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Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton · English · Gutenberg #7684 · 1,153,611 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings — Complete

Author: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton


        
Release date: November 24, 2004 [eBook #7684]
                Most recently updated: February 20, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAROLD : THE LAST OF THE SAXON KINGS — COMPLETE ***


HAROLD

by Edward Bulwer Lytton




DEDICATORY EPISTLE
TO THE RIGHT HON. C. T. D’EYNCOURT, M.P.

I dedicate to you, my dear friend, a work, principally composed under
your hospitable roof; and to the materials of which your library, rich in
the authorities I most needed, largely contributed.

The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so important and
so national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, and the
chronicles of that time had long been familiar to me.  But it is an old
habit of mine, to linger over the plan and subject of a work, for years,
perhaps, before the work has, in truth, advanced a sentence; “busying
myself,” as old Burton saith, “with this playing labour--otiosaque
diligentia ut vitarem torporen feriendi.”

The main consideration which long withheld me from the task, was in my
sense of the unfamiliarity of the ordinary reader with the characters,
events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante
Agamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which has given
to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the glorious
frenzy of the Crusades.  The Norman Conquest was our Trojan War; an epoch
beyond which our learning seldom induces our imagination to ascend.

In venturing on ground so new to fiction, I saw before me the option of
apparent pedantry, in the obtrusion of such research as might carry the
reader along with the Author, fairly and truly into the real records of
the time; or of throwing aside pretensions to accuracy altogether;--and
so rest contented to turn history into flagrant romance, rather than
pursue my own conception of extracting its natural romance from the
actual history.  Finally, not without some encouragement from you,
(whereof take your due share of blame!) I decided to hazard the attempt,
and to adopt that mode of treatment which, if making larger demand on the
attention of the reader, seemed the more complimentary to his judgment.

The age itself, once duly examined, is full of those elements which
should awaken interest, and appeal to the imagination.  Not untruly has
Sismondi said, that the “Eleventh Century has a right to be considered a
great age.  It was a period of life and of creation; all that there was
of noble, heroic, and vigorous in the Middle Ages commenced at that
epoch.” [1]  But to us Englishmen in especial, besides the more animated
interest in that spirit of adventure, enterprise, and improvement, of
which the Norman chivalry was the noblest type, there is an interest more
touching and deep in those last glimpses of the old Saxon monarchy, which
open upon us in the mournful pages of our chroniclers.

I have sought in this work, less to portray mere manners, which modern
researches have rendered familiar to ordinary students in our history,
than to bring forward the great characters, so carelessly dismissed in
the long and loose record of centuries; to show more clearly the motives
and policy of the agents in an event the most memorable in Europe; and to
convey a definite, if general, notion of the human beings, whose brains
schemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm of shadows which lies
behind the Norman Conquest;

    “Spes hominum caecos, morbos, votumque, labores,
     Et passim toto volitantes aethere curas.” [2]

I have thus been faithful to the leading historical incidents in the
grand tragedy of Harold, and as careful as contradictory evidences will
permit, both as to accuracy in the delineation of character, and
correctness in that chronological chain of dates without which there can
be no historical philosophy; that is, no tangible link between the cause
and the effect.  The fictitious part of my narrative is, as in “Rienzi,”
 and the “Last of the Barons,” confined chiefly to the private life, with
its domain of incident and passion, which is the legitimate appanage of
novelist or poet.  The love story of Harold and Edith is told differently
from the well-known legend, which implies a less pure connection.  But
the whole legend respecting the Edeva faira (Edith the fair) whose name
meets us in the “Domesday” roll, rests upon very slight authority
considering its popular acceptance [3]; and the reasons for my
alterations will be sufficiently obvious in a work intended not only for
general perusal, but which on many accounts, I hope, may be entrusted
fearlessly to the young; while those alterations are in strict accordance
with the spirit of the time, and tend to illustrate one of its most
marked peculiarities.

More apology is perhaps due for the liberal use to which I have applied
the superstitions of the age.  But with the age itself those
superstitions are so interwoven--they meet us so constantly, whether in
the pages of our own chroniclers, or the records of the kindred
Scandinavians--they are so intruded into the very laws, so blended with
the very life, of our Saxon forefathers, that without employing them, in
somewhat of the same credulous spirit with which they were originally
conceived, no vivid impression of the People they influenced can be
conveyed.  Not without truth has an Italian writer remarked, “that he who
would depict philosophically an unphilosophical age, should remember
that, to be familiar with children, one must sometimes think and feel as
a child.”

Yet it has not been my main endeavour to make these ghostly agencies
conducive to the ordinary poetical purposes of terror, and if that effect
be at all created by them, it will be, I apprehend, rather subsidiary to
the more historical sources of interest than, in itself, a leading or
popular characteristic of the work.  My object, indeed, in the
introduction of the Danish Vala especially, has been perhaps as much
addressed to the reason as to the fancy, in showing what large, if dim,
remains of the ancient “heathenesse” still kept their ground on the Saxon
soil, contending with and contrasting the monkish superstitions, by which
they were ultimately replaced.  Hilda is not in history; but without the
romantic impersonation of that which Hilda represents, the history of the
time would be imperfectly understood.

In the character of Harold--while I have carefully examined and weighed
the scanty evidences of its distinguishing attributes which are yet
preserved to us--and, in spite of no unnatural partiality, have not
concealed what appear to me its deficiencies, and still less the great
error of the life it illustrates,--I have attempted, somewhat and
slightly, to shadow out the ideal of the pure Saxon character, such as it
was then, with its large qualities undeveloped, but marked already by
patient endurance, love of justice, and freedom--the manly sense of duty
rather than the chivalric sentiment of honour--and that indestructible
element of practical purpose and courageous will, which, defying all
conquest, and steadfast in all peril, was ordained to achieve so vast an
influence over the destinies of the world.

To the Norman Duke, I believe, I have been as lenient as justice will
permit, though it is as impossible to deny his craft as to dispute his
genius; and so far as the scope of my work would allow, I trust that I
have indicated fairly the grand characteristics of his countrymen, more
truly chivalric than their lord.  It has happened, unfortunately for that
illustrious race of men, that they have seemed to us, in England,
represented by the Anglo-Norman kings.  The fierce and plotting William,
the vain and worthless Rufus, the cold-blooded and relentless Henry, are
no adequate representatives of the far nobler Norman vavasours, whom even
the English Chronicler admits to have been “kind masters,” and to whom,
in spite of their kings, the after liberties of England were so largely
indebted.  But this work closes on the Field of Hastings; and in that
noble struggle for national independence, the sympathies of every true
son of the land, even if tracing his lineage back to the Norman victor,
must be on the side of the patriot Harold.

In the notes, which I have thought necessary aids to the better
comprehension of these volumes, my only wish has been to convey to the
general reader such illustrative information as may familiarise him more
easily with the subject-matter of the book, or refresh his memory on
incidental details not without a national interest. In the mere
references to authorities I do not pretend to arrogate to a fiction the
proper character of a history; the references are chiefly used either
where wishing pointedly to distinguish from invention what was borrowed
from a chronicle, or when differing from some popular historian to whom
the reader might be likely to refer, it seemed well to state the
authority upon which the difference was founded. [4]

In fact, my main object has been one that compelled me to admit graver
matter than is common in romance, but which I would fain hope may be
saved from the charge of dulness by some national sympathy between author
and reader; my object is attained, and attained only, if, in closing the
last page of this work, the reader shall find that, in spite of the
fictitious materials admitted, he has formed a clearer and more intimate
acquaintance with a time, heroic though remote, and characters which
ought to have a household interest to Englishmen, than the succinct
accounts of the mere historian could possibly afford him.

Thus, my dear D’Eyncourt, under cover of an address to yourself, have I
made to the Public those explanations which authors in general (and I not
the least so) are often overanxious to render.

This task done, my thoughts naturally fly back to the associations I
connected with your name when I placed it at the head of this epistle.
Again I seem to find myself under your friendly roof; again to greet my
provident host entering that gothic chamber in which I had been permitted
to establish my unsocial study, heralding the advent of majestic folios,
and heaping libraries round the unworthy work. Again, pausing from my
labour, I look through that castle casement, and beyond that feudal moat,
over the broad landscapes which, if I err not, took their name from the
proud brother of the Conqueror himself; or when, in those winter nights,
the grim old tapestry waved in the dim recesses, I hear again the Saxon
thegn winding his horn at the turret door, and demanding admittance to
the halls from which the prelate of Bayeux had so unrighteously expelled
him [5]--what marvel, that I lived in the times of which I wrote, Saxon
with the Saxon, Norman with the Norman--that I entered into no gossip
less venerable than that current at the Court of the Confessor, or
startled my fellow-guests (when I deigned to meet them) with the last
news which Harold’s spies had brought over from the Camp at St. Valery?
With all those folios, giants of the gone world, rising around me daily,
more and more, higher and higher--Ossa upon Pelion--on chair and table,
hearth and floor; invasive as Normans, indomitable as Saxons, and tall as
the tallest Danes (ruthless host, I behold them still!)--with all those
disburied spectres rampant in the chamber, all the armour rusting in thy
galleries, all those mutilated statues of early English kings (including
St. Edward himself)--niched into thy grey, ivied walls--say in thy
conscience, O host, (if indeed that conscience be not wholly callous!)
shall I ever return to the nineteenth century again?

But far beyond these recent associations of a single winter (for which
heaven assoil thee!) goes the memory of a friendship of many winters, and
proof to the storms of all.  Often have I come for advice to your wisdom,
and sympathy to your heart, bearing back with me, in all such seasons,
new increase to that pleasurable gratitude which is, perhaps, the rarest,
nor the least happy sentiment, that experience leaves to man.  Some
differences, it may be,--whether on those public questions which we see,
every day, alienating friendships that should have been beyond the reach
of laws and kings;--or on the more scholastic controversies which as
keenly interest the minds of educated men,--may at times deny to us the
idem velle, atque idem nolle; but the firma amicitia needs not those
common links; the sunshine does not leave the wave for the slight ripple
which the casual stone brings a moment to the surface.

Accept, in this dedication of a work which has lain so long on my mind,
and been endeared to me from many causes, the token of an affection for
you and yours, strong as the ties of kindred, and lasting as the belief
in truth.                      E. B. L.




PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

The author of an able and learned article on MABILLON [6] in the
“Edinburgh Review,” has accurately described my aim in this work;
although, with that generous courtesy which characterises the true
scholar, in referring to the labours of a contemporary, he has overrated
my success.  It was indeed my aim “to solve the problem how to produce
the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense of historical
truth”--I borrow the words of the Reviewer, since none other could so
tersely express my design, or so clearly account for the leading
characteristics in its conduct and completion.

There are two ways of employing the materials of History in the service
of Romance: the one consists in lending to ideal personages, and to an
imaginary fable, the additional interest to be derived from historical
groupings: the other, in extracting the main interest of romantic
narrative from History itself.  Those who adopt the former mode are at
liberty to exclude all that does not contribute to theatrical effect or
picturesque composition; their fidelity to the period they select is
towards the manners and costume, not towards the precise order of events,
the moral causes from which the events proceeded, and the physical
agencies by which they were influenced and controlled.  The plan thus
adopted is unquestionably the more popular and attractive, and, being
favoured by the most illustrious writers of historical romance, there is
presumptive reason for supposing it to be also that which is the more
agreeable to the art of fiction.

But he who wishes to avoid the ground pre-occupied by others, and claim
in the world of literature some spot, however humble, which he may
“plough with his own heifer,” will seek to establish himself not where
the land is the most fertile, but where it is the least enclosed.  So,
when I first turned my attention to Historical Romance, my main aim was
to avoid as much as possible those fairer portions of the soil that had
been appropriated by the first discoverers.  The great author of Ivanhoe,
and those amongst whom, abroad and at home, his mantle was divided, had
employed History to aid Romance; I contented myself with the humbler task
to employ Romance in the aid of History,--to extract from authentic but
neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the
incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts to which
the general historian is confined,--construct my plot from the actual
events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could
create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of
those who had been the living actors in the real drama.  For the main
materials of the three Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted
the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if
intending to write, not a fiction but a history.  And having formed the
best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered
faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true
course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential
attributes of the principal agents.  Solely in that inward life which,
not only as apart from the more public and historical, but which, as
almost wholly unknown, becomes the fair domain of the poet, did I claim
the legitimate privileges of fiction, and even here I employed the agency
of the passions only so far as they served to illustrate what I believed
to be the genuine natures of the beings who had actually lived, and to
restore the warmth of the human heart to the images recalled from the
grave.

Thus, even had I the gifts of my most illustrious predecessors, I should
be precluded the use of many of the more brilliant.  I shut myself out
from the wider scope permitted to their fancy, and denied myself the
license to choose or select materials, alter dates, vary causes and
effects according to the convenience of that more imperial fiction which
invents the Probable where it discards the Real.  The mode I have adopted
has perhaps only this merit, that it is my own--mine by discovery and
mine by labour.  And if I can raise not the spirits that obeyed the great
master of romance, nor gain the key to the fairyland that opened to his
spell,--at least I have not rifled the tomb of the wizard to steal my art
from the book that lies clasped on his breast.

In treating of an age with which the general reader is so unfamiliar as
that preceding the Norman Conquest, it is impossible to avoid (especially
in the earlier portions of my tale) those explanations of the very
character of the time which would have been unnecessary if I had only
sought in History the picturesque accompaniments to Romance. I have to do
more than present an amusing picture of national manners--detail the
dress, and describe the banquet.  According to the plan I adopt, I have
to make the reader acquainted with the imperfect fusion of races in Saxon
England, familiarise him with the contests of parties and the ambition of
chiefs, show him the strength and the weakness of a kindly but ignorant
church; of a brave but turbulent aristocracy; of a people partially free,
and naturally energetic, but disunited by successive immigrations, and
having lost much of the proud jealousies of national liberty by
submission to the preceding conquests of the Dane; acquiescent in the
sway of foreign kings, and with that bulwark against invasion which an
hereditary order of aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very
foundations by the copious admixture of foreign nobles.  I have to
present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate
monk, there, the dark superstition that still consulted the deities of
the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the dead.  And in
contrast to those pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I
have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the
coming conquerors,--the stern will and deep guile of the Norman
chief--the comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church--the nascent
spirit of chivalry in the Norman vavasours; a spirit destined to
emancipate the very people it contributed to enslave, associated, as it
imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom: disdainful, it is true, of
the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits, the
domination of the liege.  In a word, I must place fully before the
reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political and
moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier
attributes, and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book, why
England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.

In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which the
task itself raises up,--objections to the labour it has cost; to the
information which the labour was undertaken in order to bestow;
objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but which
in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the position
of the persons whose characters it illustrates,--whose fate it involves;
objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact might be
disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of Saxon words,
for which no accurate synonyms could be exchanged; objections, in short,
to the colouring, conduct, and composition of the whole work; objections
to all that separate it from the common crowd of Romances, and stamp on
it, for good or for bad, a character peculiarly its own.  Objections of
this kind I cannot remove, though I have carefully weighed them all.  And
with regard to the objection most important to story-teller and novel
reader--viz., the dryness of some of the earlier portions, though I have
thrice gone over those passages, with the stern determination to inflict
summary justice upon every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that
I have found but little which it was possible to omit without rendering
the after narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more
stirring interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general
reader of Romance.

As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be
presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given
either in the text or a foot-note.  Such archaisms are much less numerous
than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and they have
rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have been employed
without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase. Would it indeed
be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the customs and manners
of our Saxon forefathers without employing words so mixed up with their
daily usages and modes of thinking as “weregeld” and “niddering”?  Would
any words from the modern vocabulary suggest the same idea, or embody the
same meaning?

One critic good-humouredly exclaims, “We have a full attendance of thegns
and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old friends and
approved good masters thanes and knights.”  Nothing could be more
apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted in censure;
nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of employing the Saxon
words.  For I should sadly indeed have misled the reader if I had used
the word knight in an age when knights were wholly unknown to the
Anglo-Saxon and cneht no more means what we understand by knight, than a
templar in modern phrase means a man in chain mail vowed to celibacy, and
the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Mussulman.
While, since thegn and thane are both archaisms, I prefer the former; not
only for the same reason that induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it,
viz., because it is the more etymologically correct; but because we take
from our neighbours the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in
which we apply it; and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach
to the various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo-Saxon
comprehended in the title of thegn.  It has been peremptorily said by
more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the erudition
of William, in permitting him to know Latin; nay, to have read the
Comments of Caesar at the age of eight.--Where these gentlemen find the
authorities to confute my statement I know not; all I know is, that in
the statement I have followed the original authorities usually deemed the
best.  And I content myself with referring the disputants to a work not
so difficult to procure as (and certainly more pleasant to read than) the
old Chronicles.  In Miss Strickland’s “Lives of the Queens of England,”
 (Matilda of Flanders,) the same statement is made, and no doubt upon the
same authorities.

More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in all
matter’s of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that I have
overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that which
flourished in Normandy under his reign; for I should have thought that
the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most thriving period of
that principality; the rapidity of its growth; the benefits it derived
from Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from William, had been
phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age, and in the history of
literature, to have met with an incredulity which the most moderate
amount of information would have sufficed to dispel.  Not to refer such
sceptics to graver authorities, historical and ecclesiastical, in order
to justify my representations of that learning which, under William the
Bastard, made the schools of Normandy the popular academies of Europe, a
page or two in a book so accessible as Villemain’s “Tableau du Moyen
Age,” will perhaps suffice to convince them of the hastiness of their
censure, and the error of their impressions.

It is stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose
authority on the merits of opera singers I am far from contesting but of
whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of human
industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, “that I am much mistaken when
I represent not merely the clergy but the young soldiers and courtiers of
the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with the literature of
Greece and Rome.”

The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous.  I have done no such
thing.  This general animadversion is only justified by a reference to
the pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville--and it is expressly stated
in the text that Mallet de Graville was originally intended for the
Church, and that it was the peculiarity of his literary information, rare
in a soldier (but for which his earlier studies for the ecclesiastical
calling readily account, at a time when the Norman convent of Bec was
already so famous for the erudition of its teachers, and the number of
its scholars,) that attracted towards him the notice of Lanfranc, and
founded his fortunes.  Pedantry is made one of his characteristics (as it
generally was the characteristic of any man with some pretensions to
scholarship, in the earlier ages;) and if he indulges in a classical
allusion, whether in taunting a courtier or conversing with a “Saxon from
the wealds of Kent,” it is no more out of keeping with the pedantry
ascribed to him, than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to rail at Meg
Merrilies in Latin, or James the First to examine a young courtier in the
same unfamiliar language.  Nor should the critic in question, when
inviting his readers to condemn me for making Mallet de Graville quote
Horace, have omitted to state that de Graville expressly laments that he
had never read, nor could even procure, a copy of the Roman poet--judging
only of the merits of Horace by an extract in some monkish author, who
was equally likely to have picked up his quotation second-hand.

So, when a reference is made either by Graville, or by any one else in
the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone
through the ordinary education of an English gentleman would never
thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems of
Homer themselves--he would have known that Homeric fables, or personages,
though not the Homeric poems, were made familiar, by quaint travesties
[7], even to the most illiterate audience of the gothic age.  It was
scarcely more necessary to know Homer then than now, in order to have
heard of Ulysses.  The writer in the Athenaeum is acquainted with Homeric
personages, but who on earth would ever presume to assert that he is
acquainted with Homer?

Some doubt has been thrown upon my accuracy in ascribing to the
Anglo-Saxon the enjoyments of certain luxuries (gold and silver
plate--the use of glass, etc.), which were extremely rare in an age much
more recent.  There is no ground for that doubt; nor is there a single
article of such luxury named in the text, for the mention of which I have
not ample authority.

I have indeed devoted to this work a degree of research which, if unusual
to romance, I cannot consider superfluous when illustrating an age so
remote, and events unparalleled in their influence over the destinies of
England.  Nor am I without the hope, that what the romance-reader at
first regards as a defect, he may ultimately acknowledge as a
merit;--forgiving me that strain on his attention by which alone I could
leave distinct in his memory the action and the actors in that solemn
tragedy which closed on the field of Hastings, over the corpse of the
Last Saxon King.


CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST
The Norman Visitor, the Saxon King, and the Danish Prophetess

BOOK SECOND
Lanfranc the Scholar

BOOK THIRD
The House of Godwin

BOOK FOURTH
The Heathen Altar and the Saxon Church

BOOK FIFTH
Death and Love

BOOK SIXTH
Ambition

BOOK SEVENTH
The Welch King

BOOK EIGHTH
Fate

BOOK NINTH
The Bones of the Dead

BOOK TENTH
The Sacrifice on the Altar

BOOK ELEVENTH
The Norman Schemer, and the Norwegian Sea-king

BOOK TWELFTH
The Battle of Hastings




HAROLD, THE LAST OF THE SAXON KINGS

by Edward Bulwer Lytton




BOOK I.
THE NORMAN VISITOR, THE SAXON KING, AND THE DANISH PROPHETESS.




CHAPTER I.

