CHAP. VII. The Dane, once brought to the knowledge of a purer faith and a higher civilization, soon learned to identify

himself with the land in which he had settled, and to Incapacity live as an Englishman under the Law of England. But

of the

French to to the French favourites of Eadward the name, the speech, appreciate the laws of England were things on which their ignorant English

institu- pride looked down with utter contempt.

tions.

They had no sympathy with that great fabric of English liberty, which gave to every freeman his place in the commonwealth, and even to the slave held out the prospect of freedom. Gentlemen of the school of Richard the Good,1 taught to despise all beneath them as beings of an inferior nature, could not understand the spirit of a land where the Churl had his rights before the Law, where he could still raise his applauding voice in the Assemblies of the nation, and where men already felt as keenly as we feel now that an Englishman's house is his castle. Everything in short which had already made England free and glorious, everything which it is now our pride and happiness to have preserved down to our own times, was looked on by the foreign counsellors of Eadward as a mark of manifest inDiversity feriority and barbarism. The Dane spoke a tongue which in speech; hardly differed more widely from our own than the dialects of different parts of the Kingdom differed from one another. But the ancient mother-speech, once common to Dane and Frank and Angle and Saxon, the speech of which some faint traces may still have lingered at Laôn and at Bayeux, had now become only one of many objects of contempt in the eyes of men whose standards were drawn from the in military Romanized courts of Rouen and Paris. The Dane met the

tactics.

Englishman in battle, face to face and hand to hand, with the same tactics and the same weapons. Shield-wall to shield-wall, sword to sword or axe to axe, had men waged 871-1016. the long warfare which had ranged from the fight of

1 See vol. i. p. 254.

CONTRAST BETWEEN ENGLISH AND FRENCH.

127

Reading to the fight of Assandun. To the Frenchman CHAP. VII. the traditions of Teutonic warfare appeared contemptible.1 His trust was placed, not in the stout heart and the strong arm of the warrior, but in the horse which is as useful in the flight as in the charge, and in the arrow which places the coward and the hero upon a level. Men brought up in such feelings as these, full too no doubt of the insolent and biting wit of their nation, now stood round the throne of the King of the English. They were not as yet, to any great extent, temporal rulers of the land, but they had already begun to be owners of its soil; they were already the Fathers of the Church; they were the personal friends of the King; they were the channels of royal favour; their influence could obtain the highest ecclesiastical office, when it was refused alike to the demand of the Earl of the West-Saxons and to the prayer of the canonical electors. In the company of these men the King was at home; among his own people he was a stranger. The sight of a denationalized Court, a Court Evils of a where the national tongue is despised and where the alized sounds of a foreign speech are alone thought worthy of Court, especially in royal lips, a Court in which the heart of the sovereign early times. beats more warmly for foreign favourites or foreign kinsmen than for the children of the soil, is a sight which in any age is enough to stir up a nation's blood. But far heavier is the wrong in an age when Kings govern as well as reign, when it is not the mere hangers-on of a Court, but the nation itself, which is made personally to feel that strangers fill the posts of influence and honour on its own soil and at its own cost. Often indeed since the days of Eadward has the Court of England been the least

1 "Nescia gens belli solamina spernit equorum," says Guy of Amiens (369) of the English, but his following lines are, however unwittingly, a noble panegyric.

* Thuc. iv. 40. ἀπεκρίνατο αὐτῷ πολλοῦ ἂν ἄξιον εἶναι τὸν ἄτρακτον (λέγων τὸν ὀϊστὸν), εἰ τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς διεγίγνωσκε.

denation

CHAP. VII. English thing within the realm of England. But for ages past no sovereign, however foreign in blood or feeling,

could have ventured to place a stranger ignorant of the

English tongue on the patriarchal throne of Dunstan and Revolt of Elfheah. Against such a state of things as this the England against the heart of England rose. And the soul of the patriotic foreign in- movement, the leader of the patriotic struggle, was the

fluence.

Indignation at the appointment of

Robert to Canterbury.

man whom Norman calumny has ever since picked out as its special victim, but with whom every true English heart was prepared to live and die. The man who strove for England, the man who for a while suffered for England, but who soon returned in triumph to rescue England, was once more Godwine, Earl of the WestSaxons.

