Edward, surnamed the Confessor, had resided in England for some time, when the throne became vacant by the death of Hardicanute; and the Danes, left without a leader by the sudden and unexpected demise of their king, had no means of resisting the Saxon force, which all at once wheeled up on the side of Edward, and, led on by Godwin, placed the crown of England upon the head of the son of Ethelred. To strengthen the power which he already possessed, the earl Godwin proposed that the king should marry his daughter, Editha, who appears to have been a lady of high intellectual attainments: it was said of her, in contrast to the stern and ambitious character of her father, that, as the thorn produces the rose, so Godwin produced Editha. Ingulphus, one of the most celebrated historians living at this period, after describing her as being very beautiful, meek, modest, faithful, virtuous, a lady of learning, and the enemy of no one, says, "I have very often seen her, when, only a boy, I visited my father in the royal court. Often, as I came from school, she questioned me on letters and my verse; and willingly passing from grammar to logic, she caught me in the subtle nets of argument. I had always three or four pieces of money counted by her maiden, and was sent to the royal larder for refreshment." But all these amiable qualities were not sufficient to bring happiness to the royal hearth; the earl was ever stepping in between Edward and Editha, for Godwin became jealous of the Normans, who were constantly coming over, and obtaining dignities and honours from the court. Norman soldiers were placed over the English fortresses; Norman priests officiated in the Saxon churches, and, as the Danish power waned, and the offices which Hardicanute had given to his own countrymen became vacant, Edward filled up the places with his Norman favourites. Those who had befriended him in his exile came over—such as had grown up side by side with him till they reached manhood—had shared his sports and pastimes—dined at the same table with him when, without friend or companion, except his brother Alfred, he landed a stranger upon the shores of Normandy;—all such as had clung to him, and assisted him while he was in exile, now came over to congratulate their old acquaintance who had so suddenly emerged from his obscurity, and become, by the voice of the whole Saxon nation, and the tacit consent of the overawed and powerless Danes, the undisputed monarch of England. Edward, on the other hand, landed in his native country almost a stranger; he brought with him foreign habits, foreign manners, and even spake the Norman-French more fluently than the plain Saxon tongue of his ancestors. He was but a child when he left England, and nearly thirty years residence in a foreign court must have caused his native language to have sounded harshly on his ears when he again landed on the shores of Britain. With the exception of those who accompanied him, England would seem like a strange country; he found none there whose habits and tastes were congenial to his own, none with whom he had interchanged the warm friendship which is natural to youth; and he must instinctively have shunned the advances made to him by earl Godwin, standing suspected, as he did, of having indirectly contributed to the death of his brother Alfred, or, at the least, of having deserted him in the night, and left him in the hands of the Danes. Either Edward must have stood far aloof from such suspicion, or, when he consented to marry the daughter of Godwin, have purchased the crown of England by making a sacrifice of his feelings and of his honour. Edward's mother, it will also be remembered, was a Norman, and while the friends of her son poured into the English court, she herself was followed by those who claimed kindred with her race, until even the very language of the Norman usurped that of the Saxon.
The Norman costume now became fashionable; those who were ambitious of rising in the king's favour, or who wished to stand high in the estimation of his favourites, began to speak in broken Norman, until, in the neighbourhood of the court, the Saxon seemed to have grown into an unfashionable language. One man alone, and he, the most powerful in the kingdom, still stuck sturdily to the old Saxon habits, and openly expressed his dislike of the Norman favourites. This was the cowherd, the son of Ulfnoth, whose daughter the king of England had married; and he, with his sons, who had proved themselves second to none in valour in the hard-fought field, rose up, and made head against the Norman encroachments. The Saxon earl, and his tall sons, boldly shouldered their way through the crowded court, where their sister and daughter reigned as queen; they lowered their helmets to no one, but rudely jostled as they passed the groups of knaves and place-seekers who infested the palace. Thus, without, at the folk-moots, and the guilds, the Saxon earl and his sons were the favourites of the people; while within, and about the palace, they were bitterly hated by the Norman favourites. Such was the state of parties at the English court nearly a thousand years ago, and it will be necessary for the reader to bear them in mind, for the better understanding of the changes which they lead to—the invasion of England by the Normans—a period at which we are now rapidly arriving.
