It is necessary, in order to comprehend the course taken by the great Anglo-Saxon Houses at the time of the Conquest, to remember that the members of Godwin's House appeared to them wholly different beings from the personages represented to our generation by the writers of romantic histories and historic romances. Almost every one of them stood charged with some fearful crime. Edric Streone was the worst of ingrates and traitors. Godwin had on his hands the blood of the young Alfred. Sweyn had debauched a nun and assassinated a kinsman. Harold had the weight of perjury and usurpation on his soul. Tostig's name was associated with bloodshed, savagery, and treason. Even Edith, the queen, was not free from reproach. Chroniclers tell how, on the fourth night of Christmas, 1065, while the Confessor was on his death-bed, starting restlessly from dreams of woe and terror, Edith, for love of her brother, Tostig, caused some Northumbrians, who were dependents of Cospatrick, to be murdered in the king's court.
Such being the idea entertained of the House of Godwin, Cospatrick was probably in no mood to pray for the usurpation of Harold being attended with success. More probably, indeed, the Saxon magnate, rich, potent, ambitious, and surrounded, in his halls at Raby, by a huge household of warriors, cœrles, serfs, and adherents of every description, who fed at his board, lived on his hospitality, and ministered to his pride, reflected with bitterness on being excluded from the government of that magnificent province, which from infancy he had been taught to regard as his birthright, and only awaited a favourable opportunity to enforce his hereditary claim to these fair domains.
Thus it came to pass, that when the enterprise of the Normans so prospered, that the Saxon prelates and chiefs carried Edgar Atheling to Berkhampstead, Cospatrick claimed the earldom of Northumberland, as heir of Uchtred. William the Conqueror, however, proved as unaccommodating as Harold the Usurper had been; and Cospatrick not only saw the government of Northumberland bestowed upon another, but found that he was no longer safe on the south of the Tweed.
However, when William perceived the necessity for cultivating the good-will of the Northumbrians, he entered into negotiations with Cospatrick, and indicated his readiness to come to terms. A bargain was soon struck between the Conqueror and the grandson of Uchtred. Cospatrick paid William a large sum of money, and William invested Cospatrick with the earldom of Northumberland.
[XXVII.]
SAXON SAINTS AND NORMAN SOLDIERS.
At the time when William the Conqueror was north of the Humber; when the Normans were ruthlessly ravaging Northumberland with fire and sword; when the bishop and clergy of Durham were carrying off the body of St. Cuthbert to Holy Island; and when the invaders were slaughtering man and beast without a thought of mercy, one spot of ground escaped, as if by miracle, from devastation, and remained cultivated and covered with buildings, when every other part of the country around was laid waste or given to the flames. The land thus miraculously saved from the spoiler's hand lay around, and belonged to, the church of St. John of Beverley.
It appears that, in 1070, when the Normans were encamped about seven miles from Beverley, many Northumbrians, in utter despair of resisting the invaders with the slightest success, remembered, in the hour of darkness, that St. John of Beverley was a saint of Saxon race, and, in accordance with the ideas prevalent at the time, believed he was potent enough to afford them protection. Alarmed beyond measure at the approach of the Conqueror, and at the accounts of atrocities perpetrated by the victorious Normans, many women of rank whose husbands and brothers had fallen, and old men on the verge of the grave, taking with them their most valuable property, gathered to the church of Beverley, and prostrating themselves at the shrine of St. John, prayed to their canonized countryman, "that he, remembering in heaven he was born a Saxon, might protect them and their property from the fury of the foreigners." Having thus committed themselves to the care of St. John, the refugees awaited the issue, with fear and trembling indeed, but not without hope of salvation.