Merry was the month of May in the year of our Lord 1052.  Few were the
boys, and few the lasses, who overslept themselves on the first of that
buxom month.  Long ere the dawn, the crowds had sought mead and woodland,
to cut poles and wreathe flowers.  Many a mead then lay fair and green
beyond the village of Charing, and behind the isle of Thorney, (amidst
the brakes and briars of which were then rising fast and fair the Hall
and Abbey of Westminster;) many a wood lay dark in the starlight, along
the higher ground that sloped from the dank Strand, with its numerous
canals or dykes;--and on either side of the great road into Kent:--flutes
and horns sounded far and near through the green places, and laughter and
song, and the crash of breaking boughs.

As the dawn came grey up the east, arch and blooming faces bowed down to
bathe in the May dew.  Patient oxen stood dozing by the hedge-rows, all
fragrant with blossoms, till the gay spoilers of the May came forth from
the woods with lusty poles, followed by girls with laps full of flowers,
which they had caught asleep.  The poles were pranked with nosegays, and
a chaplet was hung round the horns of every ox. Then towards daybreak,
the processions streamed back into the city, through all its gates; boys
with their May-gads (peeled willow wands twined with cowslips) going
before; and clear through the lively din of the horns and flutes, and
amidst the moving grove of branches, choral voices, singing some early
Saxon stave, precursor of the later song--

    “We have brought the summer home.”

Often in the good old days before the Monk-king reigned, kings and
ealdermen had thus gone forth a-maying; but these merriments, savouring
of heathenesse, that good prince misliked: nevertheless the song was as
blithe, and the boughs were as green, as if king and ealderman had walked
in the train.

On the great Kent road, the fairest meads for the cowslip, and the
greenest woods for the bough, surrounded a large building that once had
belonged to some voluptuous Roman, now all defaced and despoiled; but the
boys and the lasses shunned those demesnes; and even in their mirth, as
they passed homeward along the road, and saw near the ruined walls, and
timbered outbuildings, grey Druid stones (that spoke of an age before
either Saxon or Roman invader) gleaming through the dawn--the song was
hushed--the very youngest crossed themselves; and the elder, in solemn
whispers, suggested the precaution of changing the song into a psalm.
For in that old building dwelt Hilda, of famous and dark repute; Hilda,
who, despite all law and canon, was still believed to practise the dismal
arts of the Wicca and Morthwyrtha (the witch and worshipper of the dead).
But once out of sight of those fearful precincts, the psalm was
forgotten, and again broke, loud, clear, and silvery, the joyous chorus.

So, entering London about sunrise, doors and windows were duly wreathed
with garlands; and every village in the suburbs had its May-pole, which
stood in its place all the year.  On that happy day labour rested; ceorl
and theowe had alike a holiday to dance, and tumble round the May-pole;
and thus, on the first of May--Youth, and Mirth, and Music, “brought the
summer home.”

The next day you might still see where the buxom bands had been; you
might track their way by fallen flowers, and green leaves, and the deep
ruts made by oxen (yoked often in teams from twenty to forty, in the
wains that carried home the poles); and fair and frequent throughout the
land, from any eminence, you might behold the hamlet swards still crowned
with the May trees, and air still seemed fragrant with their garlands.

It is on that second day of May, 1052, that my story opens, at the House
of Hilda, the reputed Morthwyrtha.  It stood upon a gentle and verdant
height; and, even through all the barbarous mutilation it had undergone
from barbarian hands, enough was left strikingly to contrast the ordinary
abodes of the Saxon.

The remains of Roman art were indeed still numerous throughout England,
but it happened rarely that the Saxon had chosen his home amidst the
villas of those noble and primal conquerors.  Our first forefathers were
more inclined to destroy than to adapt.

By what chance this building became an exception to the ordinary rule, it
is now impossible to conjecture, but from a very remote period it had
sheltered successive races of Teuton lords.

The changes wrought in the edifice were mournful and grotesque.  What was
now the Hall, had evidently been the atrium; the round shield, with its
pointed boss, the spear, sword, and small curved saex of the early
Teuton, were suspended from the columns on which once had been wreathed
the flowers; in the centre of the floor, where fragments of the old
mosaic still glistened from the hard-pressed paving of clay and lime,
what now was the fire-place had been the impluvium, and the smoke went
sullenly through the aperture in the roof, made of old to receive the
rains of heaven.  Around the Hall were still left the old cubicula or
dormitories, (small, high, and lighted but from the doors,) which now
served for the sleeping-rooms of the humbler guest or the household
servant; while at the farther end of the Hall, the wide space between the
columns, which had once given ample vista from graceful awnings into
tablinum and viridarium, was filled up with rude rubble and Roman bricks,
leaving but a low, round, arched door, that still led into the tablinum.
But that tablinum, formerly the gayest state-room of the Roman lord, was
now filled with various lumber, piles of faggots, and farming utensils.
On either side of this desecrated apartment, stretched, to the right, the
old lararium, stripped of its ancient images of ancestor and god; to the
left, what had been the gynoecium (women’s apartment).

One side of the ancient peristyle, which was of vast extent, was now
converted into stabling, sties for swine, and stalls for oxen.  On the
other side was constructed a Christian chapel, made of rough oak planks,
fastened by plates at the top, and with a roof of thatched reeds.  The
columns and wall at the extreme end of the peristyle were a mass of
ruins, through the gigantic rents of which loomed a grassy hillock, its
sides partially covered with clumps of furze.  On this hillock were the
mutilated remains of an ancient Druidical crommel, in the centre of which
(near a funeral mound, or barrow, with the bautastean, or gravestone, of
some early Saxon chief at one end) had been sacrilegiously placed an
altar to Thor, as was apparent both from the shape, from a rude,
half-obliterated, sculptured relief of the god, with his lifted hammer,
and a few Runic letters.  Amidst the temple of the Briton the Saxon had
reared the shrine of his triumphant war-god.

Now still, amidst the ruins of that extreme side of the peristyle which
opened to this hillock were left, first, an ancient Roman fountain, that
now served to water the swine, and next, a small sacellum, or fane to
Bacchus (as relief and frieze, yet spared, betokened): thus the eye, at
one survey, beheld the shrines of four creeds: the Druid, mystical and
symbolical; the Roman, sensual, but humane; the Teutonic, ruthless and
destroying; and, latest riser and surviving all, though as yet with but
little of its gentler influence over the deeds of men, the edifice of the
Faith of Peace.

Across the peristyle, theowes and swineherds passed to and fro:--in the
atrium, men of a higher class, half-armed, were, some drinking, some at
dice, some playing with huge hounds, or caressing the hawks that stood
grave and solemn on their perches.

The lararium was deserted; the gynoecium was still, as in the Roman time,
the favoured apartment of the female portion of the household, and indeed
bore the same name [8], and with the group there assembled we have now to
do.

The appliances of the chamber showed the rank and wealth of the owner. At
that period the domestic luxury of the rich was infinitely greater than
has been generally supposed.  The industry of the women decorated wall
and furniture with needlework and hangings: and as a thegn forfeited his
rank if he lost his lands, so the higher orders of an aristocracy rather
of wealth than birth had, usually, a certain portion of superfluous
riches, which served to flow towards the bazaars of the East and the
nearer markets of Flanders and Saracenic Spain.

In this room the walls were draped with silken hangings richly
embroidered.  The single window was glazed with a dull grey glass [9]. On
a beaufet were ranged horns tipped with silver, and a few vessels of pure
gold.  A small circular table in the centre was supported by symbolical
monsters quaintly carved.  At one side of the wall, on a long settle,
some half-a-dozen handmaids were employed in spinning; remote from them,
and near the window, sat a woman advanced in years, and of a mien and
aspect singularly majestic.  Upon a small tripod before her was a Runic
manuscript, and an inkstand of elegant form, with a silver graphium, or
pen.  At her feet reclined a girl somewhat about the age of sixteen, her
long hair parted across her forehead and falling far down her shoulders.
Her dress was a linen under-tunic, with long sleeves, rising high to the
throat, and without one of the modern artificial restraints of the shape,
the simple belt sufficed to show the slender proportions and delicate
outline of the wearer.  The colour of the dress was of the purest white,
but its hems, or borders, were richly embroidered.  This girl’s beauty
was something marvellous. In a land proverbial for fair women, it had
already obtained her the name of “the fair.”  In that beauty were
blended, not as yet without a struggle for mastery, the two expressions
seldom united in one countenance, the soft and the noble; indeed in the
whole aspect there was the evidence of some internal struggle; the
intelligence was not yet complete; the soul and heart were not yet
united: and Edith the Christian maid dwelt in the home of Hilda the
heathen prophetess.  The girl’s blue eyes, rendered dark by the shade of
their long lashes, were fixed intently upon the stern and troubled
countenance which was bent upon her own, but bent with that abstract gaze
which shows that the soul is absent from the sight.  So sate Hilda, and
so reclined her grandchild Edith.

“Grandam,” said the girl in a low voice and after a long pause; and the
sound of her voice so startled the handmaids, that every spindle stopped
for a moment and then plied with renewed activity; “Grandam, what
troubles you--are you not thinking of the great Earl and his fair sons,
now outlawed far over the wide seas?”

As the girl spoke, Hilda started slightly, like one awakened from a
dream; and when Edith had concluded her question, she rose slowly to the
height of a statue, unbowed by her years, and far towering above even the
ordinary standard of men; and turning from the child, her eye fell upon
the row of silent maids, each at her rapid, noiseless, stealthy work.
“Ho!” said she; her cold and haughty eye gleaming as she spoke;
“yesterday they brought home the summer--to-day, ye aid to bring home the
winter.  Weave well--heed well warf and woof; Skulda [10] is amongst ye,
and her pale fingers guide the web!”

The maidens lifted not their eyes, though in every cheek the colour paled
at the words of the mistress.  The spindles revolved, the thread shot,
and again there was silence more freezing than before.

“Askest thou,” said Hilda at length, passing to the child, as if the
question so long addressed to her ear had only just reached her mind;
“askest thou if I thought of the Earl and his fair sons?--yea, I heard
the smith welding arms on the anvil, and the hammer of the shipwright
shaping strong ribs for the horses of the sea.  Ere the reaper has bound
his sheaves, Earl Godwin will scare the Normans in the halls of the
Monk-king, as the hawk scares the brood in the dovecot.  Weave well, heed
well warf and woof, nimble maidens--strong be the texture, for biting is
the worm.”

“What weave they, then, good grandmother?” asked the girl, with wonder
and awe in her soft mild eyes.

“The winding-sheet of the great!”

Hilda’s lips closed, but her eyes, yet brighter than before, gazed upon
space, and her pale hand seemed tracing letters, like runes, in the air.

Then slowly she turned, and looked forth through the dull window. “Give
me my coverchief and my staff,” said she quickly.

Every one of the handmaids, blithe for excuse to quit a task which seemed
recently commenced, and was certainly not endeared to them by the
knowledge of its purpose communicated to them by the lady, rose to obey.

Unheeding the hands that vied with each other, Hilda took the hood, and
drew it partially over her brow.  Leaning lightly on a long staff, the
head of which formed a raven, carved from some wood stained black, she
passed into the hall, and thence through the desecrated tablinum, into
the mighty court formed by the shattered peristyle; there she stopped,
mused a moment, and called on Edith.  The girl was soon by her side.

“Come with me.--There is a face you shall see but twice in life;--this
day,”--and Hilda paused, and the rigid and almost colossal beauty of her
countenance softened.

“And when again, my grandmother?”

“Child, put thy warm hand in mine.  So! the vision darkens from me.--when
again, saidst thou, Edith?--alas, I know not.”

While thus speaking, Hilda passed slowly by the Roman fountain and the
heathen fane, and ascended the little hillock.  There on the opposite
side of the summit, backed by the Druid crommel and the Teuton altar, she
seated herself deliberately on the sward.

A few daisies, primroses, and cowslips, grew around; these Edith began to
pluck.  Singing, as she wove, a simple song, that, not more by the
dialect than the sentiment, betrayed its origin in the ballad of the
Norse [11], which had, in its more careless composition, a character
quite distinct from the artificial poetry of the Saxons.  The song may be
thus imperfectly rendered:

    “Merrily the throstle sings
       Amid the merry May;
     The throstle signs but to my ear;
       My heart is far away!

     Blithely bloometh mead and bank;
       And blithely buds the tree;
     And hark!--they bring the Summer home;
       It has no home with me!

     They have outlawed him--my Summer!
       An outlaw far away!
     The birds may sing, the flowers may bloom,
       O, give me back my May!”

As she came to the last line, her soft low voice seemed to awaken a
chorus of sprightly horns and trumpets, and certain other wind
instruments peculiar to the music of that day.  The hillock bordered the
high road to London--which then wound through wastes of forest land--and
now emerging from the trees to the left appeared a goodly company.  First
came two riders abreast, each holding a banner.  On the one was depicted
the cross and five martlets, the device of Edward, afterwards surnamed
the Confessor: on the other, a plain broad cross with a deep border round
it, and the streamer shaped into sharp points.

The first was familiar to Edith, who dropped her garland to gaze on the
approaching pageant; the last was strange to her.  She had been
accustomed to see the banner of the great Earl Godwin by the side of the
Saxon king; and she said, almost indignantly,--

“Who dares, sweet grandam, to place banner or pennon where Earl Godwin’s
ought to float?”

“Peace,” said Hilda, “peace and look.”

Immediately behind the standard-bearers came two figures--strangely
dissimilar indeed in mien, in years, in bearing: each bore on his left
wrist a hawk.  The one was mounted on a milk-white palfrey, with housings
inlaid with gold and uncut jewels.  Though not really old--for he was
much on this side of sixty--both his countenance and carriage evinced
age.  His complexion, indeed, was extremely fair, and his cheeks ruddy;
but the visage was long and deeply furrowed, and from beneath a bonnet
not dissimilar to those in use among the Scotch, streamed hair long and
white as snow, mingling with a large and forked beard.  White seemed his
chosen colour.  White was the upper tunic clasped on his shoulder with a
broad ouche or brooch; white the woollen leggings fitted to somewhat
emaciated limbs; and white the mantle, though broidered with a broad hem
of gold and purple.  The fashion of his dress was that which well became
a noble person, but it suited ill the somewhat frail and graceless figure
of the rider. Nevertheless, as Edith saw him, she rose, with an
expression of deep reverence on her countenance, and saying, “it is our
lord the King,” advanced some steps down the hillock, and there stood,
her arms folded on her breast, and quite forgetful, in her innocence and
youth, that she had left the house without the cloak and coverchief which
were deemed indispensable to the fitting appearance of maid and matron
when they were seen abroad.

“Fair sir, and brother mine,” said the deep voice of the younger rider,
in the Romance or Norman tongue, “I have heard that the small people of
whom my neighbours, the Breton tell us much, abound greatly in this fair
land of yours; and if I were not by the side of one whom no creature
unassoilzed and unbaptised dare approach, by sweet St. Valery I should
say--yonder stands one of those same gentilles fees!”

King Edward’s eye followed the direction of his companion’s outstretched
hand, and his quiet brow slightly contracted as he beheld the young form
of Edith standing motionless a few yards before him, with the warm May
wind lifting and playing with her long golden locks. He checked his
palfrey, and murmured some Latin words which the knight beside him
recognised as a prayer, and to which, doffing his cap, he added an Amen,
in a tone of such unctuous gravity, that the royal saint rewarded him
with a faint approving smile, and an affectionate “Bene vene,
Piosissime.”

Then inclining his palfrey’s head towards the knoll, he motioned to the
girl to approach him.  Edith, with a heightened colour, obeyed, and came
to the roadside.  The standard-bearers halted, as did the king and his
comrade--the procession behind halted--thirty knights, two bishops, eight
abbots, all on fiery steeds and in Norman garb--squires and attendants on
foot--a long and pompous retinue--they halted all.  Only a stray hound or
two broke from the rest, and wandered into the forest land with heads
trailing.

“Edith, my child,” said Edward, still in Norman-French, for he spoke his
own language with hesitation, and the Romance tongue, which had long been
familiar to the higher classes in England, had, since his accession,
become the only language in use at court, and as such every one of
‘Eorl-kind’ was supposed to speak it;--“Edith, my child, thou hast not
forgotten my lessons, I trow; thou singest the hymns I gave thee, and
neglectest not to wear the relic round thy neck.”

The girl hung her head, and spoke not.

“How comes it, then,” continued the King, with a voice to which he in
vain endeavoured to impart an accent of severity, “how comes it, O little
one, that thou, whose thoughts should be lifted already above this carnal
world, and eager for the service of Mary the chaste and blessed, standest
thus hoodless and alone on the waysides, a mark for the eyes of men? go
to, it is naught.”

Thus reproved, and in presence of so large and brilliant a company, the
girl’s colour went and came, her breast heaved high, but with an effort
beyond her age she checked her tears, and said meekly, “My grandmother,
Hilda, bade me come with her, and I came.”

“Hilda!” said the King, backing his palfrey with apparent perturbation,
“but Hilda is not with thee; I see her not.”

As he spoke, Hilda rose, and so suddenly did her tall form appear on the
brow of the hill, that it seemed as if she had emerged from the earth.
With a light and rapid stride she gained the side of her grandchild; and
after a slight and haughty reverence, said, “Hilda is here; what wants
Edward the King with his servant Hilda?”

“Nought, nought,” said the King, hastily; and something like fear passed
over his placid countenance; “save, indeed,” he added, with a reluctant
tone, as that of a man who obeys his conscience against his inclination,
“that I would pray thee to keep this child pure to threshold and altar,
as is meet for one whom our Lady, the Virgin, in due time, will elect to
her service.”

“Not so, son of Etheldred, son of Woden, the last descendant of Penda
should live, not to glide a ghost amidst cloisters, but to rock children
for war in their father’s shield.  Few men are there yet like the men of
old; and while the foot of the foreigner is on the Saxon soil no branch
of the stem of Woden should be nipped in the leaf.”

“Per la resplendar De [12], bold dame,” cried the knight by the side of
Edward, while a lurid flush passed over his cheek of bronze; “but thou
art too glib of tongue for a subject, and pratest overmuch of Woden, the
Paynim, for the lips of a Christian matron.”

Hilda met the flashing eye of the knight with a brow of lofty scorn, on
which still a certain terror was visible.  “Child,” she said, putting her
hand upon Edith’s fair locks; “this is the man thou shalt see but twice
in thy life;--look up, and mark well!”

Edith instinctively raised her eyes, and, once fixed upon the knight,
they seemed chained as by a spell.  His vest, of a cramoisay so dark,
that it seemed black beside the snowy garb of the Confessor, was edged by
a deep band of embroidered gold; leaving perfectly bare his firm, full
throat--firm and full as a column of granite,--a short jacket or
manteline of fur, pendant from the shoulders, left developed in all its
breadth a breast, that seemed meet to stay the march of an army; and on
the left arm, curved to support the falcon, the vast muscles rose, round
and gnarled, through the close sleeve.

In height, he was really but little above the stature of many of those
present; nevertheless, so did his port [13], his air, the nobility of his
large proportions, fill the eye, that he seemed to tower immeasurably
above the rest.

His countenance was yet more remarkable than his form; still in the prime
of youth, he seemed at the first glance younger, at the second older,
than he was.  At the first glance younger; for his face was perfectly
shaven, without even the moustache which the Saxon courtier, in imitating
the Norman, still declined to surrender; and the smooth visage and bare
throat sufficed in themselves to give the air of youth to that dominant
and imperious presence.  His small skull-cap left unconcealed his
forehead, shaded with short thick hair, uncurled, but black and glossy as
the wings of a raven.  It was on that forehead that time had set its
trace; it was knit into a frown over the eyebrows; lines deep as furrows
crossed its broad, but not elevated expanse.  That frown spoke of hasty
ire and the habit of stern command; those furrows spoke of deep thought
and plotting scheme; the one betrayed but temper and circumstance; the
other, more noble, spoke of the character and the intellect.  The face
was square, and the regard lion-like; the mouth--small, and even
beautiful in outline--had a sinister expression in its exceeding
firmness; and the jaw--vast, solid, as if bound in iron--showed
obstinate, ruthless, determined will; such a jaw as belongs to the tiger
amongst beasts, and the conqueror amongst men; such as it is seen in the
effigies of Caesar, of Cortes, of Napoleon.

That presence was well calculated to command the admiration of women, not
less than the awe of men.  But no admiration mingled with the terror that
seized the girl as she gazed long and wistful upon the knight.  The
fascination of the serpent on the bird held her mute and frozen.  Never
was that face forgotten; often in after-life it haunted her in the
noon-day, it frowned upon her dreams.

“Fair child,” said the knight, fatigued at length by the obstinacy of the
gaze, while that smile peculiar to those who have commanded men relaxed
his brow, and restored the native beauty to his lip, “fair child, learn
not from thy peevish grandam so uncourteous a lesson as hate of the
foreigner.  As thou growest into womanhood, know that Norman knight is
sworn slave to lady fair;” and, doffing his cap, he took from it an uncut
jewel, set in Byzantine filigree work.  “Hold out thy lap, my child; and
when thou nearest the foreigner scoffed, set this bauble in thy locks,
and think kindly of William, Count of the Normans.” [14]

He dropped the jewel on the ground as he spoke; for Edith, shrinking and
unsoftened towards him, held no lap to receive it; and Hilda, to whom
Edward had been speaking in a low voice, advanced to the spot and struck
the jewel with her staff under the hoofs of the king’s palfrey.

