The story of the murder of Beorn is told in so minute and graphic a way

that it seems impossible to throw doubt on any part of the tale. And

every account represents the deed as a deed of deliberate

treachery.[324] An act of mere violence would not have greatly offended

the morality of that age. Had Swegen killed even a kinsman in a moment

of provocation or in a fair fight to decide a quarrel, his guilt would

not have seemed very black. Had he even used craft in carrying out an

ancestral deadly feud, he might have quoted many precedents in

Northumbrian history, and, among them, an act in the life of the

reigning Earl of the North hardly inferior in guilt to the worst

[Sidenote: Universal indignation against Swegen.] aspect of his

own.[325] But to kill a kinsman, a confiding kinsman, one who had just

granted a somewhat unreasonable prayer, was something which offended the

natural instincts not only of contemporary Englishmen but of

Scandinavian pirates. At the moment Swegen seems to have found no

friends; the voice of all England was against him; there is no sign that

any of his family stood by him; the sympathies of Harold clearly lay

with his murdered cousin. It is hardly possible to conceive a blacker or

more unpardonable crime. One would have thought that Swegen would have

failed to find patrons or protectors in any [Sidenote: His reception by

Baldwin.] corner of Christendom. Yet, strange to say, the murderer,

forsaken by all, was at once received with favour by Baldwin, even

though Baldwin must have known that by receiving him he was running the

risk of again offending the King of the English and even the Emperor

himself. [Sidenote: His outlawry is reversed and he returns to England.

Midlent, 1050.] And what followed is stranger still. In the next year,

in a Witenagemót held in London in Midlent, Swegen’s outlawry was

reversed, and he was restored to his Earldom.[326] And, strangest of

all, his restoration is attributed, not to the influence of Godwine or

his family, not to any revulsion of feeling on the part of the King or

the nation, but [Sidenote: Swegen reconciled to Eadward by Bishop

Ealdred.] to the personal agency of Bishop Ealdred the Peacemaker. He it

was who, it would seem, crossed over to Flanders, brought Swegen to

England, and procured his restoration at the hands of the King and his

Witan.[327] There is nothing to show that Ealdred was specially under

the influence of Godwine. We shall before long find him acting in a

manner which, to say the least, shows that he was not one of Godwine’s

special followers. His episcopal city and the greater part of his

diocese lay within the Earldom of Leofric; no part of it lay within the

Earldom of Godwine.[328] And, if part of his diocese lay within the

Earldom of the man whom he sought to restore, that only makes him the

more responsible for the act which was so directly to affect a portion

of his own flock. In the restoration of Swegen, Ealdred seems to have

acted purely in his capacity of peacemaker.[329] At first sight it might

seem that Ealdred strove to win the blessing promised to his class by

labouring on behalf of a sinner whom the most enlarged charity could

hardly excuse. The very strangeness of the act suggests that there must

have been some explaining cause, intelligible at the time, but which our

authorities have not recorded. The later history of Swegen shows that,

if he was a great sinner, he was also a great penitent. We can only

guess that Ealdred already marked in him some signs of remorse and

amendment, that he had received from him some confession of his crime,

to which we possibly owe the full and graphic accounts of the murder of

Beorn which have been handed down to us.[330] If so, it was doubtless

wise and charitable not to break a bruised reed; still again to entrust

the government of five English shires to the seducer of Eadgifu and

murderer of Beorn was, to say the least, a perilous experiment.

We must now go back to the time when King Eadward had just dismissed the

Mercian contingent after the reconciliation [Sidenote: Various military

operations of the year 1049.] between Baldwin and the Emperor. While the

unhappy events which I have just narrated were going on, Englishmen had

cause to be alert in more than one quarter of the island against

assaults of various kinds. In the comparatively peaceful reign of

Eadward this year stands forth as marked by warlike operations of every

sort. England had to resist the assaults of foreign enemies, of

faithless vassals, and of banished men seeking their restoration.

[Sidenote: Movements of Osgod Clapa.] Besides the small force of Swegen,

Osgod Clapa was, as has been already said,[331] at sea with a much

larger number of ships. He first appeared at Wulpe near Sluys on the

coast of Flanders, and the news of his arrival there was brought to

Eadward at the moment when the King was left at Sandwich at the head of

a very small force. The Mercian contingent had just been dismissed, and

Godwine, with the force of Wessex, had sailed westward. Eadward was

therefore nearly defenceless. He therefore countermanded the orders for

the dismissal of the Mercian vessels, and as many of them as was

possible were brought [Sidenote: He returns to Denmark.] back. Osgod

however did not act personally as the enemy of England. He merely took

his wife from Bruges, where she had been left, and sailed back to

Denmark with [Sidenote: Piracy and destruction of his fleet.] six ships.

The remainder of his fleet took to piracy off Eadulfsness in Essex, and

there did much harm. But a violent storm arose and destroyed all the

vessels except four.[332] These were chased and captured, and the crews

slain, whether by Eadward’s own fleet in pursuit or by some of the

foreign allies of England is not very clear.[333]

[Sidenote: Ships from Ireland in the Bristol Channel; joined by Gruffydd

of South Wales. July, 1049.]

The rumour which had called Godwine westward from Sandwich was not

wholly a false one. The ships which were then said to be ravaging the

south coast, were doubtless Danish pirate vessels from Ireland, the same

which, in the course of July, sailed up the Bristol Channel as far as

the mouth of the Usk.[334] There they were welcomed by the South-Welsh

King Gruffydd,[335] who was doubtless rejoiced at the prospect of such

allies, alike against the English and against his Northern namesake, the

momentary confederate of England. After a certain amount of harrying

along the coast of the Channel, the combined forces of Gruffydd and the

pirates crossed the Wye, and slew and [Sidenote: They invade

Gloucestershire, and defeat Bishop Ealdred.] plundered within the

diocese of Worcester. It is not clear who was the Earl responsible for

the safety of the country since the banishment of Swegen. It was

probably the King’s nephew, Ralph the Timid, whose name begins about

this time to appear in the Charters with the title of Earl.[336] If this

be so, this was the first appointment of a foreigner to a great temporal

office, a further step in the downward course, still more marked than

that of appointing foreign Prelates. Under such a chief as Ralph no

vigorous resistance was to be looked for, and the person who really took

upon himself the defence of the country was Bishop Ealdred. He gathered

a force from among the inhabitants of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire;

but part of his army consisted of Welshmen, whether mere mercenaries

hired for the occasion, or Welshmen living as immediate subjects of

England. But whoever these Welshmen were, their sympathies lay wholly

with Gruffydd and not with Ealdred. They sent a secret message to the

Welsh King, suggesting an immediate attack on the English army. Gruffydd

willingly answered to the call. With his twofold [Sidenote: July 29,

1049.] force, Welsh and Danish, he fell on the English camp early in the

morning, slew many good men, and put the rest, together with the Bishop,

to flight.[337] Of the further results of this singular and perplexing

campaign, especially when and how the retreat of the invaders was

brought about, we hear nothing.

[Sidenote: Increasing connexion with the continent.]

Everything which happened about this time sets before us the great and

increasing intercourse which now prevailed between England and the

continent. Our fathers [Sidenote: English attendance at Synods.] were

now brought into a nearer connexion with both the spiritual and the

temporal chiefs of Christendom than they had ever known before. We have

already seen England in close alliance with the Empire; we have now to

contemplate her relations with the Papacy. The active and saintly

Pontiff who now presided over the Church held at this time a series of

Councils in various places, at most of which English Prelates attended.

Leo, after receiving the submission of Godfrey at Aachen, entered

France, at the request of Heremar, Abbot of Saint Remigius at Rheims, to

hallow the newly built church of his monastery.[338] [Sidenote: Synod of

Rheims.] He then held a synod, which sat for six days, and passed

several canons of the usual sort, against the marriage of priests and

against their bearing arms.[339] The days of Otto the Great seemed to

have returned, when the Pope and the Emperor,[340] seemingly without

reference to the Parisian King, held a Council on French ground,

attended by a vast multitude of Prelates, clergy, and laity from the

Imperial Kingdoms and from other parts of Europe. There, besides the

Metropolitan of the city in which the synod was held, was the Archbishop

of Burgundy, as our Chronicles call him,[341] that is, the Archbishop of

the great see of Lyons, Primate of all the Gauls, but no subject or

vassal of the upstart dynasty of Paris. There were the Archbishops of

Trier and Besançon; and from England came Duduc, the Saxon Bishop of

Wells, and the Abbots Wulfric of Saint Augustine’s and Ælfwine of

Ramsey, whom King Eadward had sent to bring him word of all that should

be done for the good of Christendom.[342] [Sidenote: Synod of Mainz.] It

does not appear that any English Prelates were present at the synod

which Leo held soon after at Mainz;[343] but the two Italian synods

which were held soon after were, as we shall see, connected in a

singular manner with English affairs. There seems to have been about

[Sidenote: Deaths of Bishops and Abbots.] this time a kind of mortality

among the English Prelates. Among those who died was the Abbot of

Westminster or Thorney, the humbler foundation which was soon to give

way to the great creation of the reigning King. He bore the name of

Wulfnoth, a name which suggests the likelihood of kindred with the house

of Godwine. Another was Oswiu, the Abbot of the other Thorney in the fen

land, the neighbour of Peterborough and Crowland. This [Sidenote: Siward

dies, and Eadsige resumes the Primacy. 1049.] year too died Siward the

Coadjutor-Archbishop, and Eadsige again resumed his functions for the

short remainder [Sidenote: Eadnoth of Dorchester dies; Ulf succeeds.

