Canute and Godiva.
The first is when the famous Canute, king of both England and Denmark, and having strong taste for song and music and letters, rows by the towers of a great East-England religious house, and as he drifts with the tide, composes (if we may trust tradition) a snatch of verse which has come down to us in a thirteenth century form, about the pleasant singing of the Monks of Ely. Wordsworth has embalmed the matter in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets (xxx.):
A pleasant music floats along the mere,
From monks in Ely chanting service high,
While as Canute the king is rowing by;
My oarsman, quoth the mighty king, draw near
That we the sweet songs of the monks may hear.
He listens (all past conquests and all schemes
Of future vanishing like empty dreams)
Heart-touched, and haply not without a tear,
The royal minstrel, ere the Choir is still,
While his free barge skims the smooth flood along
Gives to the rapture an accordant Rhyme
O suffering Earth! be thankful; sternest Clime
And rudest Age are subject to the thrill
Of heaven-descended piety and song.
I think you will never go under the wondrous arches of Ely Cathedral—and you should go there if you ever travel into the eastern counties of England—without thinking of King Canute and of that wondrous singing of the monks, eight hundred years ago.
The second historic incident of which I spoke, is the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth in the year 1039, some twenty-five years before the Norman Conquest. I don’t think you want any refreshing about Macbeth.
The third incident is of humbler tone, yet it went to show great womanly devotion, and lifted a tax from the heads of a whole towns-people. I refer to the tradition of Earl Leofric of Mercia and the Lady Godiva of Coventry, based in the main, without doubt, upon actual occurrence, and the subject for centuries of annual commemoration.[11] Tennyson tells, in his always witching way, how
She rode forth clothéd on with chastity:
The deep air listened round her as she rode,
——the barking cur
Made her cheek flame; her palfry’s foot-fall shot
Light horror thro’ her pulses:
One low churl compact of thankless earth
Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will
Were shrivelled into darkness in his head,
And she, that knew not, pass’d; and all at once
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon
Was clash’d and hammered from a hundred towers,
One after one: But even then she gained
Her bower; whence re-issuing, robed and crowned,
To meet her lord, she took the tax away
And built herself an everlasting name.
Observe—that I call up these modern writers and their language, out of their turn as may seem to you, only that I may plant more distinctly in your thought the old incidents to which their words relate. It is as if I were speaking to you of some long-gone line of ancestors, and on a sudden should call up some delicate blond child and say—This one is in the line of direct descent; she bears the same old name, she murmurs the same old tunes; and this shimmer of gold in her hair is what shone on the heads of the good Saxon foreparents.