164

INFLUENCE OF THE NORMANS.

[A.D. 1050, to the English kingdom. But the influence of Godwin and his family soon came to be regarded with suspicion. One of Godwin's sons, Sweyn, was guilty of atrocities, which still indicate a period when violence is the ready instru ment of power. He carried off an abbess; and was outlawed. He became a terror of the sea, in the old trade of piracy. At length the king pronounced his pardon to the outlaw; but his brother Harold, and his cousin Beorn, opposed the royal clemency; and Sweyn murdered his cousin. Still he was restored to his estates and honours by the weak-minded king. But his crime was not forgotten. It was one of the causes by which the character of the family of Godwin was lowered; and the influence which they held over the people was for a season diminished. Their strength was, in a short time, to be measured not only with the envy of their rivals, but with the authority of their king. Edward was, however, deficient in force of character, a gentle and merciful ruler. He had abolished the Dane-gelt. Under the old laws, the Saxon and the Dane now lived in peace. They pursued their industrious occupations, and the country was flourishing. The fierce contests about ecclesiastical discipline had passed away. There was no foreign power to disturb the rest of the pacific king. He hunted and he hawked in his forest of Bernwood, near Brill; and there he gave a hunting-horn to Nigel, the

The Pusey Horn.

huntsman who slew a fierce boar, the famous Borstal horn, by which the Aubrey family hold the estates with which the king endowed the boar-slayer. So the lands of the Pusey family are still held by the horn which King Canute bestowed upon their ancestor William. The gentle king was, moreover, a healer of the sick, and a restorer to sight of the

blind. It was he who first used "the healing benediction," which he left to "the succeeding royalty," so that even the pious Charles II. "touched" eight thousand five hundred of his afflicted subjects in one year, and a hundred thousand in the course of his reign. Malmesbury, somewhat damagingly to those who believed, to very recent times, in the virtue of the touch from the .egitimate king, imputes the power of Edward to "his personal sanctity," and not to "hereditary virtue in the royal line." With these various occupations, Edward might have lived through a long reign untroubled, could he have forgotten the associations of his years of exile. When he became possessed of the power and riches that belonged to the crown of fertile England, the Normans crowded round him to share the abundance of his treasury. They came to fill the great offices of his household; to be the leaders of his troops; to take the command of his fortresses; to be his spiritual directors; to have the richest abbeys and the most honoured bishoprics. The seal of wax which Edward was the first to affix to his charters, instead of the mark of the cross of the Anglo-Saxon kings, was an offence against the See a curious account of the resistance of William III. to the continuance of this super. stition, in Macaulay's "History of England," vol. iii. p. 478.

165

A.D. 1051.j

RIOT AT DOVER.

nationality of England. In the palace where Edith was queen, her father and brothers spoke their country's speech, and wore their country's long mantle; whilst Edward gathered around him the short-cloaked Normans, and bade his subjects address their petitions to his clerks, who only heard those who could employ the polite Romance-tongue of Normandy. The Norman favourites ridiculed the Saxon earls; and the Saxon earls looked for a day of vengeance upon the Norman favourites.

Eustace, Count of Boulogne, had married Goda, the sister of Edward, who was the widow of Gualtier of Mantes. He came to the court of his brotherin-law, with a great retinue. Here he would meet with bishops and abbots, earls and knights, of French lineage. Radulf, the foreign nephew of the king, was there, all-powerful. Eustace naturally thought that England was a tribute-land for the Normans, and that the Saxon was a born slave. On his return to Boulogne, he had to rest at Dover. Before entering the town he ordered his men to put on their hauberks; and at the head of his followers he demanded quarters of the sturdy householders. We can imagine the stir

IMBASKET

SIGILLL

1 /

in the little town under the cliff. The burghers resisted the insolent mandate; and one who refused entrance to the foreigners was slain. Then Count Eustace, when the cry of vengeance rose amongst the people, made a furious onslaught with his spearmen upon the inhabitants, and many fell under the French lances. But it was not their ringed mail that could save them from the swords of the infuriated Kentish men. The burghers hastily armed, and forming themselves in the military order with which they were familiar, encountered the horsemen of Boulogne, and slew nineteen. Then a solitary rider, with a broken plume in his gilt helmet, was madly spurring on the highway, for the people had intercepted his passage to the harbour. A few of his followers came up; and together they took their course along the Watling-street, till they had reached the king's presence at Gloucester. There, surrounded by his Norman court, the pacific king showed unwonted

166

BANISHMENT OF GODWIN AND HIS SONS.

[A.D. 1051. fury against his rebellious subjects, who had resisted the will of his brother-inlaw. He sent for Earl Godwin, in whose earldom this outbreak had taken place, and ordered him to visit the people of Dover with a summary vengeance The earl refused. They should have legal trial in the burh-gemot; he would see justice done; but he would not punish, without a hearing, those whom the king was bound to protect. Sullenly Edward yielded. But the Norman counsellors represented the discretion of Godwin as direct rebellion; and he was summoned to appear before a great council at Gloucester. In his defence of the people of Dover against an illegal chastisement, he had done his strict duty. The eloquent burst of Chatham was as true in the eleventh century as in the eighteenth: "The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the storm may enter it; but the king of England cannot enter it. All his power dares not cross the threshold of that ruined tenement." The AngloSaxon had the legal right to resist, even to the death, any one who presumed to intrude into his dwelling, as follower of baron or of king. Was then Godwin, in his earldom, to punish those who, in the same spirit of ancient freedom, had resisted an insolent foreigner, because he was the husband of the king's sister? But the discharge of his duty would be no plea for his contumaciousness. While Edward was surrounded by his new favourites, Godwin saw danger; and he came prepared for resistance. The hour for resistance was come, if Saxon-England were to hold her laws and her independence. He and his sons marched to the west with a large force; and they demanded that Eustace and his men should be delivered to their custody. The Earls Siward and Leofric upheld the king, and mustered their forces. They came unwillingly. They came at first with a few men; but at the entreaties of the king they brought up the militia of their earldoms. The Norman Earl of Worcester joined the party of the king with a more determined spirit, than those felt. who were unwilling to draw the sword against their own people. Civil war seemed imminent. 66 But, inasmuch as the best men in all England were assembled together on his side and theirs, it seemed to Earl Leofric and some others, to be the more prudent part not to begin a battle with their fellowcountrymen; but they proposed that, exchanging hostages, the king and Godwin should, on a day named, meet at London for a conference."* The king, or rather his Norman advisers, employed the interval in raising a great army; whilst Godwin's adherents returned to their homes. The king's army was commanded by Normans. In London, thus beleaguered, was Godwin and his two sons summoned to attend the witan. They demanded hostages for their personal safety; but the demand was refused. Then Godwin and his sons, after a second demand, and a second refusal of hostages, disobeyed the summons. Sweyn, by sentence of the witan, was outlawed. Godwin and Harold were sentenced to banishment-to depart out of England within five days. Harold sailed from Bristol to Ireland; Godwin and Sweyn, from the east coast to Flanders. They, the proudest of the land, were driven from their homes and their large possessions. They had, in the plenitude of their power, pressed hardly upon a weak master; and he, after the fashion of all imbecile and timid rulers, was ready enough to be more oppressive than those who, out of their own strong wills, are calculatingly

* Roger de Hoveden.

A.D. 1051.]

TRIUMPH OF THE NORMAN PARTY.

167

despotic. The unmanly king extended his revenge to his own wife. He stripped her of every means of independent maintenance-of money, of lands. He plundered her of every womanly ornament. He sent her to the cheerless prison of a monastery,-that of Wherwell, where his own sister, the abbess, would be ready enough to persecute one so fair and so accomplished as Edith, the daughter of the banished earl. The time was fast approaching when no earl would defend a burgher against injustice. One system of government is melting into another system. Antiquarians, who look upon an old tower like that of Conisborough, on the Don, dispute whether it be of Saxon or Norman origin. It probably belongs to the border-time of each epoch. So the political histories of two periods that we are accustomed to regard as having distinct attributes, are now gradually blending. The Norman influence is ripening into Norman despotism.

William of Normandy-Return of Godwin-Death of Godwin-Harold-Harold in NormandyHarold returns to England-Banishment of Tostig-Death of Edward the ConfessorHarold chosen king-Norman preparations for invasion-Landing of Duke WilliamBattle of Stamford-Bridge-Battle of Hastings-The Abbey of Bataille-Burial of Harold -Close of the Saxon period.

WHEN Canute leapt into the English throne, and married the widow of Ethelred, her brother Richard II. became the protector of her two sons by her first marriage; and they remained under his guardianship till his death, about 1026. His eldest son, Richard III., succeeded to the dukedom; but he soon gave place to his brother Robert. Whether Richard were murderously thrust from his crown and from his life by his younger brother, is matter of doubtful history; but that brother was for ten years the bold and powerful duke, who is sometimes styled "Robert the Magnificent," and more commonly "Robert the Devil." He was favourable to the pretensions of his cousins, Alfred and Ethelred; for he fitted out a fleet for the invasion of England, to place them in the sovereignty which Canute had usurped. But his armament