On the other hand, we have to explain the fact that Godwine was suspected, that the suspicion arose early and prevailed extensively, and that it was not confined to Godwine’s foreign enemies and slanderers. Godwine indeed was not the only person who was suspected. One tale or legend accused Emma herself; another laid the guilt to the charge of Lyfing, Bishop of Devonshire, a prelate who often appears as a powerful supporter of Godwine’s policy; in another version, if Godwine was the instigator, the English people in general seem to have been his accomplices.[1096] Still Godwine was specially suspected, and suspected while the memory of the event was still fresh. His own special apologist and panegyrist seems to imply that the charge against him was a mere invention of the Norman Archbishop Robert.[1097] This however was not the case; Godwine was formally accused and formally acquitted |[1040.]| of the crime soon after the accession of Harthacnut, four years after the event. He was acquitted, as we shall presently see,[1098] by the solemn judgement of the highest court in the realm, and he is fully entitled to the benefit of that acquittal. Still the mere fact of his accusation has to be explained. The charge, brought at such a time and in such a shape, could not have been a mere Norman slander. Godwine’s accuser, in fact, was an Englishman of the highest rank. Nor would a mere Norman slander ever have been embodied in popular songs, or have found |Some ground for the suspicion must be supposed.| a place in any version of the English Chronicles. Such a suspicion—strong, early, native—proves something. Godwine, guilty or innocent, must have done some act which, to say the least, was capable of an unlucky misconstruction. By putting together one or two hints in the different accounts, we may perhaps come to a probable conjecture as to what his share in the matter really was. There is one version, and only one, which, while consistent with Godwine’s innocence, explains the early and prevalent suspicion as to his guilt. Let us look how things stood. |Probable state of the case.| It seems that the feeling which broke out openly in the next year was already beginning to show itself; men were beginning, even in Wessex, to be weary of the absent Harthacnut. Well they might; to wait so long for an absent King, who, still uncrowned, unsworn, unanointed, could not be looked on as full King, was something of which no man had seen the like. It was not wonderful if popular feeling was, as we are told, veering round, whether wrongfully or not, in favour of Harold.[1099] At such a moment, a son of Æthelred, either knowing the state of the kingdom or eager to try his chance in any case, lands in England. We of course dismiss the story which speaks of actual invasion and warfare, which is probably a mere repetition of the attempted invasion by Duke Robert. |Godwine probably met Ælfred.| But the Ætheling was in England; if Godwine really wished to preserve the settlement which gave Wessex to a son of Emma, it might well occur to him to ask whether the game could not be better played with the present son of Æthelred than with the absent son of Cnut. He may have sought an interview with the Ætheling; he may even have pledged himself to his cause. But if a son of Æthelred was at large in England, the throne of Harold would be endangered as well as the throne of Harthacnut. Harold and his emissaries would be on the alert. The prince who had, perhaps before his election, seized on Emma’s treasures at Winchester, would not, in such a case, be very scrupulous about respecting the frontiers of his brother’s kingdom. Perhaps, if he were superior lord, he might have a real right to interfere in a matter which |Ælfred probably seized by Harold without Godwine’s connivance.| clearly touched the interests of the whole Empire. At any rate, if the Ætheling and his companions were known to be lodged in a West-Saxon town not very far from the borders of the Northern kingdom, it is perfectly conceivable that they might be seized by the agents of Harold, against the will or without the knowledge of Godwine. When the Ætheling was once seized and carried off, Godwine might well think that the game was up, that the star of Harold was fairly in the ascendant, and that neither interest nor duty called on him to plunge Wessex into a war with Northumberland and Mercia either to deliver Ælfred or to revenge his wrongs. Such conduct would not be that of a sentimental and impulsive hero; it would be that of a wary and hard-headed statesman. Such conduct would involve no real treachery; but it might easily give rise to the suspicion of treachery. If Godwine received the Ætheling, if Harold’s agents afterwards seized him, it would be an easy inference that Godwine betrayed him to Harold. As soon as the tale had once got afloat, mythical details would, as ever, gather round it. When Godwine was once believed to have betrayed Ælfred, it would be an obvious improvement on the story to make him a personal agent in the barbarities to which his supposed treason had given occasion. It is clear that the ordinary narrative, as it stands, cannot be received; but in some such explanation as this we may discern the probable kernel of truth on which the fabulous details gradually fastened themselves.[1100]
On the whole then I incline to the belief that the great Earl, every other recorded deed of whose life is the deed of an English patriot, who on every other occasion appears as conciliatory and law-abiding, who is always as strongly opposed to everything like wrong or violence as the rude age in which he lived would let him be, did not, on this one occasion, act in a manner so contrary to his whole character as to resort to fraud or needless violence to compass the destruction of a man of English birth and kingly descent. The innocence of Godwine seems to me to be most likely in itself, most consistent with the circumstances of the time, and not inconsistent with such parts of our evidence as seem most trustworthy. But in any case, even if, while casting aside palpable fables and contradictions, we take the evidence, so far as it is credible, at the worst, even then it seems to me that the great Earl is at least entitled to a verdict of Not Proven, if not of Not Guilty.
The next year after the unlucky attempt of Ælfred[1101] was marked by the breaking down of the short-lived arrangement |of the West-Saxons.| which had been made between the two sons of Cnut. The West-Saxons had seemingly supported Harthacnut as the representative of that policy of his father which had raised Wessex, not only to the headship of England and of all Britain, but to the practical headship of all Northern Europe. No hope on the part of any people was ever more grievously disappointed. No contrast could be greater than the contrast between Wessex in the days of Cnut and |Degrading position of Wessex.| Wessex in these two years of Harthacnut. Wessex was no longer the chosen dominion, Winchester was no longer the chosen capital, of an Emperor of the North, whose name was dreaded on the Baltic and reverenced on the Tiber. The old Imperial kingdom had sunk to be, what it had never been before, a dependent province ruled by representatives of an absent sovereign. A King of the Danes, who did not think England worthy of his presence, held the West-Saxon kingdom, seemingly as a vassal of the King of the Mercians and Northumbrians, and entrusted it to the government of his Norman mother. It would doubtless be no excuse in English eyes that Denmark was now threatened by Magnus of Norway,[1102] and that Harthacnut’s first duty was to provide for its defence. To the West-Saxon people it would simply seem that they had chosen a King whom no entreaties on the part of his English subjects could persuade to come and take personal possession of his English kingdom. Being absent, he must have remained uncrowned, and his lack of the consecrating rite would alone, in the ideas of those times, be enough to make his government altogether uncertain and provisional. Even the influence of Godwine could not prolong—most likely it was not exerted to prolong—a state of things so essentially offensive to all patriotic feeling. It was felt that to accept the rule of Harold would be a far less evil than to keep a nominal independence which was practically a degrading bondage. Popular feeling therefore set strongly in favour of union with Mercia and Northumberland, even under the doubtful son of Ælfgifu of |Harthacnut deposed in Wessex, and Harold chosen King over all England. 1037.| Northampton. “Man chose Harold over all to King, and forsook Harthacnut, for that he was too long in Denmark.”[1103] That is, I conceive, the Witan of Wessex, in discharge of their undoubted constitutional right,[1104] deposed their King Harthacnut, and elected the King of the Mercians and Northumbrians as their immediate sovereign, the election being, as it would seem, confirmed by a vote of the Witan of all England. Harold was thus called by the universal voice of the nation to be King over the whole realm. The southern kingdom, just as at the final election of his father,[1105] was again joined to the northern. England again became one kingdom under one King, an union which since that day has never been broken.
The reign of the new King of the English was short and troubled. His first act was the banishment of the Lady |Banishment of Emma. 1037.| Emma, who was sent out of the land at the beginning of winter.[1106] She did not return to Normandy, as that country was now in all the confusion attendant on the minority of its new sovereign, the future Conqueror. She betook herself to the court of Baldwin of Flanders, which we shall henceforth find serving as the general place of refuge for English exiles. She was received with all honour by Baldwin and his Countess Adela.[1107] Two of the near kinswomen of Baldwin will play a prominent part in our future history; one of them indeed, his daughter Matilda, the wife of the great William, was destined, within thirty years, to fill the place from which Emma herself had been driven.
Of the administration of Harold himself we hear hardly anything. The tale which affirms that he reigned without the usual consecrating rite charges him also with entire neglect of Christian worship, and of choosing the hour of mass for his hunting or other amusements.[1108] Other accounts however imply that he was not wanting in the conventional piety of the age.[1109] He at least, like other Kings, kept chaplains in his personal service, so that he can hardly have been the avowed heathen or infidel which he appears in the hostile picture. Ecclesiastical affairs however do not seem to have been in a flourishing |Ecclesiastical appointments.| state under his government. We read, as to be sure we read in the reigns of Kings of greater claims to sanctity, of bishoprics being held in plurality and |Death of Archbishop Æthelnoth. 1038.| being sold for money. Good Archbishop Æthelnoth died |Eadsige succeeds.| in the second year of Harold’s sole reign, and was succeeded by Eadsige, who appears at once in the threefold character of a royal chaplain, a monk, and a suffragan Bishop in Kent.[1110] We also find another royal chaplain, |Promotion of Stigand and Lyfing.| Stigand, the priest of Assandun, appointed to a bishopric, deposed, seemingly before consecration, because another competitor was ready with a larger sum, and finally reinstated, whether by dint of the same prevailing arguments we are not told.[1111] Lyfing, Bishop of Devonshire, also received the see of Worcester in plurality.[1112] These appointments are worthy of notice, as throwing some light on the otherwise utterly obscure politics of this reign. Stigand, the old chaplain of Cnut, was the firm friend and |Reconciliation between Harold and the party of Godwine.| counsellor of his widow.[1113] Lyfing was the right hand man of Earl Godwine. That these men shared in the promotions of which Harold had an unusual number to distribute, that Lyfing especially became the King’s personal friend,[1114] seems to show that a perfect reconciliation was now brought about between Harold and the party which had opposed his original election. We may infer that Emma was sacrificed to the King’s personal dislike, a dislike which, it seems to be implied, was shared by the mass of the people.[1115] But there seems to have been no disposition on Harold’s part to bear hard in any other way on his former antagonists. A certain amount either of generosity or of policy must have found a place in his character.
It is probably a sign of degeneracy and weakness on the part of Harold’s government that the vassal kingdoms no longer remained in the same state of submission to which they had been brought during at least the later days of Cnut. North Wales was now gathering strength |Inroad of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn; battle of Rhyd-y-Groes and death of Eadwine. 1039.| under the famous Gruffydd son of Llywelyn. His first exploit was an inroad in which he reached as far as the Severn, and fought a battle at Rhyd-y-Groes, near Upton-on-Severn, a place which, perhaps owing to this event, still retains its British name. In that fight several eminent Englishmen were killed, and among them Eadwine, a brother of Earl Leofric.[1116] In the next year, the last year of |Duncan’s siege of Durham and his defeat. 1040.| the reign of Harold,[1117] Duncan, King of Scots, on what occasion we are not told, repeated the exploit of his grandfather, and with much the same success.[1118] He crossed the frontier and besieged Durham. The strength and prosperity of the city, though probably thrown back by the defeat of Carham,[1119] had vastly increased since its first |Bishop Eadmund of Durham. 1020–1042.| creation by Ealdhun. Ealdhun’s successor Eadmund, called to the see, as the story went, by a miraculous voice,[1120] had finished the work of his predecessor. The minster of Durham had been brought to perfection,[1121] and the city of Durham had gained strength and population enough to withstand an attack by its own efforts. In the invasion of Malcolm the infant settlement had been delivered by the intervention of Earl Uhtred; the invasion of Duncan was driven back by the valour of the citizens themselves. The Scots were put to flight; of the chief men of the army the greater part were killed in the battle; the remainder owed their escape to their horses. The soldiers of meaner degree, who had suffered less in the actual combat, were slaughtered without mercy in the pursuit.[1122] Northumbriam barbarism showed itself now as on the former occasion. The bloody trophies of victory were collected in the market-place of Durham, and a garland of Scottish heads again adorned the battlements of the rescued city.[1123]
The reign and life of Harold were now drawing to an end. Harthacnut was not at all disposed to acquiesce in the arrangements which had wholly shut him out from England. His Northern possessions were now safe. A treaty had been concluded with Magnus, according to which, as in some other instances of which we have heard, each King, in case of the other dying childless, was to succeed to his kingdom.[1124] Harthacnut therefore was now able to turn his thoughts in the direction of England, and a message from his mother in Flanders is said to have further worked upon his mind.[1125] He began to make great preparations for an invasion of England,[1126] but for the present he merely sailed to Flanders with ten ships,[1127] and there passed the winter with his mother. The time however was not spent in idleness. His preparations were busily carried on, and in the course of the next year he found himself at the head of a considerable fleet.[1128] No invasion however was needed, as an event which was probably not unexpected[1129] opened the way for his accession |Death of Harold. March 17, 1040.| without difficulty or bloodshed. King Harold, who had been for some time lying sick at Oxford, died in that town in the month of March.[1130] He was buried at Westminster, a spot which is now mentioned in our Chronicles for the first time.[1131] Its mention however seems to show that the smaller monastery which preceded the great foundation of Eadward enjoyed a greater amount of reputation than we might otherwise have been led to think. Harold, who could not have been above two or three and twenty years old, left no recorded posterity. We hear nothing of wives, mistresses, or children of any kind.
Immediately on the burial of Harold, probably at the Easter festival, the Witan of all England, English and Danish, unanimously chose Harthacnut to the kingdom.[1132] |King. Easter? 1040.| The only undoubted, and now the only surviving, son of Cnut united all claims. No attempt seems to have been made on behalf of Eadward the surviving son of Æthelred, and the events of the last reign were not likely to have prejudiced men in his favour. The universal belief of the moment was that the choice of Harthacnut was the right and wise course.[1133] An embassy, of which Ælfweard, Bishop of London and Abbot of Evesham, was a leading member,[1134] was sent to Bruges, to invite the newly-chosen |Harthacnut lands. June 17.| King to take possession of his crown. He and his mother accordingly set sail for England in the course of June; he landed at Sandwich, and was presently crowned at Canterbury by Archbishop Eadsige.[1135]
The expectations which had been formed of Harthacnut were grievously disappointed. One worthless youth had made way for another equally worthless. Writers in the Norman interest, and members of foundations to which he was lavish, try to clothe him with various virtues.[1136] But the utmost that can be claimed for him is an easy species of munificence which showed itself on the one hand in bounty to monasteries and to the poor,[1137] and on the other in providing four meals daily for his courtiers.[1138] But all his recorded public acts set him before us as a rapacious, brutal, and bloodthirsty tyrant. His short reign is merely a repetition of the first and worst days of his father, while he could not, like his father, invoke even the tyrant’s plea of necessity in palliation of his evil deeds. Harthacnut had been unanimously chosen King; he had been received with universal joy; there was no sedition within the country, and no foreign enemy threatened it. But his conduct was that of a conqueror in a hostile land. His first act was to wring a heavy contribution from his new subjects for an object which in no way concerned them. We now learn incidentally that the standing navy of England, both under Cnut and under Harold, had consisted of sixteen ships, and eight marks were paid, seemingly yearly, either to each rower singly or to some group of rowers.[1139] |Harthacnut’s first Danegeld.| Harthacnut had come over with sixty ships, manned by Danish soldiers, and his first act was to demand eight marks for each man of their crews, a piece of extortion which at once destroyed his newly gained popularity.[1140] He then began to revenge himself on his enemies alive |Harold’s body disinterred.| and dead. His first act in this way was an act of senseless brutality towards the dead body of his half-brother the late King. The dead Harold, the Chronicles tell us, was dragged up and shot into a fen. Other writers tell the story with more detail.[1141] Some of the officers of his household, Stir his Mayor of the Palace,[1142] Eadric his dispenser, Thrond his executioner, all, we are told, men of great dignity, were sent to Westminster to dig up the body, and in their company we are surprised to find Earl Godwine and Ælfric Archbishop of York. Westminster was neither in Godwine’s earldom nor in Ælfric’s diocese, so that both these chiefs of Church and State seem out of place on such an occasion. We are however told that Ælfric was something more than an instrument in the matter; it was specially at his advice that Harthacnut was guilty of this cowardly piece of spite, one which, like the brutalities of Harold himself towards the comrades of Ælfred, did not |and buried again.| go without imitators in more polished times. The body of Harold was treated on the restoration of Harthacnut much as the body of Oliver Cromwell was treated on the restoration of Charles the Second. The late King was dug up, beheaded, and thrown, according to this account, into the Thames. The body was afterwards brought up by a fisherman, and received a second burial. The large Danish population of London had a burial-place of their own without the walls of the city, the memory of which is still retained in the name of the church of Saint Clement Danes. There Harold’s body was again buried, secretly, we may suppose, though the act is spoken of as a tribute of honour paid by the Danes of London to the King whose accession to the throne had been so largely their own doing.
No act could have been more offensive to the Danes settled in England than these insults offered to the body |Harthacnut’s second Danegeld. 1040–1.| of their own chosen prince. Harthacnut’s next act was to enrage all his subjects, English and Danish, by laying on them another enormous Danegeld of about twenty-two thousand pounds, with another sum of more than eleven thousand pounds for thirty-two ships, probably a fresh contingent which had just come from Denmark.[1143] He was now, before he had been a year on the throne, thoroughly |Godwine and Lyfing accused of the death of Ælfred. 1040.| hated.[1144] As if on purpose to increase his unpopularity, he next attacked the two leaders of the national party, Earl Godwine and Bishop Lyfing. Archbishop Ælfric, who appears almost in the character of a spiritual Eadric, is said to have accused them to the King of being concerned in the death of his brother Ælfred. Some other persons unnamed joined with him in bringing the charge.[1145] Of the two defendants the Bishop was the easier victim. Lyfing lost his bishopric of Worcester, which was given to his accuser to hold in plurality,[1146] as it was held by several Archbishops of York before and after. Lyfing however recovered Worcester in the course of the next year, as the |Trial and acquittal of Godwine.| price, we are told, of money paid to the King.[1147] Whether the deposition of Lyfing was effected with any legal forms we are not told; but the Earl of the West-Saxons certainly underwent a regular trial before the Witan. The proceedings form a curious illustration of the jurisprudence of the age. The functions of witness, judge, and juror were not yet accurately distinguished, and compurgation,[1148] whenever compurgation could be had, was looked on as the surest proof of innocence. Godwine asserted his own innocence on oath, and his solemn plea of Not Guilty was confirmed by the oaths of most of the Earls and chief thegns[1149] of England. We must not judge of the value of such an acquittal by the ideas of our own time. In a modern trial, some of Godwine’s compurgators would have had to act as his judges; some would have been examined as witnesses to the facts; others might, at least in the case of a less illustrious defendant, have appeared as witnesses to character. In the rude state of the law in those times, these distinctions were not thought of. But it does not follow that substantial justice was not done. Godwine’s acquittal was as solemn as any acquittal could be. All the chief men of England swore to their belief in his innocence. The only difference between such an acquittal and a modern acquittal on a trial before the House of Lords is that, in the ancient mode of procedure, the voices of those who of their own knowledge affirmed Godwine to be innocent, and the voices of those who accepted his innocence |Value of the acquittal.| on their witness, were all reckoned together. Godwine then was acquitted, after the most solemn trial which the jurisprudence of his own time could provide. He is in fairness entitled to the full benefit of that acquittal. The judgement of a competent tribunal is always worth something, though its worth may be overbalanced by facts or probabilities the other way. There are those who hold, in defiance of all fact and all reason, that Sir Thomas More and Anne Boleyn must have been guilty, because English courts of justice pronounced them to be guilty. I am surely asking much less if I ask that Godwine may be held to be innocent, because an English court of justice, whose verdict is outweighed by no facts or probabilities the other way, solemnly pronounced him to be innocent.[1150]
One circumstance which in our days would at once throw suspicion upon the verdict proves nothing at all according to the ideas of those days. Ages after the time of Harthacnut, in times which by comparison seem as yesterday, English judges did not scruple to receive presents from their suitors, and English sovereigns did not scruple to receive presents from their subjects. It is always possible that such presents may be bribes in a guilty sense; it is always equally possible that they may not. It therefore proves nothing either way when we read that the Earl of the West-Saxons, solemnly acquitted by his peers, had still to buy his full restoration to the friendship of his highest judge at the cost of a magnificent gift. We have already seen how dear a possession a ship was in Danish eyes;[1151] we have seen how acceptable a gift it might be in English eyes.[1152] We have seen too what an astonishing amount of adornment the warriors of the North lavished upon these cherished instruments, almost companions, of their warfare.[1153] Though we hear nothing of any warlike exploits of Harthacnut,[1154] he had enough of the wiking in him for a well-equipped ship to be the most acceptable of all gifts.[1155] Godwine therefore gave Harthacnut a ship with a beak of gold, manned with eighty chosen warriors armed with all the magnificence of the full panoply of |Arms of the soldiers.| the time. Each man had on each arm a golden bracelet of sixteen ounces weight; each was clad in a triple coat of mail; each bore on his head a helmet partly gilded; each was armed with all the weapons which could be needed in warfare of any kind.[1156] Each bore on his left arm a shield with gilded boss and studs; his right hand bore the javelin, the English ategar, for the distant skirmishing at the beginning of a battle. But each too was ready for the closest and most deadly fight. Each was girded with a sword with a gilded handle, and from each man’s left shoulder hung, also adorned with |The Danish axe.| gold and silver, the most fearful weapon of all, the Danish battle-axe.[1157] This is our first mention[1158] of the weapon |1066.| which Englishmen were, twenty-six years later, to wield with such deadly prowess upon the height of Senlac, and |1203–4.| which, after the lapse of a hundred and forty years, the descendants of English exiles were still found wielding in defence of the throne of Constantine and Justinian.[1159]
Meanwhile all England was astir at the imposition of the Danegeld. Men had deemed that such imposts had passed away for ever in that Witenagemót of Oxford where Cnut the Danish conqueror changed into Cnut the English King. No enemy was in the land; Denmark, the old foe, was a sister kingdom; Normandy, the new foe, was hindered by her domestic troubles from threatening any of her neighbours; the overthrow of Duncan before Durham had taught Scotland to respect the frontiers of the Imperial state.[1160] But here was a tax such as had been heard of only in the darkest and saddest hours of the reign of Æthelred. Taxes of this kind always came in slowly,[1161] and this particular tax came in with special slowness. Military force was needed to extort payment; the housecarls, who do not seem to have been sent on such errands in the days of Cnut, were now turned into tax-gatherers, and were sent into every shire in England to collect the King’s tribute.[1162] That soldiers entrusted with such a duty behaved with insolence and violence we might take for granted in any age. In their conduct we may probably find the historical groundwork for those wonderful tales of Danish oppression in which later and rhetorical writers indulge.[1163] No doubt this collection of the Danegeld was accompanied by much oppression; but there is no evidence that it was oppression inflicted by Danes as Danes on Englishmen as Englishmen. As far as we can see, the state of things under Harthacnut must have been something like the state of England under John and Henry the Third. The natives, of whatever race, and the settlers who were fairly naturalized in the country, were all alike taxed for the sake of the mere strangers who had come in the King’s train.[1164] We cannot suppose that a Danish citizen of London, or a Danish thegn who had received a grant of lands from Cnut, was let off his share of the tribute on proof of his Danish birth. The discontent which was doubtless common to the whole kingdom at |The housecarls killed at Worcester. May 4, 1041.| last broke out in one particular quarter. The citizens of Worcester and the men of Worcestershire generally rose in revolt and attacked the housecarls. Two of their number, Feader and Thurstan, fled, like the Danes at Oxford,[1165] to a tower of the minster.[1166] The people followed them to their hiding-place, and slew them. The murder deserved legal punishment, but Harthacnut preferred a form of chastisement for which unluckily he could find precedents in the reigns of better princes than himself.[1167] He is said to have been further stirred up to vengeance by one who ought to have been the first to counsel mercy. Archbishop Ælfric had, as we have seen, received the bishopric of Worcester on the deposition of Lyfing;[1168] it would seem that the citizens refused to receive him.[1169] They were doubtless attached to their own patriotic pastor, and they may well have been unwilling to be again made an appendage to the Northumbrian metropolis. In revenge for this injury, Ælfric, we are told, counselled the terrible punishment which Harthacnut now decreed for his flock. The offending city and shire were to feel the full extremity of military vengeance; the town was to be burned, the country harried, and the inhabitants, |The Earls sent against Worcester.| as far as might be, killed. For this purpose Harthacnut sent nearly all his housecarls—unhappily we are not told their numbers—under the command of all the chief men of England. The three great Earls, Godwine of Wessex, Leofric of Mercia, Siward of Northumberland,[1170] and their subordinate Earls, among whom Thored of the Middle-Angles or Eastern part of Mercia,[1171] and Ranig of the Magesætas or Herefordshire[1172], are specially mentioned, were all sent against the one city of Worcester. Ten |[1051.]| years later, when Eadward the Confessor required the like chastisement to be inflicted on the town of Dover, Godwine utterly refused to have any hand in such a business, and distinctly asserted the right of every Englishman to a legal trial. But in that case the alleged crime had been done in Godwine’s own earldom, and no doubt Godwine’s power was much less under Harthacnut than it became under Eadward, most likely much less than it had been under Cnut. As things now stood, it was hardly possible to disobey, unless the Earls had been prepared for |The housecarls.