1049.] of his life.[344] Eadnoth too, the good Bishop of

Dorchester,[345] the builder of Stow in Lindesey, died this year, and

his death offered a magnificent bait to Norman ambition and greediness.

The great Bishoprick stretching from the Thames to the Humber, was

conferred by the King on one of his Norman chaplains, who however bore

the Scandinavian name of Ulf. As to the utter unfitness of this man for

such an office there is an universal consent among our authorities. The

King, even the holy Eadward, did evil in appointing him; the new Prelate

did nought bishoplike; it were shame to tell more of his deeds.[346]

The year which followed was one of great note in ecclesiastical history.

In England the first event recorded is [Sidenote: Witenagemót of London.

Midlent, 1050.] the usual meeting of the Witan in London at Midlent. The

proceedings of this Gemót, like those of many others about this time,

give us a glimpse of that real, though very imperfect, parliamentary

life which was then growing up in England, and which the Norman Conquest

threw back for many generations. Then, as now, there were economists

pressing for the reduction of the public expenditure, and what we should

now call the Navy Estimates were chosen as being no doubt a popular

subject for attack. The narrative of the naval events of the last year

shows that, on special occasions, naval contingents were called for,

according to the old law,[347] from various parts of the Kingdom, but

that the King still kept a small naval force [Sidenote: Reduction of the

Fleet.] in constant pay. This force had, under Cnut and Harold,

consisted of sixteen ships;[348] it seems now to have consisted only of

fourteen. The experience of the last year showed that England was still

open to attack from the West; but the great fear, fear of invasion from

the North, had now quite passed away. It seemed therefore to be a

favourable moment for further reductions. By the authority of this Gemót

nine ships were accordingly paid off, the crews receiving a year’s pay,

and the standing force was cut down to six.[349] It was in this same

assembly that Swegen [Sidenote: Swegen inlawed.] was _inlawed_,[350]

that is, his outlawry was reversed, by the intercession of Bishop

Ealdred. That Prelate, as we have seen, seems to have gone over to

Flanders, and to have brought Swegen back with him.[351]

[Sidenote: Mission of Ealdred and Hermann to Rome.]

But Ealdred had soon to set forth on a longer journey. He and the

Lotharingian Bishop Hermann were now sent to Rome on the King’s

errand.[352] What that errand was we learn only from legendary writers

and doubtful charters, but, as their accounts completely fit in with the

authentic history, we need not scruple to [Sidenote: The King’s vow of

pilgrimage to Rome.] accept their general outline.[353] The King had in

his youth vowed a pilgrimage to Rome, and the non-fulfilment of this vow

lay heavy on his conscience. It probably lay heavier still when he saw

so many of his subjects of all ranks, led by the fashionable enthusiasm

of the time, making both the pilgrimage to Rome and also the more

distant pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[354] A broken vow was a crime; still

Eadward had enough of political sense and right feeling left to see that

his absence from his Kingdom at such a time as the present would be a

criminal forsaking of his kingly duty. The Great Cnut might venture on

such a journey; his eye could see and his hand could act from Rome or

Norway or any other part of the world. But the personal presence of

Eadward was the only check by which peace could be for a moment

preserved between the true sons of the soil, and the strangers

[Sidenote: Eadward sends the Bishops to obtain a dispensation. 1050.]

who were eating into its vitals. The King laid his case before his

Witan; the unanimous voice of the Assembly forbade him to forsake his

post; the legend adds that the Witan farther counselled him to satisfy

his conscience by obtaining a Papal dispensation from his vow. This was

the King’s errand on which Ealdred and Hermann were sent to attend the

great synod[355] held this year at Rome. They made good speed with their

journey; starting at [Sidenote: The Synod of Rome.] Midlent, they

reached the Holy City on Easter Eve.[356] In that synod they stood face

to face with a man then known [Sidenote: LANFRANC.] only as a profound

scholar and theologian, the bulwark of orthodoxy and the pattern of

every monastic virtue, but who was, in years to come, to hold a higher

place in the English hierarchy, and to leave behind him a far greater

name in English history, than either of the English Prelates whose

blessing he may now have humbly craved. In that synod of Rome the

doctrines of Berengar of Tours were debated by the assembled Fathers,

and the foremost champion of the faith to which Rome still cleaves was

Lanfranc of Pavia. Suspected of complicity with the heretic, he produced

the famous letter in which Berengar had maintained the Eucharist to be a

mere figure of the Body of Christ.[357] How far Ealdred or Hermann took

part in these theological debates we know not; but they are said to have

successfully accomplished their own errand. The King’s vow of pilgrimage

was dispensed with, on condition of the rebuilding and endowment on a

grander scale of that renowned West Minster whose name was to be

inseparably bound together with that of the sainted King.[358] Before

the year was out the unwearied Leo held [Sidenote: Synod of Vercelli.]

another synod at Vercelli. Here the theological controversy was again

raised, and Lanfranc again shone forth as the irresistible smiter of

heresy. Berengar was finally condemned, notwithstanding his appeals to

the elder teaching of John Scotus, and his protests that those who

rejected John Scotus rejected Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and all the

Fathers of the Church.[359] These disputes, renowned in the Church at

large, are wholly passed over by our insular Chroniclers. To them the

famous Synod of Vercelli seems to have been memorable only as showing

the Roman Court in what was apparently a new relation towards the

Prelacy of England. Before the assembled Fathers came [Sidenote:

Confirmation of Ulf of Dorchester.] the newly appointed Bishop of

Dorchester, Ulf the Norman, seeking, it would seem, for consecration or

confirmation. His unfitness for his post was manifest; he was found

incapable of going through the ordinary service of the Church. The Synod

was on the point of deposing him, of breaking the staff which, according

to the ceremonial of those times, he had already received from the King.

But the influence which was already all-powerful at Rome saved him. He

retained his Bishoprick; but only at the cost of a lavish expenditure of

treasure, of which we may be sure that no portion found its way into the

private [Sidenote: Possible pilgrimage of Macbeth.] coffers of Leo.[360]

It was in this same year that Macbeth made that mysterious bestowal of

alms or bribes at Rome from which some have inferred a personal

pilgrimage on the part of the Scottish usurper.[361] It is not beyond

the bounds of possibility that one who seems to us hardly more real than

the creations of Grecian tragedy may have personally appeared at Rome or

at Vercelli, that he may have shown his pious indignation at the

heresies of the Canon of Tours, or have felt his soul moved within him

at the incapacity of the Bishop of Dorchester. A personal meeting

between Leo, Lanfranc, Ealdred, and Macbeth would form no unimpressive

scene in the hands of those who may venture on liberties with the men of

far-gone times which to the historian are forbidden.

Ealdred and Hermann thus came back from Rome with the wished for

dispensation from the King, and Ulf came back from Vercelli to hold the

great see of Mid-England, and to rule it in his unbishoplike fashion for

a little time. [Sidenote: Death of Archbishop Eadsige. October 9, 1050.]

But before long a still greater ecclesiastical preferment became vacant.

Eadsige, who had so lately resumed his archiepiscopal functions, died

before the end of the year.[362] The day of complete triumph for the

Norman monks and chaplains who surrounded Eadward now seemed to have

come. A Frenchman might now sit on the throne of Augustine. Patriotic

Englishmen were of course proportionably alarmed, and among them none

more so than those who were most immediately concerned, the Chapter of

the metropolitan church. The monks of Christ Church met, and made what

is called a canonical election.[363] In the eye of English law such a

process was little more than a petition to the King and his Witan for

the appointment of the man of their choice. That choice fell on a member

of their own body, their selection of whom showed that seclusion from

the world had not made them incapable of a happy union of the dove

[Sidenote: The monks of Christ Church elect Ælfric.] and the serpent.

