CHAPTER IX

.

THE REIGN OF EADWARD FROM THE RETURN OF GODWINE TO THE DEATH OF EADWARD THE ÆTHELING.[921] 1052–1057.

[Sidenote: Character of the Period.]

The two streams of English and Norman history were joined together for a moment in the year when the sovereigns of England and Normandy met face to face for the only time in the course of their joint reigns. Those streams will now again diverge. England shook off the Norman influence, and became once more, to all outward appearance, the England of Æthelstan and Eadgar. For [Sidenote: Little direct connexion between English and Norman affairs.] several years the history of each country seems to have no direct influence upon the history of the other. But this mutual independence is more apparent than real. England once more became free from Norman influence as regarded her general policy; but the effects of Eadward’s Norman tendencies were by no means wholly wiped away. Normans still remained in the land, and the circumstances of the deliverance of England were not without their effect as secondary causes of the expedition of William. Through the whole period we may be sure that the wise statesmen of both countries were diligently watching each other’s actions. Harold and William, though not as yet open enemies or avowed rivals, must have found out during these years that each was called on by his own policy to do all that he could to thwart the policy of the other. But though there was this sort of undercurrent closely connecting the interests of the two countries, yet, in all the outward events of history, it was a period of remarkable separation between them. The events recorded by English historians within this period belong almost exclusively to the affairs of our own island. It is a period in which the relations between the vassal Kingdoms of Britain and the Imperial power again assume special importance. But it is still more emphatically marked by the death of the greatest of living Englishmen, and the transmission of his power, and more than his power, to a [Sidenote: Growth of the power of Harold.] worthy successor. We left Godwine and Harold banished men. We have now to record their triumphant return to a rejoicing nation. We have then to record the death of Godwine, the accession of Harold to his father’s formal rank, and the steps by which he gradually rose to be the virtual ruler of the Kingdom, perhaps the designated successor to the Crown.

§ 1. _The Return and Death of Godwine._ 1052–1053.

[Sidenote: General regret at the absence of Godwine.]

If the minds of Englishmen had been at all divided in their estimate of Godwine during his long tenure of power, it only needed his exile to bring every patriotic heart to one opinion with regard to him. Godwine doubtless had his enemies; no man ever stood for thirty years and more at the head of affairs without making many enemies; and there were points in his character which may have given reasonable offence to many. Even if the whole of his enormous wealth was fairly and legally acquired, its mere accumulation in the hands of one man[922] must have excited envy in many breasts. His eagerness to advance his family may well have offended others, and the crimes and the restoration of Swegen, even under the guaranty of Bishop Ealdred, cannot fail to have given general scandal. It is possible then that there were Englishmen, not devoid of love and loyalty to England, who were short-sighted enough to rejoice over the fall of the great Earl. But, when Godwine was gone, men soon learned that, whatever had been his faults, they were far outweighed by his merits. Men now knew that the Earl of the West-Saxons had been the one man who stood between them and the dominion of strangers. During that gloomy winter England felt as a conquered land, as a land too conquered by foes who had not overcome her in open battle, but who had, by craft and surprise, deprived her of her champions and guardians. The common voice of England soon began to call for the return of Godwine. The banished Earl was looked to by all men as the Father of his Country; England now knew that in his fall a fatal blow had been dealt to her own welfare and freedom.[923] Men began openly to declare that it was better to share the banishment of Godwine than to live in the land from which Godwine was banished.[924] [Sidenote: Godwine invited to return.] Messages were sent to the court of Flanders, praying the Earl to return. If he chose to make his way back into the land by force, he would find many Englishmen ready to take up arms in his cause. Others crossed the sea in person, and pledged themselves to fight for him, and, if need were, to die in his behalf.[925] These invitations, we are told, were no secret intrigue of a few men. The common voice of England, openly expressed and all but unanimous, demanded the return of the great confessor of English freedom.[926]

[Sidenote: The King’s preparations against Godwine.]

These open manifestations on behalf of the exiles could not escape the knowledge of the King and his counsellors. It was thought necessary to put the south-eastern coast into a state of defence against any possible attack from the side of Flanders. The King and his Witan[927]—one would like to have fuller details of a Gemót held under such influences—decreed that ships should be sent forth to [Sidenote: The fleet at Sandwich.] watch at the old watching-place of Sandwich.[928] Forty ships were accordingly made ready, and they took their place at the appointed station under the command of the King’s nephew Earl Ralph, of Odda, the newly appointed Earl of the Western shires.[929]

Precautions of this kind against the return of one for whose return the mass of the nation was longing must have been unpopular in the highest degree. And, if anything could still further heighten the general discontent [Sidenote: Ravages of Gruffydd of North Wales. 1052.] with the existing state of things, it would be the events which were, just at this time, going on along the Welsh border. The Norman lords whom Eadward had settled in Herefordshire proved but poor defenders of their adopted country. The last continental improvements in the art of fortification proved vain to secure the land in the absence of chiefs of her own people. Gruffydd of North Wales marked his opportunity; he broke through his short-lived alliance with England, and the year of the absence of Godwine and his sons was marked by an extensive and successful invasion of the land of the Magesætas.[930] Gruffydd doubtless took also into his reckoning the absence of the local chief at Sandwich. He crossed the border, he harried far and wide, and he seems not to have met with any resistance till [Sidenote: His victory near Leominster.] he had reached the neighbourhood of Leominster.[931] There he was at last met by the levies of the country, together with the Norman garrison of Richard’s Castle.[932] Perhaps, as in a later conflict with the same enemy in the same neighbourhood, English and foreign troops failed to act well together; at all events the Welsh King had the victory, and, after slaying many men of both nations, he went away with a large booty.[933] Men remarked that this heavy blow took place exactly thirteen years after Gruffydd’s [Sidenote: 1039.] first great victory at Rhyd-y-Groes.[934] Though the coincidence is thus marked, we are not told, what day of what month was thus auspicious to the Welsh prince; but the dates of the events which follow show that it must have been early in the summer.

[Sidenote: Godwine petitions for his return.]

Godwine must by this time have seen that the path for his return was now open, and it was seemingly this last misfortune which determined him to delay no longer.[935] It was not till all peaceful means had been tried and failed, that the banished Earl made up his mind to attempt a restoration by force. He sent many messages to the King, praying for a reconciliation. He offered now to Eadward, as he had before offered both to Harthacnut and to Eadward himself, to come into the royal presence and make a compurgation in legal form in answer to all the charges which had been brought against him.[936] But all such petitions were in vain. It marks the increasing intercourse between England and the continent, that Godwine, when his own messages were not listened to, sought, as a last resource, to obtain his object through the intercession of foreign princes.[937] Embassies on his behalf were sent by his host [Sidenote: Embassies from foreign princes on his behalf.] Count Baldwin and by the King of the French. Baldwin, who had so lately been at war with England, might seem an ill-chosen intercessor; but his choice for that purpose may have been influenced by his close connexion with the Court of Normandy. William was just now earnestly pressing his suit for Matilda. The ally of the great Duke might be expected to have some influence, if not with Eadward, at least with Eadward’s Norman favourites. King Henry, it will be remembered, claimed some sort of kindred with Eadward, though it is not easy to trace the two princes to a common ancestor.[938] But King and Marquess alike pleaded in vain. Eadward was surrounded by his foreign priests and courtiers, and no intercessions on behalf of the champion of England were allowed to have any weight with the royal mind, even if they were ever allowed to reach the royal ear.[939]

[Sidenote: Godwine determines on a return by force.]

The Earl was now satisfied that nothing more was to be hoped from any attempts at a peaceful reconciliation. He was also satisfied that, if he attempted to return by force, the great majority of Englishmen would be less likely to resist him than to join his banners. He therefore, towards the middle of the summer,[940] finally determined to attempt his restoration by force of arms, and [Sidenote: Estimate of his conduct.] he began to make preparations for that purpose. His conduct in so doing hardly needs any formal justification. It is simply the old question of resistance or non-resistance. If any man ever was justified in resistance to established authority, or in irregular enterprises of any kind, undoubtedly Godwine was justified in his design of making his way back into England in arms. So to do was indeed simply to follow the usual course of every banished man of those times who could gather together the needful force. The enterprises of Osgod Clapa[941] at an earlier time, and of Ælfgar at a later time, are not spoken of with any special condemnation by the historians of the time. And the enterprise of Godwine was of a very different kind from the enterprises of Ælfgar and of Osgod Clapa. Ælfgar and Osgod may have been banished unjustly, and they may, according to the morality of those times, have been guilty of no very great crime by seeking restoration with weapons in their hands. Still the question of their banishment or restoration was almost wholly a personal question. The existence or the welfare of England in no way depended on their presence or absence. But the rebellion or invasion of Godwine was a rebellion or an invasion in form only. His personal restoration meant nothing short of the deliverance of England from misgovernment and foreign influence. He had been driven out by a faction; [Sidenote: Comparison of Godwine with Henry of Bolingbroke (1399) and William of Orange (1688).] he was invited to return by the nation. The enterprise of Godwine in short should be classed, not with the ordinary forcible return of an exile, but with enterprises like those of Henry of Bolingbroke in the fourteenth century and of William of Orange in the seventeenth. In all three cases the deliverer undoubtedly sought the deliverance of the country; in all three he also undoubtedly sought his own restoration or advancement. But Godwine had one great advantage over both his successors. They had to deal with wicked Kings; he had only to deal with a weak King. They had to deal with evil counsellors, who, however evil, were still Englishmen. Godwine had simply to deliver King and people from the influence and thraldom of foreigners. He was thus able, while they were not able, to deliver England without resorting to the death, deposition, or exile of the reigning King, and, as far as he himself was personally concerned, without shedding a drop of English blood.

The narrative of this great deliverance forms one of the most glorious and spirit-stirring tales to be found in any age of our history. It is a tale which may be read with unmixed delight, save for one event, which, whether we count it for a crime or for a misfortune, throws a shadow on the renown, not of Godwine himself, but of his nobler son. Harold and Leofwine, we have seen, had made up their minds from the beginning to resort to force, whenever the opportunity should come. They had spent the winter in Ireland in making preparations for an expedition.[942] They were by this time ready for action, and, now that their father had found all attempts at a peaceful reconciliation to be vain, the time for

## action seemed clearly to have come. [Sidenote: Harold and Leofwine sail

from Dublin.] It was doubtless in concert with Godwine that Harold and Leofwine[943] now set sail from Dublin with nine ships. Their crews probably consisted mainly of adventurers from the Danish havens of Ireland, ready for any enterprise which promised excitement and plunder. But it is quite possible that Englishmen, whether vehement partisans or simply desperate men, may have also taken service under the returning exiles. The part of England which they chose for their enterprise would have been well chosen, if [Sidenote: They enter the Bristol Channel.] they had been attacking a hostile country. They made for the debateable land forming the southern shore of the Bristol Channel, where no doubt large traces of the ancient British blood and language still remained.[944] The country was left, through the absence of its Earl Odda with the fleet, without any single responsible chief. [Sidenote: The people of Somersetshire and Devonshire ill disposed towards them.] But it soon appeared that, from whatever cause, the wishes of the people of this part of the kingdom were not favourable to the enterprise of Harold and Leofwine. Possibly the prevalence of Celtic blood in the district may have made its inhabitants less zealous in the cause [Sidenote: Possible grounds for their hostility.] of the English deliverer than the inhabitants of the purely English shires. Possibly the evil deeds of Swegen, whose government had included Somersetshire, may have made men who had lived under his rule less attached to the whole House of Godwine than those who had lived under the rule of Harold or of Godwine himself. And we must remember that, up to this time, Harold had done nothing to win for himself any special renown or affection beyond the bounds of his own East-Anglian Earldom. As yet he shone simply with a glory reflected from that of his father. And his enterprise bore in some points an ill look. He had not shared the place of exile of his father, nor had he taken any part in his father’s attempts to bring about a peaceful restoration. He had gone, determined from the first on an armed return, to a land which might almost be looked on as an enemy’s country. He now came back at the head of a force whose character could not fail to strike Englishmen with suspicion and dread. We are therefore not surprised to hear that the men of Somerset and Devon met him in arms. [Sidenote: Harold’s landing at Porlock;] He landed on the borders of those two shires, in a wild and hilly region, which to this day remains thinly peopled, cut off from the chief centres even of local life, the last [Sidenote: description of the country.] place within the borders of South Britain where the wild stag still finds a shelter. The high ground of Exmoor, and the whole neighbouring hilly region, reaches its highest point in the Beacon of Dunkery, a height whose Celtic name has an appropriate sound among the remains of primæval times with which it is crowned. It is the highest point in its own shire, and it is overtopped by no point in Southern England, except by some of the Tors of Dartmoor in the still further west. A descent, remarkably gradual for so great a height, leads down to the small haven of Porlock, placed on a bay of no great depth, but well defined by two bold headlands guarding it to the east and west. The coast has been subject to many changes. A submarine forest,[945] reaching along the whole shore, shows that the sea must have made advances in earlier times. And there is as little doubt that it has again retreated, and that what is now an alluvial flat was, eight hundred years back, a shallow and muddy inlet, accessible to the light craft of those days. Harold therefore landed at a spot nearer than the present small harbour to the small [Sidenote: Object of the enterprise.] town, or rather village, of Porlock.[946] A landing in this remote region could contribute but little to the advancement of the general scheme of Godwine; the object of Harold must have been merely to obtain provisions for his crews. He came doubtless, as we shall find his father did also, ready for peaceable supplies if a friendly country afforded them, but ready also to provide for his followers [Sidenote: Harold’s victory at Porlock; he plunders the country, and sails to join his father.] by force, if force was needed for his purpose.[947] But the whole neighbourhood was hostile; a large force was gathered together from both the border shires, and Harold, whether by his fault or by his misfortune, had to begin his enterprise of restoration and deliverance by fighting a battle with the countrymen whom he came to deliver. The exiles had the victory, but it is clear that they had to contend with a stout resistance on the part of a considerable body of men. More than thirty good Thegns and much other folk were slain.[948] So large a number of Thegns collected at such a point shows that the force which they headed must have been gathered together, not merely from the immediate neighbourhood of Porlock, but from a considerable portion of the two shires.[949] We may conceive that the system of beacons, which has been traced out over a long range of the hill-tops in the West of England, had done good service over the whole country long before the fleet of Harold had actually entered the haven of Porlock. But the crews of Harold’s ships were doubtless picked men, and their success, over even a much larger force of irregular levies, would have been in no way wonderful. Harold now plundered without opposition, and carried off what he would in the way of goods, cattle, and men.[950] He then sailed to the south-west, he doubled the Land’s End,[951] and sailed along the English Channel to meet his father.

[Sidenote: Estimate of Harold’s conduct.]

This event is the chief stain which mars the renown of Harold, and which dims the otherwise glorious picture of the return of Godwine and his house. Harold’s own age perhaps easily forgave the deed. No contemporary writer speaks of it with any marked condemnation; one contemporary writer even seems distinctly to look upon it as a worthy exploit.[952] It was in truth nothing more than the ordinary course of a banished man. Harold acted hardly worse than Osgod Clapa; he did not act by any means so badly as Ælfgar. But a man who towers above his own generation must pay, in more than one way, the penalty of his greatness. We instinctively judge Harold by a stricter standard than that by which we judge Ælfgar and Osgod Clapa. On such a character as his it is distinctly a stain to have resorted for one moment to needless violence, or to have shed one drop of English blood without good cause. The ravage and slaughter at Porlock distinctly throws a shade over the return of Godwine and over the fair fame of his son. It is a stain rather to be regretted than harshly to be condemned; but it is a stain nevertheless. It is a stain which was fully wiped out by later labours and triumphs in the cause of England. Still we may well believe that the blood of those thirty good Thegns and of those other folk was paid for in after years by prayers and watchings and fastings before the Holy Rood of Waltham; we may well believe that it still lay heavy on the hero’s soul as he marched forth to victory at Stamfordbridge and to more glorious overthrow at Senlac.

[Sidenote: Godwin sets sail. June 22, 1052.]

Harold and Leofwine were thus on their way to meet their father. Meanwhile the revolution was going on rapidly on the other side of England.[953] Godwine had gathered together a fleet in the Yser,[954] the river of Flanders which flows by Dixmuyden and Nieuport, and falls into the sea some way south-west of Bruges. He thence set [Sidenote: His first appearance off the English coast.] sail, one day before Midsummer eve, and sailed straight to Dungeness, south of Romney.[955] At Sandwich the Earls Ralph and Odda were waiting for him, and a land force had also been called out for the defence of the coast.[956] Some friendly messenger warned the Earl of his danger, and he sailed westward to Pevensey. In Sussex he was in his own country, among his immediate possessions and his immediate followers, and he seems to have designed a landing on the very spot where a landing so fatal to his house was made fourteen years later. The King’s ships followed after him, but a violent storm hindered either party from carrying out its designs. Neither side knew the whereabouts of the other;[957] the King’s fleet [Sidenote: He returns to Bruges.] put back to Sandwich, while Godwine retired to his old quarters in Flanders.[958] Great discontent seems to have followed this mishap on the King’s side. The blame was clearly laid on the Earls and on the force which they commanded. Eadward may not have learned the lesson of Cnut, and he perhaps thought that the elements were bound to submit to his will. The fleet was ordered to return to London, where the King would put at its head other Earls, and would supply them with other rowers.[959] To London accordingly the fleet returned, but it was found easier to get rid of the old force than to provide a new one; everything lagged behind; probably nobody was zealous in the cause; even if any were zealous, their zeal would, as ever happened in that age, give way beneath the irksomeness of being kept under arms without any hope of immediate action. At last the whole naval force, which was to guard the coast and keep out the returning traitor, gradually dispersed, and each man went to his own home.[960]

[Sidenote: Godwine sails the second time to Wight.]

The coast was now clear for Godwine’s return, and his friends in England were doubtless not slow to apprize him that his path was now open. He might now, it would seem, have sailed, without fear of any hindrance, from the mouth of the Yser to London Bridge. But, with characteristic wariness, he preferred not to make his great venture till he had strengthened his force by the addition of the ships of Harold and Leofwine, and till he had tried and made himself sure of the friendly feeling of a large part of England. In the first district however where he landed, he found the mass of the people either unfriendly to him or kept in check by fear of the ruling powers. From Flanders he sailed straight for the Isle of Wight, as a convenient central spot in which to await the coming of his sons from Ireland. He seems to have cruised along the coast between Wight and Portland, and to have harried the country without scruple wherever supplies were refused to him.[961] But of armed resistance, such as Harold had met with at Porlock, we hear nothing, and there is nothing which implies that a single life was lost on either [Sidenote: Meeting of Godwine and Harold: they sail eastward.] side. At last the nine ships of Harold, rich with the plunder of Devon and Somerset, joined the fleet of his father at Portland. We need hardly stop to dwell on the mutual joy of father, sons, and brothers, meeting again after so many toils and dangers, and with so fair a hope of restoration for themselves and of deliverance for their country.[962] It is more important to note that, from this time, we are expressly told that all systematic ravaging ceased; provisions however were freely taken wherever need demanded. But as the united fleet steered its course eastward towards Sandwich, the true feeling of the nation showed itself more and more plainly. As the deliverer sailed along the South-Saxon coast, the [Sidenote: Zeal in their cause shown by the men of Sussex, Kent, and Essex.] sea-faring men of every haven hastened to join his banners. From Kent, from Hastings,[963] even from comparatively distant Essex,[964] from those purely Saxon lands, whence the Briton had vanished, and where the Dane had never settled, came up the voice of England to welcome the men who had come to set her free. At every step men pressed to the shore, eager to swell the force of the patriots, with one voice pledging themselves to the national cause, and raising the spirit-stirring cry, “We will live and die with Earl Godwine.”[965] At Pevensey, at Hythe, at Folkestone, at Dover, at Sandwich, provisions were freely supplied, hostages were freely given,[966] every ship in their havens was freely placed at the bidding of their lawful Earl. The great body of the fleet [Sidenote: They enter the Thames and sail towards London.] sailed round the Forelands, entered the mouth of the Thames, and advanced right upon London. A detachment, [Sidenote: Unexplained ravages in Sheppey.] we are told, lagged behind, and did great damage in the Isle of Sheppey, burning the town of King’s Middleton. They then sailed after the Earls towards London.[967] The language of our story seems to imply that neither Godwine nor Harold had any hand in this seemingly quite wanton outrage. Needlessly to harm the house or estate of any Englishman at such a moment was quite contrary to Godwine’s policy, quite contrary to the course which both he and Harold had followed since they met at Portland. The deed was probably done by some unruly portion of the fleet, by some Englishman who seized the opportunity to gratify some local jealousy, by some Dane who, consciously or unconsciously, looked with a pirate’s eye on the corner of Britain where his race had first found a winter’s shelter.[968]

[Sidenote: Godwine reaches Southwark. September 14, 1052.]