“Son of Emma, the Norman woman, who sent thy youth into exile, trample on
the gifts of thy Norman kinsman.  And if, as men say, thou art of such
gifted holiness that Heaven grants thy hand the power to heal, and thy
voice the power to curse, heal thy country, and curse the stranger!”

She extended her right arm to William as she spoke, and such was the
dignity of her passion, and such its force, that an awe fell upon all.
Then dropping her hood over her face, she slowly turned away, regained
the summit of the knoll, and stood erect beside the altar of the Northern
god, her face invisible through the hood drawn completely over it, and
her form motionless as a statue.

“Ride on,” said Edward, crossing himself.

“Now by the bones of St. Valery,” said William, after a pause, in which
his dark keen eye noted the gloom upon the King’s gentle face, “it moves
much my simple wonder how even presence so saintly can hear without wrath
words so unleal and foul.  Gramercy, an the proudest dame in Normandy
(and I take her to be wife to my stoutest baron, William Fitzosborne) had
spoken thus to me--”

“Thou wouldst have done as I, my brother,” interrupted Edward; “prayed to
our Lord to pardon her, and rode on pitying.”

William’s lip quivered with ire, yet he curbed the reply that sprang to
it, and he looked with affection genuinely more akin to admiration than
scorn, upon his fellow-prince.  For, fierce and relentless as the Duke’s
deeds were, his faith was notably sincere; and while this made, indeed,
the prince’s chief attraction to the pious Edward, so, on the other hand,
this bowed the Duke in a kind of involuntary and superstitious homage to
the man who sought to square deeds to faith. It is ever the case with
stern and stormy spirits, that the meek ones which contrast them steal
strangely into their affections.  This principle of human nature can
alone account for the enthusiastic devotion which the mild sufferings of
the Saviour awoke in the fiercest exterminators of the North.  In
proportion, often, to the warrior’s ferocity, was his love to that Divine
model, at whose sufferings he wept, to whose tomb he wandered barefoot,
and whose example of compassionate forgiveness he would have thought
himself the basest of men to follow!

“Now, by my halidame, I honour and love thee, Edward,” cried the Duke,
with a heartiness more frank than was usual to him: “and were I thy
subject, woe to man or woman that wagged tongue to wound thee by a
breath.  But who and what is this same Hilda? one of thy kith and
kin?--surely not less than kingly blood runs so bold?”

“William, bien aime,” [15] said the King, “it is true that Hilda, whom
the saints assoil, is of kingly blood, though not of our kingly line. It
is feared,” added Edward, in a timid whisper, as he cast a hurried glance
around him, “that this unhappy woman has ever been more addicted to the
rites of her pagan ancestors than to those of Holy Church; and men do say
that she hath thus acquired from fiend or charm secrets devoutly to be
eschewed by the righteous.  Nathless, let us rather hope that her mind is
somewhat distraught with her misfortunes.”

The King sighed, and the Duke sighed too, but the Duke’s sigh spoke
impatience.  He swept behind him a stern and withering look towards the
proud figure of Hilda, still seen through the glades, and said in a
sinister voice: “Of kingly blood; but this witch of Woden hath no sons or
kinsmen, I trust, who pretend to the throne of the Saxon:”

“She is sibbe to Githa, wife of Godwin,” answered the King, “and that is
her most perilous connection; for the banished Earl, as thou knowest, did
not pretend to fill the throne, but he was content with nought less than
governing our people.”

The King then proceeded to sketch an outline of the history of Hilda, but
his narrative was so deformed both by his superstitions and prejudices,
and his imperfect information in all the leading events and characters in
his own kingdom, that we will venture to take upon ourselves his task;
and while the train ride on through glade and mead, we will briefly
narrate, from our own special sources of knowledge, the chronicle of
Hilda, the Scandinavian Vala.




CHAPTER II.

A magnificent race of men were those war sons of the old North, whom our
popular histories, so superficial in their accounts of this age, include
in the common name of the “Danes.”  They replunged into barbarism the
nations over which they swept; but from that barbarism they reproduced
the noblest elements of civilisation.  Swede, Norwegian, and Dane,
differing in some minor points, when closely examined, had yet one common
character viewed at a distance.  They had the same prodigious energy, the
same passion for freedom, individual and civil, the same splendid errors
in the thirst for fame and the “point of honour;” and above all, as a
main cause of civilisation, they were wonderfully pliant and malleable in
their admixtures with the peoples they overran.  This is their true
distinction from the stubborn Celt, who refuses to mingle, and disdains
to improve.

Frankes, the archbishop, baptised Rolf-ganger [16]: and within a little
more than a century afterwards, the descendants of those terrible
heathens who had spared neither priest nor altar, were the most
redoubtable defenders of the Christian Church; their old language
forgotten (save by a few in the town of Bayeux), their ancestral names
[17] (save among a few of the noblest) changed into French titles, and
little else but the indomitable valour of the Scandinavian remained
unaltered amongst the arts and manners of the Frankish-Norman.

In like manner their kindred tribes, who had poured into Saxon England to
ravage and lay desolate, had no sooner obtained from Alfred the Great
permanent homes, than they became perhaps the most powerful, and in a
short time not the least patriotic, part of the Anglo-Saxon population
[18].  At the time our story opens, these Northmen, under the common name
of Danes, were peaceably settled in no less than fifteen [19] counties in
England; their nobles abounded in towns and cities beyond the boundaries
of those counties which bore the distinct appellation of Danelagh.  They
were numerous in London: in the precincts of which they had their own
burial-place, to the chief municipal court of which they gave their own
appellation--the Hustings [20]. Their power in the national assembly of
the Witan had decided the choice of kings.  Thus, with some differences
of law and dialect, these once turbulent invaders had amalgamated
amicably with the native race [21].  And to this day, the gentry,
traders, and farmers of more than one-third of England, and in those
counties most confessed to be in the van of improvement, descend from
Saxon mothers indeed, but from Viking fathers.  There was in reality
little difference in race between the Norman knight of the time of Henry
I. and the Saxon franklin of Norfolk and York.  Both on the mother’s side
would most probably have been Saxon, both on the father’s would have
traced to the Scandinavian.

But though this character of adaptability was general, exceptions in some
points were necessarily found, and these were obstinate in proportion to
the adherence to the old pagan faith, or the sincere conversion to
Christianity.  The Norwegian chronicles, and passages in our own history,
show how false and hollow was the assumed Christianity of many of these
fierce Odin-worshippers.  They willingly enough accepted the outward sign
of baptism, but the holy water changed little of the inner man.  Even
Harold, the son of Canute, scarce seventeen years before the date we have
now entered, being unable to obtain from the Archbishop of
Canterbury--who had espoused the cause of his brother Hardicanute--the
consecrating benediction, lived and reigned as one who had abjured
Christianity. [22]

The priests, especially on the Scandinavian continent, were often forced
to compound with their grim converts, by indulgence to certain habits,
such as indiscriminate polygamy.  To eat horse-flesh in honour of Odin,
and to marry wives ad libitum, were the main stipulations of the
neophytes.  And the puzzled monks, often driven to a choice, yielded the
point of the wives, but stood firm on the graver article of the
horse-flesh.

With their new religion, very imperfectly understood, even when genuinely
received, they retained all that host of heathen superstition which knits
itself with the most obstinate instincts in the human breast.  Not many
years before the reign of the Confessor, the laws of the great Canute
against witchcraft and charms, the worship of stones, fountains, runes by
ash and elm, and the incantations that do homage to the dead, were
obviously rather intended to apply to the recent Danish converts, than to
the Anglo-Saxons, already subjugated for centuries, body and soul, to the
domination of the Christian monks.

Hilda, a daughter of the royalty of Denmark, and cousin to Githa (niece
to Canute, whom that king had bestowed in second spousals upon Godwin),
had come over to England with a fierce Jarl, her husband, a year after
Canute’s accession to the throne--both converted nominally, both secret
believers in Thor and Odin.

Hilda’s husband had fallen in one of the actions in the Northern seas,
between Canute and St. Olave, King of Norway (that saint himself, by the
bye, a most ruthless persecutor of his forefathers’ faith, and a most
unqualified assertor of his heathen privilege to extend his domestic
affections beyond the severe pale which should have confined them to a
single wife.  His natural son Magnus then sat on the Danish throne).  The
Jarl died as he had wished to die, the last man on board his ship, with
the soothing conviction that the Valkyrs would bear him to Valhalla.

Hilda was left with an only daughter, whom Canute bestowed on Ethelwolf,
a Saxon Earl of large domains, and tracing his descent from Penda, that
old King of Mercia who refused to be converted, but said so discreetly,
that he had no objection to his neighbours being Christians, if they
would practise that peace and forgiveness which the monks told him were
the elements of the faith.

Ethelwolf fell under the displeasure of Hardicanute, perhaps because he
was more Saxon than Danish; and though that savage king did not dare
openly to arraign him before the Witan, he gave secret orders by which he
was butchered on his own hearthstone, in the arms of his wife, who died
shortly afterwards of grief and terror.  The only orphan of this unhappy
pair, Edith, was thus consigned to the charge of Hilda.

It was a necessary and invaluable characteristic of that “adaptability”
 which distinguished the Danes, that they transferred to the land in which
they settled all the love they had borne to that of their ancestors; and
so far as attachment to soil was concerned, Hilda had grown no less in
heart an Englishwoman than if she had been born and reared amidst the
glades and knolls from which the smoke of her hearth rose through the old
Roman compluvium.

But in all else she was a Dane.  Dane in her creed and her habits--Dane
in her intense and brooding imagination--in the poetry that filled her
soul, peopled the air with spectres, and covered the leaves of the trees
with charms.  Living in austere seclusion after the death of her lord, to
whom she had borne a Scandinavian woman’s devoted but heroic
love,--sorrowing, indeed, for his death, but rejoicing that he fell
amidst the feast of ravens,--her mind settled more and more year by year,
and day by day, upon those visions of the unknown world, which in every
faith conjure up the companions of solitude and grief.

Witchcraft in the Scandinavian North assumed many forms, and was
connected by many degrees.  There was the old and withered hag, on whom,
in our later mediaeval ages the character was mainly bestowed; there was
the terrific witch-wife, or wolf-witch, who seems wholly apart from human
birth and attributes, like the weird sisters of Macbeth--creatures who
entered the house at night and seized warriors to devour them, who might
be seen gliding over the sea, with the carcase of the wolf dripping blood
from their giant jaws; and there was the more serene, classical, and
awful vala, or sibyl, who, honoured by chiefs and revered by nations,
foretold the future, and advised the deeds of heroes.  Of these last, the
Norse chronicles tell us much.  They were often of rank and wealth, they
were accompanied by trains of handmaids and servants--kings led them
(when their counsel was sought) to the place of honour in the hall, and
their heads were sacred, as those of ministers to the gods.

This last state in the grisly realm of the Wig-laer (wizard-lore) was the
one naturally appertaining to the high rank, and the soul, lofty though
blind and perverted, of the daughter of warrior-kings.  All practice of
the art to which now for long years she had devoted herself, that touched
upon the humble destinies of the vulgar, the child of Odin [23] haughtily
disdained.  Her reveries were upon the fate of kings and kingdoms; she
aspired to save or to rear the dynasties which should rule the races yet
unborn.  In youth proud and ambitious,--common faults with her
countrywomen,--on her entrance into the darker world, she carried with
her the prejudices and passions that she had known in that coloured by
the external sun.

All her human affections were centred in her grandchild Edith, the last
of a race royal on either side.  Her researches into the future had
assured her, that the life and death of this fair child were entwined
with the fates of a king, and the same oracles had intimated a mysterious
and inseparable connection between her own shattered house and the
flourishing one of Earl Godwin, the spouse of her kinswoman Githa: so
that with this great family she was as intimately bound by the links of
superstition as by the ties of blood.  The eldest born of Godwin, Sweyn,
had been at first especially her care and her favourite; and he, of more
poetic temperament than his brothers, had willingly submitted to her
influence.  But of all the brethren, as will be seen hereafter, the
career of Sweyn had been most noxious and ill-omened; and at that moment,
while the rest of the house carried with it into exile the deep and
indignant sympathy of England, no man said of Sweyn, “God bless him!”

But as the second son, Harold, had grown from childhood into youth, Hilda
had singled him out with a preference even more marked than that she had
bestowed upon Sweyn.  The stars and the runes assured her of his future
greatness, and the qualities and talents of the young Earl had, at the
very onset of his career, confirmed the accuracy of their predictions.
Her interest in Harold became the more intense, partly because whenever
she consulted the future for the lot of her grandchild Edith, she
invariably found it associated with the fate of Harold--partly because
all her arts had failed to penetrate beyond a certain point in their
joint destinies, and left her mind agitated and perplexed between hope
and terror.  As yet, however, she had wholly failed in gaining any
ascendancy over the young Earl’s vigorous and healthful mind: and though,
before his exile, he came more often than any of Godwin’s sons to the old
Roman house, he had smiled with proud incredulity at her vague
prophecies, and rejected all her offers of aid from invisible agencies
with the calm reply--“The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to
his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from
fulfilling it.”

Indeed, though Hilda’s magic was not of the malevolent kind, and sought
the source of its oracles not in fiends but gods, (at least the gods in
whom she believed,) it was noticeable that all over whom her influence
had prevailed had come to miserable and untimely ends;--not alone her
husband and her son-in-law, (both of whom had been as wax to her
counsel,) but such other chiefs as rank or ambition permitted to appeal
to her lore.  Nevertheless, such was the ascendancy she had gained over
the popular mind, that it would have been dangerous in the highest degree
to put into execution against her the laws condemnatory of witch craft.
In her, all the more powerful Danish families reverenced, and would have
protected, the blood of their ancient kings, and the widow of one of
their most renowned heroes.

Hospitable, liberal, and beneficent to the poor; and an easy mistress
over numerous ceorls, while the vulgar dreaded, they would yet have
defended her.  Proofs of her art it would have been hard to establish;
hosts of compurgators to attest her innocence would have sprung up. Even
if subjected to the ordeal, her gold could easily have bribed the priests
with whom the power of evading its dangers rested.  And with that worldly
wisdom which persons of genius in their wildest chimeras rarely lack, she
had already freed herself from the chance of active persecution from the
Church, by ample donations to all the neighbouring monasteries.

Hilda, in fine, was a woman of sublime desires and extraordinary gifts;
terrible, indeed, but as the passive agent of the Fates she invoked, and
rather commanding for herself a certain troubled admiration and
mysterious pity; no fiend-hag, beyond humanity in malice and in power,
but essentially human, even when aspiring most to the secrets of a god.
Assuming, for the moment, that by the aid of intense imagination, persons
of a peculiar idiosyncrasy of nerves and temperament might attain to such
dim affinities with a world beyond our ordinary senses, as forbid entire
rejection of the magnetism and magic of old times--it was on no foul and
mephitic pool, overhung with the poisonous nightshade, and excluded from
the beams of heaven, but on the living stream on which the star trembled,
and beside whose banks the green herbage waved, that the demon shadows
fell dark and dread.

Thus safe and thus awful, lived Hilda; and under her care, a rose beneath
the funeral cedar, bloomed her grandchild Edith, goddaughter of the Lady
of England.

It was the anxious wish, both of Edward and his virgin wife, pious as
himself, to save this orphan from the contamination of a house more than
suspected of heathen faith, and give to her youth the refuge of the
convent.  But this, without her guardian’s consent or her own expressed
will, could not be legally done; and Edith as yet had expressed no desire
to disobey her grandmother, who treated the idea of the convent with
lofty scorn.

This beautiful child grew up under the influence, as it were, of two
contending creeds; all her notions on both were necessarily confused and
vague.  But her heart was so genuinely mild, simple, tender, and
devoted,--there was in her so much of the inborn excellence of the sex,
that in every impulse of that heart struggled for clearer light and for
purer air the unquiet soul.  In manner, in thought, and in person as yet
almost an infant, deep in her heart lay yet one woman’s secret, known
scarcely to herself, but which taught her, more powerfully than Hilda’s
proud and scoffing tongue, to shudder at the thought of the barren
cloister and the eternal vow.




CHAPTER III.

While King Edward was narrating to the Norman Duke all that he knew, and
all that he knew not, of Hilda’s history and secret arts, the road wound
through lands as wild and wold-like as if the metropolis of England lay a
hundred miles distant.  Even to this day patches of such land, in the
neighbourhood of Norwood, may betray what the country was in the old
time:--when a mighty forest, “abounding with wild beasts”--“the bull and
the boar”--skirted the suburbs of London, and afforded pastime to king
and thegn.  For the Norman kings have been maligned by the popular notion
that assigns to them all the odium of the forest laws.  Harsh and severe
were those laws in the reign of the Anglo-Saxon; as harsh and severe,
perhaps, against the ceorl and the poor man, as in the days of Rufus,
though more mild unquestionably to the nobles.  To all beneath the rank
of abbot and thegn, the king’s woods were made, even by the mild
Confessor, as sacred as the groves of the Druids: and no less penalty
than that of life was incurred by the lowborn huntsman who violated their
recesses. [24]

Edward’s only mundane passion was the chase; and a day rarely passed, but
what after mass he went forth with hawk or hound.  So that, though the
regular season for hawking did not commence till October, he had ever on
his wrist some young falcon to essay, or some old favourite to exercise.
And now, just as William was beginning to grow weary of his good cousin’s
prolix recitals, the hounds suddenly gave tongue, and from a sedge-grown
pool by the way-side, with solemn wing and harsh boom, rose a bittern.

“Holy St. Peter!” exclaimed the Saint-king, spurring his palfrey, and
loosing his famous Peregrine falcon [25].  William was not slow in
following that animated example, and the whole company rode at half speed
across the rough forest-land, straining their eyes upon the soaring
quarry, and the large wheels of the falcons.  Riding thus, with his eyes
in the air, Edward was nearly pitched over his palfrey’s head, as the
animal stopped suddenly, checked by a high gate, set deep in a half
embattled wall of brick and rubble.  Upon this gate sate, quite unmoved
and apathetic, a tall ceorl, or labourer, while behind it was a gazing
curious group of men of the same rank, clad in those blue tunics of which
our peasant’s smock is the successor, and leaning on scythes and flails.
Sour and ominous were the looks they bent upon that Norman cavalcade.
The men were at least as well clad as those of the same condition are
now; and their robust limbs and ruddy cheeks showed no lack of the fare
that supports labour.  Indeed, the working man of that day, if not one of
the absolute theowes or slaves, was, physically speaking, better off,
perhaps, than he has ever since been in England, more especially if he
appertained to some wealthy thegn of pure Saxon lineage, whose very title
of lord came to him in his quality of dispenser of bread [26]; and these
men had been ceorls under Harold, son of Godwin, now banished from the
land.

“Open the gate, open quick, my merry men,” said the gentle Edward
(speaking in Saxon, though with a strong foreign accent), after he had
recovered his seat, murmured a benediction, and crossed himself three
times.  The men stirred not.

“No horse tramps the seeds we have sown for Harold the Earl to reap;”
 said the ceorl, doggedly, still seated on the gate.  And the group behind
him gave a shout of applause.

Moved more than ever he had been known to be before, Edward spurred his
steed up to the boor, and lifted his hand.  At that signal twenty swords
flashed in the air behind, as the Norman nobles spurred to the place.
Putting back with one hand his fierce attendants, Edward shook the other
at the Saxon.  “Knave, knave,” he cried, “I would hurt you, if I could!”

There was something in these words, fated to drift down into history, at
once ludicrous and touching.  The Normans saw them only in the former
light, and turned aside to conceal their laughter; the Saxon felt them in
the latter and truer sense, and stood rebuked.  That great king, whom he
now recognised, with all those drawn swords at his back, could not do him
hurt; that king had not the heart to hurt him. The ceorl sprang from the
gate, and opened it, bending low.

“Ride first, Count William, my cousin,” said the King, calmly.

The Saxon ceorl’s eyes glared as he heard the Norman’s name uttered in
the Norman tongue, but he kept open the gate, and the train passed
through, Edward lingering last. Then said the King, in a low voice,--

“Bold man, thou spokest of Harold the Earl and his harvests; knowest thou
not that his lands have passed from him, and that he is outlawed, and
that his harvests are not for the scythes of his ceorls to reap?”

“May it please you, dread Lord and King,” replied the Saxon simply,
“these lands that were Harold the Earl’s, are now Clapa’s, the
sixhaendman’s.”

“How is that?” quoth Edward, hastily; “we gave them neither to
sixhaendman nor to Saxon.  All the lands of Harold hereabout were divided
amongst sacred abbots and noble chevaliers--Normans all.”

“Fulke the Norman had these fair fields, yon orchards and tynen; Fulke
sold them to Clapa, the Earl’s sixhaendman, and what in mancusses and
pence Clapa lacked of the price, we, the ceorls of the Earl, made up from
our own earnings in the Earl’s noble service.  And this very day, in
token thereof, have we quaffed the bedden-ale [27]. Wherefore, please God
and our Lady, we hold these lands part and parcel with Clapa; and when
Earl Harold comes again, as come he will, here at least he will have his
own.”

Edward, who, despite a singular simplicity of character, which at times
seemed to border on imbecility, was by no means wanting in penetration
when his attention was fairly roused, changed countenance at this proof
of rough and homely affection on the part of these men to his banished
earl and brother-in-law.  He mused a little while in grave thought, and
then said, kindly--

“Well, man, I think not the worse of you for loyal love to your thegn,
but there are those who would do so, and I advise you, brotherlike, that
ears and nose are in peril if thou talkest thus indiscreetly.”

