I have thought it right to narrate the course of events by which the Danish power was established in England at nearly as great detail as I purpose to narrate the central events of my history. The Danish and Norman Conquests are so closely connected with one another as cause and effect that the history of the one is an essential part of the history of the other. I now come to a period of nineteen |Character of the reign of Cnut.| years of a widely different character. The reign of Cnut[819] was, as regards the isle of Britain, almost a repetition of the reign of Eadgar. Within the realm of England itself we do not hear of a single disturbance. And the forces of England had now but seldom to be employed against Celtic enemies within her own island. One Scottish invasion of England, one English invasion of Wales, make up nearly the whole of the warfare of this reign within our own seas. There was indeed warfare enough elsewhere, warfare in which Englishmen had their share. But the details of Cnut’s wars in the Scandinavian North are often not a little doubtful, and, even if they were far better ascertained, they would not call for any minute attention at the hands of an historian either of England or of Normandy. After Cnut’s power was once fully established in England, we have next to no purely English events to record. Still there are few periods of our history which call for more attentive study. We have to contemplate the wonderful character of the man himself, his almost unparalleled position, the general nature of his government and policy. A few particular events which directly connect English and Norman history will also need a special examination. Of one event, more important than all in its results, no man could discern the importance at the moment. While |1027 or 1028.| Cnut sat on the throne of England, William the Bastard first saw the light at Falaise.
The remainder of the period contained in this Chapter, taking in the reigns of the two sons of Cnut, is of a different character. The reigns of those two worthless youths were short and troubled, and the accounts which we find in our best authorities are singularly contradictory. But the seven years between the death of Cnut and the election of Eadward are highly important in many ways. Several men who were to play the most important part in the times immediately following, men formed under Cnut, but who, while he lived, were overshadowed by their sovereign, now come forth into full prominence. Foremost among them all is the renowned name of Godwine, Earl of the West-Saxons. These reigns also prepared the way for the Norman Conquest in a most remarkable, though an indirect manner. The great scheme of Cnut, the establishment of an Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, fell to pieces after his death through the divisions and misgovernment of his sons. Harold and Harthacnut disgusted Englishmen with Danish rule, and led them to fall back on one of their own countrymen as their King. But the English King thus chosen proved to be, for all practical purposes, a Frenchman, and his French tendencies directly paved the way for the coming of William. Now it is not likely that any power whatever could have permanently kept all Cnut’s crowns upon the same head. But had his sons been at all worthy of him, a powerful dynasty, perhaps none the less English in feeling because Danish in blood, might well have been established in England. Under such a dynasty it is still possible that England might have been conquered in the open field. But it is quite impossible that the path of the Conqueror should have been made ready for him in the way that it actually was by the weakness of Eadward and the intrigues of the foreign favourites with whom he surrounded himself.
The death of Eadmund left Cnut without a rival.[820] He had already been twice chosen to the English crown; once by the voice of the Danish host on the death of his father |February, 1014.| Swegen,[821] and a second time, more regularly, by the vote |April, 1016.| of the majority of the English Witan after the death of Æthelred.[822] He was also most likely entitled by the Treaty of Olney to succeed to the dominions of Eadmund. He was in actual possession of the larger half of the kingdom. But Cnut, if valiant, was also wary; it might be too much, especially at this stage of his life, to attribute to him any actual shrinking from bloodshed; but he at least fully understood the value of constitutional forms, and he had no wish to resort to violence when his purpose could be better accomplished by peaceful means. He was determined to be King of all England;[823] he was equally determined not to parade the right of conquest offensively before the eyes of his new subjects, but to rest his claim to the crown on an authority which no man |Witenagemót of London. Christmas, 1016–1017.| could gainsay. He accordingly assembled the Witan of all England in London,[824] no doubt at the usual Midwinter festival. Before this assembly the King of the Mercians |Cnut claims the crown by virtue of the Treaty of Olney.| and Northumbrians[825] set forth his claim to the kingdom of Wessex and East-Anglia, as the designated successor of Eadmund according to the Treaty of Olney. The danger lay from a possible competition, not so much on the part of the infant children of Eadmund as on that of his |Testimony of the witnesses to the treaty.| brothers.