FOOTNOTE:
[7] The Norman historians of a later generation made a very impressive scene of Godwine's death. The king and the earl were dining together, it was said, when Edward spoke out his suspicion that Godwine had been concerned in his brother Alfred's murder. "May the crust that I am eating choke me," cried the earl, "if I had any hand in his death." Forthwith he swallowed it, was seized with a fit, and died on the spot.
CHAPTER VI.
THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
William pitched his tents among the dead and dying where the English standards had stood. Next day he could judge of the greatness of his success, and see that the English army had been well-nigh annihilated. He vowed to build a great church on the spot, in memory of his victory, and kept his resolve, as Battle Abbey shows to this day. At first he wished to cast out his fallen rival's body on the sea-shore, as that of a perjurer and an enemy of the Church; but better counsels prevailed, and he finally permitted the canons of Waltham to bury Harold's corpse in holy ground. It is said that no one was able to identify the king among the heaps of stripped and mutilated slain except Edith with the Swan's Neck, a lady whom he had loved and left in earlier days.
William elected and crowned in London.
William expected to encounter further resistance, and marched slowly and cautiously on London by a somewhat circuitous route, crossing the Thames as high up as Wallingford. But he met with no enemy. Dover, Canterbury, Winchester, and the other cities of the south yielded themselves up to him. In fact, Wessex had been so hard hit by the slaughter at Hastings, that scarce a thegn of note survived to organize resistance. Every grown-up man of Godwine's house had fallen, and of the whole race there remained but two young children of Harold's. Meanwhile the Witan met at London to elect a new king. The two sons of Aelfgar, whose treacherous sloth had ruined England, had hoped that one of them might be chosen to receive the crown; but their conduct had been observed and noted, and rather than take Eadwine or Morcar as lord, the Witan chose the last heir of the house of Aelfred, the boy Eadgar, great-nephew to St. Edward. This choice was hopelessly bad when a victorious enemy was thundering at the gates. Eadwine and Morcar disbanded their levies, and went home in wrath to their earldoms. The south could raise no second army to replace that which had fallen at Hastings, and when William pressed on toward London the followers of Eadgar gave up the contest. As he lay at Berkhamstead, the chief men of London and Ealdred, the Archbishop of York, came out to him, and offered to take him as lord and master. So he entered the city, and there was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, after he had been duly elected in the old English fashion. A strange accident attended the coronation: when the Archbishop Ealdred proposed William's name to the assembly, and the loud shout of assent was given, the Norman soldiery without thought that a riot was beginning, and cut down some of the spectators and fired some houses before they discovered their mistake. So William's reign began, as it was to continue, in blood and fire.
Confiscations in south-east England.
Eadwine and Morcar and the rest of the English nobles soon did homage to William; but the realm was only half subdued, for, save in the south-east, where the whole manhood of the land had been cut off at Hastings, the English had submitted more for want of leaders and union than because they regarded themselves as conquered. It remained to be seen how the new king would deal with his realm, whether he would make himself well loved by his subjects, as Cnut had done, or whether he would become a tyrant and oppressor. William, though stern and cruel, was a man politic and just according to his lights. He wished to govern England in law and order, and not to maltreat the natives. But he was in an unfortunate position. He knew nothing of the customs and manners of the English, and could not understand a word of their language. Moreover, he could not, like Cnut, send away his foreign army, and rely on the loyalty of the people of the land. For his army was a rabble of mercenaries drawn from many realms outside his own duchy, and he had promised them land and sustenance in England when they enlisted beneath his banner. Accordingly, he had to begin by declaring the estates of all who had fought at Hastings, from Harold the king down to the smallest freeholder, as forfeited to the crown. This put five-sixths of the countryside in Wessex, Essex, Kent, and East Anglia into the king's hands. These vast tracts of land were distributed among the Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton soldiery, in greater and smaller shares, to be held by feudal tenure of knight-service from the king's hands.