The Ward of King Canute: A Romance of the Danish Conquest

For the facts of this romance I have made free use of the following authorities: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England; Ingulph’s History of the Abbey of Croyland; William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle of the Kings of England; The Chronicles of Florence of Worcester; Lingard’s History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and Lingard’s History of England; Dean Spencer’s The White Robe of Churches; Collier’s Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain; Montalembert’s Monks of the West; Thrupp’s Anglo-Saxon Home; Hall’s Queens Before the Conquest; Kemble’s Saxons in England; Ridgway’s Gem of Thorney Island; Brayley and Britton’s History of the Ancient Palace and Late Houses of Parliament; Loftie’s Westminster Abbey and Loftie’s History of London; Allen’s History and Antiquities of London; Lappenberg’s History of England Under the Anglo-Saxon Kings; Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons; Knight’s Old England; Hume’s History of England; Green’s Conquest of England; Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest.
For the translations of Hávamál, etc., used at the beginnings of the chapters, I am indebted to Professor Rasmus B. Anderson and Mr. Paul du Chaillu.
O. A. L.
Chicago, April 1, 1903.
There is an old myth of a hero who renewed his strength each time he touched the earth, and finally was overcome by being raised in the air and crushed. Whether or not the Angles risked a like fate as they raised themselves away from the primitive virtues that had been their life and strength, no one can tell; but it has been well said that when Northern blood mingled with English blood at the time of the Danish Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon race touched the earth again.
Full stocked folds I saw at the sons of Fitjung, Now they carry beggars’ staffs; Wealth is Like the twinkling of an eye, The most unstable of friends. Hávamál.
As the blackness of the midsummer night paled, the broken towers and wrecked walls of the monastery loomed up dim and stark in the gray light. The long-drawn sigh of a waking world crept through the air and rustled the ivy leaves. The pitying angel of dreams, who had striven all night long to restore the plundered shrine and raise from their graves the band of martyred nuns, ceased from his ministrations, softly as a bubble frees itself from the pipe that shaped it, and floated away on the breath of the wind. Through a breach in the moss-grown wall, the first sunbeam stole in and pointed a bright finger across the cloister garth at the charred spot in the centre, where missals and parchment rolls had made a roaring fire to warm the invaders’ blood-stained hands.