1215] With him the direct line of Cnut came to an end. The times were such that the land could not long abide without a King. Even before the burial of Harthacnut another great national solemnity had taken place. If Swegen cherished any hopes of the English succession, they vanished when, on his return to England, [Sidenote: Eadward chosen King. June, 1042.] he found a son of Æthelred already called to the throne of his fathers. “Before the King buried were, all folk chose Eadward to King at London.”[1216]

[Sidenote: End of the preliminary part of the history.]

I have thus gone through the whole of that part of my history which I look upon as introductory to its main subject. We have now gone through all the events which form the remoter causes of the Norman Conquest. [Sidenote: The Norman Conquest begins with the election of Eadward.] The accession of Eadward at once brings us among the events which immediately led to the Conquest, or rather we may look upon his accession as the first stage of the Conquest itself. Swegen and Cnut had shown that it was possible for a foreign power to overcome England by force of arms. The misgovernment of the sons of Cnut hindered the formation of a lasting Danish dynasty in England; the throne of Cerdic was again filled by a son of Woden; but there can be no doubt that the shock given to the country by the Danish Conquest, especially the way in which the ancient nobility was cut off in the long struggle with Swegen and Cnut, directly opened the way for the coming of the Norman. Eadward did his best, wittingly or unwittingly, to make the path of the Norman still easier. This he did by accustoming Englishmen to the sight of strangers—not national kinsmen like Cnut’s Danes, but Frenchmen, men of utterly alien speech and manners—enjoying every available place of honour or profit in the country. The great national reaction under Godwine and Harold made England once more England for a few years. But this change, happy as it was, could not altogether do away with the effects of the French tastes of Eadward. With Eadward then the Norman Conquest really begins, and his election therefore forms the proper break between these two great [Sidenote: Position of the leading men of this and the next generation.] divisions of my subject. The men of the generation before the Conquest, the men whose eyes were not to behold the event itself, but who were to do all that they could do to hasten or to delay it, are now in the full maturity of life, in the full possession of power. Eadward is on the throne of England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing into manhood. Harold Hardrada is already following his wild career of knight-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his exploits in Russia and in Sicily, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem. Swegen Estrithson is still a wanderer, not startling men by wonders of prowess like Harold, but schooling himself and gathering his forces for the day when he could establish a lasting dynasty in his native land. In our own land, the younger warriors of the Conquest, Eadwine and Morkere and Waltheof and Hereward, were probably born, but they must still have been in their cradles or in their mothers’ arms. But among the leaders of Church and State, Ealdred, who lived to place the crown on the head both of Harold and of William, was already a great prelate, Abbot of the great house of Tavistock, soon to succeed the patriot Lyfing in the chair of Worcester. Stigand, climbing to greatness by slower steps, was already the chosen counsellor of Emma, a candidate for any post of dignity and influence that chance might open to him. Wulfstan, destined to outlive them all, had begun that career of quiet holiness, neither seeking for, nor shrinking from, responsibility in temporal matters, which distinguishes him among the political and military prelates of that age. In the house of Godwine that group of sons and daughters were springing up which for a moment promised to become the royal line of England. Eadgyth was growing into those charms of mind and person which perhaps failed to win for her the heart of the King who called her his wife. Gyrth and Leofwine were still boys; Tostig was on the verge of manhood; Swegen and Harold were already men, bold and vigorous, ready to march at their father’s bidding, and before long to affect the destiny of their country for evil and for good. Beyond the sea, William, still a boy in years, but a man in conduct and counsel, was holding his own among the storms of a troubled minority, and learning those arts of the statesman and the warrior which fitted him to become the wisest ruler of Normandy, the last and greatest Conqueror of England. Thus the actors in the great drama are ready for their parts; the ground is gradually clearing for the scene of their performance. The great struggle of nations and tongues and principles in which each of them had his share, the struggle in which William of Normandy and Harold of England stand forth as worthy rivals for the noblest of prizes, will form the subject of the next, the chief and central portion of my history.

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