There was in their house a monk, Ælfric by name, who had been brought up

in the monastery from his childhood, and who enjoyed the love of the

whole society. Notwithstanding his monastic education, he was held to be

specially skilled in the affairs of the world. And he had a further

merit as likely as any of the others to weigh either with an English

Chapter or with an English Witenagemót; he was a near kinsman of Earl

Godwine.[364] The monks petitioned the Earl, the natural patron of a

corporation within his government, to use his influence to obtain the

King’s confirmation of their choice.[365] Godwine was doubtless nothing

loth to avail himself of so honourable an opportunity to promote an

Englishman and a kinsman. But his influence was crumbling away. Four

years before he had been able to obtain the confirmation of Siward as

Eadsige’s coadjutor; he was now unable to obtain the confirmation of

Ælfric, or of any other man of native birth, [Sidenote: Ælfric rejected

by the King, and Robert Bishop of London appointed to the see of

Canterbury. Midlent, 1051.] as Eadsige’s successor. The saintly King

paid no regard to the canonical election of the Convent, and in the

Midlent Witenagemót of the next year, the Archbishoprick of Canterbury

was bestowed on the King’s French favourite, Robert, Bishop of

London.[366] The national party however prevailed so far as to secure an

English successor [Sidenote: Spearhafoc appointed to London, and Rudolf

to the Abbey of Abingdon.] to the see which Robert vacated. Spearhafoc,

Abbot of Abingdon, a man famous for his skill in the goldsmith’s

craft,[367] was named to the see of London by the King’s writ under his

seal.[368] The Abbacy of Abingdon was given to a man whose description

raises our curiosity; he was one Rudolf, described as a kinsman of King

Eadward and as a Bishop in Norway.[369] For a native Northman to have

been a kinsman of the son of Æthelred and Emma is hardly possible,

unless the common ancestor was to be looked for so far back as the days

before the settlement of Rolf. A Norman is hardly likely to have desired

or obtained preferment in so unpromising a land; but it is highly

probable that Cnut, who appointed several Englishmen to Bishopricks in

Denmark, may have made use of a see in Norway either to reward or to

remove some remote and unrecorded member of the English royal family. It

is therefore very probable that Rudolf may have been an Englishman.[370]

He was an aged man and weary of his office. The hand of Harold Hardrada

pressed heavily on the Church. Pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre as he was,

he is charged with destroying ecclesiastical buildings, and even with

sending Christian men to martyrdom.[371] Rudolf sought and found a place

of more quiet, if of somewhat less honour, in the dominions of his

kinsman. The monks of Abingdon received him, not very willingly, it

would seem, but they were won over by the prospect that the old man

would not live very long, and by the King’s promise that at the next

vacancy free election should be allowed.[372] Presently the new

Archbishop [Sidenote: Robert returns from Rome. July 27, 1051.] Robert

came back from Rome with his pallium; he was enthroned in the

metropolitan church, and soon hastened to the royal presence.[373]

Spearhafoc, the Bishop-elect of London, came with the royal writ, and

demanded [Sidenote: He refuses to consecrate Spearhafoc.] consecration

of his Metropolitan. Robert refused, saying that the Pope had forbidden

him to consecrate Spearhafoc.[374] Things had come to such a pass, that

an Englishman, appointed to an English office by the King and his Witan,

was to be kept out of its full possession by one foreigner acting at the

alleged bidding of another. There were times when the Roman see showed

itself a real refuge for the oppressed, and, as far as good intentions

went, so it doubtless was in the days of good Pope Leo. But Englishmen

now needed protection against no one except against the foreign

favourites of their own King, and it was on behalf of those foreign

favourites, and against Englishmen, that these stretches of Papal

authority were now made. The unworthy Ulf was allowed, by the power of

bribes, to retain his see—for he was a stranger. Spearhafoc, on what

ground we know not—except so far as his English birth was doubtless a

crime in the eyes of Robert—was refused the rite which alone could put

him into full possession of his office. A second demand was again made

by the Bishop-elect, and consecration was again refused [Sidenote:

Spearhafoc occupies the Bishoprick without consecration.] by the Norman

Archbishop.[375] Spearhafoc, rejected, unconsecrated, nevertheless went

to Saint Paul’s, and took possession of the see which he held by the

King’s full and regular grant.[376] No doubt he did not pretend to

discharge any purely episcopal functions, but he kept possession of the

see and its revenues, and probably exercised at least its temporal

authority. This he did, the Chronicler significantly adds, all that

summer and autumn.[377] Before the year was out, the crisis had come,

and had brought with it the momentary triumph of the strangers.

One act more must be recorded before we come to the end of this portion

of Eadward’s reign. In a meeting of the Witan, seemingly that in which

Robert, Spearhafoc, [Sidenote: The remaining ships paid off and the

_Heregyld_ remitted.] and Rudolf received their several appointments,

the remaining five ships of the standing or mercenary naval force were

paid off.[378] The war-contribution or _Heregyld_ was therefore no

longer exacted. This tax had now been [Sidenote: 1012.] paid for

thirty-eight years, ever since Thurkill and his fleet entered the

service of Æthelred.[379] This impost had all along been felt to be a

great burthen; we are told that it was paid before all other taxes, the

other taxes themselves, it would seem, being looked upon as heavy.[380]

The glimpse which is thus given us of the financial system of the time

is just enough to make us wish for fuller knowledge. We must remember

that in a rude state of society any kind of taxation is apt to be looked

on as a grievance. It requires a very considerable political

developement for a nation to feel that the power of the purse is the

surest safeguard of freedom. But there must have been something

specially hateful about this tax to account for the way in which it is

spoken of by the contemporary chroniclers, and for the hold which, as

the legends show,[381] it kept on the popular imagination. The holy

King, we are told, in company with Earl Leofric, one day entered the

treasury in which the money raised by the tax was collected; he there

saw the Devil sitting and playing with the coin; warned by the sight, he

at once [Sidenote: Distinction between Danegeld and _Heregyld_.]

remitted the tax. In this story the tax is called Danegeld, and as many

of the sailors in the English service were likely to be Danes, the

_Heregyld_ seems to have been confounded with the Danegeld, and to have

been popularly called by that name.[382] The Danegeld was in strictness

a payment made to buy off the ravages of Danish invaders, a practice of

which we have seen instances enough and to spare in the days of

Æthelred. But the tax now taken off was simply a war-tax for the

maintenance of a fleet, a fleet whose crews may have been to a great

extent Danes, but Danes who were not the enemies of England, but engaged

in her service. The two ideas however easily ran into one another; it

might be difficult to say under which head we ought to place some of the

payments made both under Cnut and under Harthacnut. But the _Heregyld_,

in its more innocent shape, would, according to modern ideas, be an

impost absolutely necessary for the defence of the country. If the tax

were remitted, no naval force would be retained, except the contingents

of the shires, which could not in any case be very readily forthcoming.

But, besides the general dislike to taxation [Sidenote: Import of the

remission.] of any kind, this particular tax was a painful and hateful

badge of national disgrace. It was a memory of times when England could

find no defence against strangers except by taking other strangers into

her pay. Its remission was doubtless looked on as a declaration that

England no longer needed the services of strangers, or of hired troops

of any kind, but that she could trust to the ready patriotism and valour

of her own sons. The Law required every Englishman to join the royal

standard at the royal summons.[383] The effectual execution of that law

was doubtless held to be a truer safeguard than the employment of men,

whether natives or strangers, who served only for their pay. Such

reasonings had their weak side even in those days, but they were

eminently in the spirit of the time. The measure was undoubtedly a

popular one, and we are hardly in a position to say that, under the

circumstances of the time, it may not have been a wise one.

§ 4. _The Banishment of Earl Godwine._ 1051.

[Sidenote: The foreign influence at its height.]

The influence of the strangers had now reached its height. As yet it has

appeared on the face of the narrative mainly in the direction given to

ecclesiastical preferments. During the first nine years of Eadward’s

reign, we find no signs of any open warfare between the national and the

Normannizing parties. The course of events shows that Godwine’s power

was being practically undermined, but he was still outwardly in the

enjoyment of royal favour, and his vast possessions were still being

added to by royal grants.[384] It is remarkable how seldom, at this

stage of Eadward’s reign, the acts of the Witan bear the signatures of

any foreigners except churchmen.[385] We meet also with slight

indications showing that the King’s foreign kinsmen and the national

leaders were not yet on [Sidenote: Its seemingly stealthy character.]

terms of open enmity.[386] It was probably the policy of the strangers

to confine their action in public matters to influencing the King’s mind

through his ecclesiastical favourites, while the mass of them were

gradually providing in other ways for their own firm establishment in

the land. But the tale which I now have to tell clearly reveals the fact

that the number of French landowners in England was already

considerable, and that they had made themselves deeply hateful to the

English people. Stealthily but surely, the foreign favourites of Eadward

had eaten into the vitals of England, and they soon had the means of

showing how bitter was the hatred which they bore towards the champions

of English freedom. [Sidenote: Comparison between Danish and Norman

influences.] England now, under a native King of her own choice, felt,

far more keenly than she had ever felt under her Danish conqueror, how

great the evil is when a King and those who immediately surround him are

estranged in feeling from the mass of his people. The great Dane had

gradually learned to feel and to reign as an Englishman, to trust

himself to the love of his English subjects, and to surround the throne

of the conqueror with the men whom his own axe and spear had overcome.

Even during the troubled reigns of his two sons, the degeneracy was for

the most part merely personal. Harthacnut indeed laid on heavy and

unpopular taxes for the payment of his Danish fleet;[387] but it does

not appear that, even under him, Englishmen as Englishmen were subjected

to systematic oppression and insult on the part of strangers. And, after

all, the Danish followers of Cnut and his sons were men of kindred blood

and speech. They could hardly be looked on in any part of England as

aliens in the strictest sense, while to the inhabitants of a large part

of the Kingdom they appeared as actual countrymen. But now, as a

foretaste of what was to come fifteen years later, men utterly strange

in speech and feeling stood around the throne, engrossed the personal

favour of the King, perverted the course of justice, shared among

themselves the highest places in the Church, and were already beginning

to stretch out their hands to English lands and lordships as well as to

English Bishopricks. The Dane, once brought to the knowledge of a purer

faith and a higher civilization, soon learned to identify himself with

the land in which he had settled, and to live as an Englishman

[Sidenote: Incapacity of the French to appreciate English institutions.]

under the Law of England. But to the French favourites of Eadward the

name, the speech, the laws of England were things on which their

ignorant pride looked down with utter contempt. They had no sympathy

with that great fabric of English liberty, which gave to every freeman

his place in the commonwealth, and even to the slave held out the

prospect of freedom. Gentlemen of the school of Richard the Good,[388]

taught to despise all beneath them as beings of an inferior nature,

could not understand the spirit of a land where the Churl had his rights

before the Law, where he could still raise his applauding voice in the

Assemblies of the nation, and where men already felt as keenly as we

feel now that an Englishman’s house is his castle. Everything in short

which had already made England free and glorious, everything which it is

now our pride and happiness to have preserved down to our own times, was

looked on by the foreign counsellors of Eadward as a mark of manifest

inferiority and barbarism. [Sidenote: Diversity in speech;] The Dane

spoke a tongue which hardly differed more widely from our own than the

dialects of different parts of the Kingdom differed from one another.