“Steel to steel, and hand to hand,” said the Saxon, bluntly, touching the
long knife in his leathern belt, “and he who sets gripe on Sexwolf son of
Elfhelm, shall pay his weregeld twice over.”

“Forewarned, foolish man, thou are forewarned.  Peace,” said the King;
and, shaking his head, he rode on to join the Normans, who now, in a
broad field, where the corn sprang green, and which they seemed to
delight in wantonly trampling, as they curvetted their steeds to and fro,
watched the movements of the bittern and the pursuit of the two falcons.

“A wager, Lord King!” said a prelate, whose strong family likeness to
William proclaimed him to be the Duke’s bold and haughty brother, Odo
[28], Bishop of Bayeux;--“a wager.  My steed to your palfrey that the
Duke’s falcon first fixes the bittern.”

“Holy father,” answered Edward, in that slight change of voice which
alone showed his displeasure, “these wagers all savour of heathenesse,
and our canons forbid them to mone [29] and priest. Go to, it is naught.”

The bishop, who brooked no rebuke, even from his terrible brother, knit
his brows, and was about to make no gentle rejoinder, when William, whose
profound craft or sagacity was always at watch, lest his followers should
displease the King, interposed, and taking the word out of the prelate’s
mouth, said:

“Thou reprovest us well, Sir and King; we Normans are too inclined to
such levities.  And see, your falcon is first in pride of place.  By the
bones of St. Valery, how nobly he towers!  See him cover the
bittern!--see him rest on the wing!--Down he swoops!  Gallant bird!”

“With his heart split in two on the bittern’s bill,” said the bishop; and
down, rolling one over the other, fell bittern and hawk, while William’s
Norway falcon, smaller of size than the King’s, descended rapidly, and
hovered over the two.  Both were dead.

“I accept the omen,” muttered the gazing Duke; “let the natives destroy
each other!”  He placed his whistle to his lips, and his falcon flew back
to his wrist.

“Now home,” said King Edward.




CHAPTER IV.

The royal party entered London by the great bridge which divided
Southwark from the capital; and we must pause to gaze a moment on the
animated scene which the immemorial thoroughfare presented.

The whole suburb before entering Southwark was rich in orchards and
gardens, lying round the detached houses of the wealthier merchants and
citizens.  Approaching the river-side, to the left, the eye might see the
two circular spaces set apart, the one for bear, the other for
bull-baiting.  To the right, upon a green mound of waste, within sight of
the populous bridge, the gleemen were exercising their art.  Here one
dexterous juggler threw three balls and three knives alternately in the
air, catching them one by one as they fell [30].   There, another was
gravely leading a great bear to dance on its hind legs, while his
coadjutor kept time with a sort of flute or flageolet.  The lazy
bystanders, in great concourse, stared and laughed; but the laugh was
hushed at the tramp of the Norman steeds; and the famous Count by the
King’s side, as, with a smiling lip, but observant eye, he rode along,
drew all attention from the bear.

On now approaching that bridge which, not many years before, had been the
scene of terrible contest between the invading Danes and Ethelred’s ally,
Olave of Norway [31], you might still see, though neglected and already
in decay, the double fortifications that had wisely guarded that vista
into the city.  On both sides of the bridge, which was of wood, were
forts, partly of timber, partly of stone, and breastworks, and by the
forts a little chapel.  The bridge, broad enough to admit two vehicles
abreast [32],  was crowded with passengers, and lively with stalls and
booths.  Here was the favourite spot of the popular ballad-singer [33].
Here, too, might be seen the swarthy Saracen, with wares from Spain and
Afric [34].  Here, the German merchant from the Steel-yard swept along on
his way to his suburban home.  Here, on some holy office, went quick the
muffled monk.  Here, the city gallant paused to laugh with the country
girl, her basket full of May-boughs and cowslips.  In short, all bespoke
that activity, whether in business or pastime, which was destined to
render that city the mart of the world, and which had already knit the
trade of the Anglo-Saxon to the remoter corners of commercial Europe. The
deep dark eye of William dwelt admiringly on the bustling groups, on the
broad river, and the forest of masts which rose by the indented marge
near Belin’s gate [35].  And he to whom, whatever his faults, or rather
crimes, to the unfortunate people he not only oppressed but
deceived--London at least may yet be grateful, not only for chartered
franchise [36], but for advancing, in one short vigorous reign, her
commerce and wealth, beyond what centuries of Anglo-Saxon domination,
with its inherent feebleness, had effected, exclaimed aloud:

“By rood and mass, O dear king, thy lot hath fallen on a goodly
heritage.”

“Hem!” said Edward, lazily; “thou knowest not how troublesome these
Saxons are.  And while thou speakest, lo, in yon shattered walls, built
first, they say, by Alfred of holy memory, are the evidences of the
Danes.  Bethink thee how often they have sailed up this river. How know I
but what the next year the raven flag may stream over these waters?
Magnus of Denmark hath already claimed my crown as heir to the royalties
of Canute, and” (here Edward hesitated), “Godwin and Harold, whom alone
of my thegns Dane and Northman fear, are far away.”

“Miss not them, Edward, my cousin,” cried the Duke, in haste.  “Send for
me if danger threat thee.  Ships enow await thy best in my new port of
Cherbourg.  And I tell thee this for thy comfort, that were I king of the
English, and lord of this river, the citizens of London might sleep from
vespers to prime, without fear of the Dane.  Never again should the raven
flag be seen by this bridge!  Never, I swear, by the Splendour Divine.”

Not without purpose spoke William thus stoutly; and he turned on the King
those glittering eyes (micantes oculos), which the chroniclers have
praised and noted.  For it was his hope and his aim in this visit, that
his cousin Edward should formally promise him that goodly heritage of
England.  But the King made no rejoinder, and they now neared the end of
the bridge.

“What old ruin looms yonder?” [37] asked William, hiding his
disappointment at Edward’s silence; “it seemeth the remains of some
stately keape, which, by its fashion, I should pronounce Roman.”

“Ay!” said Edward, “and it is said to have been built by the Romans; and
one of the old Lombard freemasons employed on my new palace of
Westminster, giveth that, and some others in my domain, the name of the
Juillet Tower.”

“Those Romans were our masters in all things gallant and wise,” said
William; “and I predict that, some day or other, on that site, a King of
England will re-erect palace and tower.  And yon castle towards the
west?”

“Is the Tower Palatine, where our predecessors have lodged, and ourself
sometimes; but the sweet loneliness of Thorney Isle pleaseth me more
now.”

Thus talking, they entered London, a rude, dark city, built mainly of
timbered houses; streets narrow and winding; windows rarely glazed, but
protected chiefly by linen blinds; vistas opening, however, at times into
broad spaces, round the various convents, where green trees grew up
behind low palisades.  Tall roods, and holy images, to which we owe the
names of existing thoroughfares (Rood-lane and Lady-lane [38]), where the
ways crossed, attracted the curious and detained the pious.  Spires there
were not then, but blunt, cone-headed turrets, pyramidal, denoting the
Houses of God, rose often from the low, thatched, and reeded roofs.  But
every now and then, a scholar’s, if not an ordinary, eye could behold the
relics of Roman splendour, traces of that elder city which now lies
buried under our thoroughfares, and of which, year by year, are dug up
the stately skeletons.

Along the Thames still rose, though much mutilated, the wall of
Constantine [39].  Round the humble and barbarous Church of St. Paul’s
(wherein lay the dust of Sebba, that king of the East Saxons who quitted
his throne for the sake of Christ, and of Edward’s feeble and luckless
father, Ethelred) might be seen, still gigantic in decay, the ruins of
the vast temple of Diana [40].  Many a church, and many a convent,
pierced their mingled brick and timber work with Roman capital and shaft.
Still by the tower, to which was afterwards given the Saracen name of
Barbican, were the wrecks of the Roman station, where cohorts watched
night and day, in case of fire within or foe without. [41]

In a niche, near the Aldersgate, stood the headless statue of Fortitude,
which monks and pilgrims deemed some unknown saint in the old time, and
halted to honour.  And in the midst of Bishopsgate-street, sate on his
desecrated throne a mangled Jupiter, his eagle at his feet.  Many a
half-converted Dane there lingered, and mistook the Thunderer and the
bird for Odin and his hawk.  By Leod-gate (the People’s gate [42]) still
too were seen the arches of one of those mighty aqueducts which the Roman
learned from the Etrurian.  And close by the Still-yard, occupied by “the
Emperor’s cheap men” (the German merchants), stood, almost entire, the
Roman temple, extant in the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth.  Without the
walls, the old Roman vineyards [43] still put forth their green leaves
and crude clusters, in the plains of East Smithfield, in the fields of
St. Giles’s, and on the site where now stands Hatton Garden.  Still
massere [44] and cheapmen chaffered and bargained, at booth and stall, in
Mart-lane, where the Romans had bartered before them.  With every
encroachment on new soil, within the walls and without, urn, vase,
weapon, human bones, were shovelled out, and lay disregarded amidst heaps
of rubbish.

Not on such evidences of the past civilisation looked the practical eye
of the Norman Count; not on things, but on men, looked he; and as
silently he rode on from street to street, out of those men, stalwart and
tall, busy, active, toiling, the Man-Ruler saw the Civilisation that was
to come.

So, gravely through the small city, and over the bridge that spanned the
little river of the Fleet, rode the train along the Strand; to the left,
smooth sands; to the right, fair pastures below green holts, thinly
studded with houses; over numerous cuts and inlets running into the
river, rode they on.  The hour and the season were those in which youth
enjoyed its holiday, and gay groups resorted to the then [45] fashionable
haunts of the Fountain of Holywell, “streaming forth among glistening
pebbles.”

So they gained at length the village of Charing, which Edward had lately
bestowed on his Abbey of Westminster, and which was now filled with
workmen, native and foreign, employed on that edifice and the contiguous
palace.  Here they loitered awhile at the Mews [46] (where the hawks were
kept), passed by the rude palace of stone and rubble, appropriated to the
tributary kings of Scotland [47]--a gift from Edgar to Kenneth--and
finally, reaching the inlet of the river, which, winding round the Isle
of Thorney (now Westminster), separated the rising church, abbey, and
palace of the Saint-king from the main-land, dismounted--and were ferried
across [48] the narrow stream to the broad space round the royal
residence.




CHAPTER V.

The new palace of Edward the Confessor, the palace of Westminster, opened
its gates, to receive the Saxon King and the Norman Duke, remounting on
the margin of the isle, and now riding side by side. And as the Duke
glanced, from brows habitually knit, first over the pile, stately, though
not yet completed, with its long rows of round arched windows, cased by
indented fringes and fraet (or tooth) work, its sweep of solid columns
with circling cloisters, and its ponderous towers of simple grandeur;
then over the groups of courtiers, with close vests, and short mantles,
and beardless cheeks, that filled up the wide space, to gaze in homage on
the renowned guest, his heart swelled within him, and, checking his rein,
he drew near to his brother of Bayeux, and whispered,--

“Is not this already the court of the Norman?  Behold yon nobles and
earls, how they mimic our garb! behold the very stones in yon gate, how
they range themselves, as if carved by the hand of the Norman mason!
Verily and indeed, brother, the shadow of the rising sun rests already on
these halls.”

“Had England no people,” said the bishop, “England were yours already.
But saw you not, as we rode along, the lowering brows? and heard you not
the angry murmurs?  The villeins are many, and their hate is strong.”

“Strong is the roan I bestride,” said the Duke; “but a bold rider curbs
it with the steel of the bit, and guides it with the goad of the heel.”

And now, as they neared the gate, a band of minstrels in the pay of the
Norman touched their instruments, and woke their song--the household song
of the Norman--the battle hymn of Roland, the Paladin of Charles the
Great.  At the first word of the song, the Norman knights and youths
profusely scattered amongst the Normanised Saxons caught up the lay, and
with sparkling eyes, and choral voices, they welcomed the mighty Duke
into the palace of the last meek successor of Woden.

By the porch of the inner court the Duke flung himself from his saddle,
and held the stirrup for Edward to dismount.  The King placed his hand
gently on his guest’s broad shoulder, and, having somewhat slowly reached
the ground, embraced and kissed him in the sight of the gorgeous
assemblage; then led him by the hand towards the fair chamber which was
set apart for the Duke, and so left him to his attendants.

William, lost in thought, suffered himself to be disrobed in silence; but
when Fitzosborne, his favourite confidant and haughtiest baron, who yet
deemed himself but honoured by personal attendance on his chief,
conducted him towards the bath, which adjoined the chamber, he drew back,
and wrapping round him more closely the gown of fur that had been thrown
over his shoulders, he muttered low,--“Nay, if there be on me yet one
speck of English dust, let it rest there!--seizin, Fitzosborne, seizin,
of the English land.”  Then, waving his hand, he dismissed all his
attendants except Fitzosborne, and Rolf, Earl of Hereford [49], nephew to
Edward, but French on the father’s side, and thoroughly in the Duke’s
councils.  Twice the Duke paced the chamber without vouchsafing a word to
either, then paused by the round window that overlooked the Thames.  The
scene was fair; the sun, towards its decline, glittered on numerous small
pleasure-boats, which shot to and fro between Westminster and London or
towards the opposite shores of Lambeth.  His eye sought eagerly, along
the curves of the river, the grey remains of the fabled Tower of Julius,
and the walls, gates, and turrets, that rose by the stream, or above the
dense mass of silent roofs; then it strained hard to descry the tops of
the more distant masts of the infant navy, fostered under Alfred, the
far-seeing, for the future civilisation of wastes unknown, and the empire
of seas untracked.

The Duke breathed hard, and opened and closed the hand which he stretched
forth into space as if to grasp the city he beheld.  “Rolf,” said he,
abruptly, “thou knowest, no doubt, the wealth of the London traders, one
and all; for, foi de Gaillaume, my gentil chevalier, thou art a true
Norman, and scentest the smell of gold as a hound the boar!”

Rolf smiled, as if pleased with a compliment which simpler men might have
deemed, at the best, equivocal, and replied:

“It is true, my liege; and gramercy, the air of England sharpens the
scent; for in this villein and motley country, made up of all
races,--Saxon and Fin, Dane and Fleming, Pict and Walloon,--it is not as
with us, where the brave man and the pure descent are held chief in
honour: here, gold and land are, in truth, name and lordship; even their
popular name for their national assembly of the Witan is, ‘The Wealthy.’
[50]  He who is but a ceorl to-day, let him be rich, and he may be earl
to-morrow, marry in king’s blood, and rule armies under a gonfanon
statelier than a king’s; while he whose fathers were ealdermen and
princes, if, by force or by fraud, by waste or by largess, he become
poor, falls at once into contempt, and out of his state,--sinks into a
class they call ‘six-hundred men,’ in their barbarous tongue, and his
children will probably sink still lower, into ceorls.  Wherefore gold is
the thing here most coveted; and by St. Michael, the sin is infectious.”

William listened to the speech with close attention.  “Good,” said he,
rubbing slowly the palm of his right hand over the back of the left; “a
land all compact with the power of one race, a race of conquering men, as
our fathers were, whom nought but cowardice or treason can degrade,--such
a land, O Rolf of Hereford, it were hard indeed to subjugate, or decoy,
or tame--”

“So has my lord the Duke found the Bretons; and so also do I find the
Welch upon my marches of Hereford.”

“But,” continued William, not heeding the interruption, “where wealth is
more than blood and race, chiefs may be bribed or menaced; and the
multitude--by’r Lady, the multitude are the same in all lands, mighty
under valiant and faithful leaders, powerless as sheep without them. But
to my question, my gentle Rolf; this London must be rich?” [51]

“Rich enow,” answered Rolf, “to coin into armed men, that should stretch
from Rouen to Flanders on the one hand, and Paris on the other.”

“In the veins of Matilda, whom thou wooest for wife,” said Fitzosborne,
abruptly, “flows the blood of Charlemagne.  God grant his empire to the
children she shall bear thee!”

The Duke bowed his head, and kissed a relic suspended from his throat.
Farther sign of approval of his counsellor’s words he gave not, but after
a pause, he said:

“When I depart, Rolf, thou wendest back to thy marches.  These Welch are
brave and fierce, and shape work enow for thy hands.”

“Ay, by my halidame! poor sleep by the side of the beehive you have
stricken down.”

“Marry, then,” said William, “let the Welch prey on Saxon, Saxon on
Welch; let neither win too easily.  Remember our omens to-day, Welch hawk
and Saxon bittern, and over their corpses, Duke William’s Norway falcon!
Now dress we for the complin [52] and the banquet.”




BOOK II.
LANFRANC THE SCHOLAR.




CHAPTER I.

Four meals a day, nor those sparing, were not deemed too extravagant an
interpretation of the daily bread for which the Saxon prayed.  Four meals
a day, from earl to ceorl!  “Happy times!” may sigh the descendant of the
last, if he read these pages; partly so they were for the ceorl, but not
in all things, for never sweet is the food, and never gladdening is the
drink, of servitude.  Inebriety, the vice of the warlike nations of the
North, had not, perhaps, been the pre-eminent excess of the earlier
Saxons, while yet the active and fiery Britons, and the subsequent petty
wars between the kings of the Heptarchy, enforced on hardy warriors the
safety of temperance; but the example of the Danes had been fatal.  Those
giants of the sea, like all who pass from great vicissitudes of toil and
repose, from the tempest to the haven, snatched with full hands every
pleasure in their reach.  With much that tended permanently to elevate
the character of the Saxon, they imparted much for a time to degrade it.
The Anglian learned to feast to repletion, and drink to delirium.  But
such were not the vices of the court of the Confessor.  Brought up from
his youth in the cloister-camp of the Normans, what he loved in their
manners was the abstemious sobriety, and the ceremonial religion, which
distinguished those sons of the Scandinavian from all other kindred
tribes.

The Norman position in France, indeed, in much resembled that of the
Spartan in Greece.  He had forced a settlement with scanty numbers in the
midst of a subjugated and sullen population, surrounded by jealous and
formidable foes.  Hence sobriety was a condition of his being, and the
policy of the chief lent a willing ear to the lessons of the preacher.
Like the Spartan, every Norman of pure race was free and noble; and this
consciousness inspired not only that remarkable dignity of mien which
Spartan and Norman alike possessed, but also that fastidious self-respect
which would have revolted from exhibiting a spectacle of debasement to
inferiors.  And, lastly, as the paucity of their original numbers, the
perils that beset, and the good fortune that attended them, served to
render the Spartans the most religious of all the Greeks in their
dependence on the Divine aid; so, perhaps, to the same causes may be
traced the proverbial piety of the ceremonial Normans; they carried into
their new creed something of feudal loyalty to their spiritual
protectors; did homage to the Virgin for the lands that she vouchsafed to
bestow, and recognised in St. Michael the chief who conducted their
armies.

After hearing the complin vespers in the temporary chapel fitted up in
that unfinished abbey of Westminster, which occupied the site of the
temple of Apollo [53], the King and his guests repaired to their evening
meal in the great hall of the palace.  Below the dais were ranged three
long tables for the knights in William’s train, and that flower of the
Saxon nobility who, fond, like all youth, of change and imitation,
thronged the court of their Normanised saint, and scorned the rude
patriotism of their fathers.  But hearts truly English were not there.
Yea, many of Godwin’s noblest foes sighed for the English-hearted Earl,
banished by Norman guile on behalf of English law.

At the oval table on the dais the guests were select and chosen.  At the
right hand of the King sat William; at the left Odo of Bayeux. Over these
three stretched a canopy of cloth of gold; the chairs on which each sate
were of metal, richly gilded over, and the arms carved in elaborate
arabesques.  At this table too was the King’s nephew, the Earl of
Hereford, and, in right of kinsmanship to the Duke, the Norman’s beloved
baron and grand seneschal, William Fitzosborne, who, though in Normandy
even he sate not at the Duke’s table, was, as related to his lord,
invited by Edward to his own.  No other guests were admitted to this
board, so that, save Edward, all were Norman. The dishes were of gold and
silver, the cups inlaid with jewels. Before each guest was a knife, with
hilt adorned by precious stones, and a napkin fringed with silver.  The
meats were not placed on the table, but served upon small spits, and
between every course a basin of perfumed water was borne round by
high-born pages.  No dame graced the festival; for she who should have
presided--she, matchless for beauty without pride, piety without
asceticism, and learning without pedantry--she, the pale rose of England,
loved daughter of Godwin, and loathed wife of Edward, had shared in the
fall of her kindred, and had been sent by the meek King, or his fierce
counsellors, to an abbey in Hampshire, with the taunt “that it was not
meet that the child and sister should enjoy state and pomp, while the
sire and brethren ate the bread of the stranger in banishment and
disgrace.”

But, hungry as were the guests, it was not the custom of that holy court
to fall to without due religious ceremonial.  The rage for psalm-singing
was then at its height in England; psalmody had excluded almost every
other description of vocal music; and it is even said that great
festivals on certain occasions were preluded by no less an effort of
lungs and memory than the entire songs bequeathed to us by King David!
This day, however, Hugoline, Edward’s Norman chamberlain, had been
pleased to abridge the length of the prolix grace, and the company were
let off; to Edward’s surprise and displeasure, with the curt and unseemly
preparation of only nine psalms and one special hymn in honour of some
obscure saint to whom the day was dedicated.  This performed, the guests
resumed their seats, Edward murmuring an apology to William for the
strange omission of his chamberlain, and saying thrice to himself,
“Naught, naught--very naught.”