[826] The witnesses of the Olney compact were brought forward and questioned by Cnut. They affirmed that no portion of the kingdom had ever been assigned to the brothers of Eadmund; those princes had received no portion during his life, and they were entitled to no right or preference at his death. As for his sons, Cnut, the adopted brother of Eadmund, had been named by him as |Cnut chosen King of all England. January, 1017.| their guardian during their minority.[827] Cnut was then formally acknowledged as King of all England, his recognition, it would seem, being accompanied by a formal exclusion of the brothers and sons of Eadmund.[828] How far the electors acted under constraint, we know not; but it is certain that no act was ever more regular in point of form, and in no recorded transaction do the popular principles of the ancient English constitution stand forth more clearly. The usual compact[829] between King and people was gone through, with a further mutual promise on the part of Danes and English to forget all old grudges. Money was, as a matter of course, to be paid to the Danish army. The new King was crowned, no doubt in Saint Paul’s minster, by Archbishop Lyfing.[830] Measures |Outlawry of the two Eadwigs.| for the security of the new dynasty were taken. With regard to the Ætheling Eadwig, who is described as a prince of high character and the object of universal esteem, the jealousy of Cnut was not satisfied with his exclusion from the crown. A decree of outlawry was passed against him, as also against another Eadwig, who is unknown to us, except that he bears the strange title of King of the Churls.[831] This last Eadwig is said to have made his peace |Murder of the Ætheling Eadwig.| with the King; but Eadwig the Ætheling—so at least the rumour of the time said—was treacherously murdered by Cnut’s order before the year was out.
In this important Gemót a division of England was made which shows how thoroughly at home the new King |Cnut’s preference for England,| already felt in his new kingdom. It is clear from the whole course of Cnut’s reign that of all his dominions England was that which he most prized. In the midst of his most brilliant victories England was always his favourite dwelling-place, better loved than his native Denmark, better loved than any of the other lands which he brought under his power. In the roll-call of his titles England held the first place. England was his home; she was, as it were, the love of his youth; her crown was the prize which he had won with his own right hand, when he had as yet neither inherited the ancestral kingship of Denmark nor spread his dominion over Norwegians, Swedes, and |and for the Saxon part of England.| Wends. And he not only made himself at home in England; he made himself specially at home in the purely Saxon part of England. Already King of the Northumbrians and Mercians, it would not have been wonderful if he had fixed the seat of his rule in his own half-Danish realm, and had dealt with East-Anglia and the Saxon shires as conquered dependencies. And we may conceive that the future history of England might have been different in many ways, if York had been permanently established by Cnut as the capital of the kingdom. But Cnut, when once chosen King by the Witan of all England, was determined to fill in everything the place of the Kings of the English who had been before him. Those Kings were primarily Kings of the West-Saxons; the other English kingdoms were dependencies of the West-Saxon state. They had gradually been more or less closely incorporated with the dominant realm, but they still remained distinct governments, each with its own Ealdorman and its own Gemót. This form of administration was continued, and was more definitely |His fourfold division of the kingdom.| organized by Cnut. England was divided into four great governments, answering to the four most powerful and permanent among the seven ancient kingdoms.[832] For his |He retains Wessex in his own hands, and appoints Earls over Northumberland, Mercia,| own immediate share he kept, not Northumberland or Mercia, but Wessex, the cradle of the royal house which he had supplanted. Over the others he appointed Earls, a title which now throughout the kingdom displaces the more ancient name of Ealdormen.[833] Thurkill obtained or |and East-Anglia. January, 1017.| kept East-Anglia. Eric the King’s brother-in-law was confirmed in, or restored to, the government of Northumberland, with which he had been invested a year before.[834] Eadric, as the reward of his treasons and murders, was again appointed to his old earldom of Mercia. But the signatures to the charters show that the title of Earl was by no means confined to these three great |Other Earls.| viceroys. As before with the title of Ealdorman, so now its equivalent Earl was the title borne alike by the governor of an ancient kingdom and by the subordinate governor of one or more shires.[835] We can trace the names of several such Earls, both English and Danish, |First appearance of Earl Godwine.| through the charters of Cnut’s reign. And among them we see, as filling a marked and special position, the name of one who was presently to become the first man in the English Empire—one who rose to power by the favour of strangers, only to become the champion of our land against strangers of every race—one who, never himself a King, was to be the maker, the kinsman, the father of Kings. From an early stage of the reign of Cnut we see a high and special place among the great men of the realm filled by the deathless name of Godwine the son of Wulfnoth.