But the ancient mother-speech, once common to Dane and Frank and Angle

and Saxon, the speech of which some faint traces may still have lingered

at Laôn and at Bayeux, had now become only one of many objects of

contempt in the eyes of men whose standards were drawn from the

[Sidenote: in military tactics.] Romanized courts of Rouen and Paris.

The Dane met the Englishman in battle, face to face and hand to hand,

with the same tactics and the same weapons. Shield-wall to shield-wall,

sword to sword or axe to axe, had men waged the long warfare which had

ranged from the fight [Sidenote: 871–1016.] of Reading to the fight of

Assandun. To the Frenchman the traditions of Teutonic warfare appeared

contemptible.[389] His trust was placed, not in the stout heart and the

strong arm of the warrior, but in the horse which is as useful in the

flight as in the charge, and in the arrow which places the coward and

the hero upon a level.[390] Men brought up in such feelings as these,

full too no doubt of the insolent and biting wit of their nation, now

stood round the throne of the King of the English. They were not as yet,

to any great extent, temporal rulers of the land, but they had already

begun to be owners of its soil; they were already the Fathers of the

Church; they were the personal friends of the King; they were the

channels of royal favour; their influence could obtain the highest

ecclesiastical office, when it was refused alike to the demand of the

Earl of the West-Saxons and to the prayer of the canonical electors. In

the company of these men the King was at home; among his own people he

was a [Sidenote: Evils of a denationalized Court, especially in early

times.] stranger. The sight of a denationalized Court, a Court where the

national tongue is despised and where the sounds of a foreign speech are

alone thought worthy of royal lips, a Court in which the heart of the

sovereign beats more warmly for foreign favourites or foreign kinsmen

than for the children of the soil, is a sight which in any age is enough

to stir up a nation’s blood. But far heavier is the wrong in an age when

Kings govern as well as reign, when it is not the mere hangers-on of a

Court, but the nation itself, which is made personally to feel that

strangers fill the posts of honour and influence, on its own soil and at

its own cost. Often indeed since the days of Eadward has the Court of

England been the least English thing within the realm of England. But,

for ages past, no sovereign, however foreign in blood or feeling, could

have ventured to place a stranger, ignorant of the English tongue, on

the patriarchal throne of Dunstan and [Sidenote: Revolt of England

against the foreign influence.] Ælfheah. Against such a state of things

as this the heart of England rose. And the soul of the patriotic

movement, the leader of the patriotic struggle, was the man whom Norman

calumny has ever since picked out as its special victim, but with whom

every true English heart was prepared to live and die. The man who

strove for England, the man who for a while suffered for England, but

who soon returned in triumph to rescue England, was once more Godwine,

Earl of the West-Saxons.

[Sidenote: Indignation at the appointment of Robert to Canterbury.]

The refusal of the King to confer the Archbishoprick of Canterbury on a

kinsman of the great Earl regularly chosen by the Convent of the

metropolitan church, its bestowal instead on an intriguing monk from

Jumièges, had no doubt deeply embittered the feelings of Godwine and of

all true Englishmen. All the sons of the Church, we are told, lamented

the wrong;[391] and we may be sure that the feeling was in no way

confined to those who are no doubt chiefly intended by that description.

It now became the main object of the foreign Archbishop to bring about

the ruin of the English Earl. Robert employed his [Sidenote: Robert’s

cabals against Godwine. 1051.] influence with the King to set him still

more strongly against his father-in-law, to fill his ears with calumnies

against him, above all, to bring up again the old charge, of which

Godwine had been so solemnly acquitted, which made him an accomplice in

the death of Ælfred.[392] A dispute about the right to some lands which

adjoined the estates both of the Earl and of the Primate further

embittered the dissension between them.[393] Godwine’s influence was

manifestly fast giving way, and an open struggle was becoming imminent.

Just at this moment, an act of foreign insolence and brutality which

surpassed anything which had hitherto happened brought the whole matter

to a crisis.

[Sidenote: Marriages of Godgifu daughter of Æthelred with Drogo of

Mantes and Eustace of Boulogne.]

We have seen that Eadward’s sister Godgifu—the Goda of Norman

writers—the daughter of Æthelred and Emma, had been married to Drogo,

Count of Mantes or of the French Vexin. Their son, Ralph the Timid, was

now high in favour at the court of his uncle.[394] Drogo had accompanied

Duke Robert on his pilgrimage, and, like him, had died on his

journey.[395] His widow, who must now have been a good deal past her

prime,[396] had nevertheless found a second French husband in Eustace,

Count of Boulogne. This prince, whom English history sets before us only

in the darkest colours, was fated by a strange destiny to be the father

of one of the noblest heroes of Christendom, of Godfrey, Duke of

Lotharingia and King of Jerusalem. We cannot however claim the great

Crusader as one who had English blood in his veins through either

parent. The second marriage of Godgifu was childless, and the renowned

sons of Eustace, Godfrey and his brother Baldwin, were the children of

his second [Sidenote: Visit of Eustace to Eadward. September, 1051.]

wife Ida. The Count of Boulogne, now brother-in-law of the King of the

English, presently came, like the rest of the world, to the English

Court. The exact object of his coming is not recorded, but we are told

that whatever he came for he got.[397] Some new favours were doubtless

won for foreign followers, and some share of the wealth of England for

himself. It was now September, and the King, as seems to have been his

custom, was spending the autumn at Gloucester.[398] Thither then came

Count Eustace, and, after his satisfactory interview [Sidenote: Return

of Eustace.] with the King, he turned his face homewards. We have no

account of his journey till he reached Canterbury;[399] there he halted,

refreshed himself and his men, and rode on towards Dover. Perhaps, in a

land so specially devoted to Godwine, he felt himself to be still more

thoroughly in an enemy’s country than in other parts of England. At all

events, when they were still a few miles from Dover, the Count and all

his company took the precaution of putting on their coats of mail.[400]

They entered [Sidenote: Outrages of Eustace and his party at Dover.] the

town; accustomed to the unbridled licence of their own land, puffed up

no doubt by the favourable reception which they had met with at the

King’s Court, they deemed that the goods and lives of Englishmen were at

their mercy. Who was the villain or the burgher who could dare to refuse

ought to a sovereign prince, the friend and brother-in-law of the

Emperor of Britain? Men born on English soil, accustomed to the

protection [Sidenote: 1020–1051.] of English Law, men who for one and

thirty years[401] had lived under the rule of Godwine, looked on matters

in quite another light. The Frenchmen expected to find free quarters in

the town of Dover, and they attempted to lodge themselves at their

pleasure in the houses of the burghers. There was one Englishman

especially—his name unluckily is not preserved—into whose house a

Frenchman was bent on forcing himself against the [Sidenote: The

burghers resist,] owner’s will. The master of the house resisted; the

stranger drew his weapon and wounded him; the Englishman struck the

intruder dead on the spot.[402] Count Eustace mounted his horse as if

for battle;[403] his followers mounted theirs, the stout-hearted

Englishman was slain within his own house. The Count’s party then rode

through the town, cutting about them and slaying at pleasure. But the

neighbours of the murdered man had now come together; the burghers

resisted valiantly; a [Sidenote: and drive the French out of the town.]

skirmish began; twenty Englishmen were slain, and nineteen Frenchmen,

besides many who were wounded. Count Eustace and the remnant of his

party made their way out of the town, and hastened back to King Eadward

at Gloucester. [Sidenote: Eustace accuses the men of Dover to the King.]

They there told the story after their own fashion, throwing of course

all the blame upon the insolent burghers of Dover.[404] It is not hard

to throw oneself into the position of the accusers. To chivalrous

Frenchmen the act of the English burgher in defending his house against

a forcible entry would seem something quite beyond their understandings.

To their notions the appeal to right and law to which Englishmen were

familiar, would seem, on the part of men of inferior rank, something

almost out of the course of nature. We often see the same sort of

feeling now-a-days in men whom a long course of military habits, a life

spent in the alternation of blind obedience and arbitrary command, has

made incapable of understanding those notions of right and justice which

seem perfectly plain to men who are accustomed to acknowledge no master

but the Law.[405] The crime of Eustace was a dark one; but we may be

inclined to pass a heavier judgement still on the crime of the English

King, who, on the mere accusation of the stranger, condemned his own

subjects without a hearing. When Eustace had told his tale, the King

became very wroth with the burghers of Dover,[406] and this time he

thought that he had not only the will [Sidenote: Eadward commands

Godwine to inflict military chastisement on the town.] but the power to

hurt.[407] He sent for Godwine, as Earl of the district in which the

offending town lay. The English champion was then in the midst of a

domestic rejoicing. He had, like the King, been strengthening himself by

a foreign alliance, and had just connected his house with that of a

sovereign prince. Tostig, the third son of Godwine, had just married

Judith, the daughter or near kinswoman of Baldwin of Flanders.[408] Such

a marriage could hardly have been contracted without a political object.