The fleet was now in the Thames. Strengthened by the whole naval force of south-eastern England, the Earl had now a following which was formidable indeed. The river was covered with ships; their decks were thick with warriors harnessed for the battle.[969] In such guise the Earl advanced to Southwark, and paused there, in sight doubtless of his own house, of the house whence he and his sons had fled for their lives a year before.[970] He had to wait for the tide, and he employed the interval in sending messages to the citizens of London.[971] The townsfolk of the great city were not a whit behind their brethren of Kent and Sussex in zeal for the national cause. [Sidenote: London declares for Godwine.] The spirit which had beaten back Swend and Cnut, the spirit which was in after times to make London ever the stronghold of English freedom, the spirit which made its citizens foremost in the patriot armies alike of the thirteenth and of the seventeenth centuries, was now as warm in the hearts of those gallant burghers as in any earlier or later age. With a voice all but unanimous, the citizens declared in favour of the great Earl; a few votes only, the votes, it may be, of strangers or of courtiers, were given against the emphatic resolution that what the Earl would the city would.[972]

[Sidenote: The King hastens to London with an army.]

But meanwhile where was King Eadward? At a later crisis of hardly inferior moment we shall find him taking his pleasure among the forests of Wiltshire, and needing no little persuasion to make him leave his sport and give a moment’s thought to the affairs of his Kingdom. He must have been engaged at this time in some such absorbing pursuit, as he appears to have heard nothing of Godwine’s triumphant progress along the southern coast till the Earl had actually reached Sandwich. The news awakened him to a fit of unusual energy. The interests at stake were indeed not small; the return of Godwine might cut him off from every face that reminded him of his beloved Normandy; he might be forced again to surround himself with Englishmen, and to recall his wife from her cloister to his palace. In such a cause King Eadward did not delay. He came with speed to London, accompanied by the Earls Ralph and Odda, and surrounded by a train of Norman knights and priests, and sent out orders for the immediate gathering in arms of such of his subjects as still remained loyal to him.[973] But men had no heart in the cause; the summons was slowly and imperfectly obeyed. The King contrived however, before the fleet of Godwine actually reached the city, to get together fifty ships,[974] those no doubt whose crews had forsaken them a few weeks earlier. And he contrived, out of his own housecarls, strengthened, it would seem, by the levies of some of the northern shires, to gather a force strong enough to line the northern shore of the Thames with armed men.[975]

[Sidenote: Godwine before London.]

The day on which Godwine and his fleet reached Southwark was an auspicious one. It was the Feast of the [Sidenote: Monday, September 14, 1052.] Exaltation of the Holy Cross.[976] It was the day kept in memory of the triumphant return and the devout humility of that renowned Emperor who restored the glory of the Roman arms, who rivalled the great Macedonian in a second overthrow of the Persian power, and who brought with him, as the choicest trophy of his victories, that holiest [Sidenote: 628.] of Christian relics which his sword had won back from heathen bondage. Harold, like Heraclius, was returning to his own, perhaps already the sworn votary of that revered relic whose name he chose as his war-cry, and in whose honour he was perhaps already planning that great foundation which was of itself enough to make his name immortal. The day of the Holy Cross must indeed have been a day of the brightest omen to the future founder of Waltham. And a memorable and a happy day it was. Events were thickly crowded into its short hours, events which, even after so many ages, may well make every English heart swell with pride. It is something indeed to feel ourselves of the blood and speech of the actors of that day and of its morrow. The tide for which the fleet had waited came soon after the Earls had received the promise of support from the burghers of London. The anchors were weighed; the fleet sailed on with all confidence. The bridge was passed without hindrance, and the Earls found themselves, as they had found themselves a year before, face to face with the armies of their sovereign. But men’s minds had indeed changed since the Witan of England had passed a decree of outlawry against Godwine and his house. Besides his fleet, Godwine now found himself at the head of a [Sidenote: Zeal of Godwine’s followers.] land force which might seem to have sprung out of the earth at his bidding. The King’s troops lined the north bank of the Thames, but its southern bank was lined, at least as thickly, with men who had come together, like their brethren of the southern coasts, ready to live and die with the great Earl. The whole force of the neighbourhood, instead of obeying the King’s summons, had come unsummoned to the support of Godwine, and stood ready in battle array awaiting his orders.[977] And different indeed was the spirit of the two hosts. The Earl’s men were eager for action; it needed all his eloquence, all his authority, to keep them back from jeoparding or disgracing his cause by too hasty an attack on their sovereign [Sidenote: Lukewarmness of the King’s troops.] or on their countrymen.[978] But the Englishmen who had obeyed Eadward’s call were thoroughly disheartened and lukewarm in his cause. The King’s own housecarls shrank from the horrors of a civil war, a war in which Englishmen would be called on to slaughter one another, for no object but to rivet the yoke of outlandish men about their necks.[979] With the two armies in this temper, the success of Godwine was certain; all that was needed was for the Earl to insure that it should be a bloodless success. The [Sidenote: Godwine demands his restoration;] object of Godwine was to secure his own restoration and the deliverance of his country without striking a blow. He sent a message to the King, praying that he and his might be restored to all that had been unjustly taken from [Sidenote: Eadward hesitates; increased indignation of Godwine’s men;] them.[980] The King, with his Norman favourites around him, hesitated for a while. The indignation of the Earl’s men grew deeper and louder; fierce cries were heard against the King and against all who took part with him; no power less than that of Godwine could have checked the demand for instant battle.[981] The result of a battle could hardly have been doubtful. Ralph the Timid and Richard the son of Scrob, even the pious Earl Odda himself, would hardly, even at the head of more willing soldiers, have found themselves a match for the warrior who had fleshed his sword at Sherstone and Assandun, and who had made the name of Englishman a name of terror among the stoutest [Sidenote: Godwine restrains their eagerness.] warriors of the shores of the Baltic.[982] But it was not with axe and javelin that that day’s victory was to be won. The mighty voice, the speaking look and gesture, of that old man eloquent could again sway assemblies of Englishmen at his will.[983] His irresistible tongue now pleaded with all earnestness against any hasty act of violence or disloyalty. His own conscience was clear from any lack of faithfulness; he would willingly die rather than do, or allow to be done on his behalf, any act of wrong or irreverence towards his Lord the King.[984] The appeal was successful in every way. The eagerness of his own men was checked, and time was given for wiser counsels to [Sidenote: Embassy of Stigand; hostages exchanged and matters referred to a Gemót.] resume their sway on the other side. Bishop Stigand and other wise men, both from within and from without the city, appeared on board the Earl’s ship in the character of mediators. It was soon agreed to give hostages on both sides, and to defer the decision of all matters to a solemn Gemót to be holden the next morning.[985] Godwine, Harold, and such of their followers as thought good, now left their [Sidenote: Godwine and Harold land.] ships, and once more set foot in peace on the soil of their native island.[986] The Earl and his sons no doubt betook themselves to his own house in Southwark, and there waited for the gathering of the next day with widely different feelings from those with which they had last waited in that house for the decisions of an Assembly of the Wise.

But there were those about Eadward who could not with the like calmness await the sentence of the great tribunal which was to give judgement on the morrow. [Sidenote: Fears of the King’s Norman favourites.] There were those high in Church and State who knew too well what would be the inevitable vote of a free assembly of Englishmen. There were Thegns and Prelates in Eadward’s court who saw in the promised meeting of the Witan of the land only a gathering of men eager to inflict on them the righteous punishment of their evil deeds. First and foremost among them was the Norman monk whom the blind partiality of Eadward had thrust into the highest place in the English Church. Robert of Jumièges, the man who, more than any other one man, had stirred up strife between the King and his people, the man who, more than any other one man, had driven the noblest sons of England into banishment, now felt that his hour was come. He dared not face the assembled nation which he had outraged; he dared not take his place in that great Council of which his office made him the highest member. The like fear fell on Ulf of Dorchester, the Bishop who had done nought bishoplike, on William of London, and on all the Frenchmen, priests and knights alike, who had sunned themselves in the smiles of the court, but who shrank from meeting the assembly of the people. Flight [Sidenote: General flight of the foreigners.] was their only hope. As soon as the news came that peace was made, and that all matters were referred to a lawful Gemót, the whole company of the strangers who had been the curse of England mounted their horses and rode for their lives. Eastward, westward, northward, Norman knights and priests were seen hurrying. Godwine and Harold, in the like case, had been treacherously pursued;[987] but these men, criminals as they were fleeing from the vengeance of an offended nation, were allowed to go whither they would unmolested. Whatever violence was done was wholly the act of the strangers. Some rode west to the castle in Herefordshire, Pentecost’s castle, the original cause of so much mischief; some rode towards a castle in the north, belonging to the Norman Staller, Robert the son of Wymarc.[988] The Bishops, perhaps the objects of a still fiercer popular indignation than even the lay favourites, undertook a still more perilous journey by themselves. What became of William of London is not quite plain,[989] but we have [Sidenote: Flight of Archbishop Robert and Bishop Ulf.] a graphic description of the escape of the Prelates of Canterbury and Dorchester. Robert and Ulf, mounted and sword in hand, cut their way through the streets, wounding and slaying as they went;[990] they burst through the east gate of London; they rode straight for the haven of Eadwulfsness;[991] there they found an old crazy ship;[992] they went on board of her and so gat them over sea. Never again did those evil Prelates trouble England with their personal presence; but the tongue of Robert was still busy in other lands to do hurt to England and her people. The patriotic chronicler raises an emphatic note of triumph over the ignominious flight of the stranger Primate. “He left behind his pall and all Christendom here in the land, even as God it willed; for that he had before taken upon him that worship, as God willed it not.”[993]

[Sidenote: Meeting of the _Mycel Gemót_. Tuesday, September 15th.]

In the morning the great Assembly met.[994] The great city and its coasts were now clear of strangers, save such as had come in the train of the deliverers.[995] The people of England—for such a gathering may well deserve that name—came together to welcome its friends and to pronounce sentence upon its enemies. The two armies and the citizens of London formed a multitude which no building could [Sidenote: It meets in the open air.] contain. That _Mickle Gemót_, whose memory long lived in the minds of Englishmen, came together, in old Teutonic fashion, in the open air without the walls of London.[996] The scene was pictured ages before by the pencil of Tacitus and sung in yet earlier days by the voice of Homer. It may still be seen, year by year, among the [Sidenote: Its popular character.] mountains of Uri and in the open market-place of Trogen. Other Assemblies of those times may have shrunk up into Councils of a small body of Thegns and Prelates; but on that great day the English people appeared, in all the fulness of its ancient rights, as a coordinate authority with the English King.[997] Men came armed to the place of meeting;[998] our fathers did so in their old homes beyond the sea, and our distant kinsmen still preserve the same immemorial use in the free assemblies of Appenzell.[999] But the enemy was no longer at hand; in that great gathering of liberated and rejoicing Englishmen sword and axe were needed only as parts of a solemn pageant, or to give further effect to the harangue of a practised orator. There, girt with warlike weapons, but shorn of the help and countenance of Norman knights and Norman churchmen,[1000] sat the King of the English, driven at last to meet face to face with a free assembly of his people. There were all the Earls and all the best men that were in this land;[1001] there was the mighty multitude of English freemen, gathered to hail the return of the worthiest of their own blood. And [Sidenote: Godwine at the Gemót.] there, surrounded by his four valiant sons, stood the great deliverer, the man who had set the King upon his throne, the man who had refused to obey his unlawful orders, who had cleared the land of his unworthy favourites, but who had never swerved in his true loyalty to the King and his Kingdom. The man at whose mere approach the foreign knights and Prelates had fled for their lives,[1002] could now [Sidenote: He supplicates the King;] afford to assume the guise of humble supplication towards the sovereign who had received his Crown at his hands. Godwine stood forth; he laid his axe at the foot of the throne, and knelt, as in the act of homage, before his Lord the King.[1003] By the Crown upon his brow, whose highest and brightest ornament was the cross of Christ, he conjured his sovereign to allow him to clear himself [Sidenote: he speaks to the people.] before the King and his people of all the crimes which had been laid against him and his house.[1004] The demand could not be refused, and the voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more, in all the fulness of its eloquence, setting forth the innocence of Godwine himself and of Harold and all his sons.[1005] Few[1006] and weighty were the words which the great Earl spoke that day before the King and all the people of the land.[1007] But they were words which at once carried the whole Assembly with them. Those who have heard the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds, when a sovereign people binds itself to observe the laws which it has itself decreed, when thousands of voices join as one man in the repetition of one solemn formula,[1008] can conceive the shout of assent with which the assembled multitude agreed to the proposal that Godwine should be deemed to have cleared himself of [Sidenote: The Assembly decrees his acquittal and restoration.] every charge. The voice of that great Assembly, the voice of the English nation, at once declared him guiltless, at once decreed the restoration of himself, his sons, and all his followers, to all the lands, offices, and honours which they had held in the days before his outlawry. The old charges were thus again solemnly set aside, and an amnesty was proclaimed for all the irregular acts of the last three months of revolution. The last year was as it were wiped out; Godwine was once more Earl of the West-Saxons, Harold was once more Earl of the East-Angles, as if Eustace and Robert had never led astray the simplicity [Sidenote: It decrees the outlawry and deprivation of Archbishop Robert and many other Normans.] of the royal saint. And yet more; it was not enough merely to put England again into the state in which she stood at the moment of the banishment of Godwine. It was needful to punish the authors of all the evils that had happened, and to guard against the possible recurrence of such evils in days to come. The deepest in guilt of all the royal favourites was felt to be the Norman Archbishop. He had taken himself beyond the reach of justice; but, had he been present, the mildness of English political warfare would have hindered any severer sentence than that which was actually pronounced. “He had done most to cause the strife between Earl Godwine and the King”[1009]—the words of the formal resolution peep out, as they so often do, in the words of the Chronicler—and, on this charge, Robert was deprived of his see, and was solemnly declared an outlaw. The like sentence was pronounced against “all the Frenchmen”—we are again reading the words of the sentence—“who had reared up bad law, and judged unjust judgements, and counselled evil [Sidenote: Normans excepted from the sentence.] counsel in this land.”[1010] But the sentence did not extend to all the men of Norman birth or of French speech who were settled in the country. It was intended only to strike actual offenders. By an exception capable of indefinite and dangerous extension, those were excepted “whom the King liked, and who were true to him and all his folk.”[1011] Lastly, in the old formula which we have so often already [Sidenote: “Good law” decreed.] come across—“Good law was decreed for all folk.”[1012] As in other cases, the expression refers far more to administration than to legislation, to the observance of old laws rather than to the enactment of new. The Frenchmen had reared up bad law; that is, they had been guilty of corrupt and unjust administration; the good law, that is, the good government of former times, was now to be restored. There was no need to renew the Law of Eadgar or of Cnut or of any other King of past times. The “good state,” as an Italian patriot might have called it, was not, in the eyes of that Assembly, a vision of past times, a tradition of the days of their fathers or of the old time before them. It was simply what every man could remember for himself, in the days before Robert, and men like Robert, had obtained exclusive possession of the royal ear. There was no need to go back to any more distant standard than the earliest years of the reigning King. Good Law was decreed for all folk. Things were to be once more as they had been in the days when Earl Godwine had been the chief adviser of the King on whom he had himself bestowed the Crown.

[Sidenote: Personal reconciliation of Godwine and the King.]

The work of the Assembly was done; the innocent had been restored, the guilty had been punished; the nation had bound itself to the maintenance of law and right. Godwine was again the foremost man in the realm. But though the political restoration was perfect, the personal reconciliation seems still to have cost the King a struggle.[1013] It required the counsel of wise men, and a full conviction that all resistance was hopeless, before Eadward again received his injured father-in-law to his personal friendship. At last he yielded; King and Earl walked unarmed to the Palace of Westminster, and there, on his own hearth, Eadward again admitted Godwine to the kiss of peace. To receive again to his friendship the wife and sons of Godwine, Gytha, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, and Leofwine, probably cost him no special struggle. They had never personally offended him, and they seem, even before their outlawry, to have won his personal affection. But the complete restoration of the family to its former honours required another step which [Sidenote: Restoration of the Lady Eadgyth.] may perhaps have caused Eadward a pang. When Godwine, his wife and his sons, were restored to their old honours, it was impossible to refuse the like restitution to his daughter. The Lady Eadgyth was brought back with all royal pomp from her cloister at Wherwell; she received again all the lands and goods of which she had been deprived, and was restored to the place, whatever that place may have been, which she had before held in the court and household of Eadward.[1014]

[Sidenote: Absence of Swegen;]

The restoration of the house of Godwine to its rank and honours was thus complete, so far as the members of that house had appeared in person to claim again that which they had lost. But in the glories of that day the eldest born of Godwine and Gytha had no part. Swegen had shared his father’s banishment; he had not shared his father’s return. His guilty, but not hardened, soul had been stricken to the earth by the memory of his crimes. [Sidenote: his pilgrimage to Jerusalem,] The blood of Beorn, the wrongs of Eadgifu, lay heavy upon his spirit. At the bidding of his own remorse, he had left his father and brothers behind in Flanders, and had gone, barefooted, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Tomb. He fulfilled his vow, but he lived not to return to his Earldom or to his native land. While his father and brothers were making their triumphant defence before their assembled countrymen, Swegen was toiling back, slowly and wearily, through the dwelling-places of men of other tongues and of other creeds. The toil was too great for a frame no doubt already bowed down by remorse and penance. Cold, [Sidenote: and death in Lykia. September 29, 1052.] exposure, and weariness were too much for him, and fourteen days after Godwine’s solemn restoration in London, the eldest son of Godwine breathed his last in some unknown spot of the distant land of Lykia.[1015]

There is no doubt that the three great decrees, for the restoration of Godwine and his family, for the outlawry of the Archbishop and the other Normans, and for the renewal of the good laws, were all passed in the great Gemót of this memorable Tuesday.[1016] Other measures which were their natural complement may well have been dealt with in later, perhaps in less crowded and excited, [Sidenote: Disposition of Earldoms; Ælfgar gives way to Harold.] assemblies. Some of the greatest offices in Church and State had to be disposed of. Godwine and Harold received their old Earldoms back again. The restoration of Harold implied the deposition of Ælfgar. It is singular that we find no distinct mention either of him or of his father, or yet of Siward, through the whole history of the revolution. The only hint which we have on the subject seems to imply that they at least acquiesced in the changes which were made, and even that Ælfgar cheerfully submitted to the loss [Sidenote: Ralph.] of his Earldom.[1017] As Swegen did not return, there was no need to disturb Ralph in his Earldom of the Magesætas. [Sidenote: Odda.] Odda must have given up that portion of Godwine’s Earldom which had been entrusted to him,[1018] but he seems to have been indemnified by the Earldom of the Hwiccas, held most probably with the reservation of a superiority on the part of Leofric.[1019]

[Sidenote: The vacant Bishopricks.]

