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GENERAL FLIGHT OF THE NORMANS.

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done was wholly the deed of the strangers. Some rode west to the castle in Herefordshire, Pentecost's castle, the first cause of so much evil; some rode towards a castle in the north, belonging to the Norman Staller, Robert the son of Wymarc. The Bishops, perhaps the objects of a still fiercer popular indignation than even the lay favourites, undertook a still more perilous journey by themselves. What became of William of London is not quite plain,2 but we have a graphic description of the escape of the Prelates of Canterbury and Dorchester. Robert and Ulf, mounted and sword in hand, cut their way through the streets, wounding and slaying as they went; they burst through the east gate of London; they rode straight for the haven of Eadwulfsness; there they found an old crazy ship; 5 they went on board of her, and so gat them over sea. Never again did those evil Prelates trouble England with their personal presence; but the tongue of Robert was still busy in other lands to do hurt to England and her people. The patriotic chronicler raises an emphatic note of triumph over the ignominious flight of the stranger Primate. "He left behind his pall and all Christendom here in the land, even as God it willed; for that he had before taken upon him that worship, as God willed it not." "

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In the morning the great Assembly met. The great city and

1 Chron. Petrib. "Sume west to Pentecostes castele, sume nor to Rodbertes castele." Pentecost, as we gather from Florence, who speaks of "Osbernus cognomento Pentecost "—what can be the meaning of so strange a surname ?-is the same as Osbern, the son of Richard of Richard's Castle, of whom we have already heard so much. Robert's castle must be some castle belonging to Robert the son of Wymarc, as distinctly the most notable man of his name in the country after Robert the Archbishop. Most of his lands lay in the East of England; but he had also property in the shires of Hertford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, though I do not find any mention of a castle on any of his estates there.

2 The Abingdon Chronicle, followed by Florence, makes William accompany Robert and Ulf on their desperate ride; "Rodbeard bisceop and Willelm bisceop and Ulf bisceop unea de ætburstan mid þam Frenciscum mannum þe heom mid waron, and swa ofer sæ becomon." But the Peterborough writer speaks only of Robert and Ulf, and William's restoration to his see, a matter of which there is no kind of

doubt, would hardly have followed if he had any share in the murderous adventure of his brethren.

3 Chron. Petrib. "And Rodbert arcebisceop and Ulf bisceop gewendon ût æt æst geate, and heora geferan, and ofslogon and elles amyrdon manige iunge men.'” One might almost fancy London apprentices, as in after times, zealous for the popular cause.

4 Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex; see above, p. 71.

5 Chron. Petrib. "And wear him þær on anon unwræste scipe, and ferde him on ân ofer sæ." See Mr. Earle's note on "unwræste," p. 346.

6 Chron. Petrib. "And forlet his pallium and Christendom ealne her on lande, swa swa hit God wolde; pæ he ær begeat pone wurdscipe swa swa hit God nolde." The English tongue has not gained by dropping the negative verb, which survives only in the saying "will he, nill he."

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its coasts were now clear of strangers, save such as had come in the train of the deliverers. The people of England-for such a gathering may well deserve that name-came together to welcome its friends and to give judgement upon its enemies. The two armies and the citizens of London formed a multitude which no building could 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. 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 mountains of Uri and in the open market-place of Trogen. Other Assemblies of those times may have shrunk into Councils of a small body of Thegns and Prelates; but on that great day the English people stood forth, in all the fulness of its ancient rights, as a coordinate authority with the English King. Men came armed to the place of meeting; our fathers did so in their old homes beyond the sea, and our distant kinsmen still preserve the same immemorial use in the free assemblies of Appenzell. 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, sat the King of the English, driven at last to deal 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; there was the mighty multitude of English freemen, gathered to hail the return of the worthiest of their

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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.

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

2 Widutan Lundene," says the Peterborough Chronicler. See Appendix AA.

3 Chron. Petrib. "þær bær Godwine Eorl up his mal, and betealde hine þær wið Eadward cyng his hlaford and wid ealle landleodan."

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

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5 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.

