"Belt and Spur," Stories of the Old Knights.
XLI.—THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
1. Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir of Westminster—where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain—Earl Harold Godwinson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess.
Edward the Confessor's Tomb.
2. Then out of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all men, the ideal Viking of his time. He had been away to Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at Constantinople—and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic characters—if you go to Venice you may see them at this day—on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but in Athens. And now, King of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his half-barbarous host had conquered, the civilization of Britain would have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.
3. England was to be conquered by the Normans; but by the civilized, not the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before, in the northeast of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger, so called, they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they changed their creed, their language, their habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilized people in Europe, and—as was most natural then—the most faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the great-great grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign and the greatest statesman and warrior in Europe.
4. So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him, namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of English ground."