II. secular §23. The Laws of The secular laws of Edgar bear the stamp of Dun- CHAP. stan's mind. In them, an assumption of such a guardianship over the poor and oppressed as befits a king, is combined with an acquiescence in those existing conditions of the national life which made the exercise of that Edgar. guardianship so difficult. The great division of the population into Danes and Englishmen stands revealed. Edgar can venture, with the consent of his witan, to amend the laws for the behoof of Englishmen. The Danes must be left to such laws as they please to choose for themselves. The spectacle which the reign presents is that of a king aiming at a higher life for his people but conscious of the want of support. The king is more national than the thegns, and the thegns are more national than the people. The thegns would be ready to gather into groups, East Anglian, Northumbrian, Mercian, or West Saxon. Danes and English were especially ready to fly apart. In the lower classes there was still less cohesion. A strong king might draw the band a little more closely, if he tried to do no more. A weak king with unwise remissness and unwise violence would bring chaos back again. Ethelred With Ethelred, chaos came again indeed. A fresh $24. invasion of the Northern Danes found local resistance and Edbut no general resistance. The local ealdorman, an mund. Ulfkytel or a Brihtnoth, might lead the men of his shire to battle. But the king who, like Ethelred, was content to bribe off the invader made all national resistance impossible. He alone was the band by which the sticks of the faggot were united for resistance. When he contented himself with inaction, each stick was separately overpowered. The Witenagemot had in theory the power of deposing kings. But it had not the will to exercise it. Each man had his own interests and intrigues to attend to. At last, after Ethelred's death came a bright СНАР. § 25. Cnut's Reign. $26. Edward the moment under the hero Edmund. With his death all hope of resistance died away, and England without further struggle sank under the sway of Cnut. Cnut's rule was not as terrible as might have been feared. He was perfectly unscrupulous in striking down the treacherous and mischievous chieftains who had made a trade of Ethelred's weakness and the country's divisions. But he was wise and strong enough to rule, not by increasing but by allaying those divisions. Resting his power upon his Scandinavian kingdoms beyond the sea, upon his Danish countrymen in England and his Danish huscarles, or specially trained soldiers in his service, he was able without even the appearance of weakness to do what in him lay to bind Dane and Englishman together as common instruments of his power.. Fidelity counted more with him than birth. To bring England itself into unity was beyond his power. The device which he hit upon was operative only in hands as strong as his own. There were to be four great earls, deriving their name from the Danish word jarl, centralising the forces of government in Wessex, in Mercia, in East Anglia, and in Northumberland. With Cnut the four were officials of the highest class. They were there because he placed them there. They would cease to be there if he so willed it. But it could hardly be that it would always be so. Some day or another, unless a great catastrophe swept away Cnut and his creation, the carldoms would pass into territorial sovereignties, and the divisions of England would be made evident openly. After the brief and inglorious reigns of the sons of Confessor. Cnut, the English crown was once more won by a king of the old West Saxon line. Edward the Confessor was less English in his character than any of his subjects. His mother Emma was the sister and daughter of Norman Dukes, and he had himself spent the early years of life in exile in Normandy. He passed amongst his contemporaries as one endowed with prophetic powers, and in truth he saw what none around him saw, the insufficiency of the moral and mental standard of English life. He shrunk from the jealousies of the great English families, from the rough animalism of English enjoyments, from its want of polish and culture, and from its low ideal of the religious life. But he shrunk from this with the petulance of a petty mind. He tried to do weakly what Dunstan had tried to do strongly. Dunstan had introduced foreign ideas and foreign teachers, with the purpose of weaving the golden threads of higher thought into the midst of the strong web of English life. Edward would have substituted that which he liked for that which he disliked, would have surrounded himself with foreign officers in church and state, would have spoken in the tongue of the foreigner and lived a foreigner's life, and he was not content till he had defied, the laws and customs of his despised land by offering the succession to the throne to the foreign Duke of the Normans, without a thought of consulting his own Witan, in whom alone its disposal rested. СНАР. II. House of Godwin. Insulted in such a way, the English feeling turned, § 27. The if not upon the king, at least upon his foreign favourites. The revolt was headed by Godwin, and Harold, his nobler son. After Godwin's death, Harold ruled England in Edward's name. Strenuous and warlike, prompt in decision, and generous in thought, Harold was the ablest man of an unprogressive race. What he did he did well. But he brought no new ideas into the work of government, or into the existing system of military tactics. When on Edward's death, he was called to assume the crown, it was the natural choice of the wor СНАР. II. thiest man in England. But he could not bind Englishmen together into a national unity. Edwin and Morcar, the chiefs of central and northern England, looked coldly on him with family jealousy. They were glad of his aid against the Norsemen at Stamford Bridge. They would not come to his help at Senlac. His last fight was a combat, in which heroic bravery strove in vain to compensate for want of discipline and lack of intelligence. In fighting qualities both sides were equal. The power of grasping the new idea, and the readiness to subordinate individual thought to the skill of the commander, were on the side of the invader. The Norman troops attacking, or flying in simulated rout, at the word of Duke William, or exchanging the combat of the horseman for the combat of the archer at his word, deserved, at least in a military sense, to win. William put his mind into the battle, Harold could but give his example. 41 CHAPTER III. NORMAN AND ANGEVIN ORGANISATION. CHAP. IN the first half of the eleventh century, the two most purely Teutonic states, Germany and England, were beyond comparison, the strongest and the best governed §1. North states of Europe. Before the end of the century, England and South. had been smitten to the ground, and Germany was in deadly combat with the foe before whose persistent attacks she was ultimately to fall. Up to that time it seemed to be the law of progress that in England, as on the Continent, the last comer who placed his Teutonic freshness of vigour under the restraints of Roman civilisation should rise to the mastery. As dominion passed here from the descendants of Alfred and Athelstan to Cnut, so had it passed there from the children of Clovis to the Carolingian border family from the lands. east of the Meuse, and then again to the new border family of the Saxon line of Henry and the Ottos. The second half of the eleventh century witnessed a great revulsion. It was the time of the reaction of the south against the north. In the world of ideas a great spiritual power arose at Rome, clothing in ecclesiastical forms the claims of the old imperial city, and baffling and driving back the Teutonic sovereign who had decked himself in the imperial mantle which the great Otto and the greater Charles had donned, as the symbol of the heritage of Constantine and Augustus. In our own |