We feel that we are at last drawing near to the real centre of our history when we bring in the name of the great champion of England against Norman influence, the father of the King who died as her champion against Norman invasion. The sudden and mysterious rise of this great man is one of the most striking features of our history, and his origin is perhaps the most obscure and difficult question of all the obscure and difficult questions |Sudden promotion of Godwine by Cnut.| which our history presents. With no certain explanation of so singular a promotion, we find, from the very beginning of the reign of Cnut, Godwine, an Englishman, whose parentage and whose rank by birth are utterly doubtful, holding high office under the Danish monarch, honoured with a connexion by marriage with the royal house, and before long distinctly marked out as the first |Different statements as to Godwine’s origin.| subject in the realm. One account makes him a kinsman of the traitor Eadric; another makes him the son of a churl, seemingly on the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, who won the favour of the Danish Earl Ulf by incidental services done to him after the battle of Sherstone.[836] But, whatever was his origin, it is clear that his advancement was one of the first acts of the reign of Cnut. |Godwine wins Cnut’s favour, and is raised to the rank of Earl. [Before 1018.]| Among the foremost men of his newly won kingdom, Godwine recommended himself to the discerning conqueror by his valour in war, his prudence in counsel, his diligence in business, his eloquence in speech, his agreeable discourse and equable temper.[837] I infer that Godwine had distinguished himself in the war on the side of Eadmund, but that he was early in offering his allegiance to the conqueror.[838] The rank of Earl—with what jurisdiction we know not—was the reward of these merits. We find him holding that dignity in the second year of Cnut’s reign,[839] and it is not unlikely to have been conferred upon him in the very Gemót of which we have just been speaking. He became a personal favourite with the King, high in his confidence, and he soon rose to greater power and dignity still.
Cnut’s power now seemed firmly established; at the same time he thought it expedient to resort to more than one means of strengthening it. In the month of |July, 1017.| July in this year he contracted a marriage which is one of the most singular on record. The widow of Æthelred, Ælfgifu-Emma, was asked to share the English throne a second time. Nothing loth, she came over from Normandy, married the new King, and took up her old position as Lady of the English.[840] Fifteen years before, she had in her youth crossed the sea on the same errand; now, a mature widow, she gave herself to a man who was much younger than herself, who had overturned the throne of her first husband, and had driven her children |Motives for the marriage.| into banishment. Cnut’s motives for this singular marriage are not very clear, unless, as one historian suggests, it was part of his system of reconciliation. He wished, we are told, to win the hearts of the English, and to make as little change as possible in the appearance of the English court, by putting again in her old place a Lady to whom they were accustomed.[841] But this would seem to imply that Emma enjoyed a popularity among the English, which the foreign woman, the cause of so many evils, was not likely to have won. If a connexion with the ducal house of Normandy was all that Cnut aimed at, a marriage with one of Duke Richard’s daughters would have seemed a more natural alliance for the young conqueror than a marriage with their dowager aunt. But it is possible, after all, that personal preference may really have led to this strange match. There is some slight reason to think that Cnut and Emma may have met for the purposes of negotiation during the siege of London.[842] And Emma, though much older than Cnut, may still have kept much of the beauty which won her the title of the Gem of the Normans.[843] The marriage was, after all, less strange than one which had scandalized the West-Frankish court two generations earlier. Eadgifu, the daughter of Eadward, the sister of Æthelstan, the widow of Charles, the mother of Lewis, had, when already |951.| a grandmother of some standing, eloped with the young and handsome Count Herbert, and had bestowed two half-brothers on her royal son.[844] At any rate, whatever may have been Cnut’s motive in his marriage with the royal widow, it is certain that at the time of his forming this more exalted connexion he was, like so many of the Norman Dukes, already hampered by an earlier connexion of that doubtful kind of which I have often spoken.[845] |Cnut’s relations with Ælfgifu of Northampton.| Cnut had already taken as his concubine or Danish wife, Ælfgifu of Northampton, the daughter of Ælfhelm the murdered Earl of the Northumbrians. By her Cnut believed himself to be the father of two sons, Harold and Swegen, who after his death succeeded to two of his kingdoms. But scandal affirmed that neither of them was really of kingly birth. The barren Ælfgifu successively passed off on her confiding husband or lover two children whom she affirmed to be their common offspring, but of whom Swegen was in truth the son of a priest and Harold the son of a shoemaker. Ælfgifu was certainly living at the time of Cnut’s marriage with her namesake; whether either of her supposed sons was born after that date is not so clear. But it was doubtless the existence of one or other of these children which made Emma stipulate, as she is said to have done, that the throne should pass to Cnut’s children by her, to the exclusion of those by any other wife. The King agreed, no doubt only so far as he constitutionally could; the marriage took place, and was blessed with the births of Harthacnut and Gunhild. Emma seems to have utterly forgotten, not only the memory of Æthelred, but the existence of her children by him; her whole love was transferred to the young Danish King and to the children whom she bore to him.