The mirth languished at the royal table, despite some gay efforts from
Rolf, and some hollow attempts at light-hearted cheerfulness from the
great Duke, whose eyes, wandering down the table, were endeavouring to
distinguish Saxon from Norman, and count how many of the first might
already be reckoned in the train of his friends.  But at the long tables
below, as the feast thickened, and ale, mead, pigment, morat, and wine
circled round, the tongue of the Saxon was loosed, and the Norman knight
lost somewhat of his superb gravity.  It was just as what a Danish poet
called the “sun of the night,” (in other words, the fierce warmth of the
wine,) had attained its meridian glow, that some slight disturbance at
the doors of the hall, without which waited a dense crowd of the poor on
whom the fragments of the feast were afterwards to be bestowed, was
followed by the entrance of two strangers, for whom the officers
appointed to marshal the entertainment made room at the foot of one of
the tables.  Both these new-comers were clad with extreme plainness; one
in a dress, though not quite monastic, that of an ecclesiastic of low
degree; the other in a long grey mantle and loose gonna, the train of
which last was tucked into a broad leathern belt, leaving bare the
leggings, which showed limbs of great bulk and sinew, and which were
stained by the dust and mire of travel.  The first mentioned was slight
and small of person; the last was of the height and port of the sons of
Anak.  The countenance of neither could be perceived, for both had let
fall the hood, worn by civilians as by priests out of doors, more than
half way over their faces.

A murmur of great surprise, disdain, and resentment, at the intrusion of
strangers so attired circulated round the neighbourhood in which they had
been placed, checked for a moment by a certain air of respect which the
officer had shown towards both, but especially the taller; but breaking
out with greater vivacity from the faint restraint, as the tall man
unceremoniously stretched across the board, drew towards himself an
immense flagon, which (agreeably to the custom of arranging the feast in
“messes” of four) had been specially appropriated to Ulf the Dane,
Godrith the Saxon, and two young Norman knights akin to the puissant Lord
of Grantmesnil,--and having offered it to his comrade, who shook his
head, drained it with a gusto that seemed to bespeak him at least no
Norman, and wiped his lips boorishly with the sleeve of his huge arm.

“Dainty sir,” said one of those Norman knights, William Mallet, of the
house of Mallet de Graville [54], as he moved as far from the gigantic
intruder as the space on the settle would permit, “forgive the
observation that you have damaged my mantle, you have grazed my foot, and
you have drunk my wine.  And vouchsafe, if it so please you, the face of
the man who hath done this triple wrong to William Mallet de Graville.”

A kind of laugh--for laugh absolute it was not--rattled under the cowl of
the tall stranger, as he drew it still closer over his face, with a hand
that might have spanned the breast of his interrogator, and he made a
gesture as if he did not understand the question addressed to him.

Therewith the Norman knight, bending with demure courtesy across the
board to Godrith the Saxon, said:

“Pardex [55], but this fair guest and seigneur seemeth to me, noble
Godree (whose name I fear my lips do but rudely enounce) of Saxon line
and language; our Romance tongue he knoweth not.  Pray you, is it the
Saxon custom to enter a king’s hall so garbed, and drink a knight’s wine
so mutely?”

Godrith, a young Saxon of considerable rank, but one of the most sedulous
of the imitators of the foreign fashions, coloured high at the irony in
the knight’s speech, and turning rudely to the huge guest, who was now
causing immense fragments of pasty to vanish under the cavernous cowl, he
said in his native tongue, though with a lisp as if unfamiliar to him--

“If thou beest Saxon, shame us not with thy ceorlish manners; crave
pardon of this Norman thegn, who will doubtless yield it to thee in pity.
Uncover thy face--and--”

Here the Saxon’s rebuke was interrupted; for one of the servitors just
then approaching Godrith’s side with a spit, elegantly caparisoned with
some score of plump larks, the unmannerly giant stretched out his arm
within an inch of the Saxon’s startled nose, and possessed himself of
larks, broche, and all.  He drew off two, which he placed on his friend’s
platter, despite all dissuasive gesticulations, and deposited the rest
upon his own.  The young banqueters gazed upon the spectacle in wrath too
full for words.

At last spoke Mallet de Graville, with an envious eye upon the larks--for
though a Norman was not gluttonous, he was epicurean--“Certes, and foi de
chevalier! a man must go into strange parts if he wish to see monsters;
but we are fortunate people,” (and he turned to his Norman friend, Aymer,
Quen [56] or Count, D’Evreux,) “that we have discovered Polyphemus
without going so far as Ulysses;” and pointing to the hooded giant, he
quoted, appropriately enough,

    “Monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum.”

The giant continued to devour his larks, as complacently as the ogre to
whom he was likened might have devoured the Greeks in his cave. But his
fellow intruder seemed agitated by the sound of the Latin; he lifted up
his head suddenly, and showed lips glistening with white even teeth, and
curved into an approving smile, while he said: “Bene, me fili! bene,
lepidissime, poetae verba, in militis ore, non indecora sonant.” [57]

The young Norman stared at the speaker, and replied, in the same tone of
grave affectation: “Courteous sir! the approbation of an ecclesiastic so
eminent as I take you to be, from the modesty with which you conceal your
greatness, cannot fail to draw upon me the envy of my English friends;
who are accustomed to swear in verba magistri, only for verba they
learnedly substitute vina.”

“You are pleasant, Sire Mallet,” said Godrith, reddening; “but I know
well that Latin is only fit for monks and shavelings; and little enow
even they have to boast of.”

The Norman’s lip curled in disdain.  “Latin!--O, Godree, bien
aime!--Latin is the tongue of Caesars and senators, fortes conquerors and
preux chevaliers.  Knowest thou not that Duke William the dauntless at
eight years old had the Comments of Julius Caesar by heart?--and that it
is his saying, that ‘a king without letters is a crowned ass?’ [58] When
the king is an ass, asinine are his subjects.  Wherefore go to school,
speak respectfully of thy betters, the monks and shavelings, who with us
are often brave captains and sage councillors,--and learn that a full
head makes a weighty hand.”

“Thy name, young knight?” said the ecclesiastic, in Norman French, though
with a slight foreign accent.

“I can give it thee,” said the giant, speaking aloud for the first time,
in the same language, and in a rough voice, which a quick ear might have
detected as disguised,--“I can describe to thee name, birth, and quality.
By name, this youth is Guillaume Mallet, sometimes styled De Graville,
because our Norman gentilhommes, forsooth, must always now have a ‘de’
tacked to their names; nevertheless he hath no other right to the
seigneurie of Graville, which appertains to the head of his house, than
may be conferred by an old tower on one corner of the demesnes so
designated, with lands that would feed one horse and two villeins--if
they were not in pawn to a Jew for moneys to buy velvet mantelines and a
chain of gold.  By birth, he comes from Mallet [59], a bold Norwegian in
the fleet of Rou the Sea-king; his mother was a Frank woman, from whom he
inherits his best possessions--videlicet, a shrewd wit, and a railing
tongue.  His qualities are abstinence, for he eateth nowhere save at the
cost of another--some Latin, for he was meant for a monk, because he
seemed too slight of frame for a warrior--some courage, for in spite of
his frame he slew three Burgundians with his own hand; and Duke William,
among their foolish acts, spoilt a friar sans tache, by making a knight
sans terre; and for the rest--”

“And for the rest,” interrupted the Sire de Graville, turning white with
wrath, but speaking in a low repressed voice, “were it not that Duke
William sate yonder, thou shouldst have six inches of cold steel in thy
huge carcase to digest thy stolen dinner, and silence thy unmannerly
tongue.--”

“For the rest,” continued the giant indifferently, and as if he had not
heard the interruption; “for the rest, he only resembles Achilles, in
being impiger iracundus.  Big men can quote Latin as well as little ones,
Messire Mallet the beau clerc!”

Mallet’s hand was on his dagger; and his eye dilated like that of the
panther before he springs; but fortunately, at that moment, the deep
sonorous voice of William, accustomed to send its sounds down the ranks
of an army, rolled clear through the assemblage, though pitched little
above its ordinary key:--

“Fair is your feast, and bright your wine, Sir King and brother mine! But
I miss here what king and knight hold as the salt of the feast and the
perfume to the wine: the lay of the minstrel.  Beshrew me, but both Saxon
and Norman are of kindred stock, and love to hear in hall and bower the
deeds of their northern fathers.  Crave I therefore from your gleemen, or
harpers, some song of the olden time!”

A murmur of applause went through the Norman part of the assembly; the
Saxons looked up; and some of the more practised courtiers sighed
wearily, for they knew well what ditties alone were in favour with the
saintly Edward.

The low voice of the King in reply was not heard, but those habituated to
read his countenance in its very faint varieties of expression, might
have seen that it conveyed reproof; and its purport soon became
practically known, when a lugubrious prelude was heard from a quarter of
the hall, in which sate certain ghost-like musicians in white
robes--white as winding-sheets; and forthwith a dolorous and dirgelike
voice chaunted a long and most tedious recital of the miracles and
martyrdom of some early saint.  So monotonous was the chaunt, that its
effect soon became visible in a general drowsiness.  And when Edward, who
alone listened with attentive delight, turned towards the close to gather
sympathising admiration from his distinguished guests, he saw his nephew
yawning as if his jaw were dislocated--the Bishop of Bayeux, with his
well-ringed fingers interlaced and resting on his stomach, fast
asleep--Fitzosborne’s half-shaven head balancing to and fro with many an
uneasy start--and, William, wide awake indeed, but with eyes fixed on
vacant space, and his soul far away from the gridiron to which (all other
saints be praised!) the saint of the ballad had at last happily arrived.

“A comforting and salutary recital, Count William,” said the King.

The Duke started from his reverie, and bowed his head: then said, rather
abruptly, “Is not yon blazon that of King Alfred?”

“Yea.  Wherefore?”

“Hem!  Matilda of Flanders is in direct descent from Alfred: it is a name
and a line the Saxons yet honour!”

“Surely, yes; Alfred was a great man, and reformed the Psalmster,”
 replied Edward.

The dirge ceased, but so benumbing had been its effect, that the torpor
it created did not subside with the cause.  There was a dead and funereal
silence throughout the spacious hall, when suddenly, loudly, mightily, as
the blast of the trumpet upon the hush of the grave, rose a single voice.
All started--all turned--all looked to one direction; and they saw that
the great voice pealed from the farthest end of the hall.  From under his
gown the gigantic stranger had drawn a small three-stringed
instrument--somewhat resembling the modern lute--and thus he sang,--

  THE BALLAD OF ROU. [60]

                          I.

  From Blois to Senlis, wave by wave, roll’d on the Norman flood,
  And Frank on Frank went drifting down the weltering tide of blood;
  There was not left in all the land a castle wall to fire,
  And not a wife but wailed a lord, a child but mourned a sire.
  To Charles the king, the mitred monks, the mailed barons flew,
  While, shaking earth, behind them strode the thunder march of Rou.

                         II.

  “O King,” then cried those barons bold, “in vain are mace and mail,
  We fall before the Norman axe, as corn before the hail.”
   “And vainly,” cried the pious monks, “by Mary’s shrine we kneel,
  For prayers, like arrows, glance aside, against the Norman teel.”
   The barons groaned, the shavelings wept, while near and nearer drew,
  As death-birds round their scented feast, the raven flags of Rou.

                        III.

  Then said King Charles, “Where thousands fail, what king can stand
      alone,
  The strength of kings is in the men that gather round the throne.
  When war dismays my barons bold, ‘tis time for war to cease;
  When Heaven forsakes my pious monks, the will of Heaven is peace.
  Go forth, my monks, with mass and rood the Norman camp unto,
  And to the fold, with shepherd crook, entice this grisly Rou.”

                         IV.

  “I’ll give him all the ocean coast, from Michael Mount to Eure,
  And Gille, my child, shall be his bride, to bind him fast and sure:
  Let him but kiss the Christian cross, and sheathe the heathen sword,
  And hold the lands I cannot keep, a fief from Charles his lord.”
   Forth went the pastors of the Church, the Shepherd’s work to do,
  And wrap the golden fleece around the tiger loins of Rou.

                          V.

  Psalm-chanting came the shaven monks, within the camp of dread;
  Amidst his warriors, Norman Rou stood taller by the head.
  Out spoke the Frank Archbishop then, a priest devout and sage,
  “When peace and plenty wait thy word, what need of war and rage?
  Why waste a land as fair as aught beneath the arch of blue,
  Which might be thine to sow and reap?”--Thus saith the King to Rou.

                         VI.

  “‘I’ll give thee all the ocean coast, from Michael Mount to Eure,
  And Gille, my fairest child, as bride, to bind thee fast and sure;
  If then but kneel to Christ our God, and sheathe thy paynim sword,
  And hold thy land, the Church’s son, a fief from Charles thy lord.”
   The Norman on his warriors looked--to counsel they withdrew;
  The saints took pity on the Franks, and moved the soul of Rou.

                        VII.

  So back he strode and thus he spoke, to that Archbishop meek:
  “I take the land thy king bestows from Eure to Michael-peak,
  I take the maid, or foul or fair, a bargain with the toast,
  And for thy creed, a sea-king’s gods are those that give the most.
  So hie thee back, and tell thy chief to make his proffer true,
  And he shall find a docile son, and ye a saint in Rou.”

                       VIII.

  So o’er the border stream of Epte came Rou the Norman, where,
  Begirt with barons, sat the King, enthroned at green St. Clair;
  He placed his hand in Charles’s hand,--loud shouted all the throng,
  But tears were in King Charles’s eyes--the grip of Rou was strong.
  “Now kiss the foot,” the Bishop said, “that homage still is due;”
   Then dark the frown and stern the smile of that grim convert, Rou.

                        IX.

  He takes the foot, as if the foot to slavish lips to bring;
  The Normans scowl; he tilts the throne, and backwards falls the
      King.
  Loud laugh the joyous Norman men--pale stare the Franks aghast;
  And Rou lifts up his head as from the wind springs up the mast;
  “I said I would adore a God, but not a mortal too;
  The foot that fled before a foe let cowards kiss!” said Rou.

No words can express the excitement which this rough minstrelsy--marred
as it is by our poor translation from the Romance-tongue in which it was
chanted--produced amongst the Norman guests; less perhaps, indeed, the
song itself, than the recognition of the minstrel; and as he closed, from
more than a hundred voices came the loud murmur, only subdued from a
shout by the royal presence, “Taillefer, our Norman Taillefer!”

“By our joint saint, Peter, my cousin the King,” exclaimed William, after
a frank cordial laugh; “Well I wot, no tongue less free than my warrior
minstrel’s could have so shocked our ears.  Excuse his bold theme, for
the sake of his bold heart, I pray thee; and since I know well” (here the
Duke’s face grew grave and anxious) “that nought save urgent and weighty
news from my stormy realm could have brought over this rhyming petrel,
permit the officer behind me to lead hither a bird, I fear, of omen as
well as of song.”

“Whatever pleases thee, pleases me,” said Edward, drily; and he gave the
order to the attendant.  In a few moments, up the space in the hall,
between either table, came the large stride of the famous minstrel,
preceded by the officer and followed by the ecclesiastic. The hoods of
both were now thrown back, and discovered countenances in strange
contrast, but each equally worthy of the attention it provoked.  The face
of the minstrel was open and sunny as the day; and that of the priest,
dark and close as night.  Thick curls of deep auburn (the most common
colour for the locks of the Norman) wreathed in careless disorder round
Taillefer’s massive unwrinkled brow.  His eye, of light hazel, was bold
and joyous; mirth, though sarcastic and sly, mantled round his lips.  His
whole presence was at once engaging and heroic.

On the other hand, the priest’s cheek was dark and sallow; his features
singularly delicate and refined; his forehead high, but somewhat narrow,
and crossed with lines of thought; his mien composed, modest, but not
without calm self-confidence.  Amongst that assembly of soldiers,
noiseless, self-collected, and conscious of his surpassing power over
swords and mail, moved the SCHOLAR.

William’s keen eye rested on the priest with some surprise, not unmixed
with pride and ire; but first addressing Taillefer, who now gained the
foot of the dais, he said, with a familiarity almost fond:

“Now, by’re Lady, if thou bringest not ill news, thy gay face, man, is
pleasanter to mine eyes that thy rough song to my ears.  Kneel,
Taillefer, kneel to King Edward, and with more address, rogue, than our
unlucky countryman to King Charles.”

But Edward, as ill-liking the form of the giant as the subject of his
lay, said, pushing back his seat as far as he could:

“Nay, nay, we excuse thee, we excuse thee, tall man.”  Nevertheless, the
minstrel still knelt, and so, with a look of profound humility, did the
priest.  Then both slowly rose, and at a sign from the Duke, passed to
the other side of the table, standing behind Fitzosborne’s chair.

“Clerk,” said William, eying deliberately the sallow face of the
ecclesiastic; “I know thee of old; and if the Church have sent me an
envoy, per la resplendar De, it should have sent me at least an abbot.”

“Hein, hein!”  said Taillefer, bluntly, “vex not my bon camarade, Count
of the Normans.  Gramercy, thou wilt welcome him, peradventure, better
than me; for the singer tells but of discord, and the sage may restore
the harmony.”

“Ha!” said the Duke, and the frown fell so dark over his eyes that the
last seemed only visible by two sparks of fire.  “I guess, my proud
Vavasours are mutinous.  Retire, thou and thy comrade.  Await me in my
chamber.  The feast shall not flag in London because the wind blows a
gale in Rouen.”

The two envoys, since so they seemed, bowed in silence and withdrew.

“Nought of ill-tidings, I trust,” said Edward, who had not listened to
the whispered communications that had passed between the Duke and his
subjects.  “No schism in thy Church?  The clerk seemed a peaceful man,
and a humble.”

“An there were schism in my Church,” said the fiery Duke, “my brother of
Bayeux would settle it by arguments as close as the gap between cord and
throttle.”

“Ah! thou art, doubtless, well read in the canons, holy Odo!” said the
King, turning to the bishop with more respect than he had yet evinced
towards that gentle prelate.

“Canons, yes, Seigneur, I draw them up myself for my flock conformably
with such interpretations of the Roman Church as suit best with the
Norman realm: and woe to deacon, monk, or abbot, who chooses to
misconstrue them.” [61]

The bishop looked so truculent and menacing, while his fancy thus
conjured up the possibility of heretical dissent, that Edward shrank from
him as he had done from Taillefer; and in a few minutes after, on
exchange of signals between himself and the Duke, who, impatient to
escape, was too stately to testify that desire, the retirement of the
royal party broke up the banquet; save, indeed, that a few of the elder
Saxons, and more incorrigible Danes, still steadily kept their seats, and
were finally dislodged from their later settlements on the stone floors,
to find themselves, at dawn, carefully propped in a row against the outer
walls of the palace, with their patient attendants, holding links, and
gazing on their masters with stolid envy, if not of the repose at least
of the drugs that had caused it.




CHAPTER II.

“And now,” said William, reclining on a long and narrow couch, with
raised carved work all round it like a box (the approved fashion of a bed
in those days), “now, Sire Taillefer--thy news.”

There were then in the Duke’s chamber, the Count Fitzosborne, Lord of
Breteuil, surnamed “the Proud Spirit”--who, with great dignity, was
holding before the brazier the ample tunic of linen (called dormitorium
in the Latin of that time, and night-rail in the Saxon tongue) in which
his lord was to robe his formidable limbs for repose [62],--Taillefer,
who stood erect before the Duke as a Roman sentry at his post,--and the
ecclesiastic, a little apart, with arms gathered under his gown, and his
bright dark eyes fixed on the ground.

“High and puissant, my liege,” then said Taillefer, gravely, and with a
shade of sympathy on his large face, “my news is such as is best told
briefly: Bunaz, Count d’Eu and descendant of Richard Sanspeur, hath
raised the standard of revolt.”

“Go on,” said the Duke, clenching his hand.

“Henry, King of the French, is treating with the rebel, and stirring up
mutiny in thy realm, and pretenders to thy throne.”

“Ha!” said the Duke, and his lip quivered; “this is not all.”

“No, my liege! and the worst is to come.  Thy uncle Mauger, knowing that
thy heart is bent on thy speedy nuptials with the high and noble damsel,
Matilda of Flanders, has broken out again in thine absence--is preaching
against thee in hall and from pulpit.  He declares that such espousals
are incestuous, both as within the forbidden degrees, and inasmuch as
Adele, the lady’s mother, was betrothed to thine uncle Richard; and
Mauger menaces excommunication if my liege pursues his suit! [63]  So
troubled is the realm, that I, waiting not for debate in council, and
fearing sinister ambassage if I did so, took ship from thy port of
Cherbourg, and have not flagged rein, and scarce broken bread, till I
could say to the heir of Rolf the Founder--Save thy realm from the men of
mail, and thy bride from the knaves in serge.”