The disposal of the Bishopricks which had become vacant by the flight of their foreign occupants was a more important matter, at least it led to more important consequences in the long run. At the moment of Godwine’s restoration, it probably did not occur to any Englishman to doubt that they were vacant both in fact and in law. Robert and Ulf had fled from their sees; they had been declared outlaws by the highest authority of the nation, or rather by the nation itself. Our forefathers most likely thought very little about canonical subtleties. They would hardly argue the point whether the Bishops had resigned or had been deprived, nor would they doubt that the nation had full power to deprive them. In whatever way the vacancies had occurred, the sees were in fact vacant; there was no Archbishop at Canterbury and no Bishop at Dorchester. That the King and his Witan would be stepping beyond their powers in filling those sees was not likely to come into [Sidenote: Relation of Church and State at the time. Identity of the two bodies.] any man’s head. We must remember how thoroughly the English nation and the English Church were then identified. No broad line was drawn between ecclesiastical and temporal causes, between ecclesiastical and temporal offices. The immediate personal duties of an Earl and of a Bishop were undoubtedly different; but the two dignitaries acted within their shire with a joint authority in many matters which, a hundred years later, would have been divided between a distinct civil and a distinct ecclesiastical tribunal. In appointing a Bishop, though we have seen that canonical election was not shut out, we have also seen that the Witan of the land had their share in the matter, and that it was by the King’s writ that the Bishoprick was formally bestowed.[1020] What the King and his Witan gave, the King and his Witan could doubtless take away, and they accordingly proceeded to deal with the sees of the outlawed Bishops exactly as they would have dealt [Sidenote: Vacancy of Canterbury filled by Stigand. 1052.] with the Earldoms of outlawed Earls. It might almost seem that the see of the chief offender, the Norman Primate, was at once bestowed by the voice of the great Assembly which restored Godwine.[1021] It was at all events bestowed within the year, while the Bishopricks of London and Dorchester were allowed to remain vacant some time longer. It may perhaps be thought that the appointment which was actually made to the see of Canterbury bears signs of being an act of the joyous fervour with which the nation welcomed its deliverance. It might have been expected that the claims of Ælfric to the Primacy would have revived on the expulsion of Robert. Ælfric had been canonically elected by the monks of Christ Church; no one seems to have objected to him except the King and his Frenchmen; he possessed all possible virtues, and he was moreover a kinsman of Earl Godwine. But, in the enthusiasm of the moment, there was one name which would attract more suffrages than that of any other Prelate or Priest in England. On that great Holy Cross Day the services of Stigand to the national cause had been second only to those of Godwine himself. As Robert had been the first to make strife, so Stigand had been the first to make peace, between the King and the great Earl. For such a service the highest place in the national Church would not, at the moment, seem too splendid a reward. Ælfric was accordingly forgotten, and Stigand was, either in the great Gemót of September or in the regular Gemót of the following Christmas, appointed to the Archbishoprick of Canterbury. With the Primacy, according to a practice vicious enough in itself, but which might have been defended by abundance of precedents, he continued to hold the see of Winchester in plurality.

[Sidenote: Importance of this appointment.]

This appointment of Stigand was one of great moment in many ways. Amongst other things, it gave an [Sidenote: Handle given to the Normans by Robert’s expulsion.] excellent handle to the wily Duke of the Normans, and thus became one of the collateral causes of the Norman Conquest. The outlawed Robert retired in the end to his own monastery of Jumièges, and there died and was buried. But he did not die till he had made Europe resound with the tale of his wrongs. The world soon heard how a Norman Primate had been expelled from his see, how an Englishman had been enthroned in his place, by sheer secular violence, without the slightest pretence of canonical form. Robert told his tale at Rome;[1022] we may be sure that he also told it at Rouen. William treasured it up, and knew how to use it when the time came. In his bill of indictment against England, the expulsion of Archbishop Robert appears as a prominent count.[1023] It is bracketted with the massacre of Saint Brice, with the murder of Ælfred, and with all the other stories which, though they could not make William’s claim to the Crown one whit stronger, yet served admirably to discredit the cause of England in men’s minds. No one knew better than William how to make everything of this sort tell. The restoration of Godwine was an immediate check to all his plans; it rendered his hopes of a peaceful succession far less probable. But the expulsion of Robert and the other Normans was a little sweet in the cup of bitterness. The English, and Earl Godwine himself, in their insular recklessness of canonical niceties, had unwittingly put another weapon into the hands of the foe who was carefully biding his time.

[Sidenote: Doubtful ecclesiastical position of Stigand.]

Even in England the position of Stigand was a very doubtful one.[1024] He was _de facto_ Archbishop, he acted as such in all political matters, and was addressed as such in royal writs. We hear of no opposition to him, of no attempt at his removal, till William himself was King. He was undoubtedly an able and patriotic statesman, and his merits in this way doubtless prevented any direct move against him. And yet even Englishmen, and patriotic Englishmen, seem to have been uneasy as to his ecclesiastical position. For six years he was an Archbishop without a pallium; it was one of the charges against him [Sidenote: He receives the pallium from the Antipope Benedict. 1058.] that he used the pallium of his predecessor Robert. At last he obtained the coveted ornament from Rome, but it was from the hands of a Pontiff whose occupation of the Holy See was short, and who, as his cause was unsuccessful, was not looked on by the Church as a canonical Pope. In fact, in strict ecclesiastical eyes, Stigand’s reception of the pallium from Benedict the Tenth seems only to have [Sidenote: His ministrations commonly avoided.] made matters worse than they were before. At any rate, both before and after this irregular investiture, men seem to have avoided recourse to his hands for any great ecclesiastical rite. Most of the Bishops of his province were, during his incumbency, consecrated by other hands.[1025] Even Harold himself, politically his firm friend, preferred the ministry of other Prelates in the two great ecclesiastical ceremonies of his life, the consecration of Waltham and his own coronation. One of our Chroniclers, not indeed the most patriotic of their number, distinctly and significantly denies Stigand’s right to be called Archbishop.[1026] One cannot help thinking that all this canonical precision must have arisen among the foreign ecclesiastics who held English preferment, among the Lotharingians favoured by Godwine and Harold, no less than among the King’s own Normans. But at all events the scruple soon became prevalent among Englishmen of all classes. An ecclesiastical punctilio which led Harold himself, on the occasion of two of the most solemn events of his life, to offer a distinct slight to a political friend of the highest rank, must have obtained a very firm possession of the national mind.

[Sidenote: Ulf succeeded by Wulfwig. 1053–1067.]

The case of Stigand is the more remarkable, because no such difficulties are spoken of as arising with regard to the position of another Prelate whose case seems at first sight to have been just the same as his own. If Robert was irregularly deprived, Ulf was equally so. Yet no objection seems to have been made to the canonical character of Wulfwig, who, in the course of the next year, succeeded Ulf in the see of Dorchester.[1027] It is possible that the key to the difference may be found in the fact of the long vacancy of Dorchester. This suggests the idea of some application to Rome, which was successful in the case of Wulfwig and unsuccessful in the case of Stigand. We can well conceive that the deprivation of Ulf may have been confirmed, and that of Robert, as far as the Papal power could annul it, annulled. It must be remembered that Ulf, on account of his utter lack of learning, had found great difficulty in obtaining the Papal approval of his first nomination. The sins of Robert, on the other hand, seem to have been only sins against England, which would pass for very venial errors at Rome. This difference may perhaps account for the different treatment of their two successors. At any rate, Wulfwig seems to have found no opposition in any quarter to his occupancy of the great Mid-English Bishoprick. And he seems to have himself set the example of the scruple which has been just mentioned against recognizing Stigand in any [Sidenote: Leofwine Bishop of Lichfield. 1053–1067.] purely spiritual matter. Along with Leofwine, who in the same year became Bishop of Lichfield, he went beyond sea to receive consecration, and the way in which this journey is mentioned seems to imply that their motive was a dislike to be consecrated by the hands of the new Metropolitan.[1028]

[Sidenote: William of London retains his Bishoprick.]

The see of London was treated in a different way from those of Canterbury and Dorchester, and a way certainly most honourable to its Norman occupant. We have seen that it is not certain whether Bishop William accompanied Robert and Ulf in their escape from England.[1029] It is certain that, if he left England, he was before long invited to return and to reoccupy his see. This may have been the act of Harold after the death of his father. It is an obvious conjecture that Harold would be somewhat less strict in such matters than his wary and experienced parent, and that he would listen with somewhat more favour to the King’s requests for the retention or restoration of some of his favourites.[1030] But it is certain that a Norman whom either Godwine or Harold allowed either to retain, or to return to, the great see of London must have been a man of a very different kind from Robert and Ulf. We are expressly told that William’s Bishoprick was restored to him on account of his good character.[1031] Indeed the character which could obtain such forbearance for a Norman at such a moment must have been unusually good, when we remember that he actually had an English competitor for the see. Spearhafoc, it will not be forgotten, had been regularly nominated to the Bishoprick, and though refused consecration, had held its temporalities till the outlawry of Godwine allowed a Norman to be put in his place.[1032] But the claims of Spearhafoc on the see of London seem to have been as wholly forgotten as the claims of Ælfric on the see of Canterbury. William retained the Bishoprick throughout the reigns of Eadward and Harold, and he died, deeply honoured by the city over which he [Sidenote: 1070.] ruled, four years after the accession of his namesake.

[Sidenote: Normans allowed to remain or return.]

William was the only Norman who retained a Bishoprick, as Ralph was the only stranger of any nation—for we can hardly count Siward as a stranger—who retained an Earldom, after the restoration of Godwine. But, under the terms of the exception to the general outlawry of Normans, a good many men of that nation retained or recovered inferior, though still considerable, offices. We have a list of those who were thus excepted, which contains some names which we are surprised to find there. The exception was to apply to those only who had been true to the King and his people. Yet among the Normans who remained we find Richard the son of Scrob,[1033] [Sidenote: Osbern of Richard’s castle.] and among those who returned we find his son Osbern. These two men were among the chief authors of all evil. Osbern was so conscious of guilt, or so fearful of popular vengeance, that, in company with a comrade named Hugh, he threw himself on the mercy of Earl Leofric. Osbern and Hugh surrendered their castles, and passed with the Earl’s safe-conduct into Scotland, where, along with other exiles, they were favourably received by the reigning King Macbeth.[1034] Yet it is certain that Osbern afterwards returned, and held both lands and offices in Herefordshire.[1035] Others mentioned are Robert the Deacon, described as the father-in-law of Richard, and who must therefore have been an old man,[1036] Humphrey Cocksfoot, whom I cannot further identify, and Ælfred the King’s stirrup-holder.[1037] The list might be largely extended on the evidence of Domesday and the Charters. Some of the most remarkable names are those of the Stallers, Robert the son of Wymarc and Ralph,[1038] and the King’s Chamberlain, Hugh or Hugolin, a person who has found his way from the dry entries in the Survey and the Charters into the legend of his sainted master.[1039] Altogether the number of Normans who remained in England during the later days of [Sidenote: Some of them probably restored after Godwine’s death.] Eadward was clearly not small. And, as some at least were evidently restored after flight or banishment, the suggestion again presents itself that their restoration was owing to special entreaties of the King after the death of Godwine. Harold, in the first days of his administration, may hardly have been in a position to refuse such entreaties. And, in any case, though we may call it a weakness to allow men, some of whom at least were dangerous, to remain in, or return to, the country, yet for a subject newly exalted to give too willing an ear to the prayers of his sovereign, is a weakness which may easily be forgiven.

The revolution was thus accomplished, a revolution of [Sidenote: Estimate of Godwine’s conduct.] which England may well be proud. In the words of a contemporary writer, the wisdom of Godwine had redressed all the evils of the country without shedding a drop of blood.[1040] The moderation of the Earl, the way in which he kept back his ardent followers, the way in which he preserved his personal loyalty to the King,[1041] are beyond all praise. He had delivered his country, he and his had been restored to the favour of their prince, and he now again entered on his old duties as Earl of the West-Saxons and virtual ruler of the Kingdom of England. We may be sure that his popularity had never been so high, or his general authority so boundless, as it was during the short remainder of his life. For Godwine was not destined to any long enjoyment of his renewed honour and prosperity; England was not destined to look much longer [Sidenote: Godwine’s illness.] upon the champion who had saved her. Soon after his restoration the Earl began to sicken;[1042] but he still continued his attention to public affairs, and we can see the working of his vigorous hand in the energetic way in [Sidenote: Christmas Gemót at Gloucester. 1052–1053.] which a Welsh marauder was dealt with at the Christmas Gemót of this year, held as usual at Gloucester. Rhys, the brother of Gruffydd King of the South-Welsh, had been guilty of many plundering expeditions at a place called Bulendún, the position of which seems to be unknown. Early in the year the Northern Gruffydd had ravaged the border at pleasure; now we read, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, that a decree of the Witan—a bill of attainder we may call it—was passed for the [Sidenote: Rhys beheaded and his head brought to Eadward. January 5, 1053.] execution of the Welsh prince.[1043] The decree was duly carried out, and the Christmas festivities were not over, when the head of Rhys was brought to King Eadward, on the vigil of the Epiphany, exactly thirteen years before his [Sidenote: Arnwig resigns the Abbey of Peterborough. Leofric succeeds.] own death.[1044] It was seemingly in the same Gemót that Arnwig, Abbot of Peterborough, resigned his abbey, “and gave it to Leofric the monk by the King’s leave and that of the monks.”[1045] This expression is remarkable, as illustrating that union of royal, capitular, and we may add parliamentary, action, which we have already noticed as prevailing in the appointment of English Prelates in those days.[1046] The process was no doubt the same as that by which it had been attempted to raise Ælfric to the see of Canterbury. The monks, at the suggestion of Arnwig, elected Leofric as his successor. They petitioned the King and his Witan to confirm the election. In this case the [Sidenote: Leofric Abbot of Peterborough. 1053–1066.] confirmation was granted, whereas in the case of Ælfric it had been refused. Abbot Leofric, a nephew of his namesake the Earl, was a man of high birth and of high spirit.[1047] He ruled the great house of Saint Peter with all honour for thirteen years; he enriched the monastery with lands and ornaments of all kinds, and won for it the favour of the King and all the great men of the land. Peterborough, under his rule, became so rich in the precious metals that men called the house Gildenborough.[1048] But, in the eyes of English patriots, Abbot Leofric has won a still higher fame by an act less clearly coming within the range of his ecclesiastical duties. He was one of those great Lords of the Church who did not feel that they were hindered by their monastic vows from marching by the side of Harold to the great battle.[1049]

[Sidenote: Easter Gemót at Winchester. 1053.]

The next great festival of the Church, the next great assembly of the English Witan, beheld the death of the most renowned Englishman of that generation. The King kept the Easter festival at Winchester, and on the Monday of that week of rejoicing, the Earl of the West-Saxons, with his sons Harold, Tostig, and Gyrth, were admitted [Sidenote: Godwine’s illness, April 12,] to the royal table. During the meal Godwine fell from his seat speechless and powerless. His sons lifted him from the ground, and carried him to the King’s own bower, in hopes of his recovery. Their hopes were in vain; the Earl [Sidenote: and death, April 15.] never spoke again, and, after lying insensible for three days, he died on the following Thursday. Such is the simple, yet detailed, account which a contemporary writer gives us of an event which has, perhaps even more than any other event of these times, been seized upon as a subject for Norman romance and calumny. There was undoubtedly something striking and awful in the sight of the first man in England, in all the full glory of his recovered power, thus suddenly smitten with his death-blow. He had been, as we have seen, ailing for some months, but the actual stroke, when it came, seems to have been quite unlooked for. It is not wonderful that, in such a death at such a moment, men saw a [Sidenote: Norman fictions about the death of Godwine.] special work of divine judgement. It is not wonderful that Norman enemies brought the old scandals up again, and decked out the tale of the death of the murderer of Ælfred with the most appalling details of God’s vengeance upon the hardened and presumptuous sinner. I shall elsewhere discuss their romantic inventions, which in truth belong less to the province of the historian than to that of the comparative mythologist.[1050] It is more important to note here that one English writer seems to see in Godwine’s death the punishment of his real or supposed [Sidenote: Bounty of Gytha.] aggressions on the property of the Church.[1051] On this last score however the bounty of his widow did all that she could to make atonement for any wrongdoings on the part of the deceased. The pious munificence of Gytha is acknowledged even by those who are most bitter against her husband, and it now showed itself in lavish offerings for the repose of the soul of Godwine.[1052] His place of burial [Sidenote: Godwine buried in the Old Minster.] need hardly be mentioned. The man who was greater than a King, the maker and the father of Kings, found his last resting-place among Kings. His corpse was laid by that of the King under whom he had risen to greatness, by that of the Lady whose rights he had so stoutly defended, by that of the first King whom he had placed on the West-Saxon throne, by that of the murdered nephew whose death had cast the first shade of gloom upon his house. The Earl of the West-Saxons, dying in the West-Saxon capital, was buried with all pomp in the greatest of West-Saxon sanctuaries, in the Old Minster of Winchester.[1053] That renowned church was enriched with lands [Sidenote: General grief of the nation.] and ornaments in memory of the dead. But the noblest offering of all was the grief of the nation which he had saved. His real faults, his imaginary crimes, were all forgotten. Men remembered only that the greatest man of their blood and speech was taken from them. They thought of the long years of peace and righteous government which they had enjoyed under his rule; they thought of the last and greatest of his great deeds, how he had chased the stranger from the land, and had made England England once again. Around the bier of Godwine men wept as for a father; they wept for the man whose hand had guided England and her people through all the storms of so many years of doubt and danger.[1054] They little deemed that, ages after his death, calumnies would still be heaped upon his name. They deemed not that the lies of the stranger would take such root that the deliverer for whom they mourned would live in the pages of pretended history as Godwine the traitor. The time is now come to redress the wrong, and to do tardy justice to the fair fame of one of the greatest of England’s worthies. [Sidenote: True estimate of Godwine’s character.] To know what Godwine was, we have but to cast away the fables of later days, to turn to the records of his own time, to see how he looked in the eyes of men who had seen and heard him, of men who had felt the blessings of his rule and whose hearts had been stirred by the voice of his mighty eloquence. No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of the statesman. In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will, and whose voice, during five and thirty years of political life, was never raised in any cause but that of the welfare of England. Side by side with all that is worthiest in our later history—side by side with his own counterpart two ages afterwards, the second deliverer from the yoke of the stranger, the victor of Lewes, the martyr of Evesham—side by side with all who, from his day to ours, have, in the field or in the senate, struggled or suffered in the cause of English freedom—side by side with the worthies of the thirteenth and the worthies of the seventeenth century—will the voice of truthful history, rising above the calumnies of ages, place the name of the great deliverer of the eleventh, the Earl of happy memory,[1055] whose greatness was ever the greatness of England, whose life was one long offering to her welfare, and whose death came fittingly as the crown of that glorious life, when he had once more given peace and freedom to the land which he loved so well.

§ 2. _From the Accession of Harold to the Earldom of the West-Saxons to his first War with Gruffydd._ 1053–1056.

