The Emperor Henry III., who thus drew Edward into the circle of European politics, was chiefly memorable for the beneficial influence which he exerted on the papal court, procuring the election of bishops of high character, generally Germans, instead of the dissolute lads who had been too often of late intruded into the papacy. One of the best of Henry’s German popes was Bruno of Toul, who ruled as Leo IX. from 1048 to 1054. To him in the year 1049 Edward, by the advice of his witan, sent as ambassadors the Bishops of Sherborne and Worcester, to pray for absolution from a vow of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he had made in his years of poverty and apparently hopeless exile. The Witenagemot represented to him with good reason that the fulfilment of such a vow would now be inconsistent with his higher duties to his country and his subjects; and the aid of the pope was sought to cut the casuistic knot. In the following year the two bishops returned, bringing the papal absolution from the vow of pilgrimage, coupled, it is said, with an injunction to build or restore a monastery in honour of St. Peter, and fill it with monks who should spend their days in prayer and psalmody. The condition was one in itself delightful to the heart of the pious king. From the unfulfilled vow of pilgrimage, from the journey of the two bishops to Rome, and from the reply of the venerable Leo, sprang that noble sanctuary, the name of which will endure as long as men speak the English language, the great Abbey of Westminster.
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The internal history of England during the twenty-two years of Edward’s reign is chiefly a record of the struggles of two or three great nobles for supremacy in his councils. It is true that some measures were taken for lightening the burdens of the people. “In the year 1049,” says the Abingdon chronicler, “King Edward paid off nine ships and they went away with their ships and all: and five ships remained, and the king promised them twelve months’ pay. In the next year he paid off all the shipmen.” The result is told us by his brother chronicler: “In 1052 [1051] King Edward took off the army tax (here-gyld) which King Ethelred formerly instituted. It was thirty-nine years since he began it: and this gyld oppressed the English people during all that time. This tax ever claimed priority over all the other gylds by which the people were in various ways oppressed.” As has been pointed out,[239] the tax here spoken of is not the Danegeld, a levy of money to be paid as blackmail to foreign invaders, but it is here-gyld, “army tax,” or rather, in strictness, “navy tax,” a levy of money to be paid to the naval defenders of the country, an imposition therefore which may be fittingly compared to the ship money of the Middle Ages. But the previously quoted entry concerning the exactions in the reign of Harthacnut shows how easily the here-gyld might be increased till it became an intolerable burden, and we can thus the better understand the joy of the nation at its removal.
The position of Edward appears during the whole of his reign to have been not unlike that of the later kings of the two first Frankish dynasties. If he were not a mere roi fainéant, a puppet in the hands of an all-powerful Mayor of the Palace, he was at any rate like a Carolingian Louis or Lothair, with large theoretical claims, with little real power, and quite overshadowed by a few great earls, who had not indeed yet made their offices hereditary; who were still in theory removable officers of the crown; but who ruled wide provinces, raised considerable armies among their own house-carls, and above all, possessed wealth probably much exceeding any that could be found in the treasure-house of the king. One of these great French nobles, Hugh the Great, had so played his cards as to prepare the way for the elevation of his own son to the actual seat of royalty, when the time should come for its relinquishment by the descendants of Charlemagne. It seems not improbable that the example of Hugh the Great was much before the eyes of Godwine, and that through life he kept steadily in view the possibility that sons issuing from his loins might one day sit upon the English throne, now after five centuries about to be left vacant by the dying dynasty of Cerdic.
Godwine, Leofric and Siward: these were the three greatest names in the English Witan when Edward came to the throne, and all three should be still memorable to Englishmen; Godwine, by reason of his great place in history, and the other two by reason of their renown in English poetry; Leofric being commemorated in the Godiva of Tennyson, and Siward in the Macbeth of Shakespeare.