“Ho, ho!” cried William; then bursting forth in full wrath, as he sprang
from the couch.  “Hearest thou this, Lord Seneschal?  Seven years, the
probation of the patriarch, have I wooed and waited; and lo, in the
seventh, does a proud priest say to me, ‘Wrench the love from thy
heart-strings!’--Excommunicate me--ME--William, the son of Robert the
Devil!  Ha, by God’s splendour, Mauger shall live to wish the father
stood, in the foul fiend’s true likeness, by his side, rather than brave
the bent brow of the son!”

“Dread my lord,” said Fitzosborne, desisting from his employ, and rising
to his feet; “thou knowest that I am thy true friend and leal knight;
thou knowest how I have aided thee in this marriage with the lady of
Flanders, and how gravely I think that what pleases thy fancy will guard
thy realm; but rather than brave the order of the Church, and the ban of
the Pope, I would see thee wed to the poorest virgin in Normandy.”

William, who had been pacing the room like an enraged lion in his den,
halted in amaze at this bold speech.

“This from thee, William Fitzosborne!--from thee!  I tell thee, that if
all the priests in Christendom, and all the barons in France, stood
between me and my bride, I would hew my way through the midst.  Foes
invade my realm--let them; princes conspire against me--I smile in scorn;
subjects mutiny--this strong hand can punish, or this large heart can
forgive.  All these are the dangers which he who governs men should
prepare to meet; but man has a right to his love, as the stag to his
hind.  And he who wrongs me here, is foe and traitor to me, not as Norman
Duke but as human being.  Look to it--thou and thy proud barons, look to
it!”

“Proud may thy barons be,” said Fitzosborne, reddening, and with a brow
that quailed not before his lord’s; “for they are the sons of those who
carved out the realm of the Norman, and owned in Rou but the feudal chief
of free warriors; vassals are not villeins.  And that which we hold our
duty--whether to Church or chief--that, Duke William, thy proud barons
will doubtless do; nor less, believe me, for threats which, braved in
discharge of duty and defence of freedom, we hold as air.”

The Duke gazed on his haughty subject with an eye in which a meaner
spirit might have seen its doom.  The veins in his broad temples swelled
like cords, and a light foam gathered round his quivering lips.  But
fiery and fearless as William was, not less was he sagacious and
profound.  In that one man he saw the representative of that superb and
matchless chivalry--that race of races--those men of men, in whom the
brave acknowledge the highest example of valiant deeds, and the free the
manliest assertion of noble thoughts [64], since the day when the last
Athenian covered his head with his mantle, and mutely died: and far from
being the most stubborn against his will, it was to Fitzosborne’s
paramount influence with the council, that he had often owed their
submission to his wishes, and their contributions to his wars.  In the
very tempest of his wrath, he felt that the blow belonged to strike on
that bold head would shiver his ducal throne to the dust.  Be felt too,
that awful indeed was that power of the Church which could thus turn
against him the heart of his truest knight: and he began (for with all
his outward frankness his temper was suspicious) to wrong the
great-souled noble by the thought that he might already be won over by
the enemies whom Mauger had arrayed against his nuptials.  Therefore,
with one of those rare and mighty efforts of that dissimulation which
debased his character, but achieved his fortunes, he cleared his brow of
its dark cloud, and said in a low voice, that was not without its pathos:

“Had an angel from heaven forewarned me that William Fitzosborne would
speak thus to his kinsman and brother in arms, in the hour of need and
the agony of passion, I would have disbelieved him.  Let it pass----”

But ere the last word was out of his lips, Fitzosborne had fallen on his
knees before the Duke, and, clasping his hand, exclaimed, while the tears
rolled down his swarthy cheek, “Pardon, pardon, my liege! when thou
speakest thus my heart melts.  What thou willest, that will I!  Church or
Pope, no matter.  Send me to Flanders; I will bring back thy bride.”

The slight smile that curved William’s lip, showed that he was scarce
worthy of that sublime weakness in his friend.  But he cordially pressed
the hand that grasped his own, and said, “Rise; thus should brother speak
to brother.”  Then--for his wrath was only concealed, not stifled, and
yearned for its vent--his eye fell upon the delicate and thoughtful face
of the priest, who had watched this short and stormy conference in
profound silence, despite Taillefer’s whispers to him to interrupt the
dispute.  “So, priest,” he said, “I remember me that when Mauger before
let loose his rebellious tongue thou didst lend thy pedant learning to
eke out his brainless treason.  Methought that I then banished thee my
realm?”

“Not so, Count and Seigneur,” answered the ecclesiastic, with a grave but
arch smile on his lip; “let me remind thee, that to speed me back to my
native land thou didst graciously send me a horse, halting on three legs,
and all lame on the fourth.  Thus mounted, I met thee on my road.  I
saluted thee; so did the beast, for his head well nigh touched the
ground.  Whereon I did ask thee, in a Latin play of words, to give me at
least a quadruped, not a tripod, for my journey. [65] Gracious, even in
ire, and with relenting laugh, was thine answer.  My liege, thy words
implied banishment--thy laughter pardon.  So I stayed.”

Despite his wrath, William could scarce repress a smile; but recollecting
himself, he replied, more gravely, “Peace with this levity, priest.
Doubtless thou art the envoy from this scrupulous Mauger, or some other
of my gentle clergy; and thou comest, as doubtless, with soft words and
whining homilies.  It is in vain.  I hold the Church in holy reverence;
the pontiff knows it.  But Matilda of Flanders I have wooed; and Matilda
of Flanders shall sit by my side in the halls of Rouen, or on the deck of
my war-ship, till it anchors on a land worthy to yield a new domain to
the son of the Sea-king.”

“In the halls of Rouen--and it may be on the throne of England--shall
Matilda reign by the side of William,” said the priest in a clear, low,
and emphatic voice; “and it was to tell my lord the Duke that I repent me
of my first unconsidered obeisance to Mauger as my spiritual superior;
that since then I have myself examined canon and precedent; and though
the letter of the law be against thy spousals, it comes precisely under
the category of those alliances to which the fathers of the Church accord
dispensation:--it is to tell thee this, that I, plain Doctor of Laws and
priest of Pavia, have crossed the seas.”

“Ha Rou!--Ha Rou!” cried Taillefer, with his usual bluffness, and
laughing with great glee, “why wouldst thou not listen to me,
monseigneur?”

“If thou deceivest me not,” said William, in surprise, “and thou canst
make good thy words, no prelate in Neustria, save Odo of Bayeux, shall
lift his head high as thine.”  And here William, deeply versed in the
science of men, bent his eyes keenly upon the unchanging and earnest face
of the speaker.  “Ah,” he burst out, as if satisfied with the survey,
“and my mind tells me that thou speakest not thus boldly and calmly
without ground sufficient.  Man, I like thee.  Thy name?  I forget it.”

“Lanfranc of Pavia, please you my lord; called some times ‘Lanfranc the
Scholar’ in thy cloister of Bec.  Nor misdeem me, that I, humble,
unmitred priest, should be thus bold.  In birth I am noble, and my
kindred stand near to the grace of our ghostly pontiff; to the pontiff I
myself am not unknown.  Did I desire honours, in Italy I might seek them;
it is not so.  I crave no guerdon for the service I proffer; none but
this--leisure and books in the Convent of Bec.”

“Sit down--nay, sit, man,” said William, greatly interested, but still
suspicious.  “One riddle only I ask thee to solve, before I give thee all
my trust, and place my very heart in thy hands.  Why, if thou desirest
not rewards, shouldst thou thus care to serve me--thou, a foreigner?”  A
light, brilliant and calm, shone in the eyes of the scholar, and a blush
spread over his pale cheeks.

“My Lord Prince, I will answer in plain words.  But first permit me to be
the questioner.”

The priest turned towards Fitzosborne, who had seated himself on a stool
at William’s feet, and, leaning his chin on his hand, listened to the
ecclesiastic, not more with devotion to his calling, than wonder at the
influence one so obscure was irresistibly gaining over his own martial
spirit, and William’s iron craft.

“Lovest thou not, William Lord of Breteuil, lovest thou not fame for the
sake of fame?”

“Sur mon ame--yes!” said the Baron.

“And thou, Taillefer the minstrel, lovest thou not song for the sake of
song?”

“For song alone,” replied the mighty minstrel.  “More gold in one ringing
rhyme than in all the coffers of Christendom.”

“And marvellest thou, reader of men’s hearts,” said the scholar, turning
once more to William, “that the student loves knowledge for the sake of
knowledge?  Born of high race, poor in purse, and slight of thews,
betimes I found wealth in books, and drew strength from lore.  I heard of
the Count of Rouen and the Normans, as a prince of small domain, with a
measureless spirit, a lover of letters, and a captain in war.  I came to
thy duchy, I noted its subjects and its prince, and the words of
Themistocles rang in my ear: ‘I cannot play the lute, but I can make a
small state great.’  I felt an interest in thy strenuous and troubled
career.  I believe that knowledge, to spread amongst the nations, must
first find a nursery in the brain of kings; and I saw in the deed-doer,
the agent of the thinker.  In those espousals, on which with untiring
obstinacy thy heart is set, I might sympathise with thee;
perchance”--(here a melancholy smile flitted over the student’s pale
lips), “perchance even as a lover: priest though I be now, and dead to
human love, once I loved, and I know what it is to strive in hope, and to
waste in despair.  But my sympathy, I own, was more given to the prince
than to the lover.  It was natural that I, priest and foreigner, should
obey at first the orders of Mauger, archprelate and spiritual chief, and
the more so as the law was with him; but when I resolved to stay despite
thy sentence which banished me, I resolved to aid thee; for if with
Mauger was the dead law, with thee was the living cause of man.  Duke
William, on thy nuptials with Matilda of Flanders rests thy duchy--rest,
perchance, the mightier sceptres that are yet to come.  Thy title
disputed, thy principality new and unestablished, thou, above all men,
must link thy new race with the ancient line of kings and kaisars.
Matilda is the descendant of Charlemagne and Alfred.  Thy realm is
insecure as long as France undermines it with plots, and threatens it
with arms.  Marry the daughter of Baldwin--and thy wife is the niece of
Henry of France--thine enemy becomes thy kinsman, and must, perforce, be
thine ally. This is not all; it were strange, looking round this
disordered royalty of England--a childless king, who loves thee better
than his own blood; a divided nobility, already adopting the fashions of
the stranger, and accustomed to shift their faith from Saxon to Dane, and
Dane to Saxon; a people that has respect indeed for brave chiefs, but,
seeing new men rise daily from new houses, has no reverence for ancient
lines and hereditary names; with a vast mass of villeins or slaves that
have no interest in the land or its rulers; strange, seeing all this, if
thy day-dreams have not also beheld a Norman sovereign on the throne of
Saxon England.  And thy marriage with the descendant of the best and most
beloved prince that ever ruled these realms, if it does not give thee a
title to the land, may help to conciliate its affections, and to fix thy
posterity in the halls of their mother’s kin.  Have I said eno’ to prove
why, for the sake of nations, it were wise for the pontiff to stretch the
harsh girths of the law? why I might be enabled to prove to the Court of
Rome the policy of conciliating the love, and strengthening the hands, of
the Norman Count, who may so become the main prop of Christendom?  Yea,
have I said eno’ to prove that the humble clerk can look on mundane
matters with the eye of a man who can make small states great?”

William remained speechless--his hot blood thrilled with a half
superstitious awe; so thoroughly had this obscure Lombard divined,
detailed all the intricate meshes of that policy with which he himself
had interwoven his pertinacious affection for the Flemish princess, that
it seemed to him as if he listened to the echo of his own heart, or heard
from a soothsayer the voice of his most secret thoughts.

The priest continued

“Wherefore, thus considering, I said to myself, Now has the time come,
Lanfranc the Lombard, to prove to thee whether thy self-boastings have
been a vain deceit, or whether, in this age of iron and amidst this lust
of gold, thou, the penniless and the feeble, canst make knowledge and wit
of more avail to the destinies of kings than armed men and filled
treasuries.  I believe in that power.  I am ready for the test. Pause,
judge from what the Lord of Breteuil hath said to thee, what will be the
defection of thy lords if the Pope confirm the threatened excommunication
of thine uncle?  Thine armies will rot from thee; thy treasures will be
like dry leaves in thy coffers; the Duke of Bretagne will claim thy duchy
as the legitimate heir of thy forefathers; the Duke of Burgundy will
league with the King of France, and march on thy faithless legions under
the banner of the Church.  The handwriting is on the walls, and thy
sceptre and thy crown will pass away.”  William set his teeth firmly, and
breathed hard.

“But send me to Rome, thy delegate, and the thunder of Mauger shall fall
powerless.  Marry Matilda, bring her to thy halls, place her on thy
throne, laugh to scorn the interdict of thy traitor uncle, and rest
assured that the Pope shall send thee his dispensation to thy spousals,
and his benison on thy marriage-bed.  And when this be done, Duke
William, give me not abbacies and prelacies; multiply books, and stablish
schools, and bid thy servant found the royalty of knowledge, as thou
shalt found the sovereignty of war.”

The Duke, transported from himself, leaped up and embraced the priest
with his vast arms; he kissed his cheeks, he kissed his forehead, as, in
those days, king kissed king with “the kiss of peace.”

“Lanfranc of Pavia,” he cried, “whether thou succeed or fail, thou hast
my love and gratitude evermore.  As thou speakest, would I have spoken,
had I been born, framed, and reared as thou.  And, verily, when I hear
thee, I blush for the boasts of my barbarous pride, that no man can wield
my mace, or bend my bow.  Poor is the strength of body--a web of law can
entangle it, and a word from a priest’s mouth can palsy.  But thou!--let
me look at thee.”

William gazed on the pale face: from head to foot he scanned the
delicate, slender form, and then, turning away, he said to Fitzosborne:

“Thou, whose mailed hand hath fell’d a war-steed, art thou not ashamed of
thyself?  The day is coming, I see it afar, when these slight men shall
set their feet upon our corslets.”

He paused as if in thought, again paced the room, and stopped before the
crucifix, and image of the Virgin, which stood in a niche near the
bed-head.

“Right, noble prince,” said the priest’s low voice, “pause there for a
solution to all enigmas; there view the symbol of all-enduring power;
there, learn its ends below--comprehend the account it must yield above.
To your thoughts and your prayers we leave you.”

He took the stalwart arm of Taillefer, as he spoke, and, with a grave
obeisance to Fitzosborne, left the chamber.




CHAPTER III.

The next morning William was long closeted alone with Lanfranc,--that
man, among the most remarkable of his age, of whom it was said, that “to
comprehend the extent of his talents, one must be Herodian in grammar,
Aristotle in dialectics, Cicero in rhetoric, Augustine and Jerome in
Scriptural lore,” [66]--and ere the noon the Duke’s gallant and princely
train were ordered to be in readiness for return home.

The crowd in the broad space, and the citizens from their boats in the
river, gazed on the knights and steeds of that gorgeous company, already
drawn up and awaiting without the open gates the sound of the trumpets
that should announce the Duke’s departure.  Before the hall-door in the
inner court were his own men.  The snow-white steed of Odo; the alezan of
Fitzosborne; and, to the marvel of all, a small palfrey plainly
caparisoned.  What did that palfrey amid those steeds?--the steeds
themselves seemed to chafe at the companionship; the Duke’s charger
pricked up his ears and snorted; the Lord of Breteuil’s alezan kicked
out, as the poor nag humbly drew near to make acquaintance; and the
prelate’s white barb, with red vicious eye, and ears laid down, ran
fiercely at the low-bred intruder, with difficulty reined in by the
squires, who shared the beast’s amaze and resentment.

Meanwhile the Duke thoughtfully took his way to Edward’s apartments. In
the anteroom were many monks and many knights; but conspicuous amongst
them all was a tall and stately veteran, leaning on a great two-handed
sword, and whose dress and fashion of beard were those of the last
generation, the men who had fought with Canute the Great or Edmund
Ironsides.  So grand was the old man’s aspect, and so did he contrast in
appearance the narrow garb and shaven chins of those around, that the
Duke was roused from his reverie at the sight, and marvelling why one,
evidently a chief of high rank, had neither graced the banquet in his
honour, nor been presented to his notice, he turned to the Earl of
Hereford, who approached him with gay salutation, and inquired the name
and title of the bearded man in the loose flowing robe.

“Know you not, in truth?” said the lively Earl, in some wonder.  “In him
you see the great rival of Godwin.  He is the hero of the Danes, as
Godwin is of the Saxons, a true son of Odin, Siward, Earl of the
Northumbrians.” [67]

“Norse Dame be my aid,--his fame hath oft filled my ears, and I should
have lost the most welcome sight in merrie England had I not now beheld
him.”

Therewith, the Duke approached courteously, and, doffing the cap he had
hitherto retained, he greeted the old hero with those compliments which
the Norman had already learned in the courts of the Frank.

The stout Earl received them coldly, and replying in Danish to William’s
Romance-tongue, he said:

“Pardon, Count of the Normans, if these old lips cling to their old
words.  Both of us, methinks, date our lineage from the lands of the
Norse.  Suffer Siward to speak the language the sea-kings spoke.  The old
oak is not to be transplanted, and the old man keeps the ground where his
youth took root.”

The Duke, who with some difficulty comprehended the general meaning of
Siward’s speech, bit his lip, but replied courteously:

“The youths of all nations may learn from renowned age.  Much doth it
shame me that I cannot commune with thee in the ancestral tongue; but the
angels at least know the language of the Norman Christian, and I pray
them and the saints for a calm end to thy brave career.”

“Pray not to angel or saint for Siward son of Beorn,” said the old man
hastily; “let me not have a cow’s death, but a warrior’s; die in my mail
of proof, axe in hand, and helm on head.  And such may be my death, if
Edward the King reads my rede and grants my prayer.”

“I have influence with the King,” said William; “name thy wish, that I
may back it.”

“The fiend forfend,” said the grim Earl, “that a foreign prince should
sway England’s King, or that thegn and earl should ask other backing than
leal service and just cause.  If Edward be the saint men call him, he
will loose me on the hell-wolf, without other cry than his own
conscience.”

The Duke turned inquiringly to Rolf; who, thus appealed to, said:

“Siward urges my uncle to espouse the cause of Malcolm of Cumbria against
the bloody tyrant Macbeth; and but for the disputes with the traitor
Godwin, the King had long since turned his arms to Scotland.”

“Call not traitors, young man,” said the Earl, in high disdain, “those
who, with all their faults and crimes, have placed thy kinsman on the
throne of Canute.”

“Hush, Rolf,” said the Duke, observing the fierce young Norman about to
reply hastily.  “But methought, though my knowledge of English troubles
is but scant, that Siward was the sworn foe to Godwin?”

“Foe to him in his power, friend to him in his wrongs,” answered Siward.
“And if England needs defenders when I and Godwin are in our shrouds,
there is but one man worthy of the days of old, and his name is Harold,
the outlaw.”

William’s face changed remarkably, despite all his dissimulation; and,
with a slight inclination of his head, he strode on moody and irritated.

“This Harold! this Harold!” he muttered to himself, “all brave men speak
to me of this Harold!  Even my Norman knights name him with reluctant
reverence, and even his foes do him honour;--verily his shadow is cast
from exile over all the land.”

Thus murmuring, he passed the throng with less than his wonted affable
grace, and pushing back the officers who wished to precede him, entered,
without ceremony, Edward’s private chamber.

The King was alone, but talking loudly to himself, gesticulating
vehemently, and altogether so changed from his ordinary placid apathy of
mien, that William drew back in alarm and awe.  Often had he heard
indirectly, that of late years Edward was said to see visions, and be
rapt from himself into the world of spirit and shadow; and such, he now
doubted not, was the strange paroxysm of which he was made the witness.
Edward’s eyes were fixed on him, but evidently without recognising his
presence; the King’s hands were outstretched, and he cried aloud in a
voice of sharp anguish:

“Sanguelac, Sanguelac!--the Lake of Blood!--the waves spread,
the waves redden!  Mother of mercy--where is the ark?--where the
Ararat?--Fly--fly--this way--this--” and he caught convulsive hold of
William’s arm.  “No! there the corpses are piled--high and higher--there
the horse of the Apocalypse tramples the dead in their gore.”

In great horror, William took the King, now gasping on his breast, in his
arms, and laid him on his bed, beneath its canopy of state, all blazoned
with the martlets and cross of his insignia.  Slowly Edward came to
himself, with heavy sighs; and when at length he sate up and looked
round, it was with evident unconsciousness of what had passed across his
haggard and wandering spirit, for he said, with his usual drowsy
calmness:

“Thanks, Guillaume, bien aime, for rousing me from unseasoned sleep. How
fares it with thee?”

“Nay, how with thee, dear friend and king? thy dreams have been
troubled.”

“Not so; I slept so heavily, methinks I could not have dreamed at all.
But thou art clad as for a journey--spur on thy heel, staff in thy hand!”

“Long since, O dear host, I sent Odo to tell thee of the ill news from
Normandy that compelled me to depart.”

“I remember--I remember me now,” said Edward, passing his pale womanly
fingers over his forehead.  “The heathen rage against thee.  Ah! my poor
brother, a crown is an awful head-gear.  While yet time, why not both
seek some quiet convent, and put away these earthly cares?”

William smiled and shook his head.  “Nay, holy Edward, from all I have
seen of convents, it is a dream to think that the monk’s serge hides a
calmer breast than the warrior’s mail, or the king’s ermine.  Now give me
thy benison, for I go.”