The great Earl was dead, and the office which he had held, an office which no man had ever held before him,[1056] was again at the disposal of the King and his Witan. As Godwine’s death had happened at the Easter festival, the Great Council of the nation was doubtless still in session. We may therefore assume, with perfect safety, that the appointments which the Earl’s death rendered needful [Sidenote: Nature of the succession to Earldoms.] were made at once, before the Assembly dispersed. The nature of the succession to these great governments must by this time be perfectly well understood. The King and his Witan might nominate whom they would to a vacant Earldom; but there was a strong feeling, whenever there was no special reason to the contrary, in favour of appointing the son of a deceased Earl. In Earldoms, like those of Mercia and Northumberland, where an ancient house had been in possession for several generations, this sort of preference had grown into the same kind of imperfect hereditary right which existed in the case of the Crown itself. It would have required a very strong case indeed for King and Witan to feel themselves justified in appointing any one but a son of Leofric to succeed Leofric in the government of Mercia. But in the case of [Sidenote: Special position of East-Anglia.] Wessex and East-Anglia no such inchoate right could be put forward by any man. The old East-Anglian house had probably become extinct, either through the slaughter of Assandun, or through the executions in the early days of Cnut.[1057] If not extinct, it had, at all events, sunk into insignificance, and had become lost to history. The Danish Thurkill had founded no dynasty in his Earldom. We cannot even make out with certainty the succession of Earls between [Sidenote: and Wessex.] him and Harold. The Earldom of the West-Saxons was a mere creation of Cnut himself. It would have broken in upon no feeling of ancient tradition, if the office had been abolished, and if the King had taken into his own hands the immediate government of the old cradle of his [Sidenote: Reasons for retaining the West-Saxon Earldom.] house. But such a step would have been distinctly a backward step. The King of the English was now King in every part of his realm alike. Certain parts of his realm might enjoy more of his personal presence than others; certain parts might even be practically more amenable to his authority than others; each great division of the Kingdom might still retain its local laws and customs; but there was still only one English Kingdom; no part of that Kingdom was a dependency of any other part; the King was King of the West-Saxons in no other sense than that in which he was King of the Northumbrians. But, if the local West-Saxon Earldom had been abolished, instead of a King of the English, reigning over one united Kingdom, there would again have been a King of the West-Saxons, holding East-Anglia, Mercia, and Northumberland as dependent provinces. Here then were good political reasons for retaining the institution of the Great Cnut, and for again appointing an Earl of the West-Saxons. Reverence also for the memory of the great man who was gone pleaded equally for the same course. An Earl of the West-Saxons had done more for England than any other subject had ever done. With Godwine and his great deeds still living in the minds and on the tongues of men, there could be little doubt as to giving him a successor; there could be hardly more of doubt as to who that successor should be.

[Sidenote: Harold Earl of the West-Saxons. Easter, 1053.]

The choice of the King and his Witan fell upon the eldest surviving son of the late Earl.[1058] Harold was removed from the government of the East-Angles to the greater government of the West-Saxons. This was, under such a King as Eadward, equivalent to investing him with the practical management of the King and his Kingdom. Harold then, when he could not have passed the age of thirty-two,[1059] became the first man in England. His career up to this time had been stained by what in our eyes seems to be more than one great fault, but it is clear that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, his merits far outweighed his errors. He had perhaps been guilty of selfishness in the matter of his brother Swegen;[1060] he had certainly been guilty of [Sidenote: Joy of the nation.] needless violence in the affair at Porlock. But the universal joy of the nation at his new promotion[1061] shows that the general character of his East-Anglian government must have given the brightest hopes for the future. Grief for the loss of Godwine was tempered by rejoicing at the elevation of one who at once began to walk in his father’s [Sidenote: Character of his government.] steps. From henceforth, as Earl and as King, the career of Harold is one of vigorous and just government, of skill and valour in the field, of unvarying moderation towards political foes. He won and he kept the devoted love of the English people. And, what was a harder task, he won and kept, though in a less degree than another of his house, the personal confidence and affection of the weak and wayward prince with whom he had to deal.

[Sidenote: Ælfgar Earl of the East-Angles.]

The translation of Harold to the greater government of Wessex made a vacancy in his former Earldom of the East-Angles. It would probably have been difficult to refuse the post to the man who had already held it for a short space, Ælfgar, the son of Leofric of Mercia. His appointment left only one of the great Earldoms in the House of Godwine, while the House of Leofric now again ruled from the North-Welsh border to the German Ocean.[1062] But it quite fell in with Harold’s conciliatory policy to raise no objection to an arrangement which seemed to reverse the positions of the two families. The possession of Wessex was an object paramount to all others, and all the chances of the future were in favour of the rising House. Ælfgar accordingly became Earl of the [Sidenote: Character of Ælfgar and his sons.] East-Angles.[1063] His career was turbulent and unhappy. The virtues of Leofric and Godgifu seem not to have been inherited by their descendants.[1064] We hear of Ælfgar and of his sons mainly as rebels in whom no confidence could be placed, as traitors to every King and to every cause, as men who never scrupled to call in the aid of any foreign enemy in order to promote their personal objects. Rivalry towards Harold and his house was doubtless one great mainspring of their actions, but the Norman Conqueror and the last male descendant of Cerdic found it as vain as ever Harold had found it to put trust in the grandsons of Leofric.

[Sidenote: Probable restoration of Bishop William and other Normans.]

I have already suggested that it was probably in consequence of the death of Godwine and the succession of Harold that the restoration of some of the King’s Norman favourites, especially of William Bishop of London, was allowed.[1065] This may have taken place at this same Easter festival; but it is more natural to refer it to some later Gemót of the same year. It is certain that, during this second portion of the reign of Eadward, a considerable number of Normans, or others bearing Norman or French [Sidenote: Position of the Normans in the later days of Eadward.] names, were established in England.[1066] It is equally certain that their position differed somewhat from what it had been before the outlawry of Godwine. The attempts to put them in possession of the great offices of the Kingdom were not renewed. Ralph retained his Earldom, William was allowed to return to his Bishoprick. The royal blood of the one, the excellent character of the other, procured for them this favourable exception, which, in the case of Ralph the Timid, proved eminently unlucky. But we hear of no other Norman or French Earls, Bishops, or Abbots. [Sidenote: Political office forbidden,] Excepting a few of the favoured natives of Lotharingia, none but Englishmen are now preferred to the great posts of Church and State. No local office higher than that of Sheriff, and that only in one or two exceptional cases,[1067] [Sidenote: but Court office allowed.] was now allowed to be held by a stranger. But mere Court preferment, offices about the King’s person, seem to have been freely held by foreigners to whom there was no manifest personal objection. The King was allowed to have about him his Norman stallers, his Norman chaplains, and, an officer now first beginning· to creep into a little importance, his Norman chancellor. And those Normans who were tolerated at all seem to have been looked on with less suspicion than they had been during the former period. They are now freely allowed to witness the royal charters, which implies their acting as members of the national assemblies.[1068] Their position is now clearly one of personal favour, not of political influence. They are hardly mentioned in our history; we have to trace them out by the light of entries [Sidenote: English character of Eadward’s later policy.] in Domesday and of signatures to Charters. Once only shall we have any reason to suspect that the course of events was influenced by them. And in that one case their influence is a mere surmise, and if it was exercised at all, it must have been exercised in a purely underhand way. The policy of Eadward’s reign is from henceforth distinctly an English policy. In other words, it is the policy of Harold.

[Sidenote: Difference between the position of Godwine and that of Harold.]

It is easy to understand that the feelings of Harold with regard to the foreigners differed somewhat from those of his father. They belonged to different generations. Godwine’s whole education, his whole way of looking at things, must have been purely English. It is hardly needful to make any exception on behalf of influences from Denmark. The rule of Cnut was one under which Danes became Englishmen, not one under which Englishmen became Danes. We can hardly conceive that Godwine understood the French language. Such an accomplishment would in his early days have been quite useless. We can well believe that, along with his really enlightened and patriotic policy, there was in the old Earl a good deal of mere sturdy English prejudice against strangers as strangers. But every act of Harold’s life shows that this last was a feeling altogether alien to his nature. His travels of inquiry abroad, his encouragement of deserving foreigners at home, all show him to have been a statesman who, while he maintained a strictly national policy, rose altogether above any narrow insular prejudices. That he understood French well it is impossible to doubt.[1069] If he erred at all, he was far more likely to err in granting too much indulgence to the foreign fancies of his wayward master. His policy of conciliation would forbid him to be needlessly harsh even to a Norman, and he had every motive for dealing as tenderly as possible with all the wishes and prejudices of the King. Harold stood towards Eadward in a position wholly different from that in which Godwine had stood. Godwine might claim to dictate as a father to the man to whom he had given a crown and a wife. Harold could at most claim the position of a younger brother. That Harold ruled Eadward there is no doubt, but he very distinctly ruled by obeying.[1070] Habit, temper, policy, would all lead him not to thwart the King one jot more than the interests of the Kingdom called for. The [Sidenote: Compromise between Harold and the King.] position of the strangers during the remaining years of Eadward’s reign is a manifest compromise between Eadward’s foreign weaknesses and Harold’s English policy. They were to be allowed to bask in the sunshine of the court; they were to be carefully shut out from political power. If Harold erred, his error, I repeat, lay in too great a toleration of the dangerous intruders.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical appointments. Christmas, 1053–1054.]

The remaining events of the year of Godwine’s death are some ecclesiastical appointments, which must have been made at the Christmas Gemót, and a Welsh inroad, which seems to have happened about the same time. In the one month of October three Prelates died,[1071] Wulfsige, Bishop of Lichfield, and the Abbots Godwine of Winchcombe and [Sidenote: Leofwine of Lichfield. 1053.] Æthelweard of Glastonbury. The see of Lichfield was bestowed on Leofwine, Abbot of Earl Leofric’s favourite monastery of Coventry.[1072] In this appointment we plainly see the hand of the Mercian Earl, of whom, considering his name, the new Bishop is not unlikely to have been a kinsman.[1073] [Sidenote: Wulfwig of Dorchester. 1053.] At the same time, it would seem, the see of Dorchester was at last filled by the appointment of Wulfwig, and the two Bishops, as we have seen, got them beyond sea for consecration.[1074] [Sidenote: Æthelnoth of Glastonbury. 1053–1082.] The new Abbot of Glastonbury was Æthelnoth, a monk of the house, who bears an ill character for dilapidation of the revenues of the monastery, but who continued to weather all storms, and to die in possession of [Sidenote: Bishop Ealdred holds Winchcombe.] his Abbey sixteen years after the Norman invasion.[1075] The disposition of Winchcombe is more remarkable. Ealdred, the Bishop of the diocese, who seems never to have shrunk from any fresh duties, spiritual or temporal, which came in his way, undertook the rule of that great monastery in addition to his episcopal office.[1076] This may have been mere personal love of power or pelf; but it may also have been a deliberate attempt, such as we shall see made in other cases also, to get rid of a powerful, and no doubt often troublesome, neighbour, by annexing an abbey to the Bishoprick. If such was the design of Ealdred, it did not prove successful. [Sidenote: He resigns it to Godric. July 17, 1054.] After holding Winchcombe for some time, he next year, willingly or unwillingly, resigned it to one Godric, who is described as the son of Godman, the King’s Chaplain.[1077]

Of the Welsh inroad, recorded by one Chronicler only, all that is said is that many of the “wardmen” at Westbury were slain.[1078] This is doubtless Westbury in Gloucestershire, on the Welsh side of the Severn. The expression seems to imply the maintenance of a permanent force to guard that exposed frontier.

[Sidenote: Position of Macbeth in Scotland.]

The next year was marked by a military and a diplomatic event, both of which were of high importance. The former is no other than the famous Scottish expedition of Earl Siward, an event which has almost passed from the domain of history into that of poetry. Macbeth, it will be remembered, was now reigning in Scotland.[1079] Like Siward himself,[1080] he had risen to power by a great crime, the murder of his predecessor, the young King Duncan. And, like Siward, he had made what atonement he could by ruling his usurped dominion vigorously and well. We have seen that there is no reason to believe that Macbeth had, since he assumed the Scottish Crown, renewed the fealty which he had paid to Cnut when he was under-King,[1081] or, in more accurate Scottish phrase, Maarmor of Moray. We have also seen that he had been striving, in a remarkable way, to make himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness in the quarter where that mammon was believed to have the greatest influence, [Sidenote: Siward’s designs against Macbeth.] namely at the threshold of the Apostles.[1082] We may be sure that Earl Siward, the kinsman, probably the guardian, of the young prince whom Macbeth shut out from the Scottish Crown,[1083] had all along looked on his formidable northern neighbour with no friendly eye. It is not easy to see why the attack on Macbeth, if it was to be made at all, was so long delayed. It may be that the internal troubles of England had hitherto forbidden any movement of the kind, and that Siward took advantage of the first season of domestic quiet to execute a plan which he had long cherished. It may be that the scheme fell in better with the policy of Harold than with the policy of Godwine. Between Godwine and Siward, between the West-Saxon and the Dane, there was doubtless a standing rivalry, partly national, partly personal. But it would fall in with the conciliatory policy of Harold to help, rather than to thwart, any designs of the great Northern Earl which were not manifestly opposed to the public welfare. At all events, in this year the consent of Eadward[1084] was given, a consent which certainly implies the decree of a Witenagemót, and which almost certainly implies the good will of [Sidenote: Siward’s expedition against Macbeth. 1054.] Earl Harold. An expedition on a great scale was undertaken against the Scottish usurper.[1085] That it was undertaken on behalf of Malcolm, the son of the slain Duncan, can admit of no reasonable doubt. To restore the lawful heir of the Scottish Crown was an honourable pretext for interference in Scottish affairs on which any English statesman would gladly seize. And to Siward it was more than an honourable pretext; it was asserting the rights and avenging the wrongs of a near kinsman. The Earl of the Northumbrians accordingly attacked Scotland at the head of a great force both by land and by sea. The army was largely composed of the Housecarls of the King and of the Earl, picked and tried soldiers, Danish and English. [Sidenote: Macbeth’s alliance with Thorfinn.] Macbeth was supported[1086] by a Prince who had now become a neighbour of England, and one probably quite as dangerous as himself. This was Thorfinn, the famous Earl of the Orkneys, who had established his power over the whole of the Western Islands, and even over the coast of Scotland and Strathclyde as far south as Galloway. With his help, the Scottish King ventured to meet the host of [Sidenote: Defeat of Macbeth. July 27, 1054.] Siward in a pitched battle. He was encouraged by the presence of a body of the Normans who had been driven out of England at the return of Godwine. They are spoken of as if their number was large enough to form a considerable contingent of the Scottish army. The fight was an obstinate one. The Earl’s son Osbeorn and his sister’s son Siward were slain, and with them a large number of the Housecarls, both those of the Earl himself and of the King. The slaughter on the Scottish side was more fearful still. Dolfinn, seemingly a kinsman of the Earl of Orkney, was killed,[1087] and the Norman division, fighting no doubt with all the gallantry of their race, enhanced by all the desperation of exiles, were slaughtered to a man. We thus see that the battle was a most stoutly contested one, and that, as usual, the slaughter fell mainly on the best troops on both sides, the Normans on the Scottish side and the Housecarls on the English. But the fortune of England prevailed; the Scots, deprived of their valiant allies, were utterly routed, and King Macbeth escaped with difficulty from the field. The plunder was of an amount which struck the minds of contemporary writers with wonder.[1088]

[Sidenote: Legends of Siward.]

Siward was a hero whose history has had a mythical element about it from the beginning;[1089] it would have been wonderful indeed if this, the last and greatest exploit of so renowned a warrior, had not supplied the materials for song and legend. The tale is told how Siward, hearing of the death of his son, asked whether his wounds were in front or behind. Being told that all were in front, the old warrior rejoiced; he wished no other end for either his son or himself. The story is eminently characteristic; but, as it is told us, it is difficult to find a place for it in the authentic narrative of the campaign. But fiction has taken liberties with the facts of Siward’s Scottish campaign in far more important points. As we have seen, the English victory was complete, but Macbeth himself [Sidenote: Malcolm King of Scots. 1054.] escaped. Malcolm was, as King Eadward had commanded, proclaimed King of Scots, and a King of Scots who was put into possession of his Crown by an invading English force most undoubtedly held that Crown as the sworn [Sidenote: The war continued by Macbeth.] man of the English Basileus. It took however four years before Malcolm obtained full possession of his Kingdom. Macbeth and his followers maintained their cause in the North, being, it would seem, still supported by help from

Thorfinn. Malcolm, on the other hand, was still supported by help from England, and we shall find that he deemed it expedient to enter into a very close relation with Siward’s successor in the Northumbrian Earldom. At last [Sidenote: Macbeth finally defeated and slain. 1058.] Macbeth was finally defeated and slain at Lumfanan in Aberdeenshire. An attempt was made to perpetuate the Moray dynasty in the person of Lulach, a kinsman, or perhaps a stepson, of Macbeth, a son of his wife Gruach [Sidenote: Ephemeral reign of Lulach, and final establishment of Malcolm. 1058.] by a former marriage. But this prince, who bears the surname of the Fool, could not long resist the power of Malcolm; in a few months’ time he was hunted down and slain. The rival dynasty was now crushed; all Scotland came into the hands of Malcolm, who was solemnly crowned at Scone. The power of Thorfinn was broken no less than the power of Macbeth, and Malcolm apparently recovered the full possession of Cumberland, possibly on the death of Thorfinn, when Malcolm married his widow Ingebiorg, a marriage of whose results we shall hear again.

[Sidenote: Erroneous belief that Macbeth was killed in Siward’s campaign.]

These Scottish affairs had but little interest for our English writers, who were satisfied with recording the brilliant victory of Siward and the rich booty which he won, without going on to dwell on events which were almost purely Scottish. As their narrative ends with the defeat of Macbeth and Malcolm’s first proclamation as King, it naturally passed out of mind that that proclamation did not at once give him full possession of all Scotland. The two defeats of Macbeth were confounded together, and it was believed that the usurper met his death in the battle which he fought against Siward. The error began very early, and it obtained prevalence enough to become enshrined in the poetry which, far more than any historical record, has made the name of Macbeth immortal.