The marriages of Emma would seem to have needed a bloodbath as their necessary attendant. Her bridal with Æthelred was almost immediately followed by the great massacre of the Danes;[846] her second bridal with Cnut was followed in the like sort, if not by an actual massacre, yet by a considerable slaughter of Englishmen who were felt to be dangerous to the Danish monarch. The whole course of the year was marked by executions |Fate of the children of Æthelred.| and banishments. The Ætheling Eadwig, the most dangerous of Cnut’s possible competitors, was removed as we have seen.[847] The rumour of his assassination at least implies that he died during the year in some way or other. Of the other sons of Æthelred’s first marriage we can give no account, except of those who seem to have been already dead. His children by Emma were safe in Normandy, and they did not come back to England with their mother. The romantic marriage of Eadmund Ironside with Ealdgyth the widow of Sigeferth[848] had given him two sons, Eadmund and Eadward, who were of course mere babes, and who, from the date of their |The sons of Eadmund sent to Sweden, and thence to Hungary.| mother’s marriage, would seem to have been twins. These children were now sent out of the kingdom. The scandal of the time affirmed that Eadric, the common author of all evil, counselled their death.[849] Cnut shrank from the shame of slaying them in England; but—according to one version, by the advice of Emma[850]—he sought means to have them put out of the way in some distant land. His half-brother, Olaf or James, the son of his mother Sigrid,[851] now reigned over Sweden. To him he sent the babes, begging him to put them to death. The Swede, a zealous propagator of Christianity in his own dominions,[852] abhorred the crime, but stood in fear of his brother’s power. He therefore sent the children to the King of the Hungarians, the sainted Stephen,[853] to be saved alive and brought up. Both lived, and one will appear again in our history, to become the source through which the old kingly blood of Wessex found its way into the veins of the later rulers of England and Scotland.
The Ætheling Eadwig, whatever was his end, clearly did not die by any judicial sentence. But the Christmas Gemót of this year, held in London,[854] was marked by the deaths of several men of high rank, some of whom at least, whatever may have been their guilt or innocence, seem to have died in a more regular way by the hand of the executioner. These were Æthelweard, the son of Æthelmær distinguished as the Great;[855] Brihtric, the son of Ælfheah of Devonshire, and Northman, the son of the Ealdorman Leofwine. This last name introduces us to a family which was to play a most important part in the times immediately before and immediately after the Norman Conquest.[856] Of Leofwine personally we know nothing; the fate of his son Northman is in one of our accounts specially connected with the fate of Eadric.[857] One thing is plain, that Northman’s offence, whatever it was, was something wholly personal to himself and in no way touched the rest of his family.[858] This fact, together with the advancement of Godwine, should be carefully borne in mind. Whatever was the justice or injustice of these executions,[859] they were at least no part of any deliberate plan for exterminating the English nobility and substituting Danes in their place.[860] We shall soon see that the policy of Cnut led him to an exactly opposite course.