An alliance with a prince reigning in the debateable land between France

and Germany, a land which, though its princes were rapidly becoming

French, had by no means wholly lost its Teutonic character, was quite in

harmony with the Lotharingian connexion so steadily maintained by

Godwine and Harold. At the same time, an alliance with a prince who had

been so lately in arms against England may not have tended to increase

Godwine’s favour with the King. The Earl left the marriage-feast of his

son, and hastened to the King at Gloucester. Eadward then told him what

insults had been offered within his Earldom to a sovereign allied to

himself by friendship and marriage. Let Godwine go, and subject the

offending town to all the severity of military chastisement.[409]

Godwine had once before been sent on the like [Sidenote: Comparison

between the cases of Worcester under Harthacnut and Dover under

Eadward.] errand in the days of Harthacnut.[410] He had then not dared

to refuse, though he had done what he could to lighten the infliction of

a harsh and unjust sentence. And, after all, the two cases were not

alike. In the case of Worcester, Godwine was required to act as a

military commander against a town which was not within his government,

and whose citizens stood in no special relation to him. The citizens of

Worcester too had been guilty of a real crime. Their crime was indeed

one which might readily have been pardoned, and the punishment decreed

was out of all proportion to the offence. Still the death of the two

Housecarls fairly called for some atonement, though certainly not for an

atonement of the kind commanded by Harthacnut. At that time too it was

probably sound policy in Godwine to undertake the commission in which he

was joined with the other great Earls of England, and merely to do his

best to lighten its severity in act. But in the present case all the

circumstances were different. Dover was a town in Godwine’s own Earldom;

it would almost seem that it was a town connected with him by a special

tie, a town whose burghers formed a part of his personal following.[411]

At all events it was a town over which he exercised the powers of the

highest civil magistracy, where, if it was his duty to punish the

guilty, it was equally his duty to defend and shelter the innocent. Such

a town he was now bidden, without the least legal proof of any offence,

to visit with all the horrors of fire and sword. Godwine was not long

[Sidenote: Godwine refuses to obey the King’s orders.] in choosing his

course. Official duty and public policy, no less than abstract justice

and humanity, dictated a distinct refusal. Now or never a stand was to

be made against the strangers. Now that Englishmen had been insulted and

murdered by the King’s foreign favourites, the time was indeed come to

put an end to a system under which those favourites were beginning to

deal with England as with a conquered country. The eloquent voice of

[Sidenote: He demands a legal trial for the burghers.] the great Earl

was raised, in the presence of the King, probably in the presence of

Eustace and the other strangers, in the cause of truth and justice.[412]

In England, he told them, there was a Law supreme over all, and courts

in which justice could be denied to no man. Count Eustace had brought a

charge against the men of Dover. They had, as he alleged, broken the

King’s peace, and done personal wrong to himself and his companions. Let

then the magistrates of the town be summoned before the King and his

Witan, and there be heard in their own defence and in that of their

fellow-burghers. If they could make a good excuse for their conduct, let

them depart unhurt; if they could be proved to have sinned against the

King or against the Count, let them pay for their fault with their

purses or with their persons. He, as Earl of the West-Saxons, was the

natural protector of the men of Dover; he would never agree to any

sentence pronounced against them without a fair trial, nor would he

consent to the infliction of any sort of illegal hardship upon those

whom he was bound to defend. The Earl then went his way; he had done his

own duty; he was accustomed to these momentary ebullitions of wrath on

the part of his royal son-in-law, and he expected that the affair would

soon be forgotten.[413]

But there were influences about Eadward which cut off all hope of any

such peaceful settlement of the matter. Eustace probably still lingered

about the King, to repeat his own story, to enlarge on the insolence of

the men of Dover, and on the disobedience—he would call it the

[Sidenote: Archbishop Robert excites the King against Godwine.]

treason—of the West-Saxon Earl himself. And there was another voice ever

at the royal ear, ever ready to poison the royal mind against the

English people and their leader. The foreign monk who sat on the throne

of so many English saints again seized the opportunity to revive the

calumnies of past times. He once more impressed upon the King that the

man who refused to obey his orders, the man who had protected, perhaps

excited, rebellious burghers against his dearest friends, was also the

man who had, years before, betrayed his brother to a death of

torment.[414] The old and the new charges worked [Sidenote: The Witan

summoned to Gloucester to hear charges against Godwine.] together on the

King’s mind, and he summoned a Meeting of the Witan at Gloucester, to

sit in judgement, no longer on the men of Dover, who seem by this time

to have been forgotten, but on Godwine himself.[415] The Earl now saw

that he must be prepared for all risks. And, just at this moment,

another instance of the insolence and violence of the foreigners in

another part of the Kingdom served [Sidenote: Building of Richard’s

Castle in Herefordshire.] to stir up men’s minds to the highest pitch.

Among the Frenchmen who flocked to the land of promise was one named

Richard the son of Scrob, who had received a grant of lands in

Herefordshire. He and his son Osbern had there built a castle on a spot

which, by a singularly lasting tradition, preserves to this day the

memory of himself and his building.[416] The fortress itself has

vanished, but its site is still to be marked, and the name of Richard’s

Castle, still borne by the parish in which it stood, is an abiding

witness of the deep impression which its erection made on the minds of

the men of those times. [Sidenote: Import of the building of castles.]

The building of castles is something of which the English writers of

this age frequently speak, and speak always with a special kind of

horror.[417] Both the name and the thing were new. To fortify a town, to

build a citadel to protect a town, were processes with which England had

long been familiar.[418] To contribute to such necessary public works

was one of the three immemorial obligations from which no Englishman

could free himself.[419] But for a private landowner to raise a private

fortress to be the terror of his neighbours was something to which

Englishmen had hitherto been unaccustomed, and for such a structure the

English language had hitherto contained no name. But now the tall,

square, massive donjon of the Normans, a building whose grandest type is

to be seen in the Conqueror’s own Tower of London and in the more

enriched keep of Rochester, began, doubtless on a far humbler scale, to

rear itself over the dwellings of Englishmen. Normandy had, during the

minority of William, been covered with such buildings, and his wise

policy had levelled many of them with the ground.[420] Such buildings,

strange to English eyes, bore no English name, but retained their French

designation of _castles_.[421] Such a castle at once became a centre of

all kinds of oppression. Men were harboured in it, and deeds were done

within its impregnable walls, such as could find no place in the open

hall of the ancient English Thegn. So it was with the castle which was

now raised within the government of the eldest son of Godwine. The

Welshmen, as they are called—that is, not Britons, but Frenchmen,

_Gal-Welsh_, not _Bret-Welsh_—built their castle, and “wrought all the

harm and _besmear_”—an expressive word which has dropped out of the

language—“to the King’s men thereabouts that they might.”[422] Here then

was another wrong, a wrong perhaps hardly second to the wrong which had

been done at Dover. Alike in Kent and in Herefordshire men had felt the

sort of treatment which they were to expect if the King’s foreign

favourites were to be any longer tolerated. The time was now come for

Englishmen to make a stand.

[Sidenote: Godwine and his sons meet at Beverstone with the force of

their Earldoms.]