In the course of this year, seemingly at a Gemót held at Midsummer, possibly that in which the expedition [Sidenote: State of the succession. 1054.] against Macbeth was decreed,[1090] a most important step was taken with regard to the succession to the Crown. It was a step which proved altogether fruitless, but it is most important as showing what men’s feelings and wishes were at the time. It proves incontestably that now, two years after the return of Godwine, the idea of the succession of William had quite passed away, and that the idea of the succession of Harold had not yet occurred to men’s minds. The state of the royal house was such as to cause the deepest anxiety. The English people, though they cared little for any strict law of succession, still reverenced the blood of their ancient princes, and had ever been wont, save under the irresistible pressure of foreign conquest, to choose their Kings only from among the descendants of former Kings. But now the line of their former Kings seemed to be altogether dying out. Eadward was without children or hopes of children. There was no man in the land sprung from the male line of Æthelred and Eadgar. It is quite possible that there may have been men descended from earlier Kings; but, if so, they could only have been distant kinsmen, whose royal descent was well nigh forgotten, and who were no longer allowed to count as Æthelings. There was indeed a grandson of Æthelred dwelling in the Kingdom in the person of Ralph of Hereford. [Sidenote: Position of Ralph.] Ralph would very likely have been the successor to whom Eadward’s personal inclinations would have led him. He shared with William of Normandy the merit of being a stranger speaking the French tongue, and he had the advantage over William of being really a descendant of English royalty. And the tie which bound Ralph to Eadward was a very close one. Old Teutonic feelings held the son of a sister to be hardly less near and dear than a son of one’s own loins,[1091] and we have seen some indications that this feeling was not wholly forgotten in England in the eleventh century. The sister’s son of Brihtnoth and the sister’s son of Siward[1092] are mentioned in a special way among the chosen companions of their uncles, around whose banners they fought and died. Eadward, in his heart of hearts, would naturally fall back upon Ralph, his own nephew, the son of the daughter of Æthelred and Emma, as a candidate whom the English people might perhaps be persuaded to accept, when the cause of the Norman became hopeless after Godwine’s revolution. [Sidenote: No preference given by female descent.] But however sacred was the relation between a man and his sister’s son, it was not one which by the Law of England conferred any right to the royal succession. The preference attaching to kingly blood was confined to those who were of kingly blood by direct male descent; it does not appear that the son of a King’s daughter had any sort of claim in a royal election beyond any other man in the realm. And, as for Ralph himself, his foreign origin and his personal conduct were, either of them, quite enough to make him thoroughly distasteful to the English people. Men had had quite enough of him as Earl, and they certainly had no wish to have any further experience of him as King. In the present lack of heirs, men’s thoughts turned to a branch of the royal family whose very existence [Sidenote: The sons of Eadmund Ironside.] was perhaps well nigh forgotten. Seven and thirty years before, the infant sons of Eadmund Ironside, Eadmund and [Sidenote: 1017.] Eadward, had found a shelter from the fears of Cnut under the protection of the sainted Hungarian King Stephen.[1093] [Sidenote: Eadward the Ætheling; his marriage and children.] Eadmund died, seemingly while still young. Eadward was still living. He had, seemingly through the influence of Stephen’s Queen Gisela, sister of the Emperor Henry the Second, obtained in marriage a lady of royal descent named Agatha, who seems most probably to have been a niece of the Hungarian Queen and of the sainted Emperor.[1094] This marriage would seem to show that, in those distant lands, Eadward was acknowledged as a prince, perhaps looked to as one who might some day reign in his native island. And the fact that the son of Eadward and Agatha bore the renowned English name of Eadgar, shows that the Ætheling himself cannot have wholly forgotten his native land. Yet, banished, as he was, in his cradle, he could have retained hardly anything of the feelings of an Englishman, and it is hardly possible that he could have spoken the English tongue. Eadward must have been even less of an Englishman than his royal namesake and uncle. Eadward the King had left England when he was many years older than Eadward the Ætheling, and he had lived in a land which had a much closer connexion with England. Still Normandy was dangerous, and Hungary was not. Whatever the Ætheling was, at least he was not a Frenchman; his connexions, though foreign, were in every way honourable and in no way formidable. Hungary was too distant a land to do England either good or harm, but the fame of the youngest Christian Kingdom, and of its renowned and sainted King, was doubtless great throughout Europe. And the connexion with the Imperial House, the distant kindred of the Ætheling’s children with the illustrious Cæsar, the friend and brother-in-law of King Eadward, was, of all foreign ties, that which it most became Englishmen to strengthen. In default therefore of any member of the royal house brought up and dwelling in the land, it was determined to recall the banished Ætheling with his wife and family.[1095] Besides his son Eadgar, he had two daughters, who bore the foreign names of Margaret and Christina. We shall hear of all [Sidenote: Eadgar.] three again. Eadgar lived to be in an especial manner the sport of fortune; a King twice chosen, but never crowned, the last male descendant of Cerdic dragged on a sluggish and contented life as the friend and pensioner [Sidenote: Margaret.] of Norman patrons. One of his sisters won a worthier fame. Margaret obtained the honours alike of royalty and of saintship; she became one of the brightest patterns of every virtue in her own time, and she became the source through which the blood and the rights of the Imperial House of Wessex have passed to the Angevin, the Scottish, and the German sovereigns of England.[1096]

It is impossible to doubt that the resolution to invite the Ætheling was regularly passed by the authority of the King and his Witan. No lighter authority could have justified such a step, or could have carried any weight with [Sidenote: The Ætheling invited to England: the invitation equivalent to succession to the Crown.] foreign courts. Such an invitation was equivalent to declaring the Ætheling to be successor to the Crown, so far as English Law allowed any man to be successor before the Crown was actually vacant. It is possible that, as in some other cases, an election before the vacancy may have been attempted;[1097] but it is perhaps more likely that all that was done was to guarantee to Eadward that same strong preference which naturally belonged only to a son of a reigning King. Such a preference, in favour of one who was the last remaining member of the royal family, would in practice hardly differ from an exclusive right. The resolution in short placed the Ætheling in the same position as if his father and not his uncle had been on the throne. His position would thus be the same as that of Eadwig and Eadgar during the reign of Eadred.[1098] But, when we consider what followed, it is important to remember that the preference which undoubtedly belonged to Eadward would not belong to his son. Eadward, though so long an exile, was an Englishman born, the son of a crowned King and his Lady.[1099] The young Eadgar was a native of a foreign land, and was not the son of [Sidenote: Import of the selection of Eadward.] royal parents. This _quasi_ designation of Eadward to the Crown involves, as I before said, two things. It implies that the King had learned that the succession of William was a thing which he never could bring about.[1100] It implies also that neither Harold himself nor the English people had as yet formed any serious idea of the possible succession of one not of royal descent. Indeed one can hardly doubt that the resolution to send for the Ætheling, if it was not made at Harold’s own motion, must at any rate have had his full approval. No proposal could be more contrary to the wishes and interests of the Norman courtiers, who must either have unsuccessfully opposed it or else have found it their best wisdom to hold their peace. It was therefore, seemingly at the Whitsun Gemót, resolved to send an embassy to obtain the return of the Ætheling. And about the time that Earl Siward was warring in Scotland, the English ambassadors set forth on their errand.

[Sidenote: Embassy to the Emperor Henry. July, 1054.]

A direct communication with the court of Hungary seems to have been an achievement beyond the diplomatic powers of Englishmen in that age. The immediate commission of the embassy was addressed to the Emperor Henry, with a request that he would himself send a further [Sidenote: Ealdred and Ælfwine ambassadors.] embassy into Hungary. At the head of the English legation was the indefatigable Bishop Ealdred, and with him seems to have been coupled Abbot Ælfwine of Ramsey.[1101] Both these Prelates had already had some experience of foreign courts. Ealdred had gone on the King’s errand to the Apostolic throne,[1102] and Ælfwine had been one of the representatives of the English Church at the famous Council of Rheims.[1103] The Bishop of Worcester clearly reckoned on a long absence, and we get some details of the arrangements which he made for the discharge of his ecclesiastical duties during his absence. The Abbey of Winchcombe, which he had annexed to his Bishoprick the year before, he now resigned,[1104] and the general government of the see of Worcester he entrusted to a monk of Evesham named Æthelwig.[1105] The church of that famous monastery, raised by the skill of its Abbot Mannig,[1106] was now awaiting consecration. For that ceremony he deputed his neighbour Bishop Leofwine of Lichfield.[1107] He then set forth for the court of Augustus. The Emperor was then at Köln, on his return from the consecration of his young son Henry as West-Frankish or Roman King in the Great Charles’s minster at Aachen.[1108] The immediate tie between Eadward and Henry had been broken by the death of Queen Gunhild; the King who was now to be crowned was the child of Henry’s second wife, the Empress Agnes of Poitiers.[1109] But the interchange of gifts and honours between the Roman and the insular [Sidenote: Splendid reception given to Ealdred.] Basileus was none the less cordial and magnificent. English writers dwell with evident pleasure on the splendid reception which the English Bishop met with both from the Emperor and from Hermann, the Archbishop of the [Sidenote: His long stay at Köln. 1054–1055.] city where Ealdred had been presented to Henry.[1110] But the immediate business of his embassy advanced but slowly. The time was ill chosen for an Imperial intervention with the Hungarian court. Andrew, the reigning King of Hungary, was about this time abetting the rebellious Duke Conrad of Bavaria against the Emperor.[1111] We have no details of the further course of the negotiation. Ealdred abode a whole year at Köln, probably waiting for a favourable opportunity. His embassy was in the end successful; for the Ætheling did in the end return to England. But we have no further details, and Eadward did not return to England till long after Ealdred had gone back, and till at least a year after the death of the Emperor.

[Sidenote: Death of Osgod Clapa. 1054.]

The year of Ealdred’s mission was marked also by the sudden death of a somewhat remarkable person, namely Osgod Clapa, whose movements by sea had been watched with such care five years before.[1112] The Chronicler remarks, seemingly with some little astonishment, that he died in [Sidenote: Death of Earl Siward. 1055.] his bed.[1113] Early in the next year death carried off a far more famous man, no other than the great Earl of the Northumbrians.[1114] The victory of the last year, glorious as it was, had been bought by the bitterest domestic losses, which may not have been without their effect even on the iron spirit and frame of the old Earl. His nephew and his elder son had fallen in the war with Macbeth, and [Sidenote: His son WALTHEOF.] his only surviving son, afterwards the famous Waltheof, was still a child.[1115] Siward’s first wife Æthelflæd was dead, and he had in his old age married, and survived, a widow named Godgifu.[1116] We might have fancied that Waltheof was her son, but we know for certain that he was the son of the daughter of the old Northumbrian Earls, and that he unhappily inherited all the deadly feuds of his mother’s house.[1117] Siward died at York, the capital of his Earldom. [Sidenote: Story of Siward’s death.] A tale, characteristic at least, whether historically true or not, told how the stern Danish warrior, when he felt death approaching, deemed it a disgrace that he should die, not on the field of battle, but of disease, “like a cow.” If he could not actually die amid the clash of arms, he would at least die in warrior’s garb. He called for his armour, and, harnessed as if again to march against Macbeth, the stout [Sidenote: His foundation and burial at Galmanho.] Earl Siward breathed his last.[1118] But this fierce spirit was not inconsistent with the piety of the time. Saint Olaf, the martyred King of the Northmen, had by this time become a favourite object of reverence, especially among men of Scandinavian descent. In his honour Earl Siward had reared a church in a suburb of his capital called Galmanho,[1119] a church which, after the Norman Conquest, developed into that great Abbey of Saint Mary, whose ruins form the most truly beautiful ornament of the Northern metropolis. In his own church of Galmanho Siward the Strong, the true relic of old Scandinavian times, was buried with all honour.

The death of Siward led to most important political consequences. The direct authority of the House of Godwine was now, for the first time, extended to the land beyond the Humber. This fact marks very forcibly how fully the royal authority was now acknowledged throughout the whole realm. The King and his Witan could now venture to appoint as the successor of Siward an Earl who had absolutely no connexion with any of the great families of Northumberland. Cnut, in the moment of victory, had given the Northumbrians the Dane Eric as their Earl.[1120] But this was the act of a conqueror, and such was the strength of the Danish element in Northumberland that the appointment of a Dane from Denmark probably seemed less irksome than the appointment of an Englishman from any [Sidenote: TOSTIG appointed Earl of the Northumbrians. 1055.] other part of the Kingdom. This last was the act, one wholly without a parallel, on which Eadward now ventured. The vacant Earldom of Northumberland, including also the detached shires of Northampton and Huntingdon,[1121] was [Sidenote: Influences on behalf of Tostig.] conferred on Tostig the son of Godwine. The novelty of the step is perhaps marked by the elaborate description of the influences which were brought to bear on the mind of Eadward to induce him to make the appointment. We hear, not only of Tostig’s own merits, but of the influence employed by his many friends, especially by his sister the Lady Eadgyth and by his brother Earl Harold, whom Norman calumny has represented as depriving Tostig of his hereditary rights.[1122] We may suspect that we have here an account of influences which it was more necessary to bring to bear on the minds of the Witan than on that of the King.[1123] For there is no appointment of Eadward’s reign which is more likely to have been the King’s personal act. Tostig, rather than Harold, was Eadward’s personal [Sidenote: Eadward’s personal affection for Tostig.] favourite. He was the Hêphaistiôn, the friend of Eadward, while Harold was rather the Krateros, the friend of the King.[1124] He also stood higher in the good will of their common sister the Lady Eadgyth. Cut off in a great measure from his Norman favourites, the affections of Eadward had settled themselves on the third son of Godwine. He would therefore naturally desire to raise Tostig to the highest dignities in his gift, or, if he felt hesitation in doing so, it could only be from the wish to keep his favourite always about his own person. In fact we shall find that Eadward could not bring himself to give up the society of Tostig to the degree which the interests of his distant Earldom called for. And this frequent absence of the Earl from his government seems to have been among the causes of the misfortunes which afterwards followed.[1125]

[Sidenote: Novelty of a West-Saxon Earl in Northumberland.]

This appointment of a West-Saxon to the great Northern Earldom was, as I have already implied, a distinct novelty. Ever since Northumberland had ceased to be ruled by Kings of her own, she had been ruled by Earls chosen from among her own people. The ancient Kingdom had sometimes been placed under one, sometimes under two, chiefs; but they had always been native chiefs. The rule of the stranger Eric had been short, and he seems to have allowed the line of the ancient princes to retain at least a subordinate authority.[1126] Siward, a stranger by birth, was connected with the ancient family by marriage.[1127] And both Eric and Siward were Danes; Tostig came of a line which most probably sprang from the most purely Saxon part of England. The experiment was a hazardous one, yet it was one which was not only dictated by sound policy, but which circumstances made almost unavoidable. The [Sidenote: Mode of appointment to the great Earldoms.] great Earldoms, I may again repeat, were neither strictly hereditary nor strictly elective. They were in the gift of the King and his Witan, but there was always a strong tendency, just as in the case of the Kingdom itself, to choose out of the family of the deceased Earl, whenever [Sidenote: Impossibility of appointing a native Earl on the death of Siward.] there was no obvious reason to do otherwise. But on the death of Siward there was such an obvious reason to do otherwise, just as there was in the case of the Kingdom when it became vacant by the death of Eadward. The eldest son of Siward had fallen in the Scottish war, and the one survivor of his house was still a child.[1128] Oswulf, seemingly the only male representative of the ancient Earls,[1129] was probably still a mere boy.[1130] There was therefore no available candidate of the old princely line. And, when we think of the state of the country, of the deadly feuds and jealousies which prevailed even between the reigning Earls and other powerful men,[1131] we shall see that the nomination of any private Northumbrian would have been a still more hazardous experiment than the nomination of a stranger. The Northumbrians themselves seem to have felt this, when, ten years later, the choice of their Earl was thrown into their own hands. They then chose, [Sidenote: Doubtful policy of the appointment of Tostig.] not a Northumbrian, but a Mercian. But it may well be doubted whether it was good policy to appoint a West-Saxon, and especially a member of the House of Godwine. This was perhaps going too far in the way of reminding the proud Danes of the North of their subjection to the Southern King. It could not fail to suggest the idea of an intention to monopolize all honours and all authority in a single family. And, as events showed, the personal character of Tostig proved unfitted successfully to grapple with the difficult task which was now thrown upon him.

[Sidenote: Character of Tostig.]

In weighing the character of the third son of Godwine, we must be on our guard against several distinct sources of error. We are at first tempted to condemn without mercy one who became the antagonist of his nobler brother, who waged open war with his country, and whose invasion of England, by acting as a diversion in William’s favour, was one main cause of the success of William’s expedition. We read the account of his crimes as set forth by his Northumbrian enemies, and we think that no punishment could be too heavy for the man who wrought them. On the other hand, though Tostig, as an adversary of Harold, comes in for a certain slight amount of Norman favour, there was also a temptation, which for the most part was found irresistibly strong, to blacken both sons of the [Sidenote: Legends of Harold and Tostig.] Traitor equally. The opposition between Harold and Tostig during the last two years of their joint lives has thus supplied the materials for a heap of legends of revolting absurdity. The two brothers, who clearly acted together up to those two last years, are described as being full of the most bitter mutual rivalry and hatred, even from their childhood.[1132] The effect of these two different pictures is that both admirers and depreciators of Harold are alike led to look on the acts of Tostig in the most unfavourable light. The crimes of his later years cannot be denied. He died a traitor, in arms against his country, engaged in an act of treason compared to which Harold’s ravages at Porlock, and even Ælfgar’s alliance with Gruffydd, sink into insignificance. His Northumbrian government too was evidently stained with great errors, seemingly with great crimes. But it is remarkable that it is not till the last two years of his life that we hear of anything which puts him in an unfavourable light. And there is nothing in his few recorded earlier

## actions which is at all inconsistent with the generally high character

[Sidenote: Witness of the Biographer of Eadward.] given of him by the biographer of Eadward. That writer compares him with Harold in an elaborate picture of the two which I have already made large use of in describing Harold. And it is clear that, whether from his own actual convictions or from a wish to please his patroness the Lady Eadgyth, it is Tostig rather than Harold whose partizan he is to be reckoned, and it is Tostig whose actions he is most anxious to put in a favourable light. But the two are the two noblest of mortals; no land, no age, ever brought forth two such men at the same time. He makes a comparison of virtues between the two, but he hardly ventures to make the balance decidedly weigh in [Sidenote: His description of Tostig.] favour of either. In person Tostig was of smaller stature than his elder brother, but in strength and daring he was his equal.[1133] But he seems to have lacked all Harold’s winning and popular qualities. He is set before us as a man of strong will, of stern and inflexible purpose, faithful to his promise, grave, reserved, admitting few or none to share his counsels, so that he often surprised men by the suddenness [Sidenote: His stern and unyielding character.] of his actions.[1134] His zeal against wrong-doers, the virtue of the ruler for which his father and brother are so loudly extolled, amounted in him to a passion which carried him beyond the bounds of justice and honour.[1135] The whole picture describes him as a man of honest and upright intentions, but of an unbending sternness which must have formed a marked contrast to the frank and conciliatory disposition of his brother. Such a man, placed as a ruler over a turbulent and refractory people, might, almost unconsciously, degenerate into a cruel tyrant. [Sidenote: Disturbed state of Northumberland.] Northumberland, we are told, was, at the time when he undertook its government, in a state to which it is impossible to believe that either Normandy or southern England afforded any likeness. Siward’s strong arm had done something to bring its turbulent inhabitants into order; yet thieves and murderers still had so completely the upper hand that travellers had to go in parties of [Sidenote: Tostig’s effort to restore order.] twenty and thirty, and even then were hardly safe.[1136] Tostig set himself vigorously, evidently too vigorously, to work to put an end to this state of things. His severity was merciless and impartial; death and mutilation were freely dispensed among all disturbers of public order. His efforts, we are told, were effectual; it is said, in a proverbial form of speech, that under his administration, any man could safely travel through the whole land with all his goods.[1137] Even powerful Thegns were not spared, and here comes the point in which Tostig most deeply erred. Putting our various accounts together, we shall find that, when offenders were too powerful to be reached by the arm of the law, Tostig did not scruple to rid the land of them [Sidenote: Explanation of his later crimes.] by treacherous assassination. We can well understand that a man of Tostig’s disposition, bent on bringing his province into order at any price, may have persuaded himself that the public good was superior to all other considerations, and may have blinded himself to the infamy of the means by which the public good was to be compassed. Very similar conduct in public men of our own day has been condoned by large bodies of men, and by some has even been warmly applauded. The unswerving dictate of justice is that he who, in any age, sheds blood without sentence of law, deserves the heaviest condemnation and the heaviest punishment. Still such conduct does not necessarily imply any original corruption of heart in the offender. Tostig richly deserved all that afterwards fell upon him. Like most sinners, he went on from bad to worse; but there is no reason to believe that he undertook the government of Northumberland with any less sincere intention of doing his duty there than Harold had when he undertook the government of Wessex. Tostig in the end became a great criminal; but he clearly was not a monster or a villain from the beginning of his career.

