The last years of Anglo-Saxon England
King Athelstan to Edward the "Confessor" and Harold Last English King of England - 924 AD to 1066 AD

The great Battle of Brunanburgh 937 AD – King Athelstan forms England

Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, the third of the great West Saxon Kings, sought at first, in accordance with the traditions of his house, peaceful relations with the unconquered parts of the Dane-law; but upon disputes arising he marched into Yorkshire in 926 AD, and there established himself. Northumbria submitted; the Kings of the Scots and of Strathclyde acknowledged him as their “father and lord”, and the Welsh princes agreed to pay tribute. There was an uneasy interlude; then in 933 AD came a campaign against the Scots, and in 937 AD a general rebellion and renewed war, organised by all the hitherto defeated peoples in the drama. The whole of North Britain – Scots, Picts, Irish, Danish, Norwegian, pagan and Christian – together presented a hostile front under Constantine, King of the Scots, and Olaf of Dublin, with the Viking reinforcements from Norway. On this occasion neither life nor time was wasted in manoeuvres. What followed was the two day Battle of Brunanburgh in 937 AD, a battle so mighty that it inspired Tolkeins Lord of The Rings. It occurred North of Burnley in Lancashire in the North West of England. Also known as the Battle of the Five Armies. The fight that followed is recorded for us in an Icelandic saga and an English poem. According to the saga-man, Athelstan challenged his foes to meet him in pitched battle, and to this they blithely agreed. The English King even suggested the place where all should be put to the test. The armies, vary large for those times, took up their respective positions as if for the Olympic Games, and much parleying accompanied the process. The English army under Athelstan had with him both Angles from Mercia, and Saxons from other parts of England. Tempers rose high as these masses of manhood flaunted their shields and blades at one another and flung their gibes across a narrow space; and there was a fierce clash between the Northumbrian and the Icelandic Vikings on one hand and a part of the English army on the other. In this, although the Northumbrian commander fled, the English were worsted. But on the following day the real fighting began. The rival hosts paraded in all the pomp of war, and then in hearty goodwill fell on with spear, axe, and sword. All day long the fight raged. What is known is that at one point Athelstan made a critical battle winning move. The Picts, Scots, Strathclyde Brythons, Vikings, and Irish retreated. It then turned into a 30 mile wide slaughter front as the Anglo-Saxons pursued the defeated combined forces. They lost 5 kings and Cellach the son of the Scottish King Constantine II was killed. The survivors sought their ships and fled to Dublin and further. The English were merciless.

The original victory-song on Brunanburgh opens to us a view of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors mind, with its imagery and war-delight.

The victory of the English was overwhelming. Constantine, “the perjured” as the victors claimed, fled back to the North, and Olaf retired with his remnants to Dublin.

Thus did King Alfred’s grandson, the valiant Athelstan, became one of the sovereigns of Western Europe. He styled himself on coin and charter Rex Totius Britanniae. These claims were accepted upon the Continent. His three sisters were wedded respectively to the Carolingian king, Charles the Simple, to the Capetian, Hugh the Great, and to Otto the Saxon, a future Holy Roman Emperor. He even installed a Norwegian prince, who swore allegiance and was batised as his vassal at York. Here again one might hope that a decision in the long quarrel had been reached; yet it persisted; and when Athelstan died (924-939 AD), two years after Brunanburh, and was succeeded by his half-brother a youth of eighteen, the beaten forces welled up once more against him. Edmund, in the spirit of his race, held his own. He reigned only six years, but when he died in 946 AD he had not ceded an inch. Edmund was succeeded by his brother Edred, the youngest son of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder. He too maintained the realm against all comers, and, beating them down by force of arms, seemed to have quenched for ever the rebellious fires of Northumbria.

The ‘First’ Viking era in England ends

Historians select the year 954 AD as the end of the first great episode in the Viking history of England. A hundred and twenty years had passed since the impact of the Vikings had smitten the Island. For Forty years English Christian society had struggled for life. For eighty years five warrior kings Alfred, Edward, Athelstan, Edmund, and Edred – defeated the invaders. The English rule was now restored, though in a form changed by the passage of time, over the whole country. Yet underneath it there had grown up, deeply rooted in the soil, a Danish settlement covering the great eastern plain, in which Danish blood and Danish customs survived under the authority of the English king.

The English King Edgar

In the brilliant and peaceful reign of Edgar all this long building had reached its culmination. The re-conquest of England was accompanied step by step by a conscious administrative reconstruction which has governed the development of English institution from that day to this. The shires were reorganised, each with its sheriff or reeve, a royal officer directly responsible to the Crown. The hundreds, subdivisions of the shire, were created, and the towns prepared for defence. An elaborate system of shire, hundred, and borough courts maintained law and order and pursued criminal. Taxation was reassessed. Finally, with this military and political revival marched a great re-birth of monastic life and learning and the continuation of our native English literature. The movement was slow and English in origin, but advanced with great strides from the middle of the century as it came in contact with the religious revival on the Continent. The work of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his younger contemporaries, Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, and Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, was to revive the strict observance of religion within the monasteries, and thereby indirectly to reform the Episcopate as more and more monks were elected to bishoprics. Another and happy, if incidental, result was to promote learning and the production of splendid illuminated manuscripts, which were much in demand in contemporary Europe. Many of these, designed for the religious instruction of the laity, were written in English. The Catholic Homilies of Elfric, Abbot of Eynsham, mark, we are told, the first achievement of English as a literary language – the earliest vernacular to reach this eminence in the whole of Europe. From whatever point of view we regard it, the tenth century is a decisive step forward in the destinies of England.