The Earl of the West-Saxons was not a man to be wanting to his country

at such a moment. He, with his sons Swegen and Harold, gathered together

the force of their three Earldoms at Beverstone in Gloucestershire. This

is a point on the Cotswolds, not far from the Abbey of Malmesbury, still

marked by a castle of far later date, the remaining fragments of which

form one of the most remarkable antiquities of the district. At this

time it seems to have been a royal possession, and it may not unlikely

have contained a royal house, which would probably be at the disposal of

Swegen as Earl of the shire.[423] At Beverstone then assembled the men

of Wessex, of East-Anglia, and of that part of Mercia which was under

the jurisdiction of Swegen. They came, it would seem, ready either for

debate or for battle, as might happen. We must here again remember what

the ancient constitution of our National Assemblies really was. If all

actually came who had a strict right to come, the Gemót was a ready-made

army. On the other hand we have seen that an army, gathered together as

an army, sometimes took on itself [Sidenote: The forces of Siward,

Leofric, and Ralph assemble at Gloucester.] the functions of a

Gemót.[424] Meanwhile, while Godwine assembled his men at Beverstone,

the forces of the Earldoms of Siward, Leofric, and Ralph were assembling

round the King at Gloucester. Each of the two gatherings might pass for

the local Witenagemót of one half of England. At the head of the men of

three Earldoms Godwine was still bolder than when he had stood alone in

the royal presence. He had then only refused to punish the innocent; he

now demanded the punishment of the guilty. His first steps however were

conciliatory. He first demanded an audience for himself and his sons, as

Earls of the three Earldoms; they were ready and anxious to take counsel

with the King and his Witan on all matters touching the honour of the

King and his people.[425] He even offered to renew his compurgation on

the old charge [Sidenote: Godwine’s offers to the King refused through

the influence of Frenchmen.] of the death of Ælfred.[426] But the

Frenchmen swarmed around the King; they filled his ears with the usual

charges against Godwine and his sons; they assured him that the only

object of the Earls was to betray him.[427] Eadward therefore refused

the audience, and declined to receive the compurgation.[428] Godwine

then took a higher [Sidenote: Godwine demands the surrender of Eustace

and the other criminals. September 8, 1051.] tone; messages were sent in

his name and in the name of the men of the three Earldoms, demanding the

surrender of Eustace and his men and of the Frenchmen at Richard’s

Castle.[429] The demand was a bold one; Godwine asked for the surrender

of the person of a foreign prince, the King’s own favourite and

brother-in-law. But the demand, if bold, was perfectly justifiable. The

two parties of Frenchmen had been guilty of outrageous crimes within the

jurisdictions of Godwine and Swegen respectively. The King, instead of

bringing them to justice, was sheltering them, and even listening to

their charges against innocent men. Their lawful judges, the Earls of

the two districts, were ready, at the head of the Witan of their

Earldoms, to do that justice which the King had refused. The demand was

seemingly backed by threats of an appeal to that last argument by which

unrighteous rulers must be brought to reason. Godwine and his followers

threatened war against Eadward, as the later Barons of England

threatened war against John.[430] The King was frightened and perplexed.

[Sidenote: The Northern Earls bring their full forces.] He sent to

hasten the coming of Siward, Leofric, and Ralph, and bade them bring a

force strong enough to keep Godwine and his party in check. Seemingly

they had at first brought or sent only a small body of men; when they

heard the full state of the case, they hastened to the King with the

whole force of their Earldoms, and restored confidence to his timid

mind.[431] This was the sort of occasion which was sure to awaken those

provincial jealousies which in that age were often lulled to sleep, but

which were never completely got rid of. The northern and southern parts

of England were again arrayed against [Sidenote: 1035.] each other, just

as they had been in the great Gemót of Oxford sixteen years before.[432]

The French followers of Ralph and the French friends of Eadward were

doubtless glad of any excuse to shed the blood or to seize the lands of

Englishmen. Siward and his Danes were seemingly not displeased with a

state of things in which jealousy of the West-Saxon Earl could be so

honourably cloaked under the guise of loyalty to the West-Saxon King.

They were therefore quite ready to play into the hands of the strangers.

They [Sidenote: The King finally refuses to surrender the Frenchmen.]

were still on their march, but seemingly close to the town, when Eadward

gave his final answer to the messengers of Godwine; Eustace and the

other accused persons should not be given up. The messengers had hardly

left Gloucester, [Sidenote: The Northumbrians ready for battle.] when

the Northern host entered the city, eager to be led to battle against

the men of Wessex and East-Anglia.[433] Godwine and his followers saw by

this time that there was little hope of bringing the King to reason by

peaceful means. Every offer tending to reconciliation had been spurned;

every demand of the Earls and their people had been refused. The

punishment of the innocent had been commanded; the punishment of the

guilty had been denied; the old charges, of which Godwine had been so

[Sidenote: 1040.] solemnly acquitted eleven years before, were again

raked up against him by the slanderous tongue of a foreign [Sidenote:

March of the West-Saxons and East-Angles on Gloucester.] priest. Loath

as the Earl and his followers were to fight against their Lord the

King,[434] they saw no hope but in an appeal to arms, and the men of the

three Earldoms made themselves ready for battle. From the heights of the

Cotswolds on which they had been gathered, they marched down the

hill-side which overlooks the fairest and most fertile of English

valleys.[435] The broad Severn wound through the plain beneath them;

beyond its sandy flood rose, range beyond range, the hills which guarded

the land of the still unconquered Briton. Far away, like a glimpse of

another world, opened the deep vale of the Welsh Axe,[436] the mountain

land of Brecheiniog, where, in the furthest distance, the giant Beacons

soar, vast and dim, the mightiest natural fortress of the southern

Cymry. Even then some glimpses of days to come may have kindled the soul

of Harold, as he looked forth on the land which was, before many years,

to ring with his renown, and to see his name engraved as conqueror on

the trophies of so many battle-fields. They passed by relics of

unrecorded antiquity, by fortresses and tombs reared by the hands of men

who had been forgotten before the days of Ceawlin, some perhaps even

before the days of Cæsar. They passed by the vast hill-fort of Uleybury,

where the Briton had bid defiance to the Roman invader. They passed by

the huge mound, the Giants’-Chamber of the dead, covering the remains of

men whose name and race had passed away, perhaps before even the Briton

had fixed himself in the islands of the West.[437] Straight in their

path rose the towers, in that day no doubt tall and slender, of the

great minster of the city which was their goal, where their King sat a

willing captive in the hands of the enemies of his people. And, still

far beyond, rose other hills, the heights of Herefordshire and

Shropshire, the blue range of Malvern and the far distant Titterstone,

bringing the host as it were into the actual presence of the evil deeds

with which the stranger was defiling that lovely region. Godwine had

kept his watch on the heights of Beverstone, as Thrasyboulos had kept

his on the heights of Phylê,[438] and he now came down, with the truest

sons of England at his bidding, ready, as need might be, to strive for

her freedom either in the debates of the Witan or in the actual

[Sidenote: War hindered by the intervention of Leofric.] storm of

battle. But there were now men in the King’s train at Gloucester who

were not prepared to shed the blood of their countrymen in the cause of

strangers. Eadward had now counsellors at his side who had no mind to

push personal or provincial jealousy to the extent of treason to their

common country. Earl Leofric had obeyed the command of the King, and had

brought the force of Mercia to the royal muster at Gloucester. Some

jealousies of Godwine may well have rankled in his breast, but love of

his country was a stronger feeling still. He was not ready to sacrifice

the champion of England to men who had trampled on every rule of English

law and of natural right, men who seemed to deem it a crime if

Englishmen refused to lie still and be butchered on their [Sidenote: He

effects a compromise, and procures the adjournment of the Gemót.]

hearth-stones. The good old Earl of the Mercians now, as ever,[439]

stood forth as the representative of peace and compromise between

extreme parties. The best men of England were arrayed in one host or the

other. It were madness indeed for Englishmen to destroy one another,

simply to hand over the land to its enemies without defence.[440] But,

while two armed hosts stood ready for battle, there was no room for

peaceful debate. Let both sides depart; let hostages be given on both

sides, and let the Meeting of the Witan stand adjourned, to assemble

again, after a few weeks, in another place. Meanwhile all enmities on

either side should cease, and both sides should be held to be in full

possession of the King’s peace and friendship.[441] The proposal of

Leofric was accepted by both parties, and the Gemót was accordingly

adjourned, to meet in London at Michaelmas.

[Sidenote: Gemót of London. September 29, 1051.]

The objects of Leofric in this momentary compromise were undoubtedly

honourable and patriotic. But King Eadward and his foreign advisers seem

to have been determined to make the most of the breathing-space thus

given them for the damage of the national cause. The [Sidenote: Eadward

appears at the head of an army.] King employed the time in collecting an

army still more powerful than that which had surrounded him at

Gloucester. He seems to have got together the whole force of

Northumberland and Mercia, and to have summoned the immediate following

of the King, the royal Housecarls, and perhaps the King’s immediate

Thegns, even within Godwine’s own Earldom.[442] The King’s quarters were

probably at his favourite palace of Westminster. Godwine came,

accompanied by a large force of the men [Sidenote: The King’s demands of

Godwine.] of his Earldom, to his own house in Southwark.[443] Several

messages passed to and fro between him and the King. But it soon became

clear that, though the King’s full peace and friendship had been assured

to Godwine, there was no intention in the royal councils of showing him

any favour, or even of treating him with common justice. The two parties

had separated at Gloucester on equal terms. Each had been declared to be

alike the King’s friends; each alike had given hostages to the other;

the matters at issue between them were to be fairly discussed in the

adjourned Gemót. Instead of this agreement being carried out, Godwine

and his sons found themselves dealt [Sidenote: The outlawry of Swegen

renewed. Injustice of its renewal.] with as criminals. The first act of

the Assembly, seemingly before Godwine and his sons had appeared at all,

was to renew the outlawry of Swegen.[444] No act could be more unjust.

His old crimes could no longer be brought up against him with any

fairness. The time when they might have been rightly urged was on the

motion for the repeal of his former outlawry.[445] But, whether wisely

or unwisely, that outlawry had been legally reversed; Swegen had been

restored to his Earldom, a restoration which of course implied the

absolute pardon of all his former offences. Since that time, we hear of

no fresh crime on his part, unless it were a crime to have been a

fellow-worker with his father, his brother, and the men of his Earldom,

in resistance to the wrongs inflicted by the strangers. To condemn

Swegen afresh for his old offences was a flagrant breach of all justice;

to condemn him for his late conduct was a breach of justice equally

flagrant in another way. Besides this, his condemnation on this last

ground would carry with it an equal condemnation of Godwine and Harold.

