The choice of the King and his Witan fell upon the eldest surviving son of the late Earl.[1058] Harold was removed from the government of the East-Angles to the greater government of the West-Saxons. This was, under such a King as Eadward, equivalent to investing him with the practical management of the King and his Kingdom. Harold then, when he could not have passed the age of thirty-two,[1059] became the first man in England. His career up to this time had been stained by what in our eyes seems to be more than one great fault, but it is clear that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, his merits far outweighed his errors. He had perhaps been guilty of selfishness in the matter of his brother Swegen;[1060] he had certainly been guilty of |Joy of the nation.| needless violence in the affair at Porlock. But the universal joy of the nation at his new promotion[1061] shows that the general character of his East-Anglian government must have given the brightest hopes for the future. Grief for the loss of Godwine was tempered by rejoicing at the elevation of one who at once began to walk in his father’s |Character of his government.| steps. From henceforth, as Earl and as King, the career of Harold is one of vigorous and just government, of skill and valour in the field, of unvarying moderation towards political foes. He won and he kept the devoted love of the English people. And, what was a harder task, he won and kept, though in a less degree than another of his house, the personal confidence and affection of the weak and wayward prince with whom he had to deal.
The translation of Harold to the greater government of Wessex made a vacancy in his former Earldom of the East-Angles. It would probably have been difficult to refuse the post to the man who had already held it for a short space, Ælfgar, the son of Leofric of Mercia. His appointment left only one of the great Earldoms in the House of Godwine, while the House of Leofric now again ruled from the North-Welsh border to the German Ocean.[1062] But it quite fell in with Harold’s conciliatory policy to raise no objection to an arrangement which seemed to reverse the positions of the two families. The possession of Wessex was an object paramount to all others, and all the chances of the future were in favour of the rising House. Ælfgar accordingly became Earl of the |Character of Ælfgar and his sons.| East-Angles.[1063] His career was turbulent and unhappy. The virtues of Leofric and Godgifu seem not to have been inherited by their descendants.[1064] We hear of Ælfgar and of his sons mainly as rebels in whom no confidence could be placed, as traitors to every King and to every cause, as men who never scrupled to call in the aid of any foreign enemy in order to promote their personal objects. Rivalry towards Harold and his house was doubtless one great mainspring of their actions, but the Norman Conqueror and the last male descendant of Cerdic found it as vain as ever Harold had found it to put trust in the grandsons of Leofric.
I have already suggested that it was probably in consequence of the death of Godwine and the succession of Harold that the restoration of some of the King’s Norman favourites, especially of William Bishop of London, was allowed.[1065] This may have taken place at this same Easter festival; but it is more natural to refer it to some later Gemót of the same year. It is certain that, during this second portion of the reign of Eadward, a considerable number of Normans, or others bearing Norman or French |Position of the Normans in the later days of Eadward.| names, were established in England.[1066] It is equally certain that their position differed somewhat from what it had been before the outlawry of Godwine. The attempts to put them in possession of the great offices of the Kingdom were not renewed. Ralph retained his Earldom, William was allowed to return to his Bishoprick. The royal blood of the one, the excellent character of the other, procured for them this favourable exception, which, in the case of Ralph the Timid, proved eminently unlucky. But we hear of no other Norman or French Earls, Bishops, or Abbots. |Political office forbidden,| Excepting a few of the favoured natives of Lotharingia, none but Englishmen are now preferred to the great posts of Church and State. No local office higher than that of Sheriff, and that only in one or two exceptional cases,[1067] |but Court office allowed.| was now allowed to be held by a stranger. But mere Court preferment, offices about the King’s person, seem to have been freely held by foreigners to whom there was no manifest personal objection. The King was allowed to have about him his Norman stallers, his Norman chaplains, and, an officer now first beginning· to creep into a little importance, his Norman chancellor. And those Normans who were tolerated at all seem to have been looked on with less suspicion than they had been during the former period. They are now freely allowed to witness the royal charters, which implies their acting as members of the national assemblies.[1068] Their position is now clearly one of personal favour, not of political influence. They are hardly mentioned in our history; we have to trace them out by the light of entries |English character of Eadward’s later policy.| in Domesday and of signatures to Charters. Once only shall we have any reason to suspect that the course of events was influenced by them. And in that one case their influence is a mere surmise, and if it was exercised at all, it must have been exercised in a purely underhand way. The policy of Eadward’s reign is from henceforth distinctly an English policy. In other words, it is the policy of Harold.
