CHAP. IX.

Cnut.

10161035.

Third. The danger which he dreaded at last actually The Reign of fronted him on the accession of Robert-Robert the Devil as men called him in after time-who became duke of Normandy on his brother's death in 1028. The land was now ringing with the marvellous victories over Greek or Moslem which Normans were winning in far-off fields; poor knights and younger sons, sick of peace and good order, were streaming off, in band after band, over Alps and Pyrenees; and the restless temper of his people stirred the blood in the veins of their duke. From the first Robert showed his warlike activity, crushing revolt within his duchy, bringing Brittany back into submission, restoring Count Baldwin to power in Flanders, and seating King Henry in the face of all opposition on the French throne. But France offered no such scope for greed and ambition as the land over the Channel. England was nearer than Spain or Apulia, and the title of the sons of Æthelred gave a fair pretext for attack. We are left to Norman writers for the incidents of the quarrel, and we know nothing of its cause, or of the grounds which induced Robert to set aside the claims of his sister and of the child she had borne to Cnut. But if greed and ambition were strong enough to set these aside, the claims of the sons of Æthelred, who were equally akin to him, gave Robert a fair pretext for attack. The Norman baronage at once backed him in his plan of invasion, and the duke set sail with the eldest of the two Æthelings, Ælfred.

William

That Robert's fortune would have been that of the

the Norman. later conqueror may well be doubted. Cnut was at the height of his power, and the one chance of

success against him lay in an English rising which
might have welcomed the Ætheling. But contest
there was to be none. Robert's project broke down
before the obstacle which has so often foiled attacks
on the English shore; for a storm carried the Norman
fleet down the Channel, and flung it wrecked on the
coast of Jersey. It may have been the bitterness of
this failure which drove the duke from his throne.
Pilgrimages to the Sepulchre of Christ were now
growing common in Normandy, and Robert announced
his purpose of going as pilgrim to the Holy Land.
But some prevision of the doom which awaited him
drove the duke to name his successor ere he left.
Claimants of the duchy there were in plenty, whether
of the stock of Richard the Fearless or of the stock
of Richard the Good. Child of his own, Robert had
but one.
In the little dell which parts the two cliffs,
the two "fells" which have given their name to
Falaise, one may still hear the chatter of the women
who wash their linen at the brook. One of such
a group, a tanner's daughter of the town, had caught
the light fancy of Robert, and became the mother of
his boy. At the moment of the child's birth the
gossips noted the sturdy grasp with which his fingers
seized and held the straws scattered on the floor. He
'would be no Norman, they laughed, to let go what
once he had gripped. The laugh proved a true
prophecy, but none of the laughers knew how mighty
a prize that hand was in after days to grip. It was
this boy, William, whom the duke forced his barons
to choose as their future lord ere he left the land
which he was never to see again; for after a few

CHAP. IX.

months' stay, he died on his return at Nicæa in July, The Reign of 1035. The news of his death set Normandy on fire.

Cnut.

1016

1035.

Death

of Cnut.

The boy-duke was a child and a bastard, scorned for age as for shame of birth by the haughty lords whom the upgrowth of feudalism had made powers in the land. Even the dukes before him had found it hard to secure peace and order in a country which was filled with turbulent nobles, and whose people had still the wild northern blood with its love of lawless outbreak stirring in their veins. "Normans must be trodden down and kept under foot," sang one of their poets, "and he who bridles them may use them at his need." But no child-duke could bridle them. The great border nobles held William's rule at defiance. On every height and mound rose square keeps of solid stone, which helped their builders to hold the child-duke at bay. The land became a chaos of bloodshed and anarchy, while William saw his friends murdered beside him, and was driven from refuge to refuge by foes who sought his life.

That the boy whose reign began in this wild storm was to tear England from the grasp of the Dane and to hold the land at his will, Cnut could not know. What he saw was the drifting away of the danger to his throne from the Æthelings across the Channel. From a boy-duke of eight years old, from this chaotic Normandy, small aid could come to the sons of Ethelred. But it was at the moment when his last difficulty vanished that Cnut's vigour suddenly gave way. Long and eventful as his reign had been he was still only a man of forty when he died, in November, 1035, leaving his work all unfinished.

The empire he had built up at once fell to pieces

CHAP. IX.

Cnut.

10161035.

at the tidings of his death. Norway threw off the The Reign of Danish yoke by driving out Cnut's son Swein, and chose as king the child Magnus, son of Olaf; while Swein fled to Denmark to share the kingdom with his brother Harthacnut till his death a few months after. For years to come Harthacnut's energies were wholly absorbed in guarding Denmark from the danger of Norwegian invasion, and his treaty with Magnus that if either of the kings died childless his dominions should pass to the other, showed the insecurity of the house of Cnut even in Denmark itself. The kingdom of England which was to have fallen to Harthacnut

his father's will, and doubtless was to have carried with it the overlordship of the whole empire, lay beyond the reach of the hardly-pressed ruler of Denmark; it was claimed by another son of Cnut, Harald, and itself fell asunder into two parts. A tragic fate, too, awaited the house of Cnut. Before seven years were past the same weakness which had cut short his own life had carried off his four children, not one of them having reached twenty-four years of age, and all childless save Gunhild, the wife of the German, Henry III., whose only child became a nun. The race of Gorm in the direct line of descent thus became extinct in little more than a hundred years after he had finished his work of the creation of the Danish kingdom.

Position of
Godwine.

THE death of Cnut left Godwine the greatest political power in the land. For years he had stood second only to the king in his English realm; as earl of Wessex he was master of the wealthiest and most powerful portion of the kingdom; and Cnut's absences on foreign campaigns had accustomed Englishmen to look on Godwine as the real centre of administrative government. The will of Cnut that he should be succeeded by Harthacnut in the English kingdom and the over-lordship of his northern realms, embodied no doubt not the king's purpose only, but that of the minister who had been his chief counsellor for fifteen years past; and represented that connexion with the North, that maintenance of a Scandinavian empire, which was as yet the policy of Godwine as it had been the policy of the king. For English as was his blood, and English as his policy was to become in later days, Godwine can have shared but little the general drift of English feeling against the Dane. As yet, indeed,