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REMISSION OF THE WAR-TAX.

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when England could find no defence against strangers except by taking other strangers into her pay. Its remission was doubtless looked on as a declaration that England no longer needed the services of strangers, or of hired troops of any kind, but that she could trust to the ready patriotism and valour of her own sons. The Law required every Englishman to join the royal standard at the royal summons.1 The effectual execution of that law was doubtless held to be a truer safeguard than the employment of men, whether natives or strangers, who served only for their pay. Such reasonings had their weak side even in those days, but they were eminently in the spirit of the time. The measure was undoubtedly a popular one, and we are hardly in a position to say that, under the circumstances of the time, it may not have been a wise one.

§ 4. The Banishment of Earl Godwine. 1051.

The influence of the strangers had now reached its height. As yet it has appeared on the face of the narrative mainly in the direction given to ecclesiastical preferments. During the first nine years of Eadward's reign, we find no signs of any open warfare between the national and the Normannizing parties. The course of events shows that Godwine's power was being practically undermined, but he was still outwardly in the enjoyment of royal favour, and his vast possessions were still being added to by royal grants.2 It is remarkable how seldom, at this stage of Eadward's reign, the acts of the Witan bear the signatures of any foreigners except churchmen.3 We meet also with slight indications showing that the King's foreign kinsmen and the national leaders were not yet on terms of open enmity.* It was probably the policy of the strangers to confine their action in public matters to influencing the King's mind through his ecclesiastical favourites, while the others were gradually providing in other ways for their own firm establishment in the land. But the tale

1 See vol. i. p. 227.

2 There is a grant of lands to Godwine ("uni meo fideli Duci nuncupato nomine Godwino") as late as 1050. Cod. Dipl. iv. 123. The description of the grantee as "Dux" of course identifies him with the Earl.

3 The only absolutely certain instances that I can find at this time are the signatures of Earl Ralph in 1050. See above, -p. 109. His name is added to doubtful charters in Cod. Dipl. iv. 113, 121, and another doubtful one is signed by Robert the son of Wimarc, of whom more anon. The signatures of ecclesiastics, Rægnbold

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the Chancellor and others, are more com

mon.

4 Ralph's wife bore the name of Gytha, and their son was named Harold. See Appendix KK. Robert the son of Wimarc had also a son named Swegen, afterwards famous in Domesday. See Ellis, i. 433, 489; ii. 117. These names certainly point to a certain identification with England, and suggest the idea that the sons of Ralph and Robert were godsons of the two sons of Godwine. Cf. the sons of Danes in England bearing English names. See vol. i. pp. 348, 522.

which I now have to tell clearly reveals the fact that the number of French land-owners in England was already considerable, and that they had made themselves deeply hateful to the English people. Stealthily but surely, the foreign favourites of Eadward had eaten into the vitals of England, and they soon found the means of showing how bitter was the hatred which they bore towards the champions of English freedom. England now, under a native King of her own choice, felt, far more keenly than she had ever felt under her Danish conqueror, how great the evil is when a King and those who immediately surround him are estranged in feeling from the mass of his people. The great Dane had gradually learned to feel and to reign as an Englishman, to trust himself to the love of his English subjects, and to surround the throne of the conqueror with the men whom his own axe and spear had overcome. Even during the troubled reigns of his two sons, the degeneracy was for the most part merely personal. Harthacnut indeed laid on heavy and unpopular taxes for the payment of his Danish fleet;1 but it does not appear that, even under him, Englishmen as Englishmen were subjected to systematic oppression and insult on the part of strangers. And, after all, the Danish followers of Cnut and his sons were men of kindred blood and speech. They could hardly be looked on in any part of England as aliens in the strictest sense, while to the inhabitants of a large part of the Kingdom they appeared as actual countrymen. But now, as a foretaste of what was to come fifteen years later, men utterly strange in speech and feeling stood around the throne, they engrossed the personal favour of the King, they perverted the course of justice, they shared among themselves the highest places in the Church, and they were already beginning to stretch out their hands to English lands and lordships as well as to English Bishopricks. 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 live as an Englishman under the Law of England. But to the French favourites of Eadward the name, the speech, the laws of England were things on which their ignorant pride looked down with utter contempt. 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,2 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 1 See vol. i. pp. 342, 343, 346. 2 See vol. i. p. 172.

NORMAN INFLUENCE AT ITS HEIGHT.

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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 inferiority and barbarism. The Dane spoke a tongue which 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 Romanized courts of Rouen and Paris. The Dane met the 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 the long warfare which had ranged from the fight of Reading to the fight of Assandun. To the Frenchman 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.2 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 where the national tongue is despised and where the sounds of a foreign speech are alone thought worthy of royal lips, a Court in which the heart of the sovereign 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 English thing within the realm of England. But for ages

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.

G 2

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

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 Elfheah. Against such a state

of things as this the heart of England rose. And the soul of the patriotic movement, the leader of the patriotic struggle, was the 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 West-Saxons.

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 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 Elfred.2 A dispute about the right to some lands which adjoined the estates both of the Earl and of the Primate further embittered the dissension between them.3 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.

We have seen that Eadward's sister Godgifu-the Goda of Norman writers-the daughter of Ethelred and Emma, had been married to Drogo, Count of Mantes or of the French Vexin. Their son, Ralph the Timid, was now high in favour at the court of his uncle, and was already invested with an English Earldom. Drogo had accompanied 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

6

5

1 Vita Eadw. 400. "Totius ecclesiæ filiis hanc injuriam pro nisu suo reclamantibus."

2 Ib. 401.

344.

See vol. i. pp. 330-335,

3 Vita Eadw. 400. See Appendix E. 4 See above, pp. 30, 71.

5 Ord. Vit. 487 D, 655 C.

6 A daughter of Ethelred and Emma must have been thirty-five years old at this

EUSTACE AT DOVER.

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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 the King of the English, presently came, like the rest of the world, to the English Court. The exact object of his 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. 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 one and thirty years 5 had lived under the rule of Godwine, looked on matters in quite another light. The Frenchmen expected to find free quarters in the town of Dover, and they attempted to lodge them

3

66

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. Will. Malms. ii. 199. Colloquutus cum eo, et re impetratâ quam petierat." This comes from Chron. Petrib. 1048; "And spæc wið hine þæt þæt he pa wolde."

2 Chronn. Wig. 1052; Petrib. 1048. See vol. i. p. 352.

3 I reserve an examination of the authorities for this narrative for the Appen

dix. See Note R. I here refer to the Chronicles only for details.

4 Chron. Petrib. 1048. "Da he wæs sume mila o de mare beheonan Dofran, pe 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. 285. If Godwine really became Earl of Kent in 1017 or 1018 (see vol. i. p. 275) two or three years more must be added.

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