It is easy to understand that the feelings of Harold with regard to the foreigners differed somewhat from those of his father. They belonged to different generations. Godwine’s whole education, his whole way of looking at things, must have been purely English. It is hardly needful to make any exception on behalf of influences from Denmark. The rule of Cnut was one under which Danes became Englishmen, not one under which Englishmen became Danes. We can hardly conceive that Godwine understood the French language. Such an accomplishment would in his early days have been quite useless. We can well believe that, along with his really enlightened and patriotic policy, there was in the old Earl a good deal of mere sturdy English prejudice against strangers as strangers. But every act of Harold’s life shows that this last was a feeling altogether alien to his nature. His travels of inquiry abroad, his encouragement of deserving foreigners at home, all show him to have been a statesman who, while he maintained a strictly national policy, rose altogether above any narrow insular prejudices. That he understood French well it is impossible to doubt.[1069] If he erred at all, he was far more likely to err in granting too much indulgence to the foreign fancies of his wayward master. His policy of conciliation would forbid him to be needlessly harsh even to a Norman, and he had every motive for dealing as tenderly as possible with all the wishes and prejudices of the King. Harold stood towards Eadward in a position wholly different from that in which Godwine had stood. Godwine might claim to dictate as a father to the man to whom he had given a crown and a wife. Harold could at most claim the position of a younger brother. That Harold ruled Eadward there is no doubt, but he very distinctly ruled by obeying.[1070] Habit, temper, policy, would all lead him not to thwart the King one jot more than the interests of the Kingdom called for. The |Compromise between Harold and the King.| position of the strangers during the remaining years of Eadward’s reign is a manifest compromise between Eadward’s foreign weaknesses and Harold’s English policy. They were to be allowed to bask in the sunshine of the court; they were to be carefully shut out from political power. If Harold erred, his error, I repeat, lay in too great a toleration of the dangerous intruders.
The remaining events of the year of Godwine’s death are some ecclesiastical appointments, which must have been made at the Christmas Gemót, and a Welsh inroad, which seems to have happened about the same time. In the one month of October three Prelates died,[1071] Wulfsige, Bishop of Lichfield, and the Abbots Godwine of Winchcombe and |Leofwine of Lichfield. 1053.| Æthelweard of Glastonbury. The see of Lichfield was bestowed on Leofwine, Abbot of Earl Leofric’s favourite monastery of Coventry.[1072] In this appointment we plainly see the hand of the Mercian Earl, of whom, considering his name, the new Bishop is not unlikely to have been a kinsman.[1073] |Wulfwig of Dorchester. 1053.| At the same time, it would seem, the see of Dorchester was at last filled by the appointment of Wulfwig, and the two Bishops, as we have seen, got them beyond sea for consecration.[1074] |Æthelnoth of Glastonbury. 1053–1082.| The new Abbot of Glastonbury was Æthelnoth, a monk of the house, who bears an ill character for dilapidation of the revenues of the monastery, but who continued to weather all storms, and to die in possession of |Bishop Ealdred holds Winchcombe.| his Abbey sixteen years after the Norman invasion.[1075] The disposition of Winchcombe is more remarkable. Ealdred, the Bishop of the diocese, who seems never to have shrunk from any fresh duties, spiritual or temporal, which came in his way, undertook the rule of that great monastery in addition to his episcopal office.[1076] This may have been mere personal love of power or pelf; but it may also have been a deliberate attempt, such as we shall see made in other cases also, to get rid of a powerful, and no doubt often troublesome, neighbour, by annexing an abbey to the Bishoprick. If such was the design of Ealdred, it did not prove successful. |He resigns it to Godric. July 17, 1054.| After holding Winchcombe for some time, he next year, willingly or unwillingly, resigned it to one Godric, who is described as the son of Godman, the King’s Chaplain.[1077]
Of the Welsh inroad, recorded by one Chronicler only, all that is said is that many of the “wardmen” at Westbury were slain.[1078] This is doubtless Westbury in Gloucestershire, on the Welsh side of the Severn. The expression seems to imply the maintenance of a permanent force to guard that exposed frontier.