Swegen then was outlawed, and that, [Sidenote: Godwine and Harold

summoned before the King.] as far as we can see, without a hearing; and

Godwine and Harold were summoned to appear before the King, seemingly as

criminals to receive judgement. Bishop Stigand, in whose diocese Godwine

was then living, procured some delay;[446] but Archbishop Robert took

advantage of that very delay, still further to poison the King’s mind

against the Earl.[447] Godwine, after the treatment which his eldest son

had just received, declined to appear, unless he received an assurance

of the King’s favour, guaranteed by the placing of special hostages in

his hands, as pledges for his personal safety during the interview. The

King’s answer was apparently a demand that the Earls should allow, or

perhaps compel, all the King’s Thegns who had joined them, to go over to

the King’s side.[448] The demand was at once obeyed. By this time the

tide was clearly turning against Godwine, and the force which he had

brought with him to Southwark [Sidenote: Final summons of the Earls.]

was getting smaller and smaller.[449] The King again summoned the Earls

to appear, with twelve companions only. We can hardly believe that

Stigand was compelled, however against his will, to announce as a

serious message to Godwine that the King’s final resolution was that

Godwine could hope for his peace only when he restored to him his

brother Ælfred and his companions safe and sound.[450] It is

inconceivable that such words can have formed part of a formal summons,

but it is quite possible that they may have been uttered in mockery,

either by [Sidenote: Their demand for a safe-conduct is refused.] the

King or by his Norman Archbishop. But whatever was the form of the

summons, Godwine and Harold refused to appear, unless they received

hostages and a safe-conduct for their coming and going.[451] Without

such security they could not appear in an Assembly which had sunk into a

mere gathering of their enemies.[452] They had obeyed, and would obey,

the King in all things consistent with their safety and their honour.

But both their safety and their honour would be at stake, if they

appeared before such a tribunal without any sort of safeguard, and

without their usual retinue as Earls of two great Earldoms.[453] The

demand was perfectly reasonable.[454] Godwine and his son could not be

expected to appear, without safeguards of any kind, in such an assembly

as that which now surrounded the King. The adjourned Gemót had been

summoned for the free and fair discussion of all disputes between two

parties, each of which was declared to be in the full enjoyment of the

King’s peace and friendship. It was now turned into a Court, in which

one son of Godwine had been outlawed without a crime or a hearing, in

which Godwine himself was summoned to receive judgement on charges on

one of which he had been years before solemnly acquitted. The hostages

and the safe-conduct were refused. The refusal was announced by Stigand

to the Earl as he sat at his evening meal. The Bishop wept; the Earl

sprang to his feet, overthrew the table,[455] sprang on his horse, and,

with his sons, rode for his life all that night.[456] In the morning the

King held his Witenagemót, [Sidenote: Godwine and his family outlawed.]

and by a vote of the King and his whole army,[457] Godwine and his sons

were declared outlaws, but five days were allowed them to get them out

of the land.[458] By this [Sidenote: Godwine, Swegen, &c., take refuge

in Flanders.] time Godwine, Swegen, Tostig, and Gyrth, together with

Gytha and Judith, the newly-married wife of Tostig, had reached either

Bosham or the South-Saxon Thorney.[459] There could be little doubt as

to the course which they were to take. Flanders, Baldwines land, was the

common refuge of English exiles, and Godwine and the Flemish Count are

said to have been bound to one another by the tie of many mutual

benefits.[460] It was at the court of Baldwin that Swegen had taken

refuge in his exile, and the Count was the near kinsman, perhaps the

father, of Tostig’s bride, whose wedding-festivities had been so cruelly

interrupted by these sudden gatherings of Gemóts and armies.[461] For

Bruges then they set sail in a ship laded with as much treasure as it

would hold.[462] They reached the court of Flanders in safety; they were

honourably received by the Count,[463] and passed the whole winter with

him.[464]

Godwine then, with the greater part of his family,[465] had found

shelter in the quarter where English exiles of that age commonly did

find shelter. But two of his sons sought quite another refuge. To seek

shelter in Flanders, a land forming the natural point of

intercommunication between England, France, and Germany, was the obvious

course for one whose first object, as we shall presently see, was to

obtain his restoration by peaceful diplomacy. Such were the designs of

Godwine, the veteran statesman, the man who never resorted to force till

all other means [Sidenote: Harold determines on resistance.] had been

tried in vain. But Harold, still young, and at all times more vehement

in temper than his father, had not yet learned this lesson. His high

spirit chafed under his wrongs, and he determined from the first on a

forcible return to his country, even, if need be, by the help of a

foreign force. This determination is the least honourable fact recorded

in Harold’s life. It was indeed no [Sidenote: Estimate of his conduct.]

more than was usual with banished men in his age. It is what we have

already seen done by Osgod Clapa;[466] it is what we shall presently see

done by Ælfgar the son of Leofric; it was in fact the natural resource

of every man of those times who found himself outlawed by any sentence,

just or unjust. If we judge Harold harshly in this matter, we are in

fact doing him the highest honour. So to judge him is in fact

instinctively to recognize that he has a right to be tried by a higher

standard than the mass of his contemporaries. Judged by such a standard,

his conduct must be distinctly condemned; but it should be noticed that,

among the various charges, true and false, which were brought against

Harold, we never find any reference to this, which, according to our

ideas, seems [Sidenote: He determines to seek help from the Irish

Danes.] the worst action of his life. In company with his young brother

Leofwine,[467] he despised the peaceful shelter of Bruges, and preferred

to betake himself to a land where, above all others, it would be easy to

engage warlike adventurers in his cause. The eastern coast of Ireland,

with the numerous towns peopled by Danish settlers, lay admirably suited

for their purpose. Thither then [Sidenote: Harold and Leofwine go to

Bristol; growing importance of that port.] the two brothers determined

to make their way, with the fixed purpose of raising forces to effect

their own return and to avenge their father’s wrongs.[468] For the port

of their departure they chose Bristol, a town in Swegen’s Earldom,

unknown to fame in the earlier days of our history, but which was now

rising into great, though not very honourable, importance. The port on

the Avon, the frontier stream of Wessex and Western Mercia, was the

natural mart for a large portion of both those countries. Commanding, as

it did, the whole navigation of the Channel to which it gives its name,

Bristol was then, as now, the chief seat of communication between

England and the South of Ireland. That is to say, it was in those days

the chief seat of the Irish slave-trade.[469] In the haven of Bristol

Earl Swegen had, for what cause we are not told, a ship made ready for

himself.[470] The two brothers made the best of their way towards

Bristol, in order to seize this ship for the purpose of their voyage to

Ireland. Perhaps they had, wittingly or unwittingly, allowed their

purpose of appealing to arms to [Sidenote: Ealdred sent to overtake

them.] become known. This would be the only excuse for an act on the

King’s part, which, in any other case, would be one of the most

monstrous and unprovoked breaches of faith on record. It is not likely

that the five days, which had been allowed the outlaws to leave the

country, were yet passed. Harold and Leofwine would be sure to make

better speed than that. Yet Bishop Ealdred, whose diocese of Worcester

then took in the town of Bristol, was sent after them from London with a

party to overtake them, if possible, before they got on ship-board. But

the Bishop and his company were not zealous on an errand which had at

least the appearance of shameless perfidy. They failed to overtake the

fugitives; “they could not or they would not,” says the Chronicler.[471]

Harold and [Sidenote: They escape, reach Ireland, and are well received

by King Diarmid.] Leofwine reached Bristol in safety. They went on board

Swegen’s ship; stress of weather kept them for a while at the mouth of

the Avon, but a favourable wind presently carried them to Ireland.[472]

They were there favourably received by Dermot or Diarmid Mac

Mael-na-mbo, King of Dublin and Leinster.[473] He was a prince of native

Irish descent, who had lately obtained possession of the Danish

[Sidenote: 1050.] district round Dublin, and whose authority seems to

have been recognized by the Danes as well as by the Irish.[474] In such

a state of things it would not be difficult to find bold spirits ready

for any adventure, and a King whose position must have been somewhat

precarious would doubtless welcome any chance of getting rid of some of

them. Diarmid gave Harold and Leofwine as kind a reception at Dublin as

the rest of the family had found from Baldwin at Bruges, and they stayed

at his court through the whole winter, plotting schemes of vengeance.

[Sidenote: The Lady Eadgyth sent to the Abbey of Wherwell.]

One member only of the family of Godwine still remained to be disposed

of. What had been the position or the feelings of Eadgyth during the

scenes which have been just described we have no means of knowing; but

she too was doomed to have her share in the misfortunes of her father’s

house. The English Lady, the daughter of Godwine, could not be allowed

to share the honours of royalty, now that all her kinsfolk were driven

from the land,[475] now that the reign of the Normans was about to set

in. The language of one contemporary authority seems almost to imply an

actual divorce, of which Archbishop Robert was of course the main

instigator.[476] The lawfulness or possibility of divorce in such a case

might form a curious subject of speculation for those who are learned in

the Canon Law. Eadward consented, perhaps willingly, to the separation;

he allowed the Lady to be deprived of all her goods, real and

personal;[477] but he interfered at least to save her from personal

ignominy. Eadgyth was sent, with no lack of respect or royal

attendance,[478] to the royal monastery of Wherwell,[479] and was there

entrusted to the safe keeping of the Abbess. This Abbess was a sister of

the King,[480] no doubt one of the daughters of Æthelred by his first

wife. One of the widows of the slain and banished Earls, the relict of

the traitor Eadric or of the hero Ulfcytel,[481] had taken the veil in

the holy house of Eadgar and Ælfthryth,[482] and she could there confer

with her guest on the uncertainty of human happiness and the emptiness

of human greatness.