He knelt as he spoke, and Edward bent his hands over his head, and
blessed him.  Then, taking from his own neck a collar of zimmes (jewels
and uncut gems), of great price, the King threw it over the broad throat
bent before him, and rising, clapped his hands.  A small door opened,
giving a glimpse of the oratory within, and a monk appeared.

“Father, have my behests been fulfilled?--hath Hugoline, my treasurer,
dispensed the gifts that I spoke of?”

“Verily yes; vault, coffer, and garde-robe--stall and meuse.-are well
nigh drained,” answered the monk, with a sour look at the Norman, whose
native avarice gleamed in his dark eyes as he heard the answer.

“Thy train go not hence empty-handed,” said Edward fondly.  “Thy father’s
halls sheltered the exile, and the exile forgets not the sole pleasure of
a king--the power to requite.  We may never meet again, William,--age
creeps over me, and who will succeed to my thorny throne?”  William
longed to answer,--to tell the hope that consumed him,--to remind his
cousin of the vague promise in their youth, that the Norman Count should
succeed to that “thorny throne:” but the presence of the Saxon monk
repelled him, nor was there in Edward’s uneasy look much to allure him
on.

“But peace,” continued the King, “be between thine and mine, as between
thee and me!”

“Amen,” said the Duke, “and I leave thee at least free from the proud
rebels who so long disturbed thy reign.  This House of Godwin, thou wilt
not again let it tower above thy palace?”

“Nay, the future is with God and his saints;” answered Edward, feebly.
“But Godwin is old--older than I, and bowed by many storms.”

“Ay, his sons are more to be dreaded and kept aloof--mostly Harold!”

“Harold,--he was ever obedient, he alone of his kith; truly my soul
mourns for Harold,” said the King, sighing.

“The serpent’s egg hatches but the serpent.  Keep thy heel on it,” said
William, sternly.

“Thou speakest well,” said the irresolute prince, who never seemed three
days or three minutes together in the same mind.  “Harold is in
Ireland--there let him rest: better for all.”

“For all,” said the Duke; “so the saints keep thee, O royal saint!”

He kissed the King’s hand, and strode away to the hall where Odo,
Fitzosborne, and the priest Lanfranc awaited him.  And so that day,
halfway towards the fair town of Dover, rode Duke William, and by the
side of his roan barb ambled the priest’s palfrey.

Behind came his gallant train, and with tumbrils and sumpter-mules laden
with baggage, and enriched by Edward’s gifts; while Welch hawks, and
steeds of great price from the pastures of Surrey and the plains of
Cambridge and York, attested no less acceptably than zimme, and golden
chain, and embroidered robe, the munificence of the grateful King. [68]

As they journeyed on, and the fame of the Duke’s coming was sent abroad
by the bodes or messengers, despatched to prepare the towns through which
he was to pass for an arrival sooner than expected, the more highborn
youths of England, especially those of the party counter to that of the
banished Godwin, came round the ways to gaze upon that famous chief, who,
from the age of fifteen, had wielded the most redoubtable sword of
Christendom.  And those youths wore the Norman garb: and in the towns,
Norman counts held his stirrup to dismount, and Norman hosts spread the
fastidious board; and when, at the eve of the next day, William saw the
pennon of one of his own favourite chiefs waving in the van of armed men,
that sallied forth from the towers of Dover (the key of the coast) he
turned to the Lombard, still by his side, and said:

“Is not England part of Normandy already?”

And the Lombard answered:

“The fruit is well nigh ripe, and the first breeze will shake it to thy
feet.  Put not out thy hand too soon.  Let the wind do its work.”

And the Duke made reply:

“As thou thinkest, so think I.  And there is but one wind in the halls of
heaven that can waft the fruit to the feet of another.”

“And that?” asked the Lombard.

“Is the wind that blows from the shores of Ireland, when it fills the
sails of Harold, son of Godwin.”

“Thou fearest that man, and why?” asked the Lombard with interest.

And the Duke answered:

“Because in the breast of Harold beats the heart of England.”




BOOK III.
THE HOUSE OF GODWIN.




CHAPTER I.

And all went to the desire of Duke William the Norman.  With one hand he
curbed his proud vassals, and drove back his fierce foes.  With the
other, he led to the altar Matilda, the maid of Flanders; and all
happened as Lanfranc had foretold.  William’s most formidable enemy, the
King of France, ceased to conspire against his new kinsman; and the
neighbouring princes said, “The Bastard hath become one of us since he
placed by his side the descendant of Charlemagne.”  And Mauger,
Archbishop of Rouen, excommunicated the Duke and his bride, and the ban
fell idle; for Lanfranc sent from Rome the Pope’s dispensation and
blessing [69], conditionally only that bride and bridegroom founded each
a church.  And Mauger was summoned before the synod, and accused of
unclerical crimes; and they deposed him from his state, and took from him
abbacies and sees.  And England every day waxed more and more Norman; and
Edward grew more feeble and infirm, and there seemed not a barrier
between the Norman Duke and the English throne, when suddenly the wind
blew in the halls of heaven, and filled the sails of Harold the Earl.

And his ships came to the mouth of the Severn.  And the people of
Somerset and Devon, a mixed and mainly a Celtic race, who bore small love
to the Saxons, drew together against him, and he put them to flight. [70]

Meanwhile, Godwin and his sons Sweyn, Tostig, and Gurth, who had taken
refuge in that very Flanders from which William the Duke had won his
bride,--(for Tostig had wed, previously, the sister of Matilda, the rose
of Flanders; and Count Baldwin had, for his sons-in-law, both Tostig and
William,)--meanwhile, I say, these, not holpen by the Count Baldwin, but
helping themselves, lay at Bruges, ready to join Harold the Earl.  And
Edward, advised of this from the anxious Norman, caused forty ships [71]
to be equipped, and put them under command of Rolf, Earl of Hereford.
The ships lay at Sandwich in wait for Godwin.  But the old Earl got from
them, and landed quietly on the southern coast. And the fort of Hastings
opened to his coming with a shout from its armed men.

All the boatmen, all the mariners, far and near, thronged to him, with
sail and with shield, with sword and with oar.  All Kent (the
foster-mother of the Saxons) sent forth the cry, “Life or death with Earl
Godwin.” [72]  Fast over the length and breadth of the land, went the
bodes [73] and riders of the Earl; and hosts, with one voice, answered
the cry of the children of Horsa, “Life or death with Earl Godwin.” And
the ships of King Edward, in dismay, turned flag and prow to London, and
the fleet of Harold sailed on.  So the old Earl met his young son on the
deck of a war-ship, that had once borne the Raven of the Dane.

Swelled and gathering sailed the armament of the English men.  Slow up
the Thames it sailed, and on either shore marched tumultuous the swarming
multitudes.  And King Edward sent after more help, but it came up very
late.  So the fleet of the Earl nearly faced the Julliet Keape of London,
and abode at Southwark till the flood-tide came up. When he had mustered
his host, then came the flood tide. [74]




CHAPTER II.

King Edward sate, not on his throne, but on a chair of state, in the
presence-chamber of his palace of Westminster.  His diadem, with the
three zimmes shaped into a triple trefoil [75] on his brow, his sceptre
in his right hand.  His royal robe, tight to the throat, with a broad
band of gold, flowed to his feet; and at the fold gathered round the left
knee, where now the kings of England wear the badge of St. George, was
embroidered a simple cross [76].  In that chamber met the thegns and
proceres of his realm; but not they alone.  No national Witan there
assembled, but a council of war, composed at least one third part of
Normans--counts, knights, prelates, and abbots of high degree.

And King Edward looked a king!  The habitual lethargic meekness had
vanished from his face, and the large crown threw a shadow, like a frown,
over his brow.  His spirit seemed to have risen from the weight it took
from the sluggish blood of his father, Ethelred the Unready, and to have
remounted to the brighter and earlier sources of ancestral heroes.
Worthy in that hour he seemed to boast the blood and wield the sceptre of
Athelstan and Alfred. [77]

Thus spoke the King:

“Right worthy and beloved, my ealdermen, earls, and thegns of England;
noble and familiar, my friends and guests, counts and chevaliers of
Normandy, my mother’s land; and you, our spiritual chiefs, above all ties
of birth and country, Christendom your common appanage, and from Heaven
your seignories and fiefs,--hear the words of Edward, the King of England
under grace of the Most High.  The rebels are in our river; open yonder
lattice, and you will see the piled shields glittering from their barks,
and hear the hum of their hosts.  Not a bow has yet been drawn, not a
sword left its sheath; yet on the opposite side of the river are our
fleets of forty sail--along the strand, between our palace and the gates
of London, are arrayed our armies.  And this pause because Godwin the
traitor hath demanded truce and his nuncius waits without.  Are ye
willing that we should hear the message? or would ye rather that we
dismiss the messenger unheard, and pass at once, to rank and to sail, the
war-cry of a Christian king, ‘Holy Crosse and our Lady!’”

The King ceased, his left hand grasping firm the leopard head carved on
his throne, and his sceptre untrembling in his lifted hand.

A murmur of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, the war-cry of the Normans, was heard
amongst the stranger-knights of the audience; but haughty and arrogant as
those strangers were, no one presumed to take precedence, in England’s
danger, of men English born.

Slowly then rose Alred, Bishop of Winchester, the worthiest prelate in
all the land. [78]

“Kingly son,” said the bishop, “evil is the strife between men of the
same blood and lineage, nor justified but by extremes, which have not yet
been made clear to us.  And ill would it sound throughout England were it
said that the King’s council gave, perchance, his city of London to sword
and fire, and rent his land in twain, when a word in season might have
disbanded yon armies, and given to your throne a submissive subject,
where now you are menaced by a formidable rebel. Wherefore, I say, admit
the nuncius.”

Scarcely had Alred resumed his seat, before Robert the Norman prelate of
Canterbury started up,--a man, it was said, of worldly learning--and
exclaimed:

“To admit the messenger is to approve the treason.  I do beseech the King
to consult only his own royal heart and royal honour.  Reflect--each
moment of delay swells the rebel hosts, strengthens their cause; of each
moment they avail themselves to allure to their side the misguided
citizens.  Delay but proves our own weakness; a king’s name is a tower of
strength, but only when fortified by a king’s authority. Give the signal
for--war I call it not--no--for chastisement and justice.”

“As speaks my brother of Canterbury, speak I,” said William, Bishop of
London, another Norman.

But then there rose up a form at whose rising all murmurs were hushed.

Grey and vast, as some image of a gone and mightier age towered over all,
Siward, the son of Beorn, the great Earl of Northumbria.

“We have naught to do with the Normans.  Were they on the river, and our
countrymen, Dane or Saxon, alone in this hall, small doubt of the King’s
choice, and niddering were the man who spoke of peace; but when Norman
advises the dwellers of England to go forth and slay each other, no sword
of mine shall be drawn at his hest. Who shall say that Siward of the
Strong Arm, the grandson of the Berserker, ever turned from a foe?  The
foe, son of Ethelred, sits in these halls; I fight thy battles when I say
Nay to the Norman!  Brothers-in-arms of the kindred race and common
tongue, Dane and Saxon long intermingled, proud alike of Canute the
glorious and Alfred the wise, ye will hear the man whom Godwin, our
countryman, sends to us; he at least will speak our tongue, and he knows
our laws.  If the demand he delivers be just, such as a king should
grant, and our Witan should hear, woe to him who refuses; if unjust be
the demand, shame to him who accedes. Warrior sends to warrior,
countryman to countryman; hear we as countrymen, and judge as warriors.
I have said.”

The utmost excitement and agitation followed the speech of
Siward,--unanimous applause from the Saxons, even those who in times of
peace were most under the Norman contagion; but no words can paint the
wrath and scorn of the Normans.  They spoke loud and many at a time; the
greatest disorder prevailed.  But the majority being English, there could
be no doubt as to the decision; and Edward, to whom the emergence gave
both a dignity and presence of mind rare to him, resolved to terminate
the dispute at once.  He stretched forth his sceptre, and motioning to
his chamberlain, bade him introduce the nuncius. [79]

A blank disappointment, not unmixed with apprehensive terror, succeeded
the turbulent excitement of the Normans; for well they knew that the
consequences, if not condition, of negotiations, would be their own
downfall and banishment at the least;--happy, it might be, to escape
massacre at the hands of the exasperated multitude.

The door at the end of the room opened, and the nuncius appeared.  He was
a sturdy, broad-shouldered man, of middle age, and in the long loose garb
originally national with the Saxon, though then little in vogue; his
beard thick and fair, his eyes grey and calm--a chief of Kent, where all
the prejudices of his race were strongest, and whose yeomanry claimed in
war the hereditary right to be placed in the front of battle.

He made his manly but deferential salutation to the august council as he
approached; and, pausing midway between the throne and door, he fell on
his knees without thought of shame, for the King to whom he knelt was the
descendant of Woden, and the heir of Hengist.  At a sign and a brief word
from the King, still on his knees, Vebba, the Kentman, spoke.

“To Edward, son of Ethelred, his most gracious king and lord, Godwin, son
of Wolnoth, sends faithful and humble greeting, by Vebba, the thegn-born.
He prays the King to hear him in kindness, and judge of him with mercy.
Not against the King comes he hither with ships and arms; but against
those only who would stand between the King’s heart and the subject’s:
those who have divided a house against itself, and parted son and father,
man and wife.”

At those last words Edward’s sceptre trembled in this hand, and his face
grew almost stern.

“Of the King, Godwin but prays with all submiss and earnest prayer, to
reverse the unrighteous outlawry against him and his; to restore him and
his sons their just possessions and well-won honours; and, more than all,
to replace them where they have sought by loving service not unworthily
to stand, in the grace of their born lord and in the van of those who
would uphold the laws and liberties of England.  This done--the ships
sail back to their haven; the thegn seeks his homestead and the ceorl
returns to the plough; for with Godwin are no strangers; and his force is
but the love of his countrymen.”

“Hast thou said?” quoth the King.

“I have said.”

“Retire, and await our answer.”

The Thegn of Kent was then led back into an ante-room, in which, armed
from head to heel in ring-mail, were several Normans whose youth or
station did not admit them into the council, but still of no mean
interest in the discussion, from the lands and possessions they had
already contrived to gripe out of the demesnes of the exiles;--burning
for battle and eager for the word.  Amongst these was Mallet de Graville.

The Norman valour of this young knight was, as we have seen, guided by
Norman intelligence; and he had not disdained, since William’s departure,
to study the tongue of the country in which he hoped to exchange his
mortgaged tower on the Seine, for some fair barony on the Humber or the
Thames.

While the rest of his proud countrymen stood aloof, with eyes of silent
scorn, from the homely nuncius, Mallet approached him with courteous
bearing, and said in Saxon:

“May I crave to know the issue of thy message from the reb--that is from
the doughty Earl?”

“I wait to learn it,” said Vebba, bluffly.

“They heard thee throughout, then?”

“Throughout.”

“Friendly Sir,” said the Sire de Graville, seeking to subdue the tone of
irony habitual to him, and acquired, perhaps, from his maternal ancestry,
the Franks.  “Friendly and peace-making Sir, dare I so far venture to
intrude on the secrets of thy mission as to ask if Godwin demands, among
other reasonable items, the head of thy humble servant--not by name
indeed, for my name is as yet unknown to him--but as one of the unhappy
class called Normans?”

“Had Earl Godwin,” returned the nuncius, “thought fit to treat for peace
by asking vengeance, he would have chosen another spokesman. The Earl
asks but his own; and thy head is not, I trow, a part of his goods and
chattels.”

“That is comforting,” said Mallet.  “Marry, I thank thee, Sir Saxon; and
thou speakest like a brave man and an honest.  And if we fall to blows,
as I suspect we shall, I should deem it a favour of our Lady the Virgin
if she send thee across my way.  Next to a fair friend I love a bold
foe.”

Vebba smiled, for he liked the sentiment, and the tone and air of the
young knight pleased his rough mind, despite his prejudices against the
stranger.

Encouraged by the smile, Mallet seated himself on the corner of the long
table that skirted the room, and with a debonnair gesture invited Vebba
to do the same; then looking at him gravely, he resumed:

“So frank and courteous thou art, Sir Envoy, that I yet intrude on thee
my ignorant and curious questions.”

“Speak out, Norman.”

“How comes it, then, that you English so love this Earl Godwin?--Still
more, why think you it right and proper that King Edward should love him
too?  It is a question I have often asked, and to which I am not likely
in these halls to get answer satisfactory.  If I know aught of your
troublous history, this same Earl has changed sides oft eno’; first for
the Saxon, then for Canute the Dane--Canute dies, and your friend takes
up arms for the Saxon again.  He yields to the advice of your Witan, and
sides with Hardicanute and Harold, the Danes--a letter, nathless, is
written as from Emma, the mother to the young Saxon princes, Edward and
Alfred, inviting them over to England, and promising aid; the saints
protect Edward, who continues to say aves in Normandy--Alfred comes over,
Earl Godwin meets him, and, unless belied, does him homage, and swears to
him faith.  Nay, listen yet. This Godwin, whom ye love so, then leads
Alfred and his train into the ville of Guildford, I think ye call
it,--fair quarters enow.  At the dead of the night rush in King Harold’s
men, seize prince and follower, six hundred men in all; and next morning,
saving only every tenth man, they are tortured and put to death.  The
prince is born off to London, and shortly afterwards his eyes are torn
out in the Islet of Ely, and he dies of the anguish!  That ye should love
Earl Godwin withal may be strange, but yet possible.  But is it possible,
cher Envoy, for the King to love the man who thus betrayed his brother to
the shambles?”

“All this is a Norman fable,” said the Thegn of Kent, with a disturbed
visage; “and Godwin cleared himself on oath of all share in the foul
murder of Alfred.”

“The oath, I have heard, was backed,” said the knight drily, “by a
present to Hardicanute, who after the death of King Harold resolved to
avenge the black butchery; a present, I say, of a gilt ship, manned by
fourscore warriors with gold-hilted swords, and gilt helms.--But let this
pass.”

“Let it pass,” echoed Vebba with a sigh.  “Bloody were those times, and
unholy their secrets.”

“Yet answer me still, why love you Earl Godwin?  He hath changed sides
from party to party, and in each change won lordships and lands.  He is
ambitious and grasping, ye all allow; for the ballads sung in your
streets liken him to the thorn and the bramble, at which the sheep leaves
his wool.  He is haughty and overbearing.  Tell me, O Saxon, frank Saxon,
why you love Godwin the Earl?  Fain would I know; for, please the saints
(and you and your Earl so permitting), I mean to live and die in this
merrie England; and it would be pleasant to learn that I have but to do
as Earl Godwin, in order to win love from the English.”

The stout Vebba looked perplexed; but after stroking his beard
thoughtfully, he answered thus:

“Though of Kent, and therefore in his earldom, I am not one of Godwin’s
especial party; for that reason was I chosen his bode.  Those who are
under him doubtless love a chief liberal to give and strong to protect.
The old age of a great leader gathers reverence, as an oak gathers moss.
But to me, and those like me, living peaceful at home, shunning courts,
and tempting not broils, Godwin the man is not dear--it is Godwin the
thing.”

“Though I do my best to know your language,” said the knight, “ye have
phrases that might puzzle King Solomon.  What meanest thou by ‘Godwin the
thing’?”

“That which to us Godwin only seems to uphold.  We love justice; whatever
his offences, Godwin was banished unjustly.  We love our laws; Godwin was
dishonoured by maintaining them.  We love England, and are devoured by
strangers; Godwin’s cause is England’s, and--stranger, forgive me for not
concluding.”

Then examining the young Norman with a look of rough compassion, he laid
his large hand upon the knight’s shoulder and whispered:

“Take my advice--and fly.”

“Fly!” said De Graville, reddening.  “Is it to fly, think you, that I
have put on my mail, and girded my sword?”

“Vain--vain!  Wasps are fierce, but the swarm is doomed when the straw is
kindled.  I tell you this--fly in time, and you are safe; but let the
King be so misguided as to count on arms, and strive against yon
multitude, and verily before nightfall not one Norman will be found alive
within ten miles of the city.  Look to it, youth!  Perhaps thou hast a
mother--let her not mourn a son!”

Before the Norman could shape into Saxon sufficiently polite and courtly
his profound and indignant disdain of the counsel, his sense of the
impertinence with which his shoulder had been profaned, and his mother’s
son had been warned, the nuncius was again summoned into the
presence-chamber.  Nor did he return into the ante-room, but conducted
forthwith from the council--his brief answer received--to the stairs of
the palace, he reached the boat in which he had come, and was rowed back
to the ship that held the Earl and his sons.

Now this was the manoeuvre of Godwin’s array.  His vessels having passed
London Bridge, had rested awhile on the banks of the Southward suburb
(Suth-weorde)--since called Southwark--and the King’s ships lay to the
north; but the fleet of the Earl’s, after a brief halt, veered
majestically round, and coming close to the palace of Westminster,
inclined northward, as if to hem the King’s ships.  Meanwhile the land
forces drew up close to the Strand, almost within bow-shot of the King’s
troops, that kept the ground inland; thus Vebba saw before him, so near
as scarcely to be distinguished from each other, on the river the rival
fleets, on the shore the rival armaments.

High above all the vessels towered the majestic bark, or aesca, that had
borne Harold from the Irish shores.  Its fashion was that of the ancient
sea-kings, to one of whom it had belonged.  Its curved and mighty prow,
richly gilded, stood out far above the waves: the prow, the head of the
sea-snake; the stern its spire; head and spire alike glittering in the
sun.

The boat drew up to the lofty side of the vessel, a ladder was lowered,
the nuncius ascended lightly and stood on deck.  At the farther end
grouped the sailors, few in number, and at respectful distance from the
Earl and his sons.

Godwin himself was but half armed.  His head was bare, nor had he other
weapon of offence than the gilt battle-axe of the Danes--weapon as much
of office as of war; but his broad breast was covered with the ring mail
of the time.  His stature was lower than that of any of his sons; nor did
his form exhibit greater physical strength than that of a man, well
shaped, robust, and deep of chest, who still preserved in age the pith
and sinew of mature manhood.  Neither, indeed, did legend or fame ascribe
to that eminent personage those romantic achievements, those feats of
purely animal prowess, which distinguished his rival, Siward.  Brave he
was, but brave as a leader; those faculties in which he appears to have
excelled all his contemporaries, were more analogous to the requisites of
success in civilised times, than those which won renown of old.  And
perhaps England was the only country then in Europe which could have
given to those faculties their fitting career.  He possessed essentially
the arts of party; he knew how to deal with vast masses of mankind; he
could carry along with his interests the fervid heart of the multitude;
he had in the highest degree that gift, useless in most other lands--in
all lands where popular assemblies do not exist--the gift of popular
eloquence.  Ages elapsed, after the Norman conquest, ere eloquence again
became a power in England. [80]

But like all men renowned for eloquence, he went with the popular feeling
of his times; he embodied its passions, its prejudices--but also that
keen sense of self-interest, which is the invariable characteristic of a
multitude.  He was the sense of the commonalty carried to its highest
degree.  Whatever the faults, it may be the crimes, of a career
singularly prosperous and splendid, amidst events the darkest and most
terrible,--shining with a steady light across the thunder-clouds,--he was
never accused of cruelty or outrage to the mass of the people.  English,
emphatically, the English deemed him; and this not the less that in his
youth he had sided with Canute, and owed his fortunes to that king; for
so intermixed were Danes and Saxons in England, that the agreement which
had given to Canute one half the kingdom had been received with general
applause; and the earlier severities of that great prince had been so
redeemed in his later years by wisdom and mildness--so, even in the worst
period of his reign, relieved by extraordinary personal affability, and
so lost now in men’s memories by pride in his power and fame,--that
Canute had left behind him a beloved and honoured name [81], and Godwin
was the more esteemed as the chosen counsellor of that popular prince.
At his death, Godwin was known to have wished, and even armed, for the
restoration of the Saxon line; and only yielded to the determination of
the Witan, no doubt acted upon by the popular opinion.  Of one dark crime
he was suspected, and, despite his oath to the contrary, and the formal
acquittal of the national council, doubt of his guilt rested then, as it
rests still, upon his name; viz., the perfidious surrender of Alfred,
Edward’s murdered brother.

But time had passed over the dismal tragedy; and there was an instinctive
and prophetic feeling throughout the English nation, that with the House
of Godwin was identified the cause of the English people.  Everything in
this man’s aspect served to plead in his favour.  His ample brows were
calm with benignity and thought; his large dark blue eyes were serene and
mild, though their expression, when examined, was close and inscrutable.
His mien was singularly noble, but wholly without formality or affected
state; and though haughtiness and arrogance were largely attributed to
him, they could be found only in his deeds, not manner--plain, familiar,
kindly to all men, his heart seemed as open to the service of his
countrymen as his hospitable door to their wants.

Behind him stood the stateliest group of sons that ever filled with pride
a father’s eye.  Each strikingly distinguished from the other, all
remarkable for beauty of countenance and strength of frame.

Sweyn, the eldest [82], had the dark hues of his mother the Dane: a wild
and mournful majesty sat upon features aquiline and regular, but wasted
by grief or passion; raven locks, glossy even in neglect, fell half over
eyes hollow in their sockets, but bright, though with troubled fire.
Over his shoulder he bore his mighty axe.  His form, spare, but of
immense power, was sheathed in mail, and he leant on his great pointed
Danish shield.  At his feet sate his young son Haco, a boy with a
countenance preternaturally thoughtful for his years, which were yet
those of childhood.

Next to him stood the most dreaded and ruthless of the sons of
Godwin--he, fated to become to the Saxon what Julian was to the Goth.
With his arms folded on his breast stood Tostig; his face was beautiful
as a Greek’s, in all save the forehead, which was low and lowering. Sleek
and trim were his bright chestnut locks; and his arms were damascened
with silver, for he was one who loved the pomp and luxury of war.

Wolnoth, the mother’s favourite, seemed yet in the first flower of youth,
but he alone of all the sons had something irresolute and effeminate in
his aspect and bearing; his form, though tall, had not yet come to its
full height and strength; and, as if the weight of mail were unusual to
him, he leant with both hands upon the wood of his long spear.  Leofwine,
who stood next to Wolnoth, contrasted him notably; his sunny locks
wreathed carelessly over a white unclouded brow, and the silken hair on
the upper lip quivered over arch lips, smiling, even in that serious
hour.

At Godwin’s right hand, but not immediately near him, stood the last of
the group, Gurth and Harold.  Gurth had passed his arm over the shoulder
of his brother, and, not watching the nuncius while he spoke, watched
only the effect his words produced on the face of Harold.  For Gurth
loved Harold as Jonathan loved David.  And Harold was the only one of the
group not armed; and had a veteran skilled in war been asked who of that
group was born to lead armed men, he would have pointed to the man
unarmed.

“So what says the King?” asked Earl Godwin.

“This; he refuses to restore thee and thy sons, or to hear thee, till
thou hast disbanded thine army, dismissed thy ships, and consented to
clear thyself and thy house before the Witanagemot.”

A fierce laugh broke from Tostig; Sweyn’s mournful brow grew darker;
Leofwine placed his right hand on his ateghar; Wolnoth rose erect; Gurth
kept his eyes on Harold, and Harold’s face was unmoved.

“The King received thee in his council of war,” said Godwin,
thoughtfully, “and doubtless the Normans were there.  Who were the
Englishmen most of mark?”

“Siward of Northumbria, thy foe.”

“My sons,” said the Earl, turning to his children, and breathing loud as
if a load were off his heart; “there will be no need of axe or armour
to-day.  Harold alone was wise,” and he pointed to the linen tunic of the
son thus cited.

“What mean you, Sir Father?” said Tostig, imperiously.  “Think you
to----”

“Peace, son, peace;” said Godwin, without asperity, but with conscious
command.  “Return, brave and dear friend,” he said to Vebba, “find out
Siward the Earl; tell him that I, Godwin, his foe in the old time, place
honour and life in his hands, and what he counsels that will we do.--Go.”

The Kent man nodded, and regained his boat.  Then spoke Harold.

“Father, yonder are the forces of Edward; as yet without leaders, since
the chiefs must still be in the halls of the King.  Some fiery Norman
amongst them may provoke an encounter; and this city of London is not
won, as it behoves us to win it, if one drop of English blood dye the
sword of one English man.  Wherefore, with your leave, I will take boat,
and land.  And unless I have lost in my absence all right here in the
hearts of our countrymen, at the first shout from our troops which
proclaims that Harold, son of Godwin, is on the soil of our fathers, half
yon array of spears and helms pass at once to our side.”

“And if not, my vain brother?” said Tostig, gnawing his lip with envy.

“And if not, I will ride alone into the midst of them, and ask what
Englishmen are there who will aim shaft or spear at this breast, never
mailed against England!”

Godwin placed his hand on Harold’s head, and the tears came to those
close cold eyes.

“Thou knowest by nature what I have learned by art.  Go, and prosper. Be
it as thou wilt.”

“He takes thy post, Sweyn--thou art the elder,” said Tostig, to the wild
form by his side.

“There is guilt on my soul, and woe in my heart,” answered Sweyn,
moodily.  “Shall Esau lose his birthright, and Cain retain it?”  So
saying, he withdrew, and, reclining against the stern of the vessel,
leant his face upon the edge of his shield.

Harold watched him with deep compassion in his eyes, passed to his side
with a quick step, pressed his hand, and whispered, “Peace to the past, O
my brother!”

The boy Haco, who had noiselessly followed his father, lifted his sombre,
serious looks to Harold as he thus spoke; and when Harold turned away, he
said to Sweyn, timidly, “He, at least, is ever good to thee and to me.”

“And thou, when I am no more, shalt cling to him as thy father, Haco,”
 answered Sweyn, tenderly smoothing back the child’s dark locks.

The boy shivered; and, bending his head, murmured to himself, “When thou
art no more!  No more?  Has the Vala doomed him, too?  Father and son,
both?”

Meanwhile, Harold had entered the boat lowered from the sides of the
aesca to receive him; and Gurth, looking appealingly to his father, and
seeing no sign of dissent, sprang down after the young Earl, and seated
himself by his side.  Godwin followed the boat with musing eyes.

“Small need,” said he, aloud, but to himself, “to believe in soothsayers,
or to credit Hilda the saga, when she prophesied, ere we left our shores,
that Harold--” He stopped short, for Tostig’s wrathful exclamation broke
on his reverie.

“Father, father!  My blood surges in my ears, and boils in my heart, when
I hear thee name the prophecies of Hilda in favour of thy darling.
Dissension and strife in our house have they wrought already; and if the
feuds between Harold and me have sown grey in thy locks, thank thyself
when, flushed with vain soothsayings for thy favoured Harold, thou
saidst, in the hour of our first childish broil, ‘Strive not with Harold;
for his brothers will be his men.’”

“Falsify the prediction,” said Godwin, calmly; “wise men may always make
their own future, and seize their own fates.  Prudence, patience, labour,
valour; these are the stars that rule the career of mortals.”

Tostig made no answer; for the splash of oars was near, and two ships,
containing the principal chiefs that had joined Godwin’s cause, came
alongside the Runic aesca to hear the result of the message sent to the
King.  Tostig sprang to the vessel’s side, and exclaimed, “The King, girt
by his false counsellors, will hear us not, and arms must decide between
us.”

“Hold, hold! malignant, unhappy boy!” cried Godwin, between his grinded
teeth, as a shout of indignant, yet joyous ferocity broke from the
crowded ships thus hailed.  “The curse of all time be on him who draws
the first native blood in sight of the altars and hearths of London!
Hear me, thou with the vulture’s blood-lust, and the peacock’s vain joy
in the gaudy plume!  Hear me, Tostig, and tremble. If but by one word
thou widen the breach between me and the King, outlaw thou enterest
England, outlaw shalt thou depart--for earldom and broad lands; choose
the bread of the stranger, and the weregeld of the wolf!”

The young Saxon, haughty as he was, quailed at his father’s thrilling
voice, bowed his head, and retreated sullenly.  Godwin sprang on the deck
of the nearest vessel, and all the passions that Tostig had aroused, he
exerted his eloquence to appease.

In the midst of his arguments, there rose from the ranks on the strand,
the shout of “Harold!  Harold the Earl!  Harold and Holy Crosse!”  And
Godwin, turning his eye to the King’s ranks, saw them agitated, swayed,
and moving; till suddenly, from the very heart of the hostile array,
came, as by irresistible impulse, the cry, “Harold, our Harold!  All
hail, the good Earl!”

While this chanced without,--within the palace, Edward had quitted the
presence-chamber, and was closeted with Stigand, the bishop.  This
prelate had the more influence with Edward, inasmuch as though Saxon, he
was held to be no enemy to the Normans, and had, indeed, on a former
occasion, been deposed from his bishopric on the charge of too great an
attachment to the Norman queen-mother Emma [83]. Never in his whole life
had Edward been so stubborn as on this occasion.  For here, more than his
realm was concerned, he was threatened in the peace of his household, and
the comfort of his tepid friendships.  With the recall of his powerful
father-in-law, he foresaw the necessary reintrusion of his wife upon the
charm of his chaste solitude.  His favourite Normans would be banished,
he should be surrounded with faces he abhorred.  All the representations
of Stigand fell upon a stern and unyielding spirit, when Siward entered
the King’s closet.

“Sir, my King,” said the great son of Beorn, “I yielded to your kingly
will in the council, that, before we listened to Godwin, he should
disband his men, and submit to the judgment of the Witan.  The Earl hath
sent to me to say, that he will put honour and life in my keeping, and
abide by my counsel.  And I have answered as became the man who will
never snare a foe, or betray a trust.”

“How hast thou answered?” asked the King.

“That he abide by the laws of England; as Dane and Saxon agreed to abide
in the days of Canute; that he and his sons shall make no claim for land
or lordship, but submit all to the Witan.”

“Good,” said the King; “and the Witan will condemn him now, as it would
have condemned when he shunned to meet it.”

“And the Witan now,” returned the Earl emphatically, “will be free, and
fair, and just.”

“And meanwhile, the troops----”

“Will wait on either side; and if reason fail, then the sword,” said
Siward.

“This I will not hear,” exclaimed Edward; when the tramp of many feet
thundered along the passage; the door was flung open, and several
captains (Norman as well as Saxon) of the King’s troops rushed in, wild,
rude, and tumultuous.

“The troops desert! half the ranks have thrown down their arms at the
very name of Harold!” exclaimed the Earl of Hereford.  “Curses on the
knaves!”

“And the lithsmen of London,” cried a Saxon thegn, “are all on his side,
and marching already through the gates.”

“Pause yet,” whispered Stigand; “and who shall say, this hour to-morrow,
if Edward or Godwin reign on the throne of Alfred?”

His stern heart moved by the distress of his King, and not the less for
the unwonted firmness which Edward displayed, Siward here approached,
knelt, and took the King’s hand.

“Siward can give no niddering counsel to his King; to save the blood of
his subjects is never a king’s disgrace.  Yield thou to mercy, Godwin to
the law!”

“Oh for the cowl and cell!” exclaimed the Prince, wringing his hands. “Oh
Norman home, why did I leave thee?”  He took the cross from his breast,
contemplated it fixedly, prayed silently but with fervour, and his face
again became tranquil.

“Go,” he said, flinging himself on his seat in the exhaustion that
follows passion, “go, Siward, go, Stigand, deal with things mundane as ye
will.”

The bishop, satisfied with this reluctant acquiescence, seized Siward by
the arm and withdrew him from the closet.  The captains remained a few
moments behind, the Saxons silently gazing on the King, the Normans
whispering each other, in great doubt and trouble, and darting looks of
the bitterest scorn at their feeble benefactor.  Then, as with one
accord, these last rushed along the corridor, gained the hall where their
countrymen yet assembled, and exclaimed, “A toute bride! Franc
etrier!--All is lost but life!--God for the first man,--knife and cord
for the last!”

Then, as the cry of fire, or as the first crash of an earthquake,
dissolves all union, and reduces all emotion into one thought of
self-saving, the whole conclave, crowding pell-mell on each other,
bustled, jostled, clamoured to the door--happy he who could find horse,
palfrey,--even monk’s mule!  This way, that way, fled those lordly
Normans, those martial abbots, those mitred bishops--some singly, some in
pairs; some by tens, and some by scores; but all prudently shunning
association with those chiefs whom they had most courted the day before,
and who, they now knew, would be the main mark for revenge; save only
two, who yet, from that awe of the spiritual power which characterised
the Norman, who was already half monk, half soldier (Crusader and Templar
before Crusades were yet preached, or the Templars yet dreamed of),--even
in that hour of selfish panic rallied round them the prowest chivalry of
their countrymen, viz., the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of
Canterbury.  Both these dignitaries, armed cap-a-pie, and spear in hand,
headed the flight; and good service that day, both as guide and champion,
did Mallet de Graville. He led them in a circuit behind both armies, but
being intercepted by a new body, coming from the pastures of
Hertfordshire to the help of Godwin, he was compelled to take the bold
and desperate resort of entering the city gates.  These were wide open;
whether to admit the Saxon Earls, or vomit forth their allies, the
Londoners.  Through these, up the narrow streets, riding three abreast,
dashed the slaughtering fugitives; worthy in flight of their national
renown, they trampled down every obstacle.  Bodies of men drew up against
them at every angle, with the Saxon cry of “Out--Out!”  “Down with the
outland men!”  Through each, spear pierced, and sword clove, the way. Red
with gore was the spear of the prelate of London; broken to the hilt was
the sword militant in the terrible hand of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
So on thy rode, so on they slaughtered--gained the Eastern Gate, and
passed with but two of their number lost.

The fields once gained, for better precaution they separated.  Some few,
not quite ignorant of the Saxon tongue, doffed their mail, and crept
through forest and fell towards the sea-shore; others retained steed and
arms, but shunned equally the high roads.  The two prelates were among
the last; they gained, in safety, Ness, in Essex, threw themselves into
an open, crazy, fishing-boat, committed themselves to the waves, and,
half drowned and half famished, drifted over the Channel to the French
shores.  Of the rest of the courtly foreigners, some took refuge in the
forts yet held by their countrymen; some lay concealed in creeks and
caves till they could find or steal boats for their passage.  And thus,
in the year of our Lord 1052, occurred the notable dispersion and
ignominious flight of the counts and vavasours of great William the Duke!




CHAPTER III.

The Witana-gemot was assembled in the great hall of Westminster in all
its imperial pomp.

It was on his throne that the King sate now--and it was the sword that
was in his right hand.  Some seated below, and some standing beside, the
throne, were the officers of the Basileus [84] of Britain.  There were to
be seen camararius and pincerna, chamberlain and cupbearer; disc thegn
and hors thegn [85]; the thegn of the dishes, and the thegn of the stud;
with many more, whose state offices may not impossibly have been borrowed
from the ceremonial pomp of the Byzantine court; for Edgar, King of
England, had in the old time styled himself the Heir of Constantine.
Next to these sat the clerks of the chapel, with the King’s confessor at
their head.  Officers were they of higher note than their name bespeaks,
and wielders, in the trust of the Great Seal, of a power unknown of old,
and now obnoxious to the Saxon.  For tedious is the suit which lingers
for the king’s writ and the king’s seal; and from those clerks shall
arise hereafter a thing of torture and of might, which shall grind out
the hearts of men, and be called CHANCERY! [86]

Below the scribes, a space was left on the floor, and farther down sat
the chiefs of the Witan.  Of these, first in order, both from their
spiritual rank and their vast temporal possessions, sat the lords of the
Church; the chairs of the prelates of London and Canterbury were void.
But still goodly was the array of Saxon mitres, with the harsh, hungry,
but intelligent face of Stigand,--Stigand the stout and the covetous; and
the benign but firm features of Alred, true priest and true patriot,
distinguished amidst all.  Around each prelate, as stars round a sun,
were his own special priestly retainers, selected from his diocese.
Farther still down the hall are the great civil lords and viceking
vassals of the “Lord-Paramount.”  Vacant the chair of the King of the
Scots, for Siward hath not yet had his wish; Macbeth is in his
fastnesses, or listening to the weird sisters in the wold; and Malcolm is
a fugitive in the halls of the Northumbrian earl.  Vacant the chair of
the hero Gryffyth, son of Llewelyn, the dread of the marches, Prince of
Gwyned, whose arms had subjugated all Cymry.  But there are the lesser
sub-kings of Wales, true to the immemorial schisms amongst themselves,
which destroyed the realm of Ambrosius, and rendered vain the arm of
Arthur.  With their torques of gold, and wild eyes, and hair cut round
ears and brow [87], they stare on the scene.

On the same bench with these sub-kings, distinguished from them by height
of stature, and calm collectedness of mien, no less than by their caps of
maintenance and furred robes, are those props of strong thrones and
terrors of weak--the earls to whom shires and counties fall, as hyde and
carricate to the lesser thegns.  But three of these were then present,
and all three the foes of Godwin,--Siward, Earl of Northumbria; Leofric
of Mercia (that Leofric whose wife Godiva yet lives in ballad and song);
and Rolf, Earl of Hereford and Worcestershire, who, strong in his claim
of “king’s blood,” left not the court with his Norman friends.  And on
the same benches, though a little apart, are the lesser earls, and that
higher order of thegns, called king’s thegns.

Not far from these sat the chosen citizens from the free burgh of London,
already of great weight in the senate [88],--sufficing often to turn its
counsels; all friends were they of the English Earl and his house.  In
the same division of the hall were found the bulk and true popular part
of the meeting--popular indeed--as representing not the people, but the
things the people most prized-valour and wealth; the thegn landowners,
called in the old deeds the “Ministers:” they sate with swords by their
side, all of varying birth, fortune, and connection, whether with king,
earl, or ceorl.  For in the different districts of the old Heptarchy, the
qualification varied; high in East Anglia, low in Wessex; so that what
was wealth in the one shire was poverty in the other.  There sate, half a
yeoman, the Saxon thegn of Berkshire or Dorset, proud of his five hydes
of land; there, half an ealderman, the Danish thegn of Norfolk or Ely,
discontented with his forty; some were there in right of smaller offices
under the crown; some traders, and sons of traders, for having crossed
the high seas three times at their own risk; some could boast the blood
of Offa and Egbert; and some traced but three generations back to
neatherd and ploughman; and some were Saxons and some were Danes: and
some from the western shires were by origin Britons, though little
cognisant of their race.  Farther down still, at the extreme end of the
hall, crowding by the open doors, filling up the space without, were the
ceorls themselves, a vast and not powerless body; in these high courts
(distinc

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