[Sidenote: His personal favour with Eadward.]

The strange thing is that a man of this disposition, whose virtues were all of the sterner sort, should have become a personal favourite with a feeble King like Eadward. One may perhaps explain it by the principle which often makes men, both in love and in friendship, prefer those who are most unlike themselves. A man like Eadward would cling to a man like Tostig as his natural protector, and, after all, weak as Eadward was, there were elements in his character to which the extreme severity of Tostig would not be unacceptable or even unlike. The King who had commanded Godwine to march against the untried citizens of Dover would not be likely to condemn the harshness of Tostig’s rule in [Sidenote: Tostig’s personal virtues.] Northumberland. And there were other points in Tostig’s character which would naturally and rightly commend him to the favour of the saintly King. Tostig, like William, practised some virtues which Harold neglected. While Harold’s affections seem to have dwelt wholly on an English mistress, Tostig set an example of strict fidelity to his foreign wife.[1138] The husband of Judith would thus on every ground be more acceptable to Eadward than the lover of Eadgyth. Tostig too was of a bountiful disposition, and Judith, who was a devout woman, directed a large share of his bounty to pious objects.[1139] Through all these causes Tostig easily won the highest place in the affection of his royal brother-in-law. With his sister the Lady he stood only too well. There is too much reason to fear that Eadgyth did not scruple to become something more than the accomplice of one of his worst deeds.[1140]

Such was the man to whom, probably at about the age of thirty-two,[1141] was entrusted the rule of the ancient realm beyond the Humber. The general picture of his government I have already given; but for nine years no domestic details are supplied. We shall find him, like his brother, making the fashionable pilgrimage to Rome, and aiding his brother in his wars with the Welsh. Notwithstanding Norman legends, there is, at this stage of their history, not the slightest sign of any dissension between them.

[Sidenote: Tostig becomes the sworn brother of Malcolm. 1055–1061.]

One fact however we learn quite incidentally which touches, not indeed the internal administration of his Earldom, but the measures taken at once for its external defence, and for the maintenance of the supremacy of the Imperial Crown over the great Northern dependency of England. At some time during the first six years of his government, Earl Tostig became the sworn brother of Malcolm, the restored King of Scots.[1142] This was a tie by which reconciled enemies often sought to bind one another to special friendship. It was the tie by which Cnut had been bound to Eadmund,[1143] and by which Tostig’s predecessor Ealdred had been bound to the faithless Carl.[1144] But there is nothing to show that the establishment of this tie between Tostig and Malcolm [Sidenote: Probable reference of the engagement to the war with Macbeth.] had been preceded by any hostilities between them. It is far more probable, considering the date of Tostig’s appointment to his Earldom, that the engagement took place early in Tostig’s government, and that it was made with a view to the joint prosecution of hostilities against a common enemy. When Tostig succeeded Siward, Malcolm was still struggling for his crown against Macbeth, and we cannot doubt that Tostig continued to support the man of King Eadward against the usurper.[1145] Then doubtless it was that the King of Scots and the Earl of the Northumbrians entered into this close mutual relation. But the tie of sworn brotherhood was one which was seldom found strong enough to bind the turbulent spirits of those times. It sat almost as lightly on the conscience of Malcolm as it had sat on the conscience of Carl. The engagement was observed as long as it happened to be convenient, and no longer. While Tostig was the guardian of the English border, Malcolm’s brotherhood with Tostig did not hinder him from violating the frontiers of Tostig’s Earldom. When Tostig was an exile in arms against his country, the tie was remembered, and it procured him a warm welcome at the Scottish Court.

[Sidenote: Ælfgar banished. March 20, 1055.]

The appointment of Tostig to the Earldom must have been made in the Gemót which was held in London in the Lent of this year.[1146] In the same Assembly, Ælfgar, Earl of the East-Angles, was banished. The accounts which we have of this transaction are not very intelligible. The fullest narrative that we have, that of the Chronicler who is most distinctly a partizan of Harold’s, tells us that he was charged with treason towards the King and all his people, and that he publicly confessed his guilt, though the confession escaped him unawares.[1147] The other accounts are satisfied with saying that he was guiltless or nearly guiltless.[1148] With such evidence as this, we are not in a position to determine on the guilt or innocence of Ælfgar. We do not even know what the treason was with which he was charged. But a charge to which the accused party, even in a moment of confusion, pleaded guilty, could hardly have been wholly frivolous on the part of the accuser. This point is important; for, though we have no direct statement who the accuser was, the probability is that a charge against one who stood so high in the rival family could have been brought only by Harold or by some one acting in his interest. At any rate, if Ælfgar was not a traitor before his condemnation, he became one speedily after it. In seeking a forcible restoration, he did but follow the least justifiable act in the career of his rival. But, if Harold had set a bad example, Ælfgar improved upon it. Harold had endeavoured to force his way into the country at the head of mercenaries hired in a foreign land. But he had not allied himself with the enemies of his country; he had not carried on a war against England in the interest of an ever restless foe of England. To this depth of infamy [Sidenote: Ælfgar hires ships in Ireland,] Ælfgar did not scruple to sink. He went over, as Harold had done, to Ireland, and gathered a force of eighteen ships, besides the one in which he had made his own voyage. These ships were doubtless manned by the Scandinavian settlers in that country.[1149] With this fleet he sailed to some haven in Wales, probably of North Wales, [Sidenote: and makes an alliance with Gruffydd.] where he met Gruffydd and made an alliance with him.[1150] The Welsh Prince was now at the height of his power. He had this very year overthrown and slain his South-Welsh rival, Gruffydd the son of Rhydderch.[1151] He seems now to have been master of the whole Cymrian territory, and, at the head of such a power, he was more dangerous, and probably more hostile, to England than ever. Nothing then could be more opportune for his purposes than the appearance of a banished English Earl at the head of a powerful force of Irish Danes. Ælfgar at once asked for Gruffydd’s help in a war to be waged against King Eadward.[1152] The plan of a campaign was speedily settled. Gruffydd summoned the whole force of the Cymry[1153] for a great expedition against the Saxons. Ælfgar, with his Irish or Danish following, was to meet the Welsh King at some point which is not mentioned, and the combined host was to march on a devastating inroad into Herefordshire. The plan was successfully carried out, and the forces of Gruffydd and Ælfgar entered the southern part of the shire, the district known as Archenfeld, and [Sidenote: Gruffydd and Ælfgar ravage Herefordshire,] there harried the country. The border land which they entered was one bound to special service against British enemies. The Priests of the district had the duty of carrying the King’s messages into Wales; its militia claimed the right, in any expedition against the same enemy, to form the van in the march and the rear in the retreat.[1154] To ravage this warlike district was no doubt a special object with the Welsh King, one which would be carried out with special delight. He did his work effectually. The effects of the harrying under Gruffydd were still to be seen at the time of the Norman survey.[1155]

The work of destruction thus begun seems to have been carried on by Gruffydd and his allies without opposition, till they came within two miles of the city of Hereford.[1156] [Sidenote: and meet Earl Ralph near Hereford. October 24, 1055.] There they were at last met by a large force under Ralph, the Earl of the country, consisting partly of the levies of the district, and partly of his own French and Norman following. Richard the son of Scrob, it will be remembered, was among the Normans who had been allowed to remain in England,[1157] and no doubt the forces of Richard’s Castle swelled the army of Ralph. The timid Earl[1158] thought himself called upon to be a military reformer. The English, light-armed and heavy-armed alike, were [Sidenote: Ralph requires the English to fight on horseback.] always accustomed to fight on foot. The Housecarl, the professional soldier, with his coat of mail and his battle-axe, and the churl who hastened to defend his field with nothing but his javelin and his leathern jerkin, alike looked on the horse only as a means to convey the warrior to and from the field of battle. The introduction of cavalry into the English armies might perhaps have been an improvement, but it was an improvement which could not be carried into effect with a sudden levy within sight of the enemy. But Ralph despised the English tactics, and would have his army arrayed according to the best and newest continental models. A French prince could not condescend to command a host who walked into action on their own feet, according to the barbarous English fashion. The men of Herefordshire were therefore required to meet the harassing attacks of the nimble Welsh, and the more fearful onslaught of Ælfgar’s Danes, while still [Sidenote: The battle is therefore lost.] mounted on their horses. The natural consequences followed; before a spear was hurled, the English took to flight.[1159] Nothing else could have been reasonably looked for; however strong may have been the hearts of their riders, horses which had not gone through the necessary training would naturally turn tail at the unaccustomed sights and sounds of an army in battle array.[1160] But in one account we find a statement which is far stranger and more disgraceful. If Ralph required his men to practise an unusual and foreign tactic, he and his immediate companions should at least have shown them in their own persons an example of its skilful and valiant carrying out. But we are told that Ralph, with his French and Normans, were the first to fly, and that the English in their flight did but follow the example of their leader.[1161] I suspect some exaggeration here. Whatever may have been the case with the timid Earl himself, mere cowardice was certainly not a common Norman, or even French, failing. For a party of French knights to take to flight on the field of battle without exchanging a single spear-thrust, is something almost unheard of. It is far more likely that we have here a little perversion arising from national dislike. It is far more likely that, whatever Ralph himself may have done, the Normans in his company were simply carried away by the inevitable, and therefore in no way disgraceful, flight of the English. Anyhow, the battle, before it had begun, was changed into a rout. The enemy pursued. The light-armed and nimble Welsh were probably well able to overtake the clumsily mounted English. Four or five hundred were killed, and many more wounded. On the side of Ælfgar and Gruffydd we are told that not a man was lost.[1162]

[Sidenote: Ælfgar and Gruffydd sack and burn Hereford.]

The Welsh King and the English Earl entered Hereford the same day[1163] without resistance. The chief object of their wrath seems to have been the cathedral church of the [Sidenote: Story of Æthelberht of East-Anglia. 792.] diocese, the minster of Saint Æthelberht. The holy King of the East-Angles, betrothed to the daughter of the famous Offa, had come to seek his bride at her father’s court. He was there murdered by the intrigues of Cynethryth, the wife of the Mercian King.[1164] He became the local saint of Hereford, and the minster of the city boasted [Sidenote: Æthelstan, Bishop of Hereford. 1012–1056.] of his relics as its choicest treasure. That church was now ruled by Æthelstan, an aged Prelate, who had already sat for forty-three years.[1165] But, for the last twelve years, blindness had caused him to retire from the active government of his diocese, which was administered by a Welsh Bishop named Tremerin.[1166] Æthelstan is spoken of as a man of eminent holiness, and he had, doubtless in his more active days, rebuilt the minster of Saint Æthelberht, and enriched it with many ornaments. The invaders attacked the church with the fury of heathens; indeed among the followers of Ælfgar there may still have been votaries of Thor and Odin. Seven of the Canons attempted to defend the great door of the church, but they were cut down without mercy.[1167] The church was burned, and all its relics and ornaments were lost. Of the citizens many were slain, and others were led into captivity.[1168] The whole town was sacked and set fire to, and the Welsh account specially adds that Gruffydd destroyed the fort or citadel.[1169] The history which follows seems to imply that the town itself was not fortified, but merely protected by this fortress. At its date or character we can only guess. Hereford is not spoken of among the fortresses raised by Eadward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd. It is an obvious conjecture that the fortress destroyed by Gruffydd was a Norman castle raised by Ralph. A chief who was so anxious to make his people conform to Norman ways of fighting would hardly linger behind his neighbour at Richard’s Castle, in at once providing himself with a dwelling-place, and his capital with a defence, according to the latest continental patterns. If so, we may easily form a picture of the Hereford of those days. By the banks of the Wye rose the minster, low and massive, but crowned by one or more of those tall slender towers, in which the rude art of English masons strove to reproduce the campaniles of Northern Italy. Around the church were gathered the houses of the Bishop, the Canons, the citizens, the last at least mainly of wood. Over all rose the square mass of the Norman donjon, an ominous presage of the days which were soon to come. All, church, castle, houses, fell before the wasting arms of Ælfgar and Gruffydd. They went away rejoicing in their victory and in the rich booty which [Sidenote: Deaths of Tremerin, 1055, and Æthelstan, February 10, 1056.] they carried. The blow seems to have broken the hearts of the two Prelates whose flock suffered so terribly. Tremerin died before the end of the year, and Æthelstan early in the year following.[1170]

King Eadward was now in his usual winter-quarters at Gloucester. Either the time of the Christmas Gemót was hastened, or the King, in such an emergency, acted on his own responsibility. The defence of the country and the chastisement of the rebels could no longer be left in the hands of his incapable nephew. The occasion called for the wisest head and the strongest arm in the whole realm. [Sidenote: Harold sent against the Welsh.] Though his own government had not been touched, the Earl of the West-Saxons was bidden to gather a force from all England, and to attack the Welsh in their own land. It is not unlikely that his brother was, as in a later war with the same enemy, summoned from Northumberland to his help.[1171] Late as was the season of the year, [Sidenote: Comparison of his earlier and later Welsh campaigns.] Harold did not shrink from the task.[1172] This seems to have been his first experience of Welsh warfare, and we do not know whether he now adopted those special means of adapting his operations to the peculiar nature of the country, [Sidenote: 1063.] which he tried so successfully in his later and more famous campaign. He then, as we shall see, caused his soldiers to adopt the light arms and loose array of the Welsh, and so proved more than a match for them at their own weapons. The story seems rather to imply that he did not do so on this occasion, and that the later stroke of his genius was the result of the lessons which he now learned. In neither case did a Welsh enemy dare to meet Harold in a pitched battle, but there is a marked difference between the two campaigns; in the earlier one, the Welsh successfully escaped Harold’s pursuit, while, in the later one, they were unable to do so. Harold gathered his army at Gloucester; he passed the Welsh border, and pitched his camp beyond the border district of Straddele.[1173] But the main point is that Gruffydd and Ælfgar, who had marched so boldly to the conflict with Ralph, altogether shrank from giving battle to Harold. They escaped into South Wales. Harold, finding it vain to pursue such an enemy, desisted from the attempt. He dismissed the greater part of his army, that is probably the militia of the shires, merely bidding them keep themselves in readiness to withstand the enemy in case of [Sidenote: Harold fortifies Hereford.] any sudden inroad.[1174] With the rest of his troops, that is probably with his own following, he proceeded to take measures for securing the important post of Hereford against future attacks. The castle had been levelled with the ground, the church was a ruin, the houses of the townsmen were burned. Harold set himself to repair the mischief, but his notions of defending a city were different from those of the Frenchman Ralph. The first object of the English Earl was to secure the town itself, not to provide a stronghold for its governor. It does not appear that he rebuilt the castle, but he at once supplied the city itself with the requisite defences. So important a border town was no longer to be left open to the incursions of every enemy or rebel. As a military measure, to meet a temporary emergency, he surrounded the town with a ditch and a strong wall. This wall, in its first estate, though strengthened by gates and bars, seems to have been itself merely a dyke of earth and rough stones. But, before the reign of Eadward was ended, Harold, then Earl of the shire, followed the example of Eadward at Towcester and Æthelstan at Exeter, and surrounded the town with a wall of masonry.[1175] The wooden houses of the citizens could soon be rebuilt. Hereford was soon again peopled with burghers, both within and without the wall, some of them the men of the King and others the men of Earl Harold.[1176] The minster had been burned, but we must remember how laxly that word is often taken. All its woodwork, all its fittings and ornaments, were of course destroyed, the walls would be blackened and damaged, but it was capable of at least temporary repair, as Bishop Æthelstan was buried in it next year.[1177] Under the care of Earl Harold, Hereford was again a city.

[Sidenote: Peace of Billingsley. 1055.]

Meanwhile Ælfgar and Gruffydd sued for peace. Messages went to and fro, and at last a conference was held between them and Harold at Billingsley in Shropshire, a little west of the Severn. Harold was never disposed to press hardly on an enemy, and he may possibly have felt that he was himself in some sort the cause of all that had happened, if he had promoted any ill-considered charges [Sidenote: General mildness of English political warfare.] against his rival. In fact, rude and ferocious as those times were in many ways, the struggles of English political life were then carried on with much greater mildness than they were in many later generations. Blood was often lightly shed, but it was hardly ever shed by way of judicial sentence. A victorious party never sent the vanquished leaders either to a scaffold or to a dungeon. Banishment was the invariable sentence, and banishment in those days commonly supplied the means of return. Thus when Gruffydd and Ælfgar sought for peace, it was easily granted to them; Ælfgar was even restored to the Earldom which he had forfeited. It was probably thought that he was less dangerous as Earl of the East-Angles, than as a banished man who could at any time cause an invasion of the country from Wales or Ireland. His fleet sailed to Chester, and there awaited the pay which he had promised the crews.[1178] Whether the payment was defrayed out of the spoils of [Sidenote: Ælfgar restored to his Earldom. Christmas, 1055–1056.] Herefordshire we are not told. Ælfgar now came to the King, and was formally restored to his dignity.[1179] This was done in the Christmas Gemót, in which we may suppose that the terms of the peace of Billingsley were formally confirmed.

[Sidenote: Invasion of England by Gruffydd and Magnus. 1056.]

Peace with Gruffydd was easily decreed in words, but it was not so easily carried out in act. The restless Briton eagerly caught at any opportunity of carrying his ravages beyond the Saxon border. The Welsh Annals here fill up a gap in our own, and make the story more intelligible. With the help of a Scandinavian chief whom it is not easy to identify, but who is described as Magnus the son of Harold,[1180] Gruffydd make a new incursion into Herefordshire. We may well believe that the restoration and fortification of Hereford was felt as a thorn in his side. This time the defence of the city and shire was not left in the hands of any Earl, fearful or daring, but fell to one of the [Sidenote: Death of Bishop Æthelstan. February 10, 1056.] warlike Prelates in whom that age was so fertile. Bishop Æthelstan, as I have already said, died early in the year at Bosbury, an episcopal lordship lying under the western slope of the Malvern Hills.[1181] His burial in Saint Æthelberht’s minster must have been the first great public ceremony in the restored city. In the choice of a successor, Eadward, or rather Harold, was actuated at least as much [Sidenote: Leofgar, Bishop of Hereford. March 27, 1056.] by military as by ecclesiastical considerations. The see of the venerable and pious Æthelstan was filled by a Prelate of whom, during a very short career, we hear only in the character of a warrior. This was Leofgar, a chaplain of the Earl’s, whose warlike doings seem to have been commemorated in popular ballads. He laid aside his chrism and his rood, his ghostly weapons, and took to his spear and his sword and went forth to the war against Gruffydd the Welsh King.[1182] But the warfare of this valiant churchman [Sidenote: His death in battle. June 16, 1056.] was unfortunate. He had not been three months a Bishop before he was killed, and with him his priests, as also Ælfnoth the Sheriff[1183] and many other good men. The Chronicler goes on to complain bitterly of the heavy grievances attending on a Welsh war. It is clear that the way had not yet been found out how really to quell the active sons of the mountains, when their spirits were thoroughly aroused by an able and enterprising prince like Gruffydd. The complaint does not dwell on losses in actual fight, which were probably comparatively [Sidenote: Character of the war with Gruffydd.] small. The Welsh would seldom venture on an actual battle with the English, even when commanded by captains very inferior to Harold. They would not run such a risk, except when they were either supported by Scandinavian allies, or else when they were able to take the Saxons at some disadvantage. What the Chronicler paints is the wearing, cheerless, bootless kind of warfare which is carried on with a restless enemy who can never be brought to a regular battle. It is not ill success in fighting that he speaks of, but the wretchedness of endless marching and encamping, and the loss of men and horses, evidently by weariness rather than by the sword.[1184] The wisest heads in the nation agreed that a stop must, at any cost, be put [Sidenote: Ealdred holds the see of Hereford with that of Worcester.] to this state of things. On the death of Leofgar, the see of Hereford was committed to Bishop Ealdred, whose energy seems to have shrunk from no amount of burthens, ecclesiastical, military, or civil.[1185] By the counsel of this Prelate, and of the Earls Leofric and Harold, the Welsh [Sidenote: Gruffydd reconciled to Eadward. 1056.] King was reconciled to his English overlord.[1186] This expression may be only a decorous way of attributing to the King personally a measure which was really the act of the three able statesmen who are represented as intervening between him and his dangerous vassal. But Eadward did sometimes exert a will of his own, and when he did so, his will was often in favour of more violent courses than seemed wise or just in the eyes of his counsellors. It is quite possible then that Eadward was, as he well might be, strongly incensed against Gruffydd, and that it needed all the arguments of Leofric and Harold, and of Ealdred so renowned as a peacemaker,[1187] to persuade the King to come to any terms with one so stained with treason and sacrilege. And undoubtedly, at this distance of time, there does seem somewhat of national humiliation in the notion of making peace with Gruffydd, after so many invasions and so many breaches of faith, on any terms but those of his complete [Sidenote: His oath of homage.] submission. We must take the names of Harold, Leofric, and Ealdred as a guaranty that such a course was necessary. Gruffydd did indeed so far humble himself as to swear to be for the future a faithful under-King to Eadward.[1188] It would also seem that the rebellious vassal was [Sidenote: He loses his lands in Cheshire.] mulcted of a small portion of his territories. Eadward had, at some earlier time, granted to Gruffydd certain lands, seemingly that portion of the present shire of Chester which lies west of the Dee. These lands were now forfeited, and restored to the see of Lichfield and other English possessors from whom they had been originally taken.[1189] We know not whether the grant was an original act of Eadward, or whether it was a convenient legal confirmation of some irregular seizure made by the Welsh King. Gruffydd was perhaps bought off in this way after some of his former incursions, most likely at [Sidenote: 1046.] the moment of his temporary cooperation with Swegen.[1190] If so, the restoration of the alienated lands was now required as a condition of peace. This homage of Gruffydd, and this surrender of lands, remind us of the homage [Sidenote: 1277.] and surrender made, under the like circumstances, by the last successor of Gruffydd to a greater Edward.[1191] As for the Welsh King’s oath, it was kept after the usual fashion, that is, till another favourable opportunity occurred for breaking it.