The next year was marked by a military and a diplomatic event, both of which were of high importance. The former is no other than the famous Scottish expedition of Earl Siward, an event which has almost passed from the domain of history into that of poetry. Macbeth, it will be remembered, was now reigning in Scotland.[1079] Like Siward himself,[1080] he had risen to power by a great crime, the murder of his predecessor, the young King Duncan. And, like Siward, he had made what atonement he could by ruling his usurped dominion vigorously and well. We have seen that there is no reason to believe that Macbeth had, since he assumed the Scottish Crown, renewed the fealty which he had paid to Cnut when he was under-King,[1081] or, in more accurate Scottish phrase, Maarmor of Moray. We have also seen that he had been striving, in a remarkable way, to make himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness in the quarter where that mammon was believed to have the greatest influence, |Siward’s designs against Macbeth.| namely at the threshold of the Apostles.[1082] We may be sure that Earl Siward, the kinsman, probably the guardian, of the young prince whom Macbeth shut out from the Scottish Crown,[1083] had all along looked on his formidable northern neighbour with no friendly eye. It is not easy to see why the attack on Macbeth, if it was to be made at all, was so long delayed. It may be that the internal troubles of England had hitherto forbidden any movement of the kind, and that Siward took advantage of the first season of domestic quiet to execute a plan which he had long cherished. It may be that the scheme fell in better with the policy of Harold than with the policy of Godwine. Between Godwine and Siward, between the West-Saxon and the Dane, there was doubtless a standing rivalry, partly national, partly personal. But it would fall in with the conciliatory policy of Harold to help, rather than to thwart, any designs of the great Northern Earl which were not manifestly opposed to the public welfare. At all events, in this year the consent of Eadward[1084] was given, a consent which certainly implies the decree of a Witenagemót, and which almost certainly implies the good will of |Siward’s expedition against Macbeth. 1054.| Earl Harold. An expedition on a great scale was undertaken against the Scottish usurper.[1085] That it was undertaken on behalf of Malcolm, the son of the slain Duncan, can admit of no reasonable doubt. To restore the lawful heir of the Scottish Crown was an honourable pretext for interference in Scottish affairs on which any English statesman would gladly seize. And to Siward it was more than an honourable pretext; it was asserting the rights and avenging the wrongs of a near kinsman. The Earl of the Northumbrians accordingly attacked Scotland at the head of a great force both by land and by sea. The army was largely composed of the Housecarls of the King and of the Earl, picked and tried soldiers, Danish and English. |Macbeth’s alliance with Thorfinn.| Macbeth was supported[1086] by a Prince who had now become a neighbour of England, and one probably quite as dangerous as himself. This was Thorfinn, the famous Earl of the Orkneys, who had established his power over the whole of the Western Islands, and even over the coast of Scotland and Strathclyde as far south as Galloway. With his help, the Scottish King ventured to meet the host of |Defeat of Macbeth. July 27, 1054.| Siward in a pitched battle. He was encouraged by the presence of a body of the Normans who had been driven out of England at the return of Godwine. They are spoken of as if their number was large enough to form a considerable contingent of the Scottish army. The fight was an obstinate one. The Earl’s son Osbeorn and his sister’s son Siward were slain, and with them a large number of the Housecarls, both those of the Earl himself and of the King. The slaughter on the Scottish side was more fearful still. Dolfinn, seemingly a kinsman of the Earl of Orkney, was killed,[1087] and the Norman division, fighting no doubt with all the gallantry of their race, enhanced by all the desperation of exiles, were slaughtered to a man. We thus see that the battle was a most stoutly contested one, and that, as usual, the slaughter fell mainly on the best troops on both sides, the Normans on the Scottish side and the Housecarls on the English. But the fortune of England prevailed; the Scots, deprived of their valiant allies, were utterly routed, and King Macbeth escaped with difficulty from the field. The plunder was of an amount which struck the minds of contemporary writers with wonder.[1088]