Whether Edward believed that his mother Emma had a share in the death of her son Alfred, or was stung with the remembrance that she had left them to the mercy of a strange court, and that his position in England was rendered uneasy by those who had followed him with their clamorous claims across the ocean, or he disliked her for the favour which she had shown to her Danish son, Hardicanute, or envious of the immense wealth and possessions she is said to have accumulated during the reckless reign of the hard-drinking sea-king—whether led by one or another of these motives of dislike and suspicion, or actuated by a wish to resent the neglect with which she had treated him, he seized upon her possessions, lessened her power, and either confined her in the abbey of Wearwell, or limited her residence within the compass of the lands he granted her near Winchester. This act was countenanced by Godwin, who, though he studied his own aggrandisement, seems never wholly to have neglected the interests of the Saxons. Her alleged intercourse with the bishop of Winchester—her passing through the ordeal of fire unscathed, with naked feet over burning plough-shares, are dim traditions entirely unauthenticated by any respectable historian, although such trials were not uncommon, as we shall show, when we come to treat of the manners and customs of the Anglo-Saxons. After this period, Emma of Normandy is scarcely mentioned again by our early historians.
During the second year of his reign, Edward was menaced with an invasion by Magnus, king of Norway and Denmark, who sent letters to England demanding the crown of Edward; to which the English king replied by mustering a large fleet at Sandwich, and declaring himself ready to oppose his landing. But the attention of Magnus was soon diverted from England to secure his new territory of Denmark, as Sweyn, the son of Ulfr, (the latter being the same sea-king whom the cowherd Godwin guided to the Danish camp when he had lost his way in the forest,) now aspired to the sceptre of Denmark. The son of Ulfr requested aid from Edward to support his claim to the Danish sceptre; and this request was strongly backed by earl Godwin, who, whatever other stain he may have had upon his character, cannot in this instance be accused of ingratitude, for he earnestly pleaded that fifty ships should be fitted out, and sent to the aid of the son of his early patron. Godwin's proposition was, however, overruled by Leofric and Siward, earls of Mercia and Northumbria, who will frequently be seen to stand between earl Godwin and his claims upon the throne. What aid Godwin afforded the son of Ulfr of his own accord we know not, though it is on record that Sweyn obtained the crown of Denmark on the demise of Magnus, which happened shortly after the application he made for aid to Edward of England. With the death of Magnus ended all attempts upon the English crown on the part of the Danes, and we hear no more of the ravages of these stormy sea-kings, nor of the civil wars in England between these two nations, who had, through the alternations of war and peace, been settled in various parts of England long before the star of Alfred the Great rose up and illumined the dark night of our history. A new enemy was now, with slow and silent step, coming stealthily into England; he had already obtained a footing in the palace and in the church; he had left his slimy trail in the camp, and on the decks of the Saxon vessels; he had come with a strange voice, and muttered words which they could not understand.
Those who had often quarrelled were now neighbours; the difference in language and manners was beginning to disappear; for as they, to a certain extent, understood each other's dialect, the Saxon and the Danish idioms began to assimilate; they, with few exceptions, lived under the same common law; their children mingled and played together in the same streets, in the same fields and forests, became men and women, married, and forgot the quarrels of their forefathers, and at last began to settle down like one nation upon the soil. Thus, each party looked upon the Norman favourites with the same jealous eye.
