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who, at last, twenty-one years from his first elevation, received, alone among English Kings, the Crown of England as the free gift of her people, and, alone among English Kings, died axe in hand on her own soil, in the defence of England against foreign invaders. One prince alone in the later history of Europe rivals the peculiar glory which attaches to the name of Harold. For him we must seek in a distant age and in a distant land, but in a land connected with our own by a strangely abiding tie. English warriors, soldiers of Harold, chafing under the yoke of the Norman Conqueror, sought service at the court of the Eastern Cæsar, and there retained for ages their national tongue, their national weapon,1 and the proud inheritance of their stainless loyalty. The memory of England and of Harold becomes thus strangely interwoven with the memory of the one prince of later times who died in a still nobler cause than that of the freedom of England. The King who died upon the hill of Senlac finds his only worthy peer in the Emperor who died before the Gate of Saint Romanos. The champion of England against the Southern invader must own a nobler martyr still in the champion of the faith and liberty of Christendom against the misbelieving horde who have ever since defiled the fairest and most historic regions of the world. The blood of Harold and his faithful followers has indeed proved the most fertile seed of English freedom, and the warning signs of the times seem to tell us that the day is fast coming when the blood of Constantine shall no longer send up its cry for vengeance unheeded from the earth.

The second son of Godwine was no doubt raised to greatness in the first instance mainly because he was a son of Godwine; but his great qualities gradually showed that the rank to which he was raised by his father's favour was one which he was fully entitled to retain by his own merits. The earlier elevation of the great Earl's eldest-born was less fortunate. Swegen lived to show that he had a soul of real nobleness within him; but his crimes were great, he was cut off just as he was beginning to amend his ways, and he has left a dark and sad memory behind him. A youth, evidently of no common powers, but wayward, violent, and incapable of self-control, he was hurried first into a flagrant violation of the sentiment of the age, and next into a still fouler breach of the eternal laws of right. His end may well arouse our pity, but his life, as a whole, is a dark blot on the otherwise chequered escutcheon of the house of Godwine. It was clearly felt to be so; the panegyrist of the family never once brings himself to utter the name of Swegen. Only one other child of Godwine calls for personal notice at this stage of our history. Eadgyth, his eldest daughter, became, nearly two years after Eadward's coronation, the willing or 1 See vol. i. p. 346.

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2 Chronn. Ab. Cant. 1044; Petrib. 1043. I shall discuss the exact date afterwards.

CHARACTER OF EADGYTH.

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unwilling bride of the saintly monarch. She is described as being no less highly gifted among women than her brothers were among men; as lovely in person and adorned with every female accomplishment, as endowed with a learning and refinement unusual in her age, as in point of piety and liberality a fitting help-meet for Eadward himself.1 But there are some strange inconsistencies in the facts which are recorded of her. Her zeal and piety did not hinder her from receiving rewards, perhaps, in plain words, from taking bribes. This is undoubtedly a subject on which the feelings of past times differed widely from our own; still we are a little staggered when we find the saintly King and his pious Lady receiving money from religious houses to support claims which, if just, should have been supported for nothing, and, if unjust, should not have been supported at all. But Eadgyth has been charged with far heavier offences than this. She seems to have become in some degree infected with her husband's love of foreigners, perhaps even in some sort to have withdrawn her sympathies from the national cause. She has won the doubtful honour of having her name extolled by Norman flatterers as one whose heart was rather Norman than English. And all her reputation for gentleness and piety has not kept her from being branded in the pages of one of our best chroniclers as an accomplice in a base and treacherous murder. Her character thus becomes in some sort an ænigma, and her relation to her husband is not the least ænigmatical part of her position. One of Eadward's claims to be looked on as a saint was the general belief, at least of the next generation, that the husband of the beautiful Eadgyth

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Et quicquid scribes, laus et honor
sit ei."

This perhaps gave occasion for the more
elaborate and better known description in
the false Ingulf.

William of Malmesbury's account of her (ii. 197) is singular; "Femina in cujus pcctore omnium liberalium artium esset gymnasium, sed parvum in mundanis rebus ingenium; quam quum videres, si literas stuperes, modestiam certe animi et speciem corporis desiderares."

