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DEBATE IN THE KING'S GEMÓT AT Bretford.

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wrath and excitement of mind that he fell into the sickness of which he never recovered. He complained bitterly before God that he was hindered from chastising the unrighteous, and called for divine vengeance seemingly alike upon the original offenders and on those who stood in the way of their punishment.1 But the wrath of the Saint, if violent for the time, was not always lasting, and however vigorous he may have been in curses and prophecies, he seems to have practically allowed Harold to act in his name and to settle matters as he chose.3

2

The course for Harold to take was obvious, whether looked at from the point of view of his own interest or from that of the interest of his country. The dictates of the two were exactly the same; both alike prompted him to secure a real and great advantage at the cost of a certain sacrifice of pride and passion. The revolt of the Northhumbrians could not be justified on any showing. They had undoubtedly suffered great wrongs, but they had not taken the right means to redress them. Their proper course would undoubtedly have been that which Harold himself suggested, to bring their charges against their Earl for public inquiry in a Witenagemót of the whole realm. The Gemót at York had usurped functions which did not belong to it; the deposition and outlawry of Tostig, and the election of Morkere, were both utterly illegal. The massacre and plunder at York, above all the ravages in Northamptonshire, were still more thoroughly unjustifiable. All these were doings which, in one man or in a few men, would have called for exemplary punishment. But in a case like this, where the guilty parties were the great bulk of the people of Northumberland and of several shires of Mercia, it was absurd to talk of punishment. The question was not a question of punishment, but one of peace or war. Was it either right or expedient, in the general interest of the Kingdom of England, for Wessex and East-Anglia to make war upon Northumberland and Mercia? The object of such a war would have been simply to force on Northumberland an Earl whom the Northumbrian people had rejected, and who had shown himself utterly unfit for his post. The royal authority would undoubtedly suffer some humiliation by yielding to demands which had been backed by an armed force; still such

1 Vita Eadw. 423. "Contestatusque Deum cum gravi moerore ipsi conquestus est quod suorum debito destitueretur obauditu ad comprimendam iniquorum superbiam. Denique super eos imprecatus est vindictam."

2 See above, pp. 14, 89.

3 Chronn. Wig. Petrib. "And se cyng þæs geude, and sende eft Harold heom to Hamtune" [it should be Oxford, see Appendix TT]. William of Malmesbury (iii.

252) does not ill describe the state of things; "Fiebant ista, ut a consciis accepimus [had William talked with the Biographer?], infenso Rege, quia Tostinum diligeret; sed morbo invalidus, senio gravis, pene jam despectui omnibus haberi cœperat ut dilecto auxiliari non posset." When William wrote, Eadward, however much reverenced, was not yet formally canonized.

humiliation would be a less evil than a civil war, the issue of which would be very doubtful, and whose results, in any case, would prove most baneful, if not ruinous, to the country. As a brother, Harold had done all for his brother that could be asked of him, in his proposal made in the first conference at Northampton. It could not be his duty-I quote the judgement of a writer of the next age not specially favourable to Harold1-to bring such untold evils on his country merely for the chance of restoring his brother to the authority which he had so deeply abused. Harold therefore, as a statesman and a patriot, made up his mind to yield to the demands of the insurgents.

It is equally plain that exactly the same course was dictated to him by his own interests as a candidate for the Crown. He had lost in every way by the revolt. Hitherto all England, except Eadwine's share of Mercia, had been under the government of himself and his brothers. The House of Godwine held four out of the five great Earldoms; the House of Leofric held only one. Now things were turned about. The House of Godwine still held three Earldoms, while the House of Leofric held but two; but the two which were held by the House of Leofric formed a larger, and a far more compact and united, territory than the three which were held by the House of Godwine. The opposition of a candidate from the rival family, or a proposal for the division of the Kingdom, was incomparably more likely, now that the vast region between the Welland and the Tweed was practically under the control of a single will, and that a will which Harold had small means of influencing. But deeply as Harold had lost by the Northumbrian revolution, he would have lost still more by an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution by force. Whether such an attempt succeeded or failed, the result would be much the same. In either case the sons of Elfgar, and the vast district over which they ruled, would become, not merely indifferent or unfriendly to his claims, but avowedly and bitterly hostile. In the face of their open enmity, his succession to the whole Kingdom would be hopeless; he might possibly become King of the West-Saxons; he could never become King of the English. With men like Eadwine and Morkere the tie of gratitude was likely to be but weak. Still it was the wisest course to make the best even of so weak a tie. It was wise to do the rival Earls a good turn, and so to take his chance of winning their good will, rather than at once to turn them into deadly foes. It was true that every step by which he conciliated Eadwine and Morkere would make a bitterer enemy of his own brother. But Harold's mere hesitation and moderation were already in the eyes of Tostig an unpardonable offence. His brother's enmity he had won already, and