The kingdom of England, imperfectly welded together by Egbert and Alfred, and since then modified by the large infusion of Scandinavian blood into its northern and eastern districts, showed throughout this period a strong tendency to split up again into its three old divisions, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Northumbria, as we have seen, was reconstituted as one earldom by the bloody deed of Siward the Strong, who slew his uncle Eadwulf, and so joined Bernicia to Deira. A strong, stern, unscrupulous Dane, whose martial character is attested by the well-known story of his death (hereafter to be related), he nevertheless seems to have ruled well his great province and was apparently a loyal subject of King Edward.[240]
Leofric, son of Leofwine, was sprung, as has been said, from a family which for more than two centuries had been eminent in Mercia, and it is probable that he and his offspring bore with unconcealed dislike the overshadowing competition of the great upstart house of Godwine. He is often spoken of as Earl of Mercia, and perhaps had some sort of pre-eminence over other earls in that district, but his immediate jurisdiction seems to have been confined to the three counties of Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Godwine’s nephew by marriage, Beorn, son of Ulf and Estrith, was quartered on his eastern flank in Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln. Sweyn, Godwine’s eldest son, ruled the Mercian counties of Hereford, Gloucester and Oxford, besides a part of Wessex. Well might the proud Mercian noble feel that his title was but a mockery, while such large slices of Mercia were given to his rivals. Both Leofric and his wife Godiva were munificent benefactors to the Church. Whatever may be the foundation for the beautiful legend of Godiva’s absolute surrender of herself for the lightening of her people’s burdens, we certainly should not, from his record in history, have inferred that her husband Leofric was an avaricious or close-fisted lord.
We turn to the earldoms which throughout the greater part of Edward’s reign were subject to the family of Godwine. He himself held, of course, that great and enriching office, the earldom of Wessex, which had been long ago conferred upon him by Canute, and which practically included all the lands south of the Thames; excepting that Somerset and Berkshire appear to have been carved out of them, to form what in later times would have been called an appanage for his eldest son, Sweyn, in addition to the three Mercian counties which, as we have already seen, were included in his earldom. His second son, Harold, called Earl of the East Angles, ruled not only the two strictly East Anglian shires, but also Huntingdon, Cambridge and Essex, which probably included Middlesex.[241] The three sons who came next in order, Tostig, Gyrth and Leofwine, were but boys at the time of Edward’s accession and were as yet unprovided with earldoms; but even so, it is evident if we look at the map, that more than half, and that the fairest half, of England was subject to Earl Godwine and his family.
Of the character of this man, certainly the most powerful and probably the ablest Englishman of his time, very varying judgments were formed, even in his lifetime; and after his death the antipathy of the Norman and the regretful sympathy of the Saxon writers, naturally led to very divergent estimates concerning it. Nor is the controversy even yet ended; for the enthusiastic championship of the great historian of the Norman Conquest has not unnaturally provoked an equally vigorous storm of censure. To the present writer he does not appear a high-minded patriot, nor yet, considering the age in which he lived, a detestable villain. Hard, grasping, capable, remorseless, intent on the aggrandisement of his family, and by no means successful in forming their characters, he nevertheless may be credited with a certain amount of love for his country, and for the Anglo-Danish race which now peopled it. Himself English by birth and Danish by marriage and by all his early official training, he was determined that, if he could help it, no third element should be imported by the Norman sympathies of the king, to oppress the common people and to snatch away the prizes of government from the nobles. It is when he risks life and dearly loved treasure in maintaining this contention, that he seems to us almost a patriot.
The first shock to the stately edifice of Godwine’s power was given by the disordered passions of his eldest son. In 1046, after a successful campaign in Wales, “when Sweyn was on his homeward journey, he ordered that the Abbess of Leominster [named Edgiva] should be fetched unto him, and he had her as long as he pleased and afterwards let her go home”. Such is the short dry record by the chronicler, of a deed which shocked the not too sensitive conscience of the eleventh century, and which appears to have led to the dissolution of the nunnery of Leominster, the outlawry of Sweyn and the allotment of his earldom to others. It seems, however, from later allusions to the matter, that it was not the forcible abduction but the lascivious seduction of a consecrated virgin of which the son of Godwine was guilty. Sweyn betook himself in 1047 to that refuge of all English outlaws, “Baldwin’s land,” and from thence after a time went to Denmark, where by some crime or immorality of the nature of which we are not informed, he “ruined himself with the Danes”. In 1049 he returned to England, and began to hover about the coasts of Kent and Sussex, off which the king was lying with a fleet, operating against Baldwin of Flanders and watching the proceedings of another outlaw, Osgod Clapa. This man, who had once been in high favour at the English court, had held the office of Staller or Chamberlain, and had been honoured by the presence, the ill-omened presence, of Harthacnut, at his daughter’s marriage feast, but had now fallen into disgrace, and led for some years the life of a buccaneer, imitating the ravages of the old Vikings and requiring the manœuvres of a royal fleet to keep him at bay. The Chronicle has much to tell us about Osgod Clapa’s and his wife’s movements, but he possesses for us no political significance, and we have only to note his death which happened “suddenly in his bed,” as the chronicler tells us, in the year 1054.