§ 4. The Reign of Harthacnut. 1040–2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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