[Sidenote: Cooperation of Harold, Leofric, and Ealdred.]

One other point may be noted in connexion with this last transaction. That is the way in which Harold, Leofric, and Ealdred are described as

## acting together. If this implies no further cooperation, it at least

implies that these three took the same side in a debate in the Witenagemót. Yet Leofric was the father of Harold’s rival Ælfgar, and the last time that the names of Harold and Ealdred were coupled was when Ealdred was sent to [Sidenote: 1051.] follow after Harold on his journey to Bristol. But now all these old grudges seem to have been forgotten. In fact not one of the three men was likely to prolong a grudge needlessly. Harold’s policy was always a policy of conciliation; if—what we can by no means affirm—his conduct with regard to the outlawry of Ælfgar was at all of another character, it was the last example in his history. Ealdred was emphatically the peacemaker. He had no doubt long ago made his own peace with Harold, and he had probably used his influence to reconcile him with any with whom reconciliation was still needful. Leofric had often been opposed to Godwine, and must have looked with uncomfortable feelings on his wonderful rise. But he had never been a bitter or violent enemy; we have always found him playing the part of a mediator between extreme parties. There is no trace of any personal quarrel between him and Harold. He may have thought himself wronged in the outlawry of his son; but he could not fail to condemn Ælfgar’s later conduct and to approve that of Harold. He must have admired Harold’s energetic carriage in the Welsh campaign and in the restoration of Hereford. And Leofric doubtless felt, whether Ælfgar felt or not, some gratitude to Harold for his conciliatory behaviour at Billingsley, and for the restoration of Ælfgar to his Earldom. All that we know of the good old Earl of the Mercians leads us to look on him as a man who was quite capable of sacrificing the interests and passions of himself or his family to the general welfare of his country.

§ 3. _From Harold’s first Campaign against Gruffydd to the Deaths of Leofric and Ralph._ 1055–1057.

[Sidenote: Hermann, Bishop of Ramsbury, seeks to obtain the Abbey of Malmesbury. 1055.]

A few detached ecclesiastical events must be mentioned as happening in the course of these two years of war with Gruffydd. The see of Wiltshire or Ramsbury[1192] was, it will be remembered, now held by Hermann, one of the Lotharingian Prelates who were favoured by Godwine and Harold as a sort of middle term between Englishmen and Frenchmen.[1193] This preferment was not, at least in Hermann’s eyes, a very desirable one. The church of Ramsbury, unlike other cathedral churches, seems not to have been furnished with any company of either monks or canons,[1194] and the Bishop therefore found himself somewhat solitary. The revenues also of the see were small, an evil which seems to have pressed more heavily on a stranger than it would have done on a native. Other Bishops of Ramsbury, Hermann said, had been natives of the country, and the poverty of their ecclesiastical income had been eked out by the bounty of English friends and kinsfolk. He, a stranger, had no means of support to look to except the insufficient revenues of his Bishoprick.[1195] He had, it appears, been long looking forward to annexing, after the manner of the time, a second Bishoprick to his own. As Leofric had united Crediton and Saint German’s, Hermann hoped to unite Ramsbury and Sherborne, whenever a vacancy should occur in the latter see. Hermann, as the mission with which he had been entrusted shows,[1196] stood high in royal favour, and the Lady Eadgyth had long before promised to use her influence on his behalf, whenever the wished for opportunity should occur.[1197] But another means of increasing the episcopal wealth of Ramsbury now presented itself. The Abbot of Malmesbury was dead. Though the monasteries had not yet reached their full measure of exemption from episcopal control, we may be sure that the Bishops had already begun to look with jealousy on those heads of great monastic houses who had gradually grown up into rival Prelates within their own dioceses. Hermann at Ramsbury felt towards the Abbey of Malmesbury, as in after days his countryman Savaric at Wells felt towards the Abbey of Glastonbury.[1198] Here was a good opportunity at once for raising his Bishoprick to a proper standard of temporal income and for getting rid of a rival who was doubtless a thorn in his side. He would forsake Ramsbury, with its poor income and lack of clerks, and fix his episcopal throne in the rich and famous minster which boasted of the burying-place of Æthelstan.[1199] He laid his scheme before the King, who approved of it; he went away from the royal presence already in expectation Bishop of Malmesbury. But two parties interested in the matter had not been consulted, the monks of Malmesbury and the Earl of the West-Saxons. The monks were certain to feel [Sidenote: Relation of Bishops and Monks.] the utmost repugnance to any such union. They might reasonably fear that the Lotharingian Prelate might seek to reconstruct the foundation of his newly made cathedral church according to the canonical pattern of his own country. The rule of Chrodegang, which, to the Canons of Wells and Exeter,[1200] seemed to be an insufferable approach to monastic austerity, would seem to the monks of Malmesbury to be a no less insufferable approach to secular laxity. Or, even if the Bishop allowed the church to retain its ancient monastic constitution, the monks would have no desire for any such close connexion with the Bishoprick. They doubtless, as the monks of Glastonbury did afterwards, greatly preferred a separate Abbot of their own. The monks of Malmesbury therefore betook themselves to the common helper of the oppressed, and laid their grievances at the feet of Earl Harold.[1201] As the natural protector of all men, monks and otherwise, within his Earldom, Harold pleaded their cause before the King. Within three days after the original concession to Hermann,[1202] before any formal step had been taken to put him in possession of the Abbey,[1203] the grant was revoked, and the church of Malmesbury was allowed to retain its ancient constitution.[1204]

[Sidenote: Manifest action of the Witan.]

The speed with which this business was dispatched shows that it must have been transacted at a meeting of the Witan held at no great distance from Malmesbury. Such a change as the transfer of a Bishop’s see from one church to another could certainly not have been made or contemplated without the consent of the Witan. And for the monks to hear the news, to debate, to obtain Harold’s help, and for Harold to plead for them, within three days, shows that the whole took place while the Witan were actually in session. Of the places where Gemóts were usually held the nearest to Malmesbury is Gloucester, the usual scene of the Christmas Assembly. The monks, or enough of them to act in the name of the house, may perhaps themselves have been present there, and may have determined on their course without going home to Malmesbury. But the distance between Malmesbury and Gloucester is not too great to have allowed the business, in a moment of such emergency, to have been discussed within the three days, both in the Gemót at Gloucester and in the chapter-house at Malmesbury. One can hardly [Sidenote: Christmas, 1055.] doubt that this affair took place in the Christmas Gemót in which the Peace of Billingsley was confirmed and Ælfgar reinstated in his Earldom.

[Sidenote: Harold’s action in the matter.]

The part played by Harold in this matter should also be noticed. Harold was no special lover of monks; the chief objects of his own more discerning bounty were the secular clergy. But he was no enemy to the monastic orders; he had, as we have seen in more than one case, approved and suggested the favours shown to them by others; he had even, once at least, appeared as a monastic benefactor himself.[1205] And, at any rate, monks or no monks, the brethren of Malmesbury were a society of Englishmen, who were threatened with the violation of an ancient right through what clearly was a piece of somewhat hasty legislation. To step in on their behalf was an act in no way unworthy of the great Earl, and it was quite in harmony with his usual moderate and conciliatory policy.

[Sidenote: Hermann becomes a monk at Saint Omer.]

The remainder of the story is curious. Hermann, displeased at being thus balked when he thought himself so near success, gave up, or at least forsook, his Bishoprick, crossed the sea, and assumed the monastic habit in the Abbey of Saint Bertin at Saint Omer.[1206] But the fire so suddenly kindled soon burned out; Hermann chafed under the fetters of monastic discipline, and wished to be again in the world.[1207] After three years, his earlier scheme once more presented itself to his mind, when the see of Sherborne became vacant by the death of Bishop Ælfwold. He returned to England, he pleaded his cause with the King, and found [Sidenote: Hermann returns and unites Ramsbury and Sherborne. 1058.] no opposition from the Earl.[1208] No appointment to Ramsbury had been made during Hermann’s absence; the administration of the diocese was entrusted to the indefatigable Bishop Ealdred, who thus had the care of three dioceses, Worcester, Hereford, and Ramsbury.[1209] Perhaps Hermann was looked on as still being Bishop, and the promise of the Lady with regard to the union of the sees of Ramsbury and Sherborne was held to be still binding. At all events, on Hermann’s return, Ealdred gave up Ramsbury, and Hermann became Bishop of the united Sees. He held [Sidenote: Died 1078.] them for twenty years longer; he survived the Conquest twelve years,[1210] and he lived to merge the old diocesan names of Ramsbuiy and Sherborne in one drawn from an altogether new seat of episcopal authority, the waterless hill of the elder Salisbury.[1211]

[Sidenote: Death of Earl Odda. August 31, 1056.]

The year of Bishop Leofgar’s unlucky attempt to win fame as a warrior was marked by the death of Earl Odda, the King’s kinsman. He had been set over the western parts of Godwine’s Earldom during the year of his banishment,[1212] and since his return he had probably held, under the superiority of Leofric, the Earldom of the whole or part of the old land of the Hwiccas.[1213] His unpatriotic conduct in those times seems, even in the eyes of our most patriotic chroniclers, to have been fully atoned for by his personal virtues and by the favour which he showed to monasteries. He is accordingly sent out of the world with a splendid panegyric.[1214] Before his death he was admitted a monk by his diocesan Ealdred,[1215] who might thus, by bringing so goodly a sheep into the monastic fold, atone for having himself forsaken the cloister for the cares of government and warfare. He died at Deerhurst, under the shadow of the minster of his own building, but his own burial-place was at Pershore,[1216] another of the many Abbeys of a land which, next to the eastern fens, was the richest [Sidenote: Æthelric, Bishop of Durham 1042–1056, resigns his see.] district of England in monasteries of early date. In the course of the same year, Æthelric, Bishop of Durham, the successor of the simoniacal Eadred,[1217] resigned his see and became again a monk at Peterborough, in which [Sidenote: [Dies Oct. 15, 1072.]] monastery he had spent his youth.[1218] He was, through the influence of Tostig,[1219] succeeded in his Bishoprick by his brother alike in the flesh and in monastic profession, [Sidenote: Æthelwine succeeds. 1056–1071.] Æthelwine, another monk of the Golden Borough.[1220] Both brothers survived the Norman Conquest, and we shall see each of them, alike on the throne of Durham and in the cloister of Peterborough, become victims of the watchful jealousy of the Norman Conqueror.

[Sidenote: Eadward Ætheling arrives from Hungary. 1057.]

The next year is conspicuously a year of deaths, and a year of deaths which affected the state of England far more sensibly than the deaths of Earl Odda and Bishop Æthelric. The first recorded event of the year is the arrival of the Ætheling Eadward from Hungary.[1221] The mission of Ealdred had not failed through the death of [Sidenote: [Death of the Emperor Henry. 1056.]] the great prince to whom he was sent,[1222] and, three years after the reception of the English Bishop at Köln, the English Ætheling, if English we may call him, set foot on the shores from which he had been sent into banishment as a helpless babe.[1223] He now, at the age of forty-one, came for the first time to his native country, and he came in a character as nearly approaching to that of heir presumptive to the English Crown as the laws of our [Sidenote: Prospects of his succession to the Crown.] elective monarchy allowed. He came with his foreign wife and his children of foreign birth. And it can hardly fail but that he was himself, in speech and habits, as foreign as the Norman favourites of Eadward, more foreign than the men of kindred tongue whom Godwine and Harold were glad to encourage in opposition to them.[1224] The succession of such a prince, even less of an Englishman than the reigning King, promised but little good to the Kingdom. Still the succession of the Ætheling would have had one great advantage. It was hardly possible that the claims of William could be successfully pressed against him. A supposed promise of King Eadward in William’s favour could hardly be maintained in the teeth of a bequest and an election in favour of an Englishman of royal birth and mature years, against whom William could have no personal complaint whatever. Incomparably inferior as Eadward doubtless was to Harold in every personal qualification, his succession could never have given William the opportunities which were afterwards given him by the accession of Harold. Eadward could not have been held up as an usurper, a perjurer, a man faithless to his lord, nor, had he been the opponent, could the superstitions of the time have been appealed to to avenge the fancied insult offered to the relics of the Norman saints. We can thus fully understand why an English poet, clearly writing by the light of later experience, laments the death of the Ætheling as the cause of all the woes which came upon this poor nation.[1225] Even at the time, when men’s eyes were not yet so fully opened, we may be sure that England rejoiced in his coming, and bitterly lamented his speedy removal. The son of the hero Ironside, the last adult male of the royal line, must, whatever were his personal qualities, have attracted to himself an interest which was not purely sentimental.

[Sidenote: Death of the Ætheling Eadward. 1057.]

The Ætheling then came to England; but he never saw his namesake the King. He died almost immediately afterwards in London,[1226] and was buried with his grandfather Æthelred in Saint Paul’s minster. Why he was shut out from the royal presence was unknown then as well as now.[1227] [Sidenote: His exclusion from the royal presence,] The fact that his exclusion was commented on at the time might seem to forbid, and yet perhaps it does not wholly forbid, the simplest explanation of all, that he was ill at the time of his landing, and that the illness which caused his death also hindered his presentation to his uncle. If the exclusion had a political object, to what party ought [Sidenote: not likely to be due to Harold,] we to attribute it? A distinguished modern writer attributes it, though not very confidently, to the partizans of Harold.[1228] But it is not at all clear that Harold as yet aspired to the throne; it is far more probable that it was the death of the last adult Ætheling which first suggested to Harold and his friends the possibility of the succession of a King not of the royal house. Because Harold did in the end succeed Eadward, we must beware of supposing that his succession had been looked forward to during the whole reign of Eadward. There must have been some moment when the daring thought—for a daring thought it was—of aspiring to a royal crown first presented itself to the mind of Harold or of those to whom Harold hearkened. And no moment seems so clearly marked out for that purpose by all the circumstances of the case as the moment of the death of the Ætheling. If Harold had wished to thwart a design of King Eadward’s in favour of his nephew, he would hardly have waited for his landing in England to practise his devices. He would rather have laboured to hinder Ealdred’s mission in the first instance, or to render it abortive, in some way or other, during the long period over which the negotiation [Sidenote: but rather to the Norman courtiers,] was spread. If the exclusion of the Ætheling from his uncle’s presence was really owing to the machinations of any political party, there is another party on which the charge may fall with far greater probability. There was another possible successor who had far more to fear from the good will of the King towards the Ætheling than Harold had. Whether Harold had begun to aspire to the Crown or not, there can be little doubt that William had, and William was still by no means without influence at the English Court. There were still Normans about Eadward, Bishop William of London, Robert the son of Wymarc, Hugolin the Treasurer, and others whom Godwine or Harold had, perhaps unwisely, exempted from the general proscription. To exclude—by some underhand means, if at all—a prince of the blood from the presence of his uncle and sovereign, sounds much more like the act of a party of this kind, than the act of a man whom both office and character made the first man in the realm. The thing, if done at all, was clearly some wretched court intrigue, the fitting work of a foreign faction. The Earl of the West-Saxons, had his interests been concerned in the matter, would have set about hindering [Sidenote: but, more probably than either, the result of illness.] the Ætheling’s succession in quite another way. But after all, it is far more likely that the fact that the two Eadwards never met was not owing either to the partizans of Harold or to the partizans of William, but that it was simply the natural result of the illness of which the Ætheling presently died.

[Sidenote: Surmise of Sir F. Palgrave that Harold caused the death of the Ætheling.]

Another, and a far worse, insinuation against the great Earl hardly needs to be refuted. Among all the calumnies with which, for eight hundred years, the name of Harold has been loaded, there is one whose suggestion has been reserved for our own times. Norman enemies have distorted every action of his life; they have misrepresented every circumstance of his position; they have charged him with crimes which he never committed; they have looked at all his acts through such a mist of prejudice that the victory of Stamfordbridge is changed under their hands into a wicked fratricide.[1229] But no writer of his own time, or of any time before our own, has ever ventured to insinuate that Earl Harold had a hand in the death of the Ætheling Eadward. That uncharitable surmise was reserved for an illustrious writer of our own time, in whom depreciation of the whole House of Godwine had become a sort of passion.[1230] It is enough to say that, has there been the faintest ground for such an accusation, had the idea ever entered into the mind of any man of Harold’s own age,[1231] some Norman slanderer or other would have been delighted to seize upon it.[1232] Nothing is more easy than to charge any man with having secretly made away with another man by whose death he profits, and the charge is one which, as it is easy to bring, is sometimes very hard to disprove. For that very reason, it is a charge on which the historian always looks with great suspicion, even when it is known to have been brought at the time and to have been currently believed at the time. The general infamy of Eadric is fully established, but we need not believe in every one of the secret murders which rumour charged him with having committed or instigated. Still less need we believe the tales which charge the Great William with having more than once stooped to the trade of a secret poisoner.[1233] When we think how easy the charge is to bring, and how recklessly it has been brought at all times, the mere fact that no such charge was ever brought against Harold does in truth redound greatly to his honour. Calumny itself instinctively shrank from laying such a crime to the charge of such a man. William was, as I believe, as guiltless of any such baseness as Harold himself. But the charge did not seem wholly inconsistent with the crafty and tortuous policy of the Norman Duke. The West-Saxon Earl, ambitious no doubt and impetuous, but ever frank, generous, and conciliatory, was at once felt to be incapable of such a deed.

