[460] Historia Rameseiensis, 135.
[461] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1052.
[462] C. 20.
[463] Gesta, schol. 38.
[464] The story must have arisen soon after the Danish period; it is first told by Henry of Huntingdon who wrote two generations later. Historia Anglorum, 89.
CHAPTER XV
THE COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE—1035-1042
King Canute was dead, but the great king-thought that he lived for, the policy of his dynasty, their ambition to unite the Northern peoples in the old and new homes under one sceptre persisted after his death. Historians have generally believed that Canute had realised the impossibility of keeping long united the three crowns that he wore in his declining years, and had made preparation for a division of the empire among his three sons. In the year of his death one son is found in England, one in Denmark, and one in Norway; hence it is believed that like Charlemagne before him he had executed some sort of a partition, so as to secure something for each of the three. Such a conclusion, however, lacks the support of documentary authority and is based on a mistaken view of the situation in the empire in 1035.