The refusal of the King to bestow the Archbishoprick of Canterbury on a kinsman of the great Earl regularly chosen by the Convent of the metropolitan church, its bestowal instead on an intriguing monk from Jumièges, had no doubt deeply embittered the feelings of Godwine and of all true Englishmen. All the sons of the Church, we are told, lamented the wrong;1 and we may be sure that the feeling was in no way confined to those who are doubtless chiefly intended by that description. It now became the main object of the foreign Archbishop to bring Godwine. about the ruin of the English Earl. Robert employed his influence with the King to set him still more strongly against his father-in-law, to fill his ears with calumnies against him, above all, to bring up again the old charge of which Godwine had been so solemnly acquitted, that which made him an accomplice in the death of Ælfred.2 A dispute about the right to some lands which adjoined

Robert's cabals

against

1051.

1 Vita Eadw. 400. reclamantibus."

"Totius ecclesiæ filiis hanc injuriam pro nisu suo

2 Ib. 401. See vol. i. pp. 489-497, 510.

INDIGNATION AT ROBERT'S APPOINTMENT.

129

the estates both of the Earl and of the Primate further CHAP. VII. embittered the dissension between them.' It was plain that Godwine's influence was fast giving way, and that an open struggle was becoming imminent. Just at this moment, an act of foreign insolence and brutality which surpassed anything which had hitherto happened brought the whole matter to a crisis.

3

and Eu

We have seen that Eadward's sister Godgifu-the Goda Marriages of Norman writers-the daughter of Ethelred and Emma, daughter of of Godgifu had been married to Drogo, Count of Mantes or of the Ethelred with Drogo French Vexin. Their son, Ralph the Timid, was now of Mantes high in favour at the court of his uncle, and was already stace of invested with an English Earldom.2 Drogo had accomBoulogne. panied Duke Robert on his pilgrimage, and, like him, had died on his journey. His widow, who must now have been a good deal past her prime, had nevertheless found a second French husband in Eustace Count of Boulogne. This prince, whom English history sets before us only in the darkest colours, was fated by a strange destiny to be the father of one of the noblest heroes of Christendom, of Godfrey, Duke of Lotharingia and King of Jerusalem. We cannot however claim the great Crusader as one who had English blood in his veins through either parent. The second marriage of Godgifu was childless, and the renowned sons of Eustace, Godfrey and his brother Baldwin, were the children of his second wife Ida. The Count of Boulogne, now brother-in-law of Visit of the King of the English, presently came, like the rest of Eadward. the world, to the English Court. The exact object of his September,

1 Vita Eadw. 400. See Appendix E. 2 See above, pp. 48, 109.

3 Ord. Vit. 487 D, 655 C.

A daughter of Æthelred and Emma must have been thirty-five years old at this time, and she may have been forty-seven. Considering the position held by her son, Godgifu is likely to have been approaching the more advanced age of the two.

Eustace to

1051.

Return of Eustace.

3

CHAP. VII. Coming is not recorded, but we are told that whatever he came for he got. Some new favours were doubtless won for foreign followers, and some share of the wealth of England for himself. It was now September, and the King, as seems to have been his custom, was spending the autumn at Gloucester.2 Thither then came Count Eustace, and after his satisfactory interview with the King, he turned his face homewards. We have no account of his journey till he reached Canterbury; there he halted, he refreshed himself and his men, and rode on towards Dover. Perhaps, in a land so specially devoted to Godwine, he felt himself to be still more thoroughly in an enemy's country than in other parts of England. At all events, when they were still a few miles from Dover, the Count and all his company took the precaution of putting on their coats of mail. They entered the town; accustomed to the unbridled licence of their own land, puffed up no doubt by the favourable reception which they had met with at the King's Court, they deemed that the goods and lives of Englishmen were at their mercy. Who was the villain or the burgher who could dare to refuse ought to a sovereign prince, the friend and brother-in-law of the Emperor of Britain? Men born on English soil, accustomed to the protection of English Law, men who for 1020-1051. one and thirty years had lived under the rule of Godwine, 1 Will. Malms. ii. 199. "Colloquutus cum eo, et re impetratâ quam petierat." This comes from Chron. Petrib. 1048; "And spæc wið hine bæet pæet he pa wolde."

Outrages

of Eustace and his

party at Dover.

2 Chronn. Wig. 1052; Petrib. 1048. See vol. i. p. 522.

3 I reserve an examination of the authorities for this narrative for the Appendix. See Note R. I here refer to the Chronicles only for details.

Chron. Petrib. 1048. "Da he was sume mila odde mare beheonan Dofran, pa dyde he on his byrnan, and his geferan ealle, and foran to Dofran."

5

Thirty-one, reckoning from Godwine's appointment as Earl of the West-Saxons in 1020. See vol. i. p. 422. If Godwine really became Ear of Kent in 1017 or 1018 (see vol. i. p. 407) two or three years more must be added.