With the exception of the bickerings both on the part of the Saxon and Danish chiefs against the Normans whom Edward countenanced, all went on in tolerable order at the Saxon court for seven or eight years; for Leofric and Siward were ever throwing their formidable weight into the opposite scale, and thus keeping an even balance between the power of Godwin and the throne. Edward had rendered himself popular with both the Danes and the Saxons; he had revived the old laws of his ancestors, abolished the odious tax of Dane-geld, without retaliating upon such of his subjects as belonged to that nation, as Canute and Harold had beforetime done while lording it over the Saxons. An event at last occurred which scarcely any one would have foreseen or have guarded against, and which reads more like a drunken frolic, or a common street brawl, than the grave record of history, although it ended by embittering the feelings of the Saxons against the Normans, and was another of those almost invisible steps which eventually led to the conquest of England. Amongst the foreigners who came to pay their court at this time to the king of England, was Eustace, count of Boulogne, who had married a sister of Edward, but whether maid or widow at the time of her union with the French count, is not very clearly made out; nor is it recorded whether she was the daughter of Emma of Normandy, though she laid claim to Ethelred as her father. Eustace, proud to claim such a relationship, whatever it might be, mounted the two slips of feathered whalebone in his helmet, and with a showy train of followers visited the English court, where he and his retinue were hospitably entertained by Edward. Here he met with Normans and French who spoke nearly the same language as himself, and there is but little doubt that such an assembly did not fail to show their contempt for everything that was Saxon, voting vulgar a court in which a cowherd had risen to the rank of earl; and probably extolling their own ancestry, who, time out of mind, had been brought up to the more "polite" profession of murder and robbery both by sea and land. While returning on his visit from Edward, he commanded his train to halt before they entered Dover, and putting on his coat of mail, ordered his followers to do the same; and thus armed, they entered the town. They then commenced riding up and down the streets, insulting the inhabitants, and selecting the best houses in which to take up their quarters for the night; for such had been the custom of the Danes, who made the houses of the Saxons their inns, sometimes permitting, as a great favour, the owner and his family to share the meal which they had compelled them to provide. It is pretty clear that the deeds of these "good old times" had furnished the topic of conversation amongst the visitors at the Saxon court, made up as it would be of Normans and Northmen, and descendants of the Vikingrs, who now found it dangerous to follow the "honourable" employment of their ancestors—men who mourned over the changes which no longer allowed them with impunity to insult the wife and daughter of the Saxon, whom they compelled to be their host—to eat the meal which they forced him to provide, and for which they considered they made him an ample return if they did not stab him upon his own hearth, and then set fire to his house. These cruel and bloody deeds, which had been counted valorous, had often, doubtless, furnished the midnight conversation of the cruel sea-kings, as they congregated around their fire, seated upon—
"A dismal circle
Of Druid stones upon the forlorn moor,
Where the chill rain begun at shut of eve
In dull November; and their chancel-vault
The heaven itself was blinded through the night."—Keats.
Alas! such horrors were again to be renewed; though there were but few at this time who foresaw the storm which was now slowly heaving up, and was ere long doomed to burst with renewed fury upon England.
While the French count and his followers were prancing through the streets of Dover, full, perhaps, of the thoughts of such scenes as we have faintly pictured, one of them alighted upon the threshold of a sturdy Saxon, who, considering his house was his castle, refused to allow the insulting foreigner to enter. The Frenchman or Norman instantly drew his sword and wounded the Saxon, who in his turn slew the aggressor. The count and his followers attacked the Englishman, and put him to death upon his own hearth. All Dover was instantly in arms, for the foreigners now rode through the town sword in hand, striking at all they came near, and trampling every one they could ride over under the hoofs of their horses. They were at last met by an armed body of the townsmen. A severe combat took place, and it was not until nineteen of his followers were slain, that the count of Boulogne took flight with all the speed he could; and not venturing to embark, he hastened back, with such of his train as remained, to the court of the English king.
Edward at once forgave his brother-in-law, and, on his bare assertion, believed that the inhabitants of Dover were wholly to blame; he then sent for earl Godwin, within whose governorship Dover was included, and ordered him without delay to attack the town, and punish all who had risen up in arms against the count of Boulogne and his followers. But the Saxon earl was loath to appear in arms against his countrymen on the mere report of a stranger, and reasonably enough suggested that the whole affair should be investigated by competent judges; "for it ill becomes you," replied Godwin, "to condemn without a hearing the men whom it is your duty to protect." Urged on by the clamours of his favourites, Edward insisted upon immediate vengeance being executed upon the inhabitants of Dover; and when the Saxon earl refused to fulfil his commands, he then cited him to appear before the council at Gloucester, where the court was then held. Godwin was well acquainted with the characters who would preside at the court before which he was summoned, and well knew that, right or wrong, sentence of banishment would be proclaimed against him, as it consisted chiefly of Normans, who were his sworn enemies, and who would not hesitate, by any means, to lessen the power he possessed: so, seeing the foreign enemies that were arrayed against him, and the unfair trial that awaited him, he resolved to overthrow this corrupt court by an appeal to arms, and, without offering any violence to the king, rescue both himself and England from the "cunning of the Normans." For as an old writer observes, while describing the events which preceded and were followed by those which took place about this period, "The all-powerful God must have proposed to himself at once two plans of destruction for the English race, and must have framed a sort of military ambuscade against it: for, on one hand, he let loose the Danish invasion; on the other, he created and cemented the Norman alliance; so that, if we escaped the blows aimed at our faces by the Danes, the cunning of the Normans might be at hand to surprise us."