English King Ethelred ‘The Unready’

Despite the catastrophic decline of the monarchy which followed the death of Edgar (959-975 AD), this organisation and English culture were so firmly rooted as to survive two foreign conquests in less than a century. Everywhere the courts are sitting regularly, in shire and borough and hundred; there is one coinage, and one system of weights and measures. The arts of building and decoration are reviving; learning begins to flourish again in the Church; there is literary language, a King’s English, which all educated men write. Civilisation had been restored to England. But now the political fabric which nurtured it was about to be over-thrown. Hitherto strong men armed had kept the house. Now a child, a weakling, a vacillator, a faithless, feckless creature, succeeded to the warrior throne. Twenty-five years of peace lapped the land, and the English, so magnificent in stress and danger, so invincible under valiant leadership, relaxed under its softening influences. We have reached the days of Ethelred the Unready. But this expression, which conveys a truth, means literally Ethelred the Ill-counselled, or Ethelred the Unread, again the “Redeless”.

Viking raids of 980 AD and The Battle of Maldon 991 AD

In 980 AD serious raids began again. Chester was ravaged from Ireland. The people of Southampton were massacred by marauders from Scandinavia or Denmark. Thanet, Cornwall, Devon all suffered butchery and pillage. We have an epic poem upon “The Battle of Maldon”, fought in 991 AD. The Danes were drawn up on Northey Island, east of Maldon in Essex in East England, with the English facing them from the South bank of the Blackwater estuary. The battle turned upon the causeway joining Northey to the mainland, which was flooded at high tide. The Vikings bargained in their characteristic fashion:

But Byrthtnoth, Alderman of Essex, replied:

These high words were not made good by the event. As the tide was running out while these taunts were being exchanged the causeway was now exposed, and the English naively agreed to let the Vikings cross and form on the South bank in order that the battle might be fairly drawn. No sooner had it begun than the English were worsted. Many of Byrhtnoth’s men took to flight, but a group of his thanes, knowing that all was lost, fought on to the death. Then followed the most shameful period of Dane-geld. Byrhtnoth is venerated as an Anglo-Saxon hero and is buried in Ely Cathedral in with the inscription ‘’Brithnoth, Duke of Northumberland, killed in battle by the Dames 991 AD.’’ English defeat is often celebrated. It is recognition of the will to resist even if it fails.

We have seen that Alfred in his day had never hesitated to use money as well as arms. Ethelred used money instead of arms. He used it in ever-increasing quantities, with ever-diminishing returns.

The Danish King Sweyn ‘Forkbeard’

Ethelred paid as a bribe in 991 AD, ten thousand pounds of gold and silver, with rations for the invaders. In 994 AD with sixteen thousand pounds, he gained not only a brief respite, but the baptism of the raider, Olaf, thrown in as a compliment. In 1002 AD he bought a further truce for twenty-four thousand pounds of silver, but on this occasion he was himself to break it. In their ruin and decay the English had taken large numbers of Danish mercenaries into their service. Ethelred suspected these dangerous helpers of a plot against his life. Panic-stricken, he planned the slaughter of all Danes in the South of England, whether in his pay or living peaceably on the land. This atrocious design was executed in 1002 AD on St Brice’s Day. Among the victims was Gunnhild, the wife of one of the principal Vikings, and sister of Sweyn, King of Denmark. Sweyn swore implacable revenge, and for two years executed it upon the wretched Islanders. The English towns of Exeter, Wilton, Norwich, and Thetford all record massacres, which show how widely the retaliation was applied. The fury of the avenger was not slaked by blood. It was baffled, but only for a space, by famine. The Danish army could no longer subsist in the ruined land, and departed in 1005 AD to Denmark. But the annals of 1006 AD show that Sweyn was back again, ravaging the county of Kent in the East of England, and sacking Reading and Wallingford. At last Ethelred, for thirty-six thousand pounds of silver, the equivalent of three or four years’ national income, bought another short-lived truce.

A desperate effort was now made to build a fleet. In the energy of despair, which had once inflamed the Carthaginians many centuries before, to their last effort an immense number of vessels were constructed by the poor, broken people, starving and pillaged to the bone. The new fleet was assembled at Sandwich in 1009 AD. “But”, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

Its leaders quarrelled. Some ships were sunk in the fighting; other were lost in a storm, and the rest were shamefully abandoned by the naval commanders.