Siward was a hero whose history has had a mythical element about it from the beginning;[1089] it would have been wonderful indeed if this, the last and greatest exploit of so renowned a warrior, had not supplied the materials for song and legend. The tale is told how Siward, hearing of the death of his son, asked whether his wounds were in front or behind. Being told that all were in front, the old warrior rejoiced; he wished no other end for either his son or himself. The story is eminently characteristic; but, as it is told us, it is difficult to find a place for it in the authentic narrative of the campaign. But fiction has taken liberties with the facts of Siward’s Scottish campaign in far more important points. As we have seen, the English victory was complete, but Macbeth himself |Malcolm King of Scots. 1054.| escaped. Malcolm was, as King Eadward had commanded, proclaimed King of Scots, and a King of Scots who was put into possession of his Crown by an invading English force most undoubtedly held that Crown as the sworn |The war continued by Macbeth.| man of the English Basileus. It took however four years before Malcolm obtained full possession of his Kingdom. Macbeth and his followers maintained their cause in the North, being, it would seem, still supported by help from
Thorfinn. Malcolm, on the other hand, was still supported by help from England, and we shall find that he deemed it expedient to enter into a very close relation with Siward’s successor in the Northumbrian Earldom. At last |Macbeth finally defeated and slain. 1058.| Macbeth was finally defeated and slain at Lumfanan in Aberdeenshire. An attempt was made to perpetuate the Moray dynasty in the person of Lulach, a kinsman, or perhaps a stepson, of Macbeth, a son of his wife Gruach |Ephemeral reign of Lulach, and final establishment of Malcolm. 1058.| by a former marriage. But this prince, who bears the surname of the Fool, could not long resist the power of Malcolm; in a few months’ time he was hunted down and slain. The rival dynasty was now crushed; all Scotland came into the hands of Malcolm, who was solemnly crowned at Scone. The power of Thorfinn was broken no less than the power of Macbeth, and Malcolm apparently recovered the full possession of Cumberland, possibly on the death of Thorfinn, when Malcolm married his widow Ingebiorg, a marriage of whose results we shall hear again.
These Scottish affairs had but little interest for our English writers, who were satisfied with recording the brilliant victory of Siward and the rich booty which he won, without going on to dwell on events which were almost purely Scottish. As their narrative ends with the defeat of Macbeth and Malcolm’s first proclamation as King, it naturally passed out of mind that that proclamation did not at once give him full possession of all Scotland. The two defeats of Macbeth were confounded together, and it was believed that the usurper met his death in the battle which he fought against Siward. The error began very early, and it obtained prevalence enough to become enshrined in the poetry which, far more than any historical record, has made the name of Macbeth immortal.
In the course of this year, seemingly at a Gemót held at Midsummer, possibly that in which the expedition |State of the succession. 1054.| against Macbeth was decreed,[1090] a most important step was taken with regard to the succession to the Crown. It was a step which proved altogether fruitless, but it is most important as showing what men’s feelings and wishes were at the time. It proves incontestably that now, two years after the return of Godwine, the idea of the succession of William had quite passed away, and that the idea of the succession of Harold had not yet occurred to men’s minds. The state of the royal house was such as to cause the deepest anxiety. The English people, though they cared little for any strict law of succession, still reverenced the blood of their ancient princes, and had ever been wont, save under the irresistible pressure of foreign conquest, to choose their Kings only from among the descendants of former Kings. But now the line of their former Kings seemed to be altogether dying out. Eadward was without children or hopes of children. There was no man in the land sprung from the male line of Æthelred and Eadgar. It is quite possible that there may have been men descended from earlier Kings; but, if so, they could only have been distant kinsmen, whose royal descent was well nigh forgotten, and who were no longer allowed to count as Æthelings. There was indeed a grandson of Æthelred dwelling in the Kingdom in the person of Ralph of Hereford. |Position of Ralph.