1. Will. Malms. ii. 200. commodum attenderet."

"Haroldus . . . qui magis quietem patriæ quam fratris

GEMÓT OF OXFORD.

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he could hardly foresee that that enmity would one day be still more dangerous to him than any opposition that was to be dreaded from Mercia or Northumberland.

On these grounds then, public and private, Harold, armed, it would now seem, with the full royal authority, determined to yield to the insurgents. While their answer was under discussion in the King's Gemót,' they had been ravaging Northamptonshire, and they had since entered the Earldom of Gyrth and had advanced as far as Oxford. There, in the frontier town of Mercia and Wessex, the town where the common affairs of the two great divisions of the Kingdom had been so often discussed, the Earl of the West-Saxons summoned a general Witenagemót of the whole realm.2 The Assembly met on the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude (October 28, 1065). After one more attempt to bring about a reconciliation between Tostig and the Northumbrians, Harold yielded every point. The irregular acts of the Northumbrian Gemót were confirmed by lawful authority. The deposition and outlawry of Tostig, the election of Morkere to the Northern Earldom, were legalized. But the outlying parts of the government of Siward and Tostig, the shires of Northampton and Huntingdon, were now detached from Northumberland, and were bestowed on Siward's young son Waltheof.1 He thus received an ample provision, while he was cut off from the exercise of any influence which he might possess in Morkere's Earldom, whether as the son of Siward or as a descendant of the elder line of Earls. And another solemn decree was passed, which shows that this Gemót was meant to be a wiping out of old scores and the beginning of a new æra. Northern and Southern England were again to be solemnly reconciled, as they had been reconciled forty-seven years before in another Assembly held on the same spot. Then, under the presidency of a Danish conqueror, Englishmen and Danes agreed to decree the renewal of the Laws of Eadgar. The sway of law and justice was then held to be impersonated in the peaceful Basileus, the hero of the triumph of Chester. In the space of those forty-seven years, the foreign conqueror who had presided in that earlier Gemót of Oxford had supplanted Eadgar himself as the hero of the national affections. In the North above all, where in life he had been perhaps less valued, the rule of the great Dane was now looked back to as the

That the ravages took place during this interval appears from the words of the Peterborough and Worcester Chronicles, that they happened "pa hwile pe he [Harold] for heora ærende.”

2 Both this and the Northampton Assembly are called "Mycel Gemót." See Appendix TT.

3 This is, I think, implied in the words of the Abingdon writer and of Florence (see Appendix TT). Harold tries to reconcile them ibi"-at Northampton"et post apud Oxnefordam."

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* See above, p. 250, and Appendix G. 5 See vol. i. p. 281.

golden age, the happy time before the tyranny of Tostig and the stern government of Siward. The South too, which, under the rule of Godwine and Harold, had no such complaints to make, might still look back with regret to the days of the King under whom Wessex had been, what she never was before or after, the Imperial state of all Northern Europe. Cnut now, as Eadgar then, was the one prince whose name North and South, Dane and Englishman, united in reverencing. He was the one prince whom all could agree in holding up to future Kings and Earls as the faultless model of a ruler. In this case, as in the earlier one, the reconciliation of the two parts of the realm took the form of a decree for the restoration of an earlier and better state of things. The Witenagemót of Oxford, with Earl Harold at its head, decreed with all solemnity the renewal of the laws of Cnut.1

