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he advanced to Beverston and Langtree, and there demanded that Eustace and his murderous band should be tried for the massacre at Dover. Edward, calling the great earls Leofric and Siward to his aid, met this threatening front with craft. Instead of a battle at Gloucester, there was to be a conference at London on St. Michael's Day. Godwin reached the trysting

His own

place to find the streets thick with hostile spears. army had melted away, and he stood in the very jaws of destruction with scarcely a weapon at his back. The old story of Alfred's murder being raked up against him, he bowed to necessity, and fled with his wife Githa and Sweyn his son to Bosenham in Sussex, where a few ships lay anchored off the shore. The exiles sailed to Flanders, where Count Baldwin ruled a court which stood to England in a relation not unlike that held in Tudor times by the duchy of Burgundy. All discontented spirits flocked to that centre from the English shore, to find there a welcome and a home. Harold and Leofwin, other sons of Godwin, went to Ireland; and the ban of outlawry was proclaimed by not unwilling lips on every member of his illustrious family. Queen Edith, shorn of all her state, was sent to the nunnery of Wherwell.*

1051

There now arrived in England a guest whose present coming had an ominous import. William of Normandy, who had been secretly invited over to England by the Confessor, as his kinsman, as an ally against Godwin, landed with a splendid train of knights, and received a magnificent welcome from the king. The joy with which he had greeted the summons deepened as his ambitious eye roved over the fair fields of England, laden with overflowing wealth. If not before, he must certainly then have resolved to attempt the conquest of the country. Everything favoured such a design. A spiritless weakling sat upon the throne, ruling a court already invaded by French fashions of speech, dress, and daily life; and

* Another authority says that she found a refuge in Wilton convent.

Normans already wore all the mitres and coronets that were worth possessing.

Godwin soon returned to triumph and to die in the land he loved so well. Aided by his sons from Ireland, he sailed up the Thames to London Bridge, which was purposely left unguarded by the citizens, and in sight of the royal fleet he landed his men on the Southwark side. A panic struck through Edward's Norman court as the bold Saxon earl reëntered London amid the rejoicings of the entire city. Robert, the foreign primate, and many others fled to Normandy. The king and Godwin formed a hollow friendship, Edith returned to the court, and Stigand, an Englishman, received the vacant see of Canterbury (1052).

1053

But the hand of death had already touched the great Earl of Kent. Soon after his arrival in England his health began visibly to break. The end came at Winchester on the 18th of April 1053. Brave, eloquent, and patriotic, Godwin stands out in these sunset days of Saxon greatness like a giant amid a crowd of dwarfs. Crimes he committed, no doubt, for it was an age of crime; but his unshaken loyalty to the house of Cerdic would cover far deeper stains than those that lie on his name.

The reign of Edward lingered on for thirteen ignoble years. Feuds between Godwin's sons-Harold, who had succeeded to the western earldom once held by Sweyn, and Tostig, whom Edith's favour had raised to the coronet of Northumbria-convulsed the kingdom. Edward, idling life away in the society of monks or abroad in the fields with hound and hawk, made a feeble move towards the appointment of a successor by bringing from Hungary his nephew, Edward, the exiled son of Ironside, and his three children-Edgar, Margaret, and Christina. The sudden death of his namesake, almost immediately after arriving in London, destroyed whatever hopes the king may have been building on this act of late remem

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1057

Meantime the star of Harold had been rising fast.

He in

flicted a terrible defeat on the Welsh, whose king, Grif1063 fith, was slain. Tostig drew sword with his brother in this great enterprise. But England could not contain both these giants of ambition at once. Tostig had to go; and when Edward grew sick with a mortal disease, nothing stood between Harold and the crown his father had declined to wear. The story of Harold's oath to the Conqueror would, if true, brand his kingly name with perjury. But there is good reason for believing it a monkish fiction. Shipwrecked in 1065 on the Norman coast, he fell, it is related, into the cruel hands of Guy, Count of Ponthieu, who delivered him up to the Duke of Normandy. William, resting his claim to the English crown on an old promise made to him by Edward the Confessor when they were young together in Normandy, made Harold swear to help him in securing the prize he sought. The point of the story lies in the trick by which William tried to give a solemn meaning to words lightly uttered. The English earl, thinking that he swore upon a common reliquary, turned pale with alarm when the cover of the table was removed, and a chest filled with the bones of saints appeared below. In monkish ages, to break an oath like this surpassed all other crimes.

1065

The 5th of January 1066 saw Edward the Confessor dead. One day later, the voice of the southern Witan proclaimed Harold the Dauntless King of England. With his dying breath

the Confessor had commended the queen and the king1066 dom to the care of this great soldier, on whom alone his country's heart was resting. Edgar the Etheling, grandson of Ironside, still lived, it is true; but a raw boy was not fit to wear the English crown in that hour of deepening storm. Young Edgar was made Earl of Oxford, while Harold assumed the crown.

CHAPTER IX.

THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

Preparations in Normandy-Battle of Stamford-Landing of William— March to Hastings-The array on Senlac Hill-The battle-The Norman onset-The death of Harold.

THE

HE news of Harold's succession reached the Duke of Normandy as he stood with strung bow in a park near Rouen, ready to let fly at the driven deer. Dropping his bow, he crossed the Seine in a boat, and in the hall of his palace lay on a bench for hours with muffled head, brooding over the loss he had sustained. Then the plan of conquest was matured; and the hot long days of summer shone on crowds of armourers, smiths, and shipwrights toiling in all the forges and dockyards of Normandy. With anxious heart the duke saw the days shorten and the Channel waves grow rough with autumn gales, while he waited for that posture of affairs in which his keen eye might discern the greatest likelihood of victory. At last the chance arrived. Tostig, Harold's banished brother, who had been for some time cruising as a pirate off the English shore, sailed up the Ouse with Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, inflicted a bloody defeat on an English army, and took immediate possession of York. Harold, advancing northward with a considerable force, found the invading foe occupying a strong position at Stamford Bridge on the Derwent; and there was fought a battle the importance of which is almost obscured by the great action which made the ensuing month famous in English history.

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Sept. 25, 1066

At dawn on the 25th of September the battle began. Harold with his horsemen charged the thin crescent in which the Norsemen had formed their array. The spears of the Scandinavians kept their curving hedge long unbroken, standing outward with red and fatal points. But at last the English wedge pierced the extended line, and pushing on, split it right in two. The invaders, many of whom had left. their breastplates in camp on account of the oppressive heat, fell in heaps. Hardrada found the seven feet of English earth which Harold's boastful taunt had promised him, for the giant lay stretched in death amid the corpses of nearly all his force. And Tostig, too, the traitor son of Godwin, died in the carnage of that bloody day.

Four days later, on the 29th, the same Kentish shore which had seen the galleys of Cæsar and the keels of Hengist approach laden with blood and flame, witnessed a crowd of painted sails rise out of the offing and overspread the green waves like a flock of sea-birds. They had come from St. Valeri* on the Norman coast, and bore sixty thousand soldiers, summoned from various lands to aid in the enterprise of the Norman duke. No English soldier appeared to oppose the landing. No English sail cruised along the defenceless shore; for the northern war had drawn every fighting-man to the banks of the Derwent, and the English

* St. Valeri, a small sea-port in Seine-Inférieure, eighteen miles north of YvetotAnother port of the same name stands at the mouth of the Somme.

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