[Sidenote: General character of the story; its difficulties.]

The whole of this history of the fall of Godwine is most remarkable; and

it is singular that, though it is told in great detail in three distinct

accounts, so much still remains which is far from intelligible. The

first point which at once strikes us is the strength of Godwine in the

Gemót of Gloucester and his weakness in the Gemót of London. Next year

indeed we shall see the tide turn yet again; we shall behold Godwine

return in triumph with the good will of all England. This is of course

no difficulty; it would be no difficulty, even if popular feeling had

been thoroughly against Godwine during the former year. Englishmen

welcomed Godwine back again, because they had learned what it was to be

without him. But the change of Godwine’s position during that eventful

September of which we have just gone through the history is certainly

perplexing. At Beverstone and at Gloucester he appears at the head of

the whole force of Wessex, East-Anglia, and part of Mercia. All are

zealous in his cause, ready, if need be, to fight in his quarrel against

the King himself. He is clearly not without well-wishers even in the

ranks of the Northern [Sidenote: Sudden collapse of the power of

Godwine.] Earldoms. A compromise is brought about in which his honour is

carefully guarded, and in which his party and the King’s are studiously

put on equal terms. In the London Gemót, a few weeks later, all is

changed. His followers gradually drop away from him; he does not venture

to take his place in the Assembly which he had so often swayed at his

pleasure; he is dealt with as an accused, almost as a convicted,

criminal; he is subjected with impunity to every sort of unjust and

irritating treatment; and he is at last driven to flee from the land,

without a blow being struck, almost without a voice being raised, in his

behalf. Such a falling away is difficult to understand; it is hard to

see how Godwine could have given fresh offence to any one in the time

between the conference at Gloucester and his appearance at Southwark.

Norman flatterers and talebearers may have fanned the King’s prejudice

against him into a still hotter flame; but there is at first sight

nothing to account for the desertion [Sidenote: Position of the Northern

Earls.] of his own followers. As for the Northern Earls and their

followers, they had no ground of jealousy against Godwine in London

which they had not equally at Gloucester; and at Gloucester they clearly

were not disposed to push matters to extremities. Still it was clearly

the number and strength of the following of Siward and Leofric in the

London Gemót which decided the day against Godwine. The Earl of the

West-Saxons was entrapped. He and his party came as to a peaceful

assembly, and they found the King and his foreign followers bent on

their destruction, and a powerful military force assembled to crush

them. But why did even Siward lend himself to a scheme like this? Why,

still more, did Leofric forsake the part, which he had so often and so

worthily played, of mediator between extreme parties? Unless we are to

suppose, which one would not willingly do, that Leofric was won by the

bait of Harold’s Earldom for his son, we can only suppose that a

mistaken feeling of loyalty hindered him from opposing a project on

which he saw that the King was fully bent. It is in his position and

that of Siward that the main difficulty lies. When Godwine found himself

face to face with all the strength of Northern England, the rest of the

story [Sidenote: Explanation of Godwine’s position and conduct.] becomes

more intelligible. He had come expecting a fair discussion of all the

questions at issue. But fair discussion was not to be had amid the clash

of the axes of Siward’s Danes and of the lances of Ralph’s Frenchmen.

Godwine had really no choice but to fight or to yield. Had he chosen to

fight, the whole force of Wessex and East-Anglia would no doubt soon

have been again at his command. But he shrank from a civil war; he saw

that it was better policy to bide his time, to yield, even to flee,

certain that a revulsion of national feeling would soon demand his

recall. Such a course was doubtless wise and patriotic; but it was not

one which would be at the time either acceptable or intelligible to the

mass of his followers. If he meant to resist, he should doubtless have

resisted at once; the hopes of an insurrection always lie in promptness

and energy; every hour of delay only adds to the strength of the other

side. We can thus understand how men began to fall off from a chief who,

it might be said, dared not meet his sovereign either in arms or in

council. Still, after all, there is something [Sidenote: His complete

and sudden fall.] strange in the details of the story. There is

something amazing in so sudden and so utter a fall, not only from the

general exaltation of himself and his family, but from the proud and

threatening position which he had so lately [Sidenote: Impression on his

contemporaries.] held at Beverstone and Gloucester. It is not wonderful

that Godwine’s fall from such an unparalleled height of greatness made a

deep impression on the minds of the men of his own age. The Biographer

of Eadward, who had before likened the children of Godwine to the rivers

of Paradise,[483] now deems it a fitting occasion to call upon his Muse

to set forth the sufferings of the innocent, and to compare the outlawed

Earl to Susanna, Joseph, and other ancient victims of slander.[484] The

plain English of the Chronicler who is less strongly committed to

Godwine’s cause speaks more directly to the heart; “That would have

seemed wonderful to ilk man that in England was, if any man ere that had

said that so it should be. For that ere that he was so upheaven, so that

he wielded the King and all England, and his sons were Earls and the

King’s darlings, and his daughter to the King wedded and married.”[485]

He fell from his high estate; but in his fall he doubtless foresaw that

the day of his restoration was not far distant. Another Gemót of London

was soon to repeal the unrighteous vote of its predecessor; the champion

of England was to return for a moment to his old honours and his old

power, and then to hand them on to a son even more worthy of them than

himself.

[Sidenote: Complete temporary triumph of the Norman party. October

1051—September 1052.]

But for the moment the overthrow of the patriotic leaders was complete.

The dominion of the strangers over the mind of the feeble King was fully

assured. The Norman Conquest, in short, might now seem to have more than

begun. Honours and offices were of course divided among the foreigners

and among those Englishmen who had stood on the King’s side. Through the

banishment of Godwine and his sons three great Earldoms were vacant. No

one Earl of the West-Saxons seems to have been appointed. Probably, as

in the early days of Cnut,[486] the Imperial Kingdom, or at least its

greater portion, was again put [Sidenote: Partition of honours among the

King’s friends.] under the immediate government of the Crown. The

anomalous Earldom of Swegen was dismembered. The [Sidenote: Ralph;]

King’s nephew Ralph seems to have been again invested with the

government of its Mercian portions.[487] Of the two West-Saxon shires

held by Swegen, Berkshire is not [Sidenote: Odda;] mentioned, but

Somersetshire was joined with the other western parts of Wessex to form

a new government under Odda, a kinsman of the King’s.[488] His Earldom

took in the whole of the ancient _Wealhcyn_, but it is now Cornwall only

which is distinguished as Welsh. The policy of Æthelstan[489] had been

effectual, and no part of the land east of the Tamar is now recognized

as a foreign land. Odda was a special favourite of the monks, and is

spoken of as a man of good and clean life, who in the end became a monk

himself.[490] The third Earldom, that of East-Anglia, [Sidenote:

Ælfgar.] hitherto held by Harold, was bestowed on Ælfgar, the son of

Leofric,[491] of whom we hear for the first time during these

commotions. He had himself, it would seem, played a prominent part in

them,[492] and one would wish to believe that his promotion was the

reward of acts of his own, rather than of his father’s seeming desertion

of the patriotic [Sidenote: Spearhafoc deposed,] cause. Among churchmen,

Spearhafoc, who had throughout the summer and autumn held the see of

London without consecration,[493] had now to give up his doubtful

possession. [Sidenote: and William made Bishop of London. 1051.] The

Bishoprick was then given to a Norman named William, a chaplain of the

King’s.[494] A man might now go from the Straits of Dover to the Humber,

over Kentish, East-Saxon, and Danish ground, without once, in the course

of his journey, going out of the spiritual jurisdiction of Norman

Prelates. It is due however to Bishop William to say that he bears a

very different character in our history from either his Metropolitan

Robert or his fellow-suffragan Ulf. Banished for a while, he was

restored when the patriotic party was in the height of its power—a

distinct witness in his favour, perhaps a witness against his English

competitor.[495] William kept his Bishoprick for many years, and lived

to welcome his namesake and native prince to the throne of England. But

he had not to wait for so distant an opportunity of displaying his new

honours [Sidenote: Visit of Duke William to England. 1051.] in the eyes

of his natural sovereign. While Godwine dwelt as an exile at Bruges,

while Harold was planning schemes of vengeance in the friendly court of

Dublin, William the Bastard first set foot on the shores of

England.[496]

We are thus at last brought face to face with the two great actors in

our history. Harold has already appeared before us. We have seen him

raised at an early age to the highest rank open to a subject; we have

seen him, in the cause of his country, deprived of his honours and

driven to take refuge in a foreign land. His great rival we have as yet

heard of only at a distance; he now comes directly on the field. There

can be no doubt that William’s visit to England forms a stage, and a

most important one, among the immediate causes of the Norman Conquest. I

pause then, at this point, to take up the thread of Norman history, and

to give a sketch of the birth, the childhood, the early reign, of the

man who, in the year of Godwine’s banishment, saw, for the first time,

the land which, fifteen years later, he was to claim as his own.

[Illustration: NORMANDY AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES.]