There is the record of a final payment to the Vikings in 1012. this time forty-eight thousand pounds’ weight of silver was exacted, and the oppressors enforced the collection by the sack of Canterbury in the county of Kent, holding the Archbishop of Canterbury - Alphege to ransom, and finally killing him at Greenwich (just East of the City of London,) because he refused to coerce his flock to raise the money. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states:

It is vain to recount further the catalogue of miseries. In earlier ages such horrors remain unknown because unrecorded.

The Danish Prince Canute (Cnut)

Just enough flickering light plays upon this infernal scene to give us the sense of its utter desolation and hopeless wretchedness and cruelty. It suffices to note that in 1013 AD, Sweyn, accompanied by his younger son, Canute, came again to England, subdued the Yorkshire Danes and the Five Boroughs in the Dane-law, was accepted as overlord of Northumbria and Danish Mercia, sacked Oxford and Winchester in the South of England, in a punitive foray, and, though repulsed from London, was proclaimed King of England, while Ethelred fled for refuge to the Duke of Normandy, whose sister he had married. On these triumphs Sweyn died at the beginning of 1014 AD. There was another respite. The English turned again to Ethelred, “declaring that no lord was dearer to them than their natural lord, if he would but rule them better than he had done before”.

English King Edmund ‘Ironside’

But soon the young Danish Prince, Canute, set forth to claim the English Crown. At this moment the flame of Alfred’s line rose again in Ethelred’s son, Edmund - Edmund Ironside, as he soon was called. At twenty he was famous. Although declared a rebel by his father, and acting in complete disobedience to him, he gathered forces, and in a brilliant campaign struck a succession of heavy blows. He gained battles, he relieved London, he contended with every form of treachery; the hearts of all men went out with him. New forces sprang from the ruined land. Ethelred died, and Edmund, last hope of the English, was acclaimed King. In spite of all odds and a heavy defeat he was strong enough to make a partition of the realm, and then set himself to rally his forces for the renewal of the struggle; but in 1016, at twenty-two years of age, Edmund Ironside died, and the whole realm abandoned itself to despair.

Canute becomes King of England

The ecclesiastical aristocracy, which played so great a part in politics dwelt long upon the prophecies of coming were ascribed to St Dunstan. On the coast in Southampton in the very South of England, even while Edmund lived, the lay and spiritual chiefs of England agreed to abandon the descendants of Ethelred for ever and recognise the Danish Prince Canute as King. All resistance, moral and military, collapsed before the Dane. The family of Ethelred was excised from the royal line, and the last sons of the house of Wessex fled into exile. The young Danish prince received this general and abject submission in good spirit, although a number of bloody acts were required to attain and secure his position. He made good his promise to fulfil the duties of a king both in spiritual and temporal affairs to the whole country. The English magnates agreed to buy off the Danish army with huge indemnity, and the new King, in “an oath of his soul”, endorsed by his chiefs, bound himself to rule for all. Such was the compact solemnly signed by the English and Danish leaders. “The Kingly house”, as Ranke put it,

There were three principles upon which sovereignty could be erected: conquest, which none could dispute; hereditary right, which was greatly respected; and election, which was a kind of compromise between the two. It was upon this last basis that Canute began his reign. It is possible that the early English ideal of Kingship and just government in Alfred and Canute was affected by the example of Trajan. This Emperor was a favourite of Pope Gregory, who had sent the first missionaries. There is evidence that stories of Trajan’s virtue were read aloud in the English church service.

Everyone knows the lesson he administered to his flatterers when he sat on the sea-shore and forbade the tide to come in. He made a point of submitting himself to the laws whereby he ruled. He even in his military capacity subjected himself to the regulations of his own household troops. At the earliest moment he disbanded his great Danish army and trusted himself broadly to the loyalty of the humbled English. He married Emma of Normandy, the widow of Ethelred, and so forestalled any action by the Duke of Normandy on behalf of her descendants by Ethelred. In truth like many who followed him, he became Anglised.

Canute became the ruling sovereign of the North of England, and was reckoned as having five or six Kingdoms under him. He was already King of Denmark when he conquered England, and he made good his claim to be King of Norway. Scotland offered him its homage. There are still many connections between the old ‘Viking’ countries England, Norway, Sweden and Denmark that date from this time. The Viking power, although already undermined, still stretched across the world, ranging from Norway to North America, and through the Baltic to the East. But of all his realms Canute chose England for his home and capital. He liked, we are told, the Anglo-Saxon way of life. He wished to be considered the “successor of Edgar”, whose seventeen years of peace still shone by contrast with succeeding times. He ruled according to the laws, and he made it known that these were to be administered in austere detachment from his executive authority.

Canute the Christian

He built churches, he professed high devotion to the Christian faith and to the Papal diadem. He honoured the memory of the Anglo-Saxon St Edmund and St Alphege, whom his fellow-countrymen had murdered, and brought their relics with pious pomp to the seat of the English church in Canterbury. From Rome, as a pilgrim, in 1027 AD, he wrote a letter to his subjects couched in exalted and generous terms, promising to administer equal justice, and laying particular emphasis upon the payment of Church dues. These remarkable achievements, under the blessing of God and the smiles of fortