CHAP. IX.

In the morning the great Assembly met. The great Meeting of the Mycel city and its coasts were now clear of strangers, save such Gemót. as had come in the train of the deliverers.2 The people of Tuesday, September England-for such a gathering may well deserve that name 15th.

the open

-came together to welcome its friends and to pronounce sentence upon its enemies. The two armies and the citizens of London formed a multitude which no building could It meets in contain. That Mickle Gemót, whose memory long lived in the minds of Englishmen, came together, in old Teutonic fashion, in the open air without the walls of London.3 The scene was pictured ages before by the pencil of Tacitus and sung in yet earlier days by the voice of Homer. It may still be seen, year by year, among the

air.

Its popular mountains of Uri and in the open market-place of Trogen.

character.

Other Assemblies of those times may have shrunk up into Councils of a small body of Thegns and Prelates; but on that great day the English people appeared, in all the fulness of its ancient rights, as a coordinate authority with the English King. Men came armed to the place of meeting;5 our fathers did so in their old homes beyond the

on lande, swa swa hit God wolde; þæ he ær begeat bone wurdscipe swa swa hit God nolde." English has not gained by dropping the negative verb, which survives only in the saying "will he, nill he."

1 Chron. Petrib. "Ɖa cwæð mann mycel gemót wiðutan Lundene ;" "Statutum est magnum placitum" is the translation in the Waverley Annals, p. 186 Luard. Flor. Wig. "Mane autem facto, concilium Rex habuit." Chron. Ab. "And wæs þa Witenagemót." But it is the Peterborough writer only who dwells with evident delight on the popular character of the Assembly.

2 Compare the position of the Dutch Guards and other foreign troops who accompanied William of Orange.

3 "Wiðutan Lundene," says the Peterborough Chronicler. See Appendix S.

4 Chron. Petrib. "þær bær Godwine Eorl úp his mal, and betealde hine þær wið Eadward cyng his hlaford and wið ealle landleodan.”

5 We shall presently see that Godwine and Eadward were both armed; it is not at all likely that they were singular in being so. We have already heard enough of votes passed by the army and the like to make an armed Gemót nothing wonderful.

GODWINE BEFORE THE GEMÓT.

333

sea, and our distant kinsmen still preserve the same im- CHAP. IX. memorial use in the free assemblies of Appenzell.1 But the enemy was no longer at hand; in that great gathering of liberated and rejoicing Englishmen sword and axe were needed only as parts of a solemn pageant, or to give further effect to the harangue of a practised orator. There, girt with warlike weapons, but shorn of the help and countenance of Norman knights and Norman churchmen,2 sat the King of the English, driven at last to meet face to face with a free assembly of his people. There were all the Earls and all the best men that were in this land;3 there was the mighty multitude of English freemen, gathered to hail the return of the worthiest of their own blood. And there, surrounded by his four valiant sons, stood the great Godwine deliverer, the man who had set the King upon his throne, Gemót. the man who had refused to obey his unlawful orders, who had cleared the land of his unworthy favourites, but who had never swerved in his true loyalty to the King and his Kingdom. The man at whose mere approach the foreign knights and Prelates had fled for their lives, could now afford to assume the guise of humble supplication towards He supplithe sovereign who had received his Crown at his hands.

1 I saw the armed Landesgemeinde of Appenzell-ausser-rhoden in 1864. The Law requires each landman to bring his sword; it also forbids the sword to be drawn. In Uri the custom of bearing arms has been given up. Cf. Thuc. i. 5, 6.

2 Vita Eadw. 406. "Destitutus inprimis fugâ Archipræsulis et suorum multorum verentium adspectum Ducis."

3 Chron. Petrib. "And ealle pa eorlas and þa betstan menn þe wæron on þison lande wæron on þam gemote." Does this merely mean the Earls who had been already spoken of, Godwine and Harold on the one side, Ralph and Odda on the other? Or does it imply the presence of Leofric, Elfgar, and Siward? Their presence is perfectly possible; but, if they had had any share either in this Gemót or in the earlier military proceedings, it is odd that they are not spoken of.

II. Z. 198;

ἀλλ ̓ αὕτως ἐπὶ τάφρον ἰὼν, Τρώεσσι φάνηθι, αἴ κε σ ̓ ὑποδδείσαντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο. "Verentes adspectum Ducis," says the Biographer just above.

at the

cates the

King;

he speaks

to the people.

CHAP. IX. Godwine stood forth; he laid his axe at the foot of the throne, and knelt, as in the act of homage, before his Lord the King. By the Crown upon his brow, whose highest and brightest ornament was the cross of Christ, he conjured his sovereign to allow him to clear himself before the King and his people of all the crimes which had been laid against him and his house. The demand could not be refused, and the voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more, in all the fulness of its eloquence, setting forth the innocence of Godwine himself and of Harold and all his sons.3 Few 4 and weighty were the words which the great Earl spoke that day before the King and all the people of the land.5 But they were words which at once carried the whole Assembly with them. Those who have heard the most spiritstirring of earthly sounds, when a sovereign people binds itself to observe the laws which it has itself decreed, when thousands of voices join as one man in the repetition of one

1 Vita Eadw. 406. "Viso Rege protinùs abjectis armis ejus advolvitur pedibus." I conceive the weapon borne to have been the axe, as a sort of official weapon. It appears in the Bayeux Tapestry in the hands of the attendants upon Eadward; so also in the scene where the Crown is offered to Harold, both Harold himself and one of those who make the offer to him bear axes. 2 Ib. "Orans suppliciter ut in Christi nomine, cujus signiferam regni coronam gestabat in capite, annueret ut sibi liceret purgare se de objecto crimine, et purgato pacem concederet gratiæ suæ." This surviving fragment of Godwine's eloquence shows how well he could adapt himself to every class of hearers. But what was the Crown like? The allusion seems to point to something like the Imperial Crown with a cross on the top, but the crowns in the Tapestry are quite different.

3 Chron. Petrib. "pet he was unscyldig þæs þe him geled wæs, and on Harold his sunu and ealle his bearn." This is the "purgatio" of the Biographer. So Will. Malms. ii. 199. "Probè se de omnibus quæ objectabantur expurgavit." Compurgators seem not to have been called for.

4 Will. Malms. u. s. "Tantum brevi valuit ut sibi liberisque suis honores integros restitueret."

"Ealle landleodan." We have lost this, and so many other expressive words. "Landleute" is the old official name of the people of the democratic cantons of Switzerland; but Land is there used in its ordinary opposition to Stadt.

THE GEMÓT DECREES GODWINE'S RESTORATION.

335

restoration.

solemn formula,1 can conceive the shout of assent with CHAP. IX. which the assembled multitude agreed to the proposal that Godwine should be deemed to have cleared himself of every charge. The voice of that great Assembly, the voice The Assembly decrees of the English nation, at once declared him guiltless, his acquitat once decreed the restoration of himself, his sons, and tal and all his followers, to all the lands, offices, and honours which they had held in the days before his outlawry. The old charges were thus again solemnly set aside, and an amnesty was proclaimed for all the irregular acts of the last three months of revolution. The last year was as it were wiped out; Godwine was once more Earl of the West-Saxons, Harold was once more Earl of the East-Angles, as if Eustace and Robert had never led astray the simplicity of the royal saint. And yet more; it was not enough It decrees merely to put England again into the state in which she stood at the moment of the banishment of Godwine. was needful to punish the authors of all the evils had happened, and to guard against the possible rence of such evils in days to come. The deepest in guilt Normans. of all the royal favourites was felt to be the Norman Archbishop. He had taken himself beyond the reach of justice; but, had he been present, the mildness of English political warfare would have hindered any severer sentence than that which was actually pronounced. "He had done most to cause the strife between Earl Godwine and the King" the words of the formal resolution peep out,

the out

lawry and It deprivation that bishop

of Arch

Robert

recur- and many

1 I refer to the oath of the people of Appenzell-ausser-rhoden in their Landesgemeinde. The newly elected Landammann first himself swears to obey the laws; he then administers the oath to the vast multitude before him. The effect of their answer is something overwhelming in its grandeur.

* Chron. Petrib. "And cweð mann útlaga Rotberd arcebisceop fullice, and ealle pa Frencisce menn, forðan þe hi macodon mæst þet unseht betweonan Godwine Eorle and þam Cynge." So William of Malmesbury; "Prolatâ sententiâ in Robertum archiepiscopum ejusque complices quòd statum regni conturbarent, animum regium in provinciales agitantes."

other

CHAP. IX. as they so often do, in the words of the Chronicler-and, on this charge, Robert was deprived of his see, and was solemnly declared an outlaw. The like sentence was pronounced against "all the Frenchmen "-we are again reading the words of the sentence-" who had reared up bad law, and judged unjust judgements, and counselled evil counsel in this land." But the sentence did not extend to all the men of Norman birth or of French speech who were settled in the country. It was intended only to strike actual offenders. By an exception capable of indefinite and dangerous extension, those were excepted "whom the King liked, and who were true to him and all his folk."2 Lastly, in the old formula which we have so often already come across "Good law was decreed for all folk."3

Normans excepted from the sentence.

"Good law" decreed.

As

in other cases, the expression refers far more to administration than to legislation, to the observance of old laws rather than to the enactment of new. The Frenchmen had reared up bad law; that is, they had been guilty of corrupt and unjust administration; the good law, that is, the good government of former times, was now to be restored. There was no need to renew the Law of Eadgar or of Cnut or of any other King of past times. The "good state," as an Italian patriot might have called it, was not, in the eyes of that Assembly, a vision of past times, a tradition of the days of their fathers or of the old time before them. It was simply what every man could remember for himself, in the days before Robert, and men

1 Chron. Ab. "And geutlageden þa ealle Frencisce men, þe ær unlage rærdon, and undom demdon, and únræd ræddon into dissum earde." Modern English utterly fails to express the power of the negative words, which modern High German only partially preserves. So Florence; "Omnes Nortmannos qui leges iniquas adinvenerant [a poor substitute for "unlage rærdon "] et injusta judicia judicaverant, multaque Regi insilia [an attempt at transferring the Teutonic negative to the Latin] adversus Anglos [a touch from Peterborough] dederant, exlegaverunt.”

2 Chron. Ab. and Fl. Wig. I shall have to speak of this exception again. Ib. "And eallum folce góde lage beheton."