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CHAP. X.

Godwine.

equally subject realms of Lorraine and Burgundy to The House of the west, wielding a more doubtful supremacy over Denmark and Hungary, the successors of Otto saw their rule owned from the Eider to the Liris, from Bruges to Vienna, from the Vistula to the Rhone.

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The

religious movement.

three

It was this mighty domain which passed in 1039, years before Eadward's accession to the English throne, into the hands of the second of the Franconian line, the Emperor Henry the Third. None of its rulers had shown a nobler temper or a greater capacity for action. In seven years Bohemia was quieted, Hungary conquered, and public peace established throughout Germany. But the projects of Henry were wider than those of a merely German king. He crossed the Alps to put himself at the head of a movement for the reform of the Church. A new

religious enthusiasm was awakening throughout Europe, an enthusiasm which showed itself in the reform of monasticism, in a passion for pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and in the foundation of religious houses. We have seen how energetically this movement was working in Normandy; it was the coldness, if not the antagonism, that the house of Godwine showed to it which was the special weakness of their policy in England. Godwine himself founded no religious house; he was charged by his enemies with plundering many. His son Swein outraged the religious sentiment of the day by his abduction of an abbess. But if it was repulsed by the house of Godwine, the revival found friends elsewhere. Leofric of Mercia was renowned for his piety and his bounty to religious houses. Eadward himself

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Godwine.

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was saintly in his devotion. In England however, as abroad, the first vigour of the revival spent itself on The House of the crying scandal of the day, the feudalization of the Church by grants or purchase of its highest offices as fiefs of lord or king, and by their transmission like lay estates from father to son.

and the Papacy.

It was against this abuse that Henry specially The Empire directed his action. In the theory of the Empire a spiritual head was as needful for Christendom as a secular head; Emperor and Pope were alike God's vice-gerents in His government of the world. But the Papacy was now on the verge of a more complete feudalization than the meaner prelacies of the Western Church. Three claimants now disputed the chair of St. Peter; of these, two had been raised to it by the Roman barons, one by bribery of the Roman people. Their deposition, the elevation of a German Pope, edicts against the purchase of ecclesiastical offices, showed Henry's zeal in the purification of the Church. It was shown still more grandly when the bishop whom he had called to the Papacy as Leo IX. renounced at a warning from the deacon Hildebrand the papal ornaments to which he had no title but the nomination of the Emperor, and only resumed them after a formal election by the clergy of Rome. Henry owned the justness of the principle, and Leo became his coadjutor in the settlement of Christendom. From the reforms of Henry the Third dates that revival of the Papacy which was soon to deal a fatal blow at the Empire itself. Hildebrand, the future Gregory the Seventh, was in Leo's train as he returned over the Alps, and continued to mould the

CHAP. X.

policy of the Papacy in accordance with his own The House of high conception of the commission of Christ's Church

Godwine.

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on earth. But for the moment the ecclesiastical reforms of the Emperor were interrupted by the troubles of the Empire itself. Henry's greatness stirred the jealousy of his feudatories; and though his wonderful activity held the bulk of his realm in peace he was met in Lower Lorraine, the Low Countries of later history, by a rebellion under its duke.

Normandy In this rising Duke Godfrey was backed by two Flanders. powerful neighbours, the count of Holland and the

and

count of Flanders. It was probably in the spring of 1049, at the moment when Baldwin of Lille announced by daring outrages his defiance of the Emperor, that a demand for his daughter's hand reached him from the court of Rouen. In itself the demand was natural enough. William had been pressed by his baronage to take a wife; and kinship alone might have drawn the duke to take her from the house of Flanders. It was no long time since Baldwin the Bearded, the present Count Baldwin's father, had married in his old age a daughter of Richard the Good, a cousin of William as of the English Eadward, and her presence at the court of Bruges would aid in the promotion of further alliances. But we can hardly doubt that political interest had more weight with William than the thought of kinship. A marriage with Matilda of Flanders would strengthen his hold on France, whose growing jealousy formed one of his greatest difficulties. Matilda's mother, Adela, was a sister of King Henry; and the connexion between the courts

СНАР. Х,

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of Paris and Bruges was of the closest kind. Even in a war with France the friendship of Flanders The House of would cover the weakest side of the Norman frontier. But it is likely enough that England already occupied as large a part in William's plans as France. We can hardly doubt from his visit but two years later that dreams of an English crown were already stirring within him. And in any projects upon highest import to secure the

England it was of the

friendship of Flanders.

Flanders.

It was the more important that Baldwin's friendship England and seemed already to have been won by the great English house in which William must even now have discerned the main obstacle to his success.

In seeking the

alliance of the count of Flanders, Godwine was only following the traditional policy of the English kings. A common dread of the northmen had long held the two countries in close political connexion; and the marriage of a former Count Baldwin with Elfthryth1 the daughter of Elfred, was part of a system of alliances by which Eadward the Elder and Æthelstan strove to bridle Normandy in its earlier days. Even when that dread of the northmen died away, a friendly intercourse went on between the two countries. It was at Count Arnulf's court that Dunstan sought refuge in his exile; and one of the archbishop's biographies is due to a Flemish scholar. Commerce too linked England with "Baldwin's land," as Flanders was generally styled. Bruges formed the great mart for the countries of the Lower Rhine; and the merchants of Bruges were seen commonly enough in 1 See p. 183.

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the streets of London. Flemings indeed were among The House of the strangers whose encouragement was laid as a fault to Eadgar's charge. In the later days of Ethelred the political relations between the two countries became of a less friendly kind. It was from a Flemish harbour that Cnut steered to English shores, and it was at Bruges that Emma and Harthacnut planned their invasion of England. But aid to Harthacnut and Emma was less offensive to Eadward than it would have been to Harald Harefoot, and even the reception of some Danish pirates in the Scheldt, with English booty on board, was hardly of weight enough to prevent the renewal of the old English friendship during the Confessor's reign.

The policy of
William.

The friendship was at this time drawn closer by the relations between Baldwin and the real ruler of England. A formal alliance by which Godwine and the count were bound to each other was of old standing; and it had been sedulously strengthened on the earl's part by repeated gifts. The terms on which the two houses stood had indeed been shown only a year before by the reception which Swein found at Baldwin's court. To break the connexion between the house of Godwine and the Flemish court, at any rate to neutralize its force, was of the first importance therefore for any success in after attempts upon England. The march of a Flemish army on Rouen, the appearance of a Flemish squadron off the Seine, would alike be fatal to any passage of the Channel by a Norman force. The friendship of Baldwin, on the other hand, would complete the schemes which William was already devising for securing the whole

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