2 Hist. Rams. cxiv. (p. 457). Abbot Elfwine, wishing to obtain certain lands bequeathed to the monastery by one

Ethelwine the Black, but which were withheld from it by one Elfric the son of Wihtgar, "apposuit quoque de divitis crumena dispendio viginti marcas auri, quibus gratiam Regis mercaretur, Ædthithe [sic] quippe Reginæ sedulitatem quinque marcarum auri pretio exegit interponi, ut pias ejus preces regiis auribus fideliter importaret." So again, in a charter of 1060 in Cod. Dipl. iv. 142, Eadgyth lays claim to certain lands claimed by the Abbey of Peterborough, but on the intercession of her husband and her brothers Harold and Tostig (none of whom seem to have taken anything), and on the gift of twenty marks and certain church ornaments, she is induced to confirm the grant. That she looked carefully after her rents in money, kine, and honey, and after the man who stole her horse (Cod. Dipl. iv. 257), is no blame to her.

3 Will. Pict. 199 A, B (Duckèsne). Flor. Wig. 1065.

lived with her only as a brother with a sister.1 If this story be true, a more enlightened standard of morality can see no virtue, but rather a crime, in his conduct. We can see nothing to admire in a King who, in such a crisis of his country, himself well nigh the last of his race, and without any available member of the royal family to succeed him, shrank, from whatever motive, from the obvious duty of raising up direct heirs to his Crown. But it seems probable that this report is merely part of the legend of the saint and not part of the history of the King. His contemporary panegyrists undoubtedly praise Eadward's chastity. But it is not necessary to construe their words as meaning more than might be asserted of Alfred, of William, of Saint Lewis, or of Edward the First. The conjugal faith of all those great monarchs remained, as far as we know, unbroken; but not one of them thought it any part of his duty to observe continence towards his own wife. Still, from whatever cause, the marriage of Eadward and Eadgyth was undoubtedly childless; and the relations of the royal pair to each other in other respects are hardly more intelligible. Eadgyth is described as the partaker of all her husband's good works, and as nursing him with the most affectionate care during his last sickness.2 Yet, at the moment of his reign when he could most freely exercise a will of his own, if he did not absolutely of his own accord banish her from his court, he consented, seemingly without any reluctance, to her removal from him by the enemies of her family and her country.3 The anxiety of Eadward's Norman favourites to separate Eadgyth from her husband is, after all, the most honourable record of her to be found among the singularly contradictory descriptions of her character and actions.

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We thus find, within a few years after the accession of Eadward, the whole of the ancient Kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex, East-Anglia, and part of Mercia, under the government of Godwine, his two elder sons, and his nephew. His daughter meanwhile shared the throne of England with a King whom he had himself placed upon it. Such greatness could hardly be lasting. It rested wholly on Godwine's own personal character and influence, for the fame of Harold was yet to be won. Those parts of Mercia which were not otherwise occupied remained, as before, in the hands of Leofric the son of Leofwine, under whom Worcestershire seems, at all events some years later, to have been held by the King's nephew Ralph as a subordinate earldom. Leofric and his famous wife Godgifu, the Lady Godiva of legend," were chiefly celebrated for their boundless

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EARLDOMS OF LEOFRIC AND SIWARD.

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liberality to ecclesiastical foundations.1 Worcester, Leominster, Evesham, Chester, Wenlock, Stow in Lindesey, and, above all, Coventry, were special objects of their bounty. They seem not to have been satisfied with mere grants of lands and privileges, but to have taken a special interest in the buildings and ornaments of the houses which they favoured. The minster of Coventry, rebuilt and raised to cathedral rank after their time, has utterly vanished from the earth, and recent changes have abolished even the titular position of the city as a see of a Bishop. But at Stow, the ancient Sidnacester, a place even then of infinitely less consideration than Coventry, portions of the church enriched by Leofric still remain.2 Leofric, his son Elfgar, his grandsons and his granddaughter, play an important part in the history of this period down to the complete establishment of the Norman power in England. It is clear that Leofric must have felt more personal annoyance at the rise of Godwine and his house than any other of the great men of England. A race whom he could not fail to look down upon as upstarts hemmed him in on every side except towards the North. Later in the reign of Eadward, we shall find the rivalries and the reconciliations of the two houses of Godwine and Leofric forming a considerable portion of the history. But while Leofric himself lived, he continued to play the part which we have already seen him playing," that part of a mediator between two extreme parties which was laid upon him by the geographical position of his Earldom.

North of the Humber, the great Dane, Siward the Strong, still ruled over the Earldom which he had won by the murder of his wife's uncle. The manners of the Northumbrians were so savage, murders and hereditary deadly feuds were so rife among them, that

factor of Crowland Abbey. Cf. John of Peterborough, a. 1052. p. 49 Giles. See Mr. Nichols on the Earldom of Lincoln in the Lincoln volume of the Archælogical Institute, p. 256. The legend of her riding naked through Coventry is found in Roger of Wendover (i 497), Bromton (949), and Knighton (2334). They do not mention peeping Tom, who, it is some comfort to think, must at any rate have been one of King Eadward's Frenchmen.

1 See Will. Malms. ii. 196. Cf. Æthel. Rev. 389; Chron. Evesham. 84 This last writer extends Leofric's authority to the borders of Scotland.

2 "Stow sub promontorio Lincolnia." Bromton, 949. See the charters of Bishop Wulfwig, Cod. Dipl. iv. 290. The church was not built by Leofric, but by Eadnoth the Second, Bishop of Dorchester (1034

1050); Leofric's benefaction took the form of ornaments. See Flor. Wig. 1057, where he calls Stow "locus famosus qui Sanctæ Maria Stou Anglice, Latine vero Sanctæ Mariæ Locus appellatur." The antiquity of part of the church is indisputable, but a more wretched village can hardly be found.

A document, professing to be a petition from Godgifu to Pope Victor, praying for the confirmation of her gifts to Stow, is marked as doubtful by Mr. Kemble (Cod. Dipl. iv. 168), doubtless on good grounds. But I do not understand his date, 10601066, as the Popedom of Victor the Second was from 1055 to 1057. Siward, who died early in 1055, could hardly have signed an address to Pope Victor. 3 See vol. i. p. 326. 4 See vol. i. p. 352.

it is quite possible that the slaughter of Eadwulf may have been looked on, by a party at least, as a praiseworthy act of vigour. Perhaps however, as we go on, we may discern signs that Siward and his house were not specially popular in Northumberland, and that men looked back with regret to the more regular line of their native Earls. However this may be, Siward remained for the rest of his days in undisturbed possession of both the Northumbrian governments, and along with these he seems to have held the Earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon within the proper limits of Mercia.1 He ruled, we are told, with great firmness and severity, labouring hard to bring his troublesome province into something like order.2 Neither was he lacking in that bounty to the Church, which might seem specially needful as an atonement for the crime by which he rose to power.3

The mention of these great Earls suggests several considerations as to the constitutional and administrative systems of the time. It is quite a mistake to think, as often has been thought, that the position of these powerful viceroys at all proves that England was at this time tending to separation. It was in truth tending to closer union, and the position of the great Earls is really one of the signs of that tendency. A mistaken parallel has sometimes been drawn between the condition of England under Eadward and the condition of Gaul under the later Karlings. The transfer of the English sceptre to the house of Godwine is of course likened to the transfer of the French sceptre to the house of Hugh of Paris. But if we are to look for a parallel in Gaulish history, we shall find one, by no means exact but certainly the closer of the two, in the state of things under the later Merwings, and in the transfer of the Frankish sceptre to the Carolingian dynasty. The position of Godwine and Harold is, of the two, more akin to the position of Charles Martel and Pippin than it is to that of Hugh the Great and Hugh Capet. The Earls of Eadward's reign were, as I have already explained, not territorial princes, gradually withdrawing themselves from the authority of their nominal over-lord, but great magistrates, wielding indeed a power well nigh royal within their several governments, but wielding it only by delegation from the common sovereign. The Danish Conquest, and the fearful slaughter of the ancient nobility in the wars of Swegen and Cnut, had done much to break up the force of ancient local associations and the influence of the ancient local families. Many of these families, that of the East-Anglian Earls for instance, doubtless became extinct. · From the accession of Cnut we find a new state of things. The rule of the old half-kingly families, holding an almost hereditary sway over 3 See Chronn. 1055.

1 See Appendix G.

2 Vita Eadw. 421, 422.

See vol. i. p. 166.

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