| Ralph would very likely have been the successor to whom Eadward’s personal inclinations would have led him. He shared with William of Normandy the merit of being a stranger speaking the French tongue, and he had the advantage over William of being really a descendant of English royalty. And the tie which bound Ralph to Eadward was a very close one. Old Teutonic feelings held the son of a sister to be hardly less near and dear than a son of one’s own loins,[1091] and we have seen some indications that this feeling was not wholly forgotten in England in the eleventh century. The sister’s son of Brihtnoth and the sister’s son of Siward[1092] are mentioned in a special way among the chosen companions of their uncles, around whose banners they fought and died. Eadward, in his heart of hearts, would naturally fall back upon Ralph, his own nephew, the son of the daughter of Æthelred and Emma, as a candidate whom the English people might perhaps be persuaded to accept, when the cause of the Norman became hopeless after Godwine’s revolution. |No preference given by female descent.| But however sacred was the relation between a man and his sister’s son, it was not one which by the Law of England conferred any right to the royal succession. The preference attaching to kingly blood was confined to those who were of kingly blood by direct male descent; it does not appear that the son of a King’s daughter had any sort of claim in a royal election beyond any other man in the realm. And, as for Ralph himself, his foreign origin and his personal conduct were, either of them, quite enough to make him thoroughly distasteful to the English people. Men had had quite enough of him as Earl, and they certainly had no wish to have any further experience of him as King. In the present lack of heirs, men’s thoughts turned to a branch of the royal family whose very existence |The sons of Eadmund Ironside.| was perhaps well nigh forgotten. Seven and thirty years before, the infant sons of Eadmund Ironside, Eadmund and |1017.| Eadward, had found a shelter from the fears of Cnut under the protection of the sainted Hungarian King Stephen.[1093] |Eadward the Ætheling; his marriage and children.| Eadmund died, seemingly while still young. Eadward was still living. He had, seemingly through the influence of Stephen’s Queen Gisela, sister of the Emperor Henry the Second, obtained in marriage a lady of royal descent named Agatha, who seems most probably to have been a niece of the Hungarian Queen and of the sainted Emperor.[1094] This marriage would seem to show that, in those distant lands, Eadward was acknowledged as a prince, perhaps looked to as one who might some day reign in his native island. And the fact that the son of Eadward and Agatha bore the renowned English name of Eadgar, shows that the Ætheling himself cannot have wholly forgotten his native land. Yet, banished, as he was, in his cradle, he could have retained hardly anything of the feelings of an Englishman, and it is hardly possible that he could have spoken the English tongue. Eadward must have been even less of an Englishman than his royal namesake and uncle. Eadward the King had left England when he was many years older than Eadward the Ætheling, and he had lived in a land which had a much closer connexion with England. Still Normandy was dangerous, and Hungary was not. Whatever the Ætheling was, at least he was not a Frenchman; his connexions, though foreign, were in every way honourable and in no way formidable. Hungary was too distant a land to do England either good or harm, but the fame of the youngest Christian Kingdom, and of its renowned and sainted King, was doubtless great throughout Europe. And the connexion with the Imperial House, the distant kindred of the Ætheling’s children with the illustrious Cæsar, the friend and brother-in-law of King Eadward, was, of all foreign ties, that which it most became Englishmen to strengthen. In default therefore of any member of the royal house brought up and dwelling in the land, it was determined to recall the banished Ætheling with his wife and family.[1095] Besides his son Eadgar, he had two daughters, who bore the foreign names of Margaret and Christina. We shall hear of all |Eadgar.| three again. Eadgar lived to be in an especial manner the sport of fortune; a King twice chosen, but never crowned, the last male descendant of Cerdic dragged on a sluggish and contented life as the friend and pensioner |Margaret.| of Norman patrons. One of his sisters won a worthier fame. Margaret obtained the honours alike of royalty and of saintship; she became one of the brightest patterns of every virtue in her own time, and she became the source through which the blood and the rights of the Imperial House of Wessex have passed to the Angevin, the Scottish, and the German sovereigns of England.[1096]