The new King however kept a careful eye on all who were in any way connected with the English royal family. The sons-in-law of Æthelred seem to have awakened the suspicions of Cnut almost as strongly as his sons. Of the daughters of Æthelred three were certainly married, to Eadric, to Uhtred, and to an unknown Æthelstan.[861] A fourth is said to have been the wife of Ulfcytel, and to have passed with his East-Anglian government to the Dane Thurkill. All these men were gradually got rid of by death or banishment. Æthelstan and Ulfcytel had had the good luck to die in open battle. We have already seen how easily Cnut was led to consent to the death of |Thurkill banished. 1021.| Uhtred,[862] and we shall presently see Thurkill himself, to whom Cnut in a great measure owed his crown, driven |Eadric put to death. Christmas, 1017.| into banishment. The remaining son-in-law of Æthelred, the infamous Eadric, met the reward of all his crimes in this same Christmas Gemót. So short a time had he enjoyed the dignity which he had kept or recovered by so many treasons. That he was put to death at this time is certain, but that is nearly all that can be said. The renown, or rather infamy, of his name drew special attention to his end, and the retributive justice which lighted on the traitor became a favourite subject of romance.[863] |Motives for his execution.| The immediate cause or pretext of his death can hardly be ascertained; but the feelings of Cnut towards him may easily be guessed. Eadric, notwithstanding all his crimes, was an Englishman of the highest rank; in the absence of available male heirs, his marriage made him in some sort the nearest representative of the royal house; the very success of his repeated crimes shows that he must, somehow or other, have obtained the lead of a considerable party. In all these characters he was dangerous; Cnut must have felt that a man who had so often betrayed his former masters would have as little scruple about betraying him;[864] he could hardly avoid confirming him in his earldom in the assembly of the former winter, but he had doubtless already made up his mind to seize on the first opportunity to destroy him. We may believe that Cnut, as we are told in most versions of the story, gave himself out as the avenger of his adopted brother; but the removal of the arch-traitor was a step which prudence, as prudence was understood by Cnut at that stage of his reign, called for fully as much as justice.
The character and career of Eadric, like those of Ælfric, his predecessor in office and in crime,[865] form one of the standing puzzles of history. It is hard to understand the motives for such constant and repeated treasons on the part of one who had, solely by royal favour, risen from nothing to the highest rank in the state. It is equally difficult to understand by what sort of fascination he could have found the means either to work his treasons or to blind the eyes of those who suffered by them. That both his crimes and his influence have been much exaggerated is highly probable. It is likely enough that he has been made the scape-goat for many of the sins both of other individuals and of the whole nation. A tendency of this kind to lay all blame upon some one man is not uncommon. Thus in our Norman history we have seen all the mischief that happened attributed at one time to Arnulf of Flanders, and at another to Theobald of Chartres.[866] But exaggeration of this kind must have had some substantial ground to go upon. Without necessarily believing that Eadric personally wrought all the countless and inexplicable treasons which are laid to his charge, it is impossible to doubt that he knew how to exercise an extraordinary influence over men’s minds, and that that |Two classes of treasons ascribed to Eadric.| influence was always exerted for evil. It may be observed that the crimes attributed to him fall into two classes. His treasons on the field of battle, at Sherstone and at Assandun, were wrought openly in the sight of two armies, and, asserted as they are by contemporary writers, we |Difference in the credibility of the two kinds of charges.| cannot do otherwise than accept them. But there is another class of charges which do not rest on the same firm ground. Such are his supposed share in the deaths of Eadmund and Eadwig, his advice to destroy the children of Eadmund, and other cases where his counsel is said to have led to various crimes and mischiefs, or to have thwarted the accomplishment of wise and manly purposes. Some of these charges are not found in our best authorities, and, of those which are, some may well be merely the surmises of the time, going on the general principle that, whenever any mischief was done, Eadric must needs be the doer of it. The annalists could not well be mistaken as to Eadric’s conduct on the field of Assandun; they might easily be mistaken as to any particular piece of advice said to have been given by him to Æthelred, to Eadmund, or to Cnut. In these last cases their statements prove little more than the universal belief that Eadric was capable of every wickedness. But that universal belief, though it proves little as to this or that particular action, proves everything as to Eadric’s general character. After making every needful deduction, enough is left, not only to brand the name of Eadric with infamy, but to brand it with infamy of a peculiar kind, which holds him up as a remarkable study of human character as well for the philosopher as for the historian. We have much more both of crime and of sorrow to go through in the course of our history; it is at least some comfort that no sinner of the peculiar type of Eadric will occur again.
By the death of Eadric his earldom of Mercia became vacant. It was most likely conferred on Leofwine, the father of the slain Northman, who had seemingly hitherto held the ealdormanship of the Hwiccas under the superior rule of Eadric.[867] And an earldom held by Northman, perhaps that of Chester, is said to have been conferred on his brother Leofric, who some years later succeeded his father in the government of all Mercia.
The next year we hear that a fleet of thirty pirate ships, seemingly coming to attack England, was cut off by Cnut. Thus, as a contemporary writer says, he who had once been the destroyer of the land had now become its |Payment of Danegeld. 1018.| defender.[868] In the same year a heavy Danegeld was paid, doubtless that which had been agreed upon in the treaty between Cnut and Eadmund at Olney.[869] London paid ten thousand five hundred[870] pounds, and the rest of England paid seventy-two thousand. This is something like a measure of the position which the great merchant city |Cnut dismisses the greater part of his fleet.| held in the kingdom. Cnut was thus able to satisfy the claims of his fleet, and he now kept only forty ships in his pay, sending the rest back to Denmark. The crews of these ships seem to have been the germ of the famous force of the Thingmen or Housecarls, of whom, and of the peculiar legislation which affected them, I shall presently have |Witenagemót of Oxford. 1018.| much to say. This same year a Witenagemót was held, which marks an æra in the reign of Cnut, and which may be looked upon as the winding up of the severities which almost necessarily followed upon the conquest. A large body of the chief men of both nations, Danish and English, assembled at Oxford, the town where a like assembly, |1015.| three years before, had been dishonoured by the murder |Renewal of “Eadgar’s Law.”| of Sigeferth and Morkere.[871] Danes and English alike united in a decree for the observance of the laws of King Eadgar.[872] This is the first time that we have met with this formula in England, though we have already come across it in Norman history, when Cnut’s grandfather |Import of the phrase.| Harold is said to have restored the laws of Rolf.[873] It has here the same meaning which it has in earlier and in later examples. The renewal of the laws of Eadgar has the same meaning as the renewal of the laws of Rolf after the expulsion of the French from Normandy, as the renewal of the laws of Cnut after the expulsion of Tostig from Northumberland, as the often promised and often evaded renewal of the laws of Eadward in the days of the Norman Kings of England. It does not always imply that the princes spoken of were specially looked on as lawgivers. Eadgar and Cnut had undoubtedly some claim to that title, but we know not that Rolf had any, and Eadward certainly had none. But the demand does not refer to codes of law issued, or believed to be issued, by any of these princes. The cry is really, as an ancient writer explains it,[874] not for the laws which such a King enacted, but for the laws which such a King observed. It is in fact a demand for good government in a time of past or expected oppression or maladministration. It is, as in this case, a demand that a foreign King should take the best of his native predecessors as his model. The name of the last King who left behind him a name for just and mild government is taken as the embodiment of all just and mild government. The people in effect demand, and the King in effect promises, that his government shall be as good as that of the popular hero whose name is put forward. Now, with a foreign conqueror for their King, with the ancient kingly house cut down to a few exiled children, with the flower of the ancient nobility cut off in the carnage of Assandun, Englishmen looked back with yearning to the days of their native rulers. The reign of Æthelred was a time which the national memory would be |The memory of Eadgar acceptable both to the English and to the Danes.| glad to deal with as a blank. English imagination leaped back to the glorious and happy days of the peaceful Basileus, when Englishmen beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, when the mountains brought peace and the little hills righteousness, when the Lord of Wessex could boast that, within the four seas of Britain, all Kings fell down before him and all nations did him service. And the name of Eadgar was one which would be hardly less acceptable to the Danes than to the English themselves. When their King was more and more throwing off the feelings of a conqueror, when he was more and more closely making himself at one with the realm which he had won, when the Earls and Thegns of the conquered land stood around his throne on a perfect level with the proudest of their conquerors, when the mass of the victorious army had just been sent away to their own homes, the Danish followers of Cnut might well tremble, not only for their supremacy over the vanquished English, but almost for their equality with them. To them the name of Eadgar may well have represented a prince who was raised to the throne in a great measure by Danish swords, who, while he defended his island against Danish invasions, did full justice to the Dane within his own realm, who guaranteed to his Danish subjects every right that they could desire, and whose fondness for them, among other strangers, was the only fault with which Englishmen could reproach him.[875] Danes and Englishmen therefore joined in looking back to Eadgar as the ideal of kingship, and in demanding of their common sovereign that he should take that incomparable[876] example as the model of his government. Men of both nations looked back to the happy days of Eadgar, as in after days the Northumbrians, groaning under the tyranny of Tostig, looked back to the happy days of Cnut himself |Contrast between Cnut and the Norman Kings.| and demanded the renewal of his law. They looked back to them, as Englishmen under the Norman yoke looked back to the happy days of Eadward, and put forth the vain demand that their foreign lords should rule them, not merely according to the same formal enactments, but in the same spirit of justice and mercy in which the royal saint was held to have ruled. That prayer was not, and could not be, granted, till the swords of Robert Fitzwalter and Simon of Montfort had won back for us more than the laws of Eadward in another shape. The great Dane was more happily placed. With him the renewal of the ancient laws was neither an empty nor an impossible promise. If by renewing the laws of Eadgar was meant the establishment of a rule as strong and as just and as safe against foreign invasion as that of Eadgar, King Cnut fully kept his word.[877]
Cnut had now been absent from his native country for five years. He had stayed in England ever since his return |1014–5.| thither after he had been driven out by the solitary military exploit of King Æthelred the Unready.[878] It was clearly his intention to make England the seat of his empire,[879] but as he was now, by the death or deposition of his brother Harold, sovereign of Denmark,[880] and as |Cnut visits Denmark. 1019.| England was perfectly quiet and reconciled to his government, he deemed it expedient to pay a visit to the land of |He is accompanied by Godwine, who is said to have distinguished| his birth.[881] He took with him Godwine, whose conduct in this foreign journey, perhaps in one of Cnut’s northern wars, procured him a still higher degree of his sovereign’s esteem.[882] According to one account, it was by a gallant |himself in a Wendish war.| action in an expedition against the Wends that the English Earl gained Cnut’s special favour. An English contingent under Godwine’s command served in the Danish army. The two armies lay near together, and a battle was expected the next day. Godwine, without the King’s knowledge, attacked the enemy by night at the head of his countrymen, routed them utterly, and occupied their camp. In the morning Cnut missed the English portion of his army, and hastily inferred that they had deserted, or even gone over to the enemy. He marched however to the Wendish camp, and there, to his surprise, found Godwine and the English in possession, and nothing left of the Wends but their dead bodies and their spoil. This exploit, we are told, greatly raised both Godwine and the English in general in the opinion of Cnut. The tale has a mythical sound; but, whatever may be the truth or falsehood of its details, that Godwine rose still higher from the time of this Danish expedition is beyond doubt. Cnut |Godwine marries Gytha, sister of Earl Ulf.| now admitted him to his most secret counsels, and gave him in marriage Gytha, the sister of the Danish Earl Ulf, the husband of his own sister Estrith. This Ulf, the son of Thurgils Sprakaleg, is one of the most famous characters in the Danish history or romance of the time. Like some other heroes of the North, his parentage was not wholly human. The father of Thurgils, Biorn, was the offspring of a bear, who carried off a human damsel.[883] Ulf himself is said to have served in Cnut’s English wars, and according to one version, it was to him that Godwine owed his earliest introduction to Cnut.[884] But in English history he plays hardly any part.[885] His marriage we shall have to speak of again as one of the events which connect England and Denmark and Normandy; but his real or imaginary exploits and treasons,[886] and his death by order of his brother-in-law, belong wholly to |Her long and chequered life.| Scandinavian history. But his sister Gytha, the wife of the greatest of living Englishmen, became thoroughly naturalized in England. She shared the momentary banishment of her husband in the days of Norman intrigue, and she lived to undergo an eternal banishment in the days of Norman dominion. No mother was ever surrounded by a fairer or more hopeful offspring; none ever underwent a longer series of hopeless bereavements. She saw a nephew on the throne of Denmark, a daughter and a son on the throne of England. She saw her other children and kinsfolk ruling as princes in England and allying themselves with princes in foreign lands. But she also saw her brother cut off by the hand of his kinsman and sovereign; she saw one son stained with the blood of a cousin, and another son stained with treason against his house and country. Of her remaining sons she saw three cut off in one day by the most glorious of deaths, while the sole survivor dragged on his weary days in a Norman prison. No tale of Grecian tragedy ever set forth a sadder and more striking record of human vicissitudes, of brighter hopes in youth, of more utter desolation in old age, than the long and chequered life of her whom our notices are at least enough to set her before us as a wife worthy of Godwine, a mother worthy of Harold.