One step more remained to be taken. The deposed Earl had to leave the Kingdom. According to one account, it would seem that a violent expulsion was still needed, in which Earl Eadwine appears as the chief actor. But this account seems to be a misconception. It would rather seem that, while all these messages and debates were going on, Tostig had never quitted the King. After this last decree, Eadward saw that he had no longer any power to protect him, and he therefore, though with deep sorrow, required his favourite's departure.3 The Earl bade farewell to his mother and his friends, and with his wife and his children, and some partizans who shared his exile," he set forth for the same friendly refuge which had sheltered him when a guiltless exile fourteen years before. He left England on the Feast of All Saints (November 1). The means of communication in those days must, as we have already seen more than once, have been much speedier than we are generally inclined to think. This whole revolution, with its gatherings, its meetings, its marches, its messages to and fro between distant places, took up less than one Kalendar month, from the first assemblage of the Thegns at York to the departure of Tostig from England. The banished Earl crossed over to Baldwines

1 Chronn. Wig. Petrib. "And he [Harold] niwade þær Cnutes lage."

2 Fl. Wig. "Cum adjutorio Comitis Eadwini de Angliâ Tostium expulerunt."

3 Vita Eadw. 423. "At Deo dilectus Rex, quum Ducem suum tutare non posset, gratiâ suâ multipliciter donatum, ⚫morens nimium quod in hanc impotentiam deciderit, a se dimisit." The Chronicles, by simply saying "fór ofer sæ," or something to that effect, distinctly favour the Biographer's account.

The Chronicles mention the departure of Tostig and his wife; the Biographer

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BANISHMENT OF TOSTIG.

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land, the land of his wife's brother. Under his protection he passed the whole of the winter at Saint Omer.1

§ 4. The Last Days of Eadward.

1065-1066.2

The life of Eadward was now drawing near to its end; we are approaching the close of the first act of our great drama. From the sickness into which Eadward was thrown by the excitement of the Northumbrian revolt, he never thoroughly recovered.3 He barely lived to complete the great work of his life: The royal saint deemed himself set upon the throne, not to secure the welfare or the inde→→ pendence of his Kingdom, but to build a church and endow a monastery in honour of the Prince of the Apostles. If we were reading the life, not of a King, but of a Bishop or Abbot, we might well look on this as an object worthy of the devotion of a life. It was no small work to rear that stately minster which has ever since been the crowning-place of our Kings, and which for so many ages remained their place of burial. It was no small work to call into being that mighty Abbey, whose chapter-house plays so great a part in the growth of the restored freedom of England, and which has well nigh supplanted the Kentish mother-church itself as the ecclesiastical home of the English nation. The church of Saint Peter at Westminster, the great work of Eadward's life, has proved a more than equal rival of the older sanctuaries of Canterbury and York and Winchester and Glastonbury. But when looked at as the work of a King in such an age, it awakens very different feelings from those with which we look on the ecclesiastical works of Ælfred or Æthelstan or Harold. In the eyes of those great princes, a care for ecclesiastical administration and ecclesiastical reform, the establishment of foundations designed to spread piety and enlightenment among their people, naturally and rightly seemed an important part of the duty of a ruler. But in Eadward we can discern no sign of the higher aspirations of a sovereign; a monk rather than a King, he seems never to have risen beyond a monk's selfish anxiety for the welfare of his own soul. The

1 Chronn. Ab. Wig. Petrib. and Flor. Wig. The Abingdon Chronicle and Florence alone mention Saint Omer.

2 Since this section was written, Dean Stanley has published his Memorials of Westminster Abbey, in the early part of which he goes over nearly the same ground. But I find a good deal of difference between my ideas of historical evidence and those of the Dean,

Flor. Wig. "Post hæc Rex Eadwardus

paullatim ægrotare cœpit." Vita Eadw. 423. "Quo dolore decidens in morbum, ab eâ die usque in diem mortis suæ ægrum trahebat animum." Will. Malms. iii. 252. "Quare ex animi ægritudine majorem valetudinem corporis contrahens, non multo post decessit." The hagiographers do not feel called on to enlarge on the real cause of the death of their hero-baffled wrath against his own people.

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