had been, had yet fallen short of the devastating completeness
of those of the earlier vikings. He had been more set on exacting
tribute than on perpetrating wanton massacres. A few years
of peace and wise administration seem to have restored the realm
to a satisfactory condition. A considerable mass of his legislation
has survived to show Canute’s care for law and order.
Canute died in 1035, aged not more than forty or forty-one. The crown was disputed between his two sons, the half-brothers Harold and Harthacnut; it was doubtful whether the birth of the elder prince was legitimate, and Queen Emma strove to get her own son Harthacnut preferred to him. In Denmark the younger claimant was acknowledged by the whole people, but in England the Mercian and Northumbrian earls chose Harold as king, and Wessex only fell to Harthacnut. Both the young kings were cruel, dissolute and wayward, most unworthy sons of a wise father. It was to the great profit of England that they died within two years of each other, the elder in 1040, the younger in 1042.
On Harthacnut’s death he was succeeded not by any Danish prince but by his half-brother Edward, the elder son of Æthelred and Emma, whom he had entertained at his court, and had apparently designated as his heir, for he had no offspring. There was an end of the empire of Canute, Edward the Confessor. for Denmark fell to the great king’s nephew, Sweyn Estrithson, and Norway had thrown off the Danish yoke. Engaged in wars with each other, Dane and Norseman had no leisure to think of reconquering England. Hence Edward’s accession took place without any friction. He reigned, but did not rule, for twenty-four years, though he was well on in middle age before he was crowned. Of all the descendants of Alfred he was the only one who lived to see his sixtieth birthday—the house of Wessex were a short-lived race. In character he differed from all his ancestors—he had Alfred’s piety without his capacity, and Æthelred’s weakness without his vices. The mildest of men, a crowned monk, who let slip the reins of government from his hands while he busied himself in prayer and church building, he lowered the kingly power to a depth to which it had never sunk before in England. His sole positive quality, over and above his piety, was a love for his mother’s kin, the Normans. He had spent his whole life from 1013 to 1040 as an exile at the court of Rouen, and was far more of a Norman than an Englishman. It was but natural, therefore, that he should invite his continental relatives and the friends of his youth to share in his late-coming prosperity. But when he filled his court with them, made them earls and bishops, and appointed one of them, Robert of Jumièges, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, his undisguised preference for strangers gave no small offence to his English subjects. In the main, however, the king’s personal likes and dislikes mattered little to the realm, since he had a comparatively small share in its governance. He was habitually overruled and dominated by his earls, of whom three, Leofric, Godwine and Siward—all old servants of Canute—had far more power than their master. Holding respectively the great earldoms of West Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, they reigned almost like petty sovereigns in their domains, and there seemed some chance that England might fall apart into semi-independent feudal states, just as France had done in the preceding century. The rivalries and intrigues of these three magnates constitute the main part of the domestic politics of Edward’s reign. Godwine, whose Harold. daughter had wedded the king, was the most forcible and ambitious of the three, but his pre-eminence provoked a general league against him and in 1051 he was cast out of the kingdom with his sons. In the next year he returned in arms, raised Wessex in revolt, and compelled the king to in-law him again, to restore his earldom, and to dismiss with ignominy the Norman favourites who were hunted over seas. The old earl died in 1053, but was succeeded in power by his son Harold, who for thirteen years maintained an unbroken mastery over the king, and ruled England almost with the power of a regent. There seems little doubt that he aspired to be Edward’s successor: there was no direct heir to the crown, and the nearest of kin was ah infant, Edgar, the great-nephew of the reigning sovereign and grandson of Edmund Ironside. England’s experience of minors on the throne had been unhappy—Edwy and Æthelred the Redeless were warnings rather than examples. Moreover, Harold had before his eye as a precedent the displacement of the effete Carolingian line in France, by the new house of Robert the Strong and Hugh Capet, seventy years before. He prepared for the crisis that must come at the death of Edward the Confessor by bestowing the governance of several earldoms upon his brothers. Unfortunately for him, however, the eldest of them, Tostig, proved the greatest hindrance to his plans, provoking wrath and opposition wherever he went by his high-handedness and cruelty.
Harold’s governance of the realm seems to have been on the whole successful. He put down the Scottish usurper Macbeth with the swords of a Northumbrian army, and restored Malcolm III. to the throne of that kingdom (1055–1058). He led an army into the heart of Wales to punish the raids of King Griffith ap Llewelyn, and harried the Welsh so bitterly that they put their leader to death, and renewed their homage to the English crown (1063). He won enthusiastic devotion from the men of Wessex and the South, but in Northumbria and Mercia he was less liked. His experiment in taking the rule of these earldoms out of the hands of the descendants of Siward and Leofric proved so unsuccessful that he had to resign himself to undoing it. Ultimately one of Leofric’s grandsons, Edwin, was left as earl of Mercia, and the other, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria instead of Harold’s unpopular brother Tostig. It was on this fact that the fortune of England was to turn, for in the hour of crisis Harold was to be betrayed by the lords of the Midlands and the North.
Somewhere about the end of his period of ascendancy, perhaps
in 1064, Harold was sailing in the Channel when his ship was
driven ashore by a tempest near the mouth of the
Somme. He fell into the hands of William the Bastard,
duke of Normandy, King Edward’s cousin and best-loved
Origin of
the Norman Conquest.
relative. The duke brought him to Rouen, and
kept him in a kind of honourable captivity till he had extorted
a strange pledge from him. William alleged that his cousin
had promised to make him his heir, and to recommend him to
the witan as king of England. He demanded that Harold
should swear to aid him in the project. Fearing for his personal
safety, the earl gave the required oath, and sailed home a perjured
man, for he had assuredly no intention of keeping the
promise that had been extorted from him. Within two years
King Edward expired (Jan. 5, 1066) after having recommended
Harold as his successor to the thegns and bishops who stood
about his death-bed. The witan chose the earl as king without
any show of doubt, though the assent of the Mercian and Northumbrian
earls must have been half-hearted. Not a word was
said in favour of the claim of the child Edgar, the heir of the
house of Alfred, nothing (of course) for the preposterous claim
of William of Normandy. Harold accepted the crown without
a moment’s hesitation, and at once prepared to defend it, for
he was aware that the Norman would fight to gain his purpose.
He endeavoured to conciliate Edwin and Morcar by marrying
their sister Ealdgyth, and trusted that he had bought their
loyal support. When the spring came round it was known that
William had begun to collect a great fleet and army. Aware
that the resources of his own duchy were inadequate to the
conquest of England, he sent all over Europe to hire mercenaries,
promising every knight who would join him broad lands beyond
the Channel in the event of victory. He gathered beneath his
banner thousands of adventurers not only from France, Brittany
and Flanders, but even from distant regions such as Aragon,
Apulia and Germany. The native Normans were but a third
part of his host, and he himself commanded rather as director
of a great joint-stock venture than as the feudal chief of his own
duchy. He also obtained the blessing of Pope Alexander II. for
his enterprise, partly on the plea that Harold was a perjurer,
partly because Stigand, the archbishop of Canterbury, had
acknowledged the late anti-pope Benedict.
All through the summer Harold held a fleet concentrated