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

7 Chron. Petrib. "And ealle ba 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, Ælfgar, and Siward? 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.

Their presence is

GODWINE Before the GEMÓT.

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own blood. And there, surrounded by his four valiant sons, stood the great deliverer, the man who had set the King upon his throne, 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 put on the guise of humble supplication towards the sovereign who had received his Crown at his hands. 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.2 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 house. Few 5 and weighty were the words which the great Earl spoke that day before the King and all the people of the land." But they were words which at once carried the whole Assembly with them. Those who have heard the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds, when a sovereign people binds itself to obey the laws which it has itself decreed, when thousands of voices join as one man in the rehearsal of one solemn formula, can conceive the shout of assent

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1 II. E. 198;

ἀλλ ̓ αὕτως ἐπὶ τάφρον ἰὼν, Τρώεσσι φάνηθι,

αἴ κε σ ̓ ὑποδδείσαντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο.

"Verentes adspectum Ducis," says the Biographer just above.

2 Vita Eadw. 406. "Viso Rege, protinus 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.

3 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.

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

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

6" Ealle landleodan." We have lost this, like 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.

I refer to the oath of the people of Appenzell-ausser-rhoden in their Landesgemeinde. First the newly elected Land

with 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 of the English nation, at once declared him guiltless, at once decreed the restoration of himself, his sons, 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 merely to put England again into the state in which she stood at the moment of the banishment of Godwine. It was needful to punish the authors of all the evils that had happened, and to take heed that no such evils should ever happen again in days to come. The deepest in guilt 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 harsher sentence than that which was actually pronounced.1 "He had done most to stir up strife between Earl Godwine and the King"-the words of the formal resolution peep out, as they so often do, in the words of the chroniclerand, 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."3 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 meant to strike none but actual offenders. By an exception capable of indefinite and dangerous extension, those were excepted "whom the King liked, and who were

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3 Chron. Ab. "And geutlageden þa ealle Frencisce men, þe ær unlage rærdon, and undom demdon, and unræd ræddon into dissum earde." Modern English utterly fails to express the power of the negative words, which modern High-Dutch 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] advresus Anglos [a touch from Peterborough] dederant, exlegavrunt."

THE GEMOT DECREES GODWINE'S RESTORATION.

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true to him and all his folk."1 Lastly, in the old formula which we have so often already come across-" Good law was decreed for all folk."2 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 like Robert, had won the royal ear wholly to themselves. There was no need to go back to any more distant standard than the earliest years of the reigning King. Good Law was decreed for all folk. Things were to be once more as they had been in the days when Earl Godwine had been the chief adviser of the King on whom he had himself bestowed the Crown.

The work of the Assembly was done; the innocent had been restored, the guilty had been punished; the nation had bound itself to the maintenance of law and right. Godwine was again the foremost man in the realm. But though the political restoration was perfect, the personal reconciliation seems still to have cost the King a struggle. It required the counsel of wise men, and a full conviction that all resistance was hopeless, before Eadward again received his injured father-in-law to his personal friendship. At last he yielded. He returned to Godwine the axe which the Earl had laid at his feet, the restoration of the official weapon being evidently the outward sign of restoration to office and to royal favour.3 King and Earl then walked together to the Palace of Westminster, and there, on his own hearth, Eadward again admitted Godwine to the kiss of peace. To receive again to his friendship the wife and sons of Godwine, Gytha, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, and Leofwine, probably cost Eadward no special struggle. They had never personally offended him, and they seem, even before their outlawry, to have won his personal affection. But the complete restoration of the family to its former honours required another step which may perhaps have cost Eadward a pang. When Godwine, his wife and his sons, were restored to their old honours, it was impossible to refuse the like restitution to his daughter. The Lady Eadgyth was brought back with all royal pomp from her cloister at Wherwell; she received again all the lands and goods of which she

1 Chron. Ab. and Fl. Wig. I shall have to speak of this exception again.

2 lb.

"And callum folce gode lage

beheton."

3 See the passage on which I ground this description in Appendix AA..

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