[Sidenote: Heaca, Bishop of Selsey, dies.]

Three other deaths followed among the great men of the land, two of which were of no small political importance. [Sidenote: Æthelric succeeds. 1057.] It was not of any special moment, as far as we know, when Heaca, Bishop of Selsey or of the South-Saxons, died, and was succeeded by Æthelric, a monk of Christ Church.[1234] It [Sidenote: Death of Earl Leofric. August 31, 1057.] was quite another matter when the great Earl of the Mercians, so long the honoured mediator between opposing races and opposing interests, died in a good old age in his own house at Bromley in Staffordshire.[1235] Of all the churches and monasteries which had been enriched and adorned by the bounty of Leofric and Godgifu, none was dearer to them than the great minster of Coventry, the city with which their names are inseparably connected in one of those silly legends which have helped to displace our early history.[1236] There Leofric was buried in the church which he and his wife had raised from the foundations,[1237] and had enriched with gifts which made it wealthier and more magnificent than all the minsters of England.[1238] Godgifu survived her husband many years; she saw her son and grandsons rise and fall; she saw her granddaughter share first a vassal and then an Imperial Crown, and then vanish out of sight as a homeless widow. At last she herself died, still in the possession of some part at least of her vast estates, a subject of the Norman invader.[1239]

[Sidenote: Death of Earl Ralph. December 21, 1057.]

A few months after the death of Leofric came the death of the stranger who had seemingly held a subordinate Earldom under his authority. Ralph, Earl of the Magesætas, the French nephew of King Eadward, died near the end of the year, and was buried in the distant minster of Peterborough,[1240] to which he had been a benefactor.[1241] [Sidenote: His possible pretensions to the Crown.] I have already started the question whether the thoughts of Eadward had ever turned towards him as a possible successor.[1242] After the death of the Ætheling, the hopes of Ralph and his brother Walter, if they had any, might again revive. But if so, death soon cut short any such schemes. Walter, the reigning prince of a foreign state, would have no chance. If any such prince were to be chosen, it would be better at once to take the renowned Duke of the Normans than the insignificant Count of Mantes. But Ralph, whether he was ever actually thought of or not, was clearly a possible candidate; his death therefore, following so soon after the death of the Ætheling, removed another obstacle from the path of Harold.

[Sidenote: Redistribution of Earldoms. Christmas, 1057–1058?]

The deaths of the two Earls involved a redistribution of the chief governments of England, which would naturally be carried out in the following Christmas Gemót. The Earldom of the Mercians, such parts of it at least as had been under the immediate authority of Leofric, was conferred [Sidenote: Ælfgar Earl of the Mercians.] on his son Ælfgar.[1243] It shows how vast must have been the hereditary influence of his house, when such a trust could not be refused to a man who had so lately trampled under foot every principle of loyalty and patriotism. But care was taken to make him as little dangerous as possible. Ælfgar may have hoped that, on the death of Ralph, the Earldom of the Magesætas would again be merged in Mercia, and that, excepting the shires attached to Northumberland, he might rule over the whole realm of Offa and Æthelflæd. But policy altogether forbade that the Herefordshire border should be again placed in the hands of one who had so lately acted as the [Sidenote: Marriage of Gruffydd and Ealdgyth.] ally of Gruffydd. We know not whether the Welsh King had already entered into a still closer relation with the English Earl by his marriage with Ælfgar’s beautiful daughter Ealdgyth. The date of that marriage is not recorded; it may have already taken place, or it may have happened on the next occasion, one distant only by a few months, when we shall find the names of Gruffydd and Ælfgar coupled together. But if the Welsh King was already the son-in-law of the Mercian Earl, there was a still further reason for placing some special safeguard on that border of the realm. In short, the government of Herefordshire was so important that it could not be safely placed in any hands but those of the foremost man in England. There is distinct evidence to show that, within two or three years after the death of [Sidenote: Herefordshire added to Harold’s Earldom.] Leofric, the Earldom of Herefordshire was in the hands of Harold.[1244] We can therefore hardly doubt that, on the resettlement which must have followed the deaths of Leofric and Ralph, the Earldom of the Magesætas was attached to the Earldom of the West-Saxons, and that Harold now became the immediate ruler of the district of which he had been the deliverer, and of the city of which he might [Sidenote: Harold the son of Ralph.] claim to be the second founder. Earl Ralph had left a son, a namesake, probably a godson, of the great Earl, and Harold the son of Ralph appears in Domesday as a landowner both before and after the Conquest. His name still survives within his father’s Earldom, where it cleaves to an existing parish and to a castle which has wholly vanished. But Earldoms were not hereditary, and the son of Ralph was so young that, eight years later, he was still under wardship.[1245] On this ground, if on no other, Harold, the great-nephew of Eadward, the great-grandson of Æthelred, was so far from appearing as a competitor for the Crown of his ancestors that he was not even thought of as a possible successor for his father’s Earldom. His name is altogether unknown to history, and but for his place in Domesday and in local tradition, his very existence might have been forgotten. His renowned namesake was now entrusted [Sidenote: Question as to Gloucestershire.] with the great border government. But it is by no means clear whether Harold held Herefordshire as a detached possession, as Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire were held by Siward and Tostig, or whether it was connected with his West-Saxon Earldom by the possession of Gloucestershire. If so, the rule of the Earl of the West-Saxons must now have been extended over nearly all that was West-Saxon land in the days of Ceawlin.[1246]

While the power of Harold was thus increased, the time seemed to have come for raising the younger sons of Godwine to a share in the honours of his house. The [Sidenote: Gyrth Earl of the East-Angles, [1057–1058],] East-Anglian Earldom, vacated by the translation of Ælfgar to Mercia, was now conferred on Gyrth. But the boundaries of the government were changed. Essex was detached from East-Anglia. The new Earl probably received only the two strictly East-Anglian shires, with the [Sidenote: and of Oxfordshire.] addition of Cambridgeshire, to which was afterwards added the detached shire of Oxford.[1247] The policy of attaching [Sidenote: Policy of these detached shires.] these detached shires to distant Earldoms is not very clear. It could not be the same policy which afterwards led the Conqueror to scatter the fiefs of his great vassals over distant portions of the Kingdom. There was certainly no intention of weakening any of the Earls whose governments were thus divided. The object was far more probably to bring the influence of the House of Godwine to bear upon all parts of the country. Some old connexion had attached Northamptonshire to Northumberland at an earlier time, and the example thus given was seized on as a means for planting the authority of the rising house in every convenient quarter. Oxfordshire, it will be remembered, had formed part of the Earldom of Swegen; it was now placed in the hands of Gyrth. For it was highly important that the great frontier town of Mercia and Wessex, the seat of so many important national meetings, should be in thoroughly trustworthy hands. Ælfgar’s loyalty was most doubtful; it was impossible altogether to oust him from command, but it was expedient to confine his powers of mischief within the smallest possible compass, and to hem him in, whenever it could be, by men who could be relied on. Unfortunately at Chester, the most dangerous point of all, the family interest of the House of Leofric was too strong to allow of that important shire being put into any hands but those of Ælfgar. We shall presently see the result.

[Sidenote: Leofwine Earl of Kent, Essex, &c.]

Leofwine also was apparently provided for at the same time.[1248] His government, like that of Swegen at an earlier time, was carved out of several ancient Kingdoms and Earldoms, but it lay much more compactly on the map than the anomalous province which took in Oxford, Taunton, and Hereford. It consisted in fact of south-eastern England—of Kent, Essex, Hertford, Surrey, probably Buckinghamshire—that is of the shires round the [Sidenote: London exempt.] mouth of the Thames. London, as was natural, remained exempt from any jurisdiction but that of its Bishop and the chief officers of the city. The whole East of England was thus placed under the rule of the two younger sons of Godwine. But the evidence of the writs seems to show that Harold retained a general superintendence over their governments, whether simply as their elder brother or in any more exalted character.

[Sidenote: The House of Godwine at its greatest point of greatness. 1058–1065.]

The House of Godwine had thus reached the greatest height of power and dignity which a subject house could reach. Whatever was the origin of the family, they had won for themselves a position such as no English family ever won before or after. Four brothers, sons of a father who, whether Earl or churl by birth, had risen to greatness by his own valour and counsel, divided by far the greater part of England among them. The whole Kingdom, save a few shires in the centre, was in their hands. And three at least out of the four showed that they well deserved their greatness. To the eldest among the four there evidently belonged a more marked preeminence still. Two of his brothers, those most recently appointed to Earldoms, were clearly little more than Harold’s lieutenants. And a prospect of still higher greatness now lay open to him [Sidenote: State of the royal line.] and his house. The royal line was dying out. No adult male descendant of Æthelred remained; no adult descendant of any kind remained within the Kingdom. The only survivors of the true kingly stock were the son and daughters of the Ætheling, children born in a foreign land. If any hopes of royalty had ever flitted before the eyes of Ralph, such hopes could not extend to his son the young Harold or to his brother the Count of Mantes. [Sidenote: Harold’s prospect of the Crown.] The time was clearly coming when Englishmen might choose for themselves a King from among their brethren, unfettered by any traditional reverence for the blood of Ælfred, Cerdic, and Woden. And when that day should come, on whom should the choice of England fall save on the worthiest man of the worthiest house within the realm? We cannot doubt that, from the year when the three deaths of Eadward, Leofric, and Ralph seemed to sweep away all hindrances from his path, Harold looked forward to a day when he and his might rise to a rank yet loftier than that of Earl. It was no longer wholly beyond hope that he might himself ascend the Imperial throne of Britain, and that the Earldoms of England might be held by his brothers as Æthelings of the House of Godwine. The event proves that such were the hopes of Harold, that such, we may add, were the hopes of England. Such hopes may, even at an earlier time, have flashed across the mind of Harold himself or across the minds of zealous friends of his house or zealous admirers of his exploits. But this was the first moment when such hopes could have assumed anything like form and substance; it was the first moment when the chances seemed distinctly to be rather for than against their fulfilment. That Harold from this time doubtless aspired to the Crown, that he directed all his conduct by a hope of securing the Crown, cannot be doubted. And the unanimity with which he was raised to the throne when the great day came seems to show that men’s minds had long been prepared to look to him as their future sovereign. We cannot doubt that, after the death of the Ætheling Eadward, Wessex and East-Anglia at least were ready to transfer the English Crown from the line of Æthelred to the line of Godwine.

[Sidenote: Questions as to Harold’s position.]

Two questions still remain. Did Harold, in thus looking forward to the Crown, know, as he came to know at last, how formidable a rival was making ready for him beyond the sea? And was the succession of Harold merely a probability, a moral certainty it may be, to which men learned to look forward as a matter of course, or were the hopes of the great Earl confirmed by any act of the Witan or any promise of the King? Both questions are hard to answer. Both are inseparably mixed up with the most difficult questions in our whole history, the alleged promise made to William by Eadward and the alleged oath made to him by Harold. I have already expressed my belief that Eadward’s alleged promise to the Norman Duke, which formed the main ground of William’s pretensions to the English Crown, though exaggerated and perverted in the Norman accounts, was not a mere Norman invention. I believe that some promise really was made, and that the time when it was made was when William visited Eadward during the banishment of Godwine.[1249] Of the nature and form of that promise it is difficult to say anything. We may indeed unhesitatingly dismiss the notion that a settlement was made in William’s favour by a decree [Sidenote: Effects of Eadward’s promise to William.] of the Witan. Still any promise of any kind could hardly have been kept so complete a secret but that it must have got blazed abroad, and have reached the ears of the Earl and his countrymen. The Norman party, during their short moment of complete triumph, would have no motive to keep the matter a secret. They would deem themselves to have reached the great accomplishment of all that they had been scheming for, when there seemed a prospect of the English Crown passing, without slash or blow, to the brow of the Norman. The fact of the promise would doubtless be known, and by statesmen it would be remembered. But it does not follow that it would make any deep impression on the mass of the nation. Men would hear of the promise in a vague sort of way, and would at the time be divided between wonder and indignation. But the idea of the succession of the Norman would be looked on as something which had passed away with other Norman ideas, when the English Earls came back to claim their own. Even after Harold’s election as King, the prospect of the Norman invasion is spoken of in a way which seems to show that, to the mass of Englishmen, the claim of William was even then something new and surprising.[1250] [Sidenote: Policy of the patriotic party;] But by a statesman like Harold, if the matter was once known, it would never be forgotten. It would hardly be a thing to talk much of openly; but to counteract any possible schemes of William must have been the main object of Harold’s policy from the day when he was first called to the head of affairs. We can understand how Eadward was led to deem his promise null, and to send for [Sidenote: candidature first of Eadward the Ætheling,] the Ætheling as his destined successor. This was, under the circumstances, a great triumph of the national policy. A competitor, accepted by the voice of the nation, was placed in William’s path, a competitor whom William himself would hardly dare to attack. The death of the Ætheling made matters more difficult. There was now no such unexceptionable rival to oppose to the Norman. [Sidenote: then of Harold.] Harold indeed, before his oath, was a far more formidable rival to William than Harold after his oath. He had not yet given his enemy that fatal advantage which the wily Duke knew so well how to employ. But Harold’s succession would have all the disadvantages of a novelty. If he could not yet be branded as a perjurer, yet he might be, in a way that the Ætheling never could be, branded as an usurper. Either of the Eadwards, in short, with Harold for his guide and counsellor, would be really stronger than Harold himself as King. But the risk had now to be run. The nation at large had most likely but vague notions as to the danger. But Harold, Stigand, and all the leaders of the nation must have known that any step that they took would bring on their country the enmity of a most active and dangerous foe. Harold’s main object during his whole administration clearly was to strengthen England at home and abroad, to make her powerful and united when the inevitable day should come.

[Sidenote: Question as to any formal act in Harold’s favour.]

It is a more difficult question whether Harold’s succession was at all guaranteed, at this or at any time before Eadward’s death, by any formal act either of the King or of the Witan. We know that Eadward did exercise in Harold’s favour whatever influence or authority an English King had in the nomination of his successor. That nomination appears to have been finally and formally made on Eadward’s death-bed.[1251] But such a death-bed nomination is in no way inconsistent with a promise to the same effect at an earlier time. Any one indeed to whom such a promise had been made would undoubtedly seek to have it confirmed with all the solemnity which attaches to the last act of a dying man. And there are several circumstances, none perhaps of any great weight singly, but having together a sort of cumulative force, which seem to [Sidenote: Quasi-royal position of Harold.] point to Harold from this time as being something more than an ordinary Earl, however powerful and popular, as being in some sort a sharer in the powers and honours of royalty.[1252] We find his name coupled in public documents with that of the King in a way which certainly is not usual with the name of any subject. We find vassal princes plighting their faith to the King and to the Earl, as if they were senior and junior colleagues in a common office. We find Harold appearing in the eyes of foreigners under the lofty guise of a Duke of the English. That sounding title cannot have been really borne by him at home, but it seems to show that, even among strangers, he was felt to hold the position of a prince rather than that of the most exalted private noble. Lastly, in our best Latin chronicler we find him distinctly called by a title which is nowhere else, to my knowledge, conferred on a subject, but which is the familiar designation of vassal princes.[1253] All these touches, coming from such different quarters, seem naturally to suggest the view that Earl Harold was, seemingly from the death of the Ætheling, publicly recognized as holding a _quasi_-royal position, as being, in fact, the designated successor to the Crown.

[Sidenote: Difficulties in the supposition of any formal vote.]

On the other hand, there are difficulties about the belief that this position was conferred on Harold by any formal vote of the Witan. It is plain that a perfectly free choice of the King during the actual vacancy was a right which the English people, or their leaders, prized very dearly. All attempts to limit the choice of the electors beforehand had always signally failed.[1254] Since the abortive scheme of Æthelwulf, nothing at all answering to a King of the Romans had been seen in England.[1255] And if there were some reasons which, under present circumstances, might make such an unusual course specially desirable, there were other reasons which told against it with nearly equal force. With the royal house on the verge of extinction, with such a competitor as William carefully watching the course of events, it was most desirable to settle the succession with as much certainty as the laws of an elective monarchy allowed. It was most desirable that the successor to the throne should be the man most fitted for the highest of offices, the wisest head and the stoutest arm in the land. It was, in a word, the wish of every clear-sighted patriot that the successor of Eadward should be no other than Earl Harold. But, on the other hand, the choice of Earl Harold, or of any other man not of kingly blood, was something strange and unprecedented, something which might well shock the feelings and prejudices of men. The choice of a new King would in fact be the choice of a new dynasty; it would be to wipe out a sentiment as old as the days when the first West-Saxon set foot on British ground; it would be to transfer the Crown of Wessex, of England, of Britain, from the house of Cerdic, of Ecgberht, and of Æthelstan to the house of Godwine the son of Wulfnoth. Men might not as yet be so ready for so momentous a change as they certainly were nine years [Sidenote: Possible claims of young Eadgar.] later. And an irrevocable decision in favour of Harold might well be looked on as a wrong done to a third possible competitor. The royal house, though on the verge of extinction, was not yet extinct. The Ætheling had left a son, the young Eadgar. The son was undoubtedly not entitled to the same constitutional preference as his father. But in some respects he was a more promising candidate than his father. Like the renowned Bastard himself, he was little, but he would grow.[1256] If a vacancy happened at once, his claims could hardly be pressed. But the King might live many years, and Eadgar might succeed his great-uncle in all the vigour of early manhood. He was not indeed, like his father, an Englishman born, the son of an English King by an English mother. But then he might be, as his father had not been, brought up with the feelings of an Englishman, of a destined ruler of England. Nine years before the death of Eadward, men might well deem that it was not expedient, by any premature declaration in favour of the great Earl, to cut off the chances of a succession in many ways so desirable as that of the young Ætheling. If King Eadward lived long enough to make Eadgar’s succession possible and expedient, that succession might, like that of his father, form a better check to the ambition of William than the succession of Harold.

[Sidenote: Probably no formal act, but a general understanding in favour of Harold.]

On the whole then it is perhaps safer not to suppose any formal act of the Witan on behalf of Harold. The circumstances of the case may be explained by supposing that Eadward promised Harold his recommendation in case of his own death during Eadgar’s childhood. It would be a sort of understood thing that, in case of such an event, the Earl of the West-Saxons would be a candidate for the Crown with every chance of success. As Harold’s renown increased, as the chances of Eadward’s life grew weaker, as Eadgar’s incapacity became more and more manifest, men would look with more and more certainty to the great Earl as their future King.[1257] Without any formal decree, he would, by common consent, step into the position, or more than the position, of a born Ætheling, and he would find himself insensibly sharing the powers, and even the titles, of royalty. And we cannot doubt that the great rival beyond sea was carefully watching every step of this process. If we realize that Harold—the Duke of the English—was virtually, if not formally, the designated successor to the Crown, we can still better understand the eagerness of William to obtain by any means the Earl’s recognition of his claims. It was not merely to bind the most powerful man in the land to his cause; it was to obtain what was virtually an abdication from one who was virtually the destined heir.

[Sidenote: Harold now chief ruler of England. 1057–1066.]

The famous oath of Harold is so uncertain as to its date and all its circumstances that it might be treated without impropriety at almost any stage of my narrative. But, as it is so uncertain, as it is recorded by no contemporary English writer, I prefer to put off its consideration till it is convenient to take up again the thread of Norman affairs, to examine fully into William’s claims, and to describe his preparations to assert those claims. Meanwhile we have to see how Harold ruled over England, now that he was without an equal competitor within the land. Save the shires ruled by the turbulent Ælfgar, the government of all England was now divided between himself and his brothers; and there was now nothing but the life of the reigning King between him and the English Crown.

##