| the extreme measure of deposing the King. England in fact in this age felt for the first time both the good and the bad consequences of the existence of a standing army. We shall hereafter see what the housecarls could do for England under a patriotic King; we now see what they could do against Englishmen at the bidding of a rapacious tyrant. It was not at the head of the forces of their several governments that the Earls were bidden to attack the offending city. Those forces would have taken some time to bring together, and, when they were brought together, they would doubtless have sympathized with their intended victims. The King had now at his command a body of Janissaries, who could march at a moment’s notice, a force bound to him by a personal tie, and ready to carry out his personal will in all things. It was no doubt deemed a great stroke of policy to implicate in the deed all the chief men of the land, English and Danish, by putting them at the head of the King’s personal force. But it seems plain that the Earls showed little zeal in the bloody errand on which they were sent. Placed as they were, they could hardly avoid doing much mischief to property, but they were evidently determined to shed as little blood as might be. |Worcester burned and the shire ravaged.| Their approach was well known[1173]—most likely they took care that it should be well known—to those against whom they were coming. The inhabitants of the shire took shelter in various places, while the men of the city itself entrenched[1174] themselves in an island of the Severn, whose name of Beverege reminds us of one of the losses which our national fauna has undergone.[1175] They held out for four days; on the fifth peace was made, and they were allowed to go where they would. But the city was burned, and the army marched away with great plunder.[1176] The vengeance of Harthacnut and Ælfric was thus partly satisfied, and the Archbishop, having thus witnessed the harrying of the diocese upon which he had been forced, seems to have been not unwilling to give back the see to its earlier possessor. As Ælfric still held it at the time of the burning of the city,[1177] it seems to follow that Lyfing’s reappointment |Patriotic Bishops of Worcester.| happened soon after this conclusion of peace. And it is a natural conjecture that the restoration of the popular prelate and the exclusion of the Northumbrian Metropolitan was one of the articles agreed on between the Earls and the citizens. Worcester has been happy in its Bishops in more than one great crisis of our history. Side by side with Godwine we find Lyfing; side by side with Harold we find Wulfstan; and in later times, when the part of Godwine is played again by Simon of Montfort, we find Walter of Cantelupe walking in the steps of Lyfing, and |[1265.]| saying mass and hearing the confession of the martyred Earl on the morning of the fight of Evesham.[1178]
Harthacnut had still another great crime in store; but the burning of Worcester seems to have set the final seal to the shame and hatred which he had drawn upon himself |Harthacnut recalls Eadward from Normandy. 1041.| among all classes of his people.[1179] It may have been a desperate effort to win back some measure of popularity which now led him to send for his half-brother Eadward out of Normandy.[1180] He could have had no personal affection for a brother whom he had never seen, and the influence of Emma would hardly have been exercised in Eadward’s favour. But the events of the next year showed that popular feeling was now veering round towards the ancient royal family. The memory of Cnut had secured the throne to two of his sons in succession; but this feeling could hardly have survived the evil deeds of Harold and Harthacnut. Harthacnut himself was childless; he was also, young as he was,[1181] in failing health.[1182] The recall of Eadward at once provided him with a successor in case of his death, and with one whose presence would be some support to him while he lived. Foreign writers tell us that he associated Eadward with him in the kingdom.[1183] For this statement there is no English authority, and it is not according to English customs. But to have given Eadward the government of a part of the kingdom, whether as Earl or as Under-king, would have been in no way wonderful. We do not however hear anything of such an arrangement; Eadward is set before us as living in great honour at his brother’s court, but no English writer describes him as holding any administrative office.[1184]
One thing however Eadward did, which, had men’s eyes been open to the future, would have seemed to them a sure sign of the evil to come. Emma had brought with her Hugh the French churl, who betrayed Exeter to the Dane.[1185] So her son, even when coming back as a private man, brought with him the advanced guard of that second swarm of strangers who were finally to bring the land into bondage. Among other Frenchmen, Eadward brought with him to England his nephew Ralph, the son of his sister Godgifu by her first husband Drogo of Mantes.[1186] He must now have been a mere youth; but he lived to be gorged with English wealth and honours, to bring his feeble force to oppose the champions of England, and to be branded in our history as “the timid Earl,”[1187] who sought to work improvements in English warfare, and himself turned and fled at the first sight of an armed enemy.