It is impossible to doubt that the resolution to invite the Ætheling was regularly passed by the authority of the King and his Witan. No lighter authority could have justified such a step, or could have carried any weight with |The Ætheling invited to England: the invitation equivalent to succession to the Crown.| foreign courts. Such an invitation was equivalent to declaring the Ætheling to be successor to the Crown, so far as English Law allowed any man to be successor before the Crown was actually vacant. It is possible that, as in some other cases, an election before the vacancy may have been attempted;[1097] but it is perhaps more likely that all that was done was to guarantee to Eadward that same strong preference which naturally belonged only to a son of a reigning King. Such a preference, in favour of one who was the last remaining member of the royal family, would in practice hardly differ from an exclusive right. The resolution in short placed the Ætheling in the same position as if his father and not his uncle had been on the throne. His position would thus be the same as that of Eadwig and Eadgar during the reign of Eadred.[1098] But, when we consider what followed, it is important to remember that the preference which undoubtedly belonged to Eadward would not belong to his son. Eadward, though so long an exile, was an Englishman born, the son of a crowned King and his Lady.[1099] The young Eadgar was a native of a foreign land, and was not the son of |Import of the selection of Eadward.| royal parents. This quasi designation of Eadward to the Crown involves, as I before said, two things. It implies that the King had learned that the succession of William was a thing which he never could bring about.[1100] It implies also that neither Harold himself nor the English people had as yet formed any serious idea of the possible succession of one not of royal descent. Indeed one can hardly doubt that the resolution to send for the Ætheling, if it was not made at Harold’s own motion, must at any rate have had his full approval. No proposal could be more contrary to the wishes and interests of the Norman courtiers, who must either have unsuccessfully opposed it or else have found it their best wisdom to hold their peace. It was therefore, seemingly at the Whitsun Gemót, resolved to send an embassy to obtain the return of the Ætheling. And about the time that Earl Siward was warring in Scotland, the English ambassadors set forth on their errand.
A direct communication with the court of Hungary seems to have been an achievement beyond the diplomatic powers of Englishmen in that age. The immediate commission of the embassy was addressed to the Emperor Henry, with a request that he would himself send a further |Ealdred and Ælfwine ambassadors.| embassy into Hungary. At the head of the English legation was the indefatigable Bishop Ealdred, and with him seems to have been coupled Abbot Ælfwine of Ramsey.[1101] Both these Prelates had already had some experience of foreign courts. Ealdred had gone on the King’s errand to the Apostolic throne,[1102] and Ælfwine had been one of the representatives of the English Church at the famous Council of Rheims.[1103] The Bishop of Worcester clearly reckoned on a long absence, and we get some details of the arrangements which he made for the discharge of his ecclesiastical duties during his absence. The Abbey of Winchcombe, which he had annexed to his Bishoprick the year before, he now resigned,[1104] and the general government of the see of Worcester he entrusted to a monk of Evesham named Æthelwig.[1105] The church of that famous monastery, raised by the skill of its Abbot Mannig,[1106] was now awaiting consecration. For that ceremony he deputed his neighbour Bishop Leofwine of Lichfield.[1107] He then set forth for the court of Augustus. The Emperor was then at Köln, on his return from the consecration of his young son Henry as West-Frankish or Roman King in the Great Charles’s minster at Aachen.[1108] The immediate tie between Eadward and Henry had been broken by the death of Queen Gunhild; the King who was now to be crowned was the child of Henry’s second wife, the Empress Agnes of Poitiers.[1109] But the interchange of gifts and honours between the Roman and the insular |Splendid reception given to Ealdred.| Basileus was none the less cordial and magnificent. English writers dwell with evident pleasure on the splendid reception which the English Bishop met with both from the Emperor and from Hermann, the Archbishop of the |His long stay at Köln. 1054–1055.| city where Ealdred had been presented to Henry.[1110] But the immediate business of his embassy advanced but slowly. The time was ill chosen for an Imperial intervention with the Hungarian court. Andrew, the reigning King of Hungary, was about this time abetting the rebellious Duke Conrad of Bavaria against the Emperor.[1111] We have no details of the further course of the negotiation. Ealdred abode a whole year at Köln, probably waiting for a favourable opportunity. His embassy was in the end successful; for the Ætheling did in the end return to England. But we have no further details, and Eadward did not return to England till long after Ealdred had gone back, and till at least a year after the death of the Emperor.
The year of Ealdred’s mission was marked also by the sudden death of a somewhat remarkable person, namely Osgod Clapa, whose movements by sea had been watched with such care five years before.[1112] The Chronicler remarks, seemingly with some little astonishment, that he died in |Death of Earl Siward. 1055.| his bed.[1113] Early in the next year death carried off a far more famous man, no other than the great Earl of the Northumbrians.[1114] The victory of the last year, glorious as it was, had been bought by the bitterest domestic losses, which may not have been without their effect even on the iron spirit and frame of the old Earl. His nephew and his elder son had fallen in the war with Macbeth, and |His son Waltheof.| his only surviving son, afterwards the famous Waltheof, was still a child.[1115] Siward’s first wife Æthelflæd was dead, and he had in his old age married, and survived, a widow named Godgifu.[1116] We might have fancied that Waltheof was her son, but we know for certain that he was the son of the daughter of the old Northumbrian Earls, and that he unhappily inherited all the deadly feuds of his mother’s house.[1117] Siward died at York, the capital of his Earldom. |Story of Siward’s death.| A tale, characteristic at least, whether historically true or not, told how the stern Danish warrior, when he felt death approaching, deemed it a disgrace that he should die, not on the field of battle, but of disease, “like a cow.” If he could not actually die amid the clash of arms, he would at least die in warrior’s garb. He called for his armour, and, harnessed as if again to march against Macbeth, the stout |His foundation and burial at Galmanho.| Earl Siward breathed his last.[1118] But this fierce spirit was not inconsistent with the piety of the time. Saint Olaf, the martyred King of the Northmen, had by this time become a favourite object of reverence, especially among men of Scandinavian descent. In his honour Earl Siward had reared a church in a suburb of his capital called Galmanho,[1119] a church which, after the Norman Conquest, developed into that great Abbey of Saint Mary, whose ruins form the most truly beautiful ornament of the Northern metropolis. In his own church of Galmanho Siward the Strong, the true relic of old Scandinavian times, was buried with all honour.
The death of Siward led to most important political consequences. The direct authority of the House of Godwine was now, for the first time, extended to the land beyond the Humber. This fact marks very forcibly how fully the royal authority was now acknowledged throughout the whole realm. The King and his Witan could now venture to appoint as the successor of Siward an Earl who had absolutely no connexion with any of the great families of Northumberland. Cnut, in the moment of victory, had given the Northumbrians the Dane Eric as their Earl.[1120] But this was the act of a conqueror, and such was the strength of the Danish element in Northumberland that the appointment of a Dane from Denmark probably seemed less irksome than the appointment of an Englishman from any |Tostig appointed Earl of the Northumbrians. 1055.| other part of the Kingdom. This last was the act, one wholly without a parallel, on which Eadward now ventured. The vacant Earldom of Northumberland, including also the detached shires of Northampton and Huntingdon,[1121] was |Influences on behalf of Tostig.| conferred on Tostig the son of Godwine. The novelty of the step is perhaps marked by the elaborate description of the influences which were brought to bear on the mind of Eadward to induce him to make the appointment. We hear, not only of Tostig’s own merits, but of the influence employed by his many friends, especially by his sister the Lady Eadgyth and by his brother Earl Harold, whom Norman calumny has represented as depriving Tostig of his hereditary rights.[1122] We may suspect that we have here an account of influences which it was more necessary to bring to bear on the minds of the Witan than on that of the King.[1123] For there is no appointment of Eadward’s reign which is more likely to have been the King’s personal act. Tostig, rather than Harold, was Eadward’s personal |Eadward’s personal affection for Tostig.| favourite. He was the Hêphaistiôn, the friend of Eadward, while Harold was rather the Krateros, the friend of the King.[1124] He also stood higher in the good will of their common sister the Lady Eadgyth. Cut off in a great measure from his Norman favourites, the affections of Eadward had settled themselves on the third son of Godwine. He would therefore naturally desire to raise Tostig to the highest dignities in his gift, or, if he felt hesitation in doing so, it could only be from the wish to keep his favourite always about his own person. In fact we shall find that Eadward could not bring himself to give up the society of Tostig to the degree which the interests of his distant Earldom called for. And this frequent absence of the Earl from his government seems to have been among the causes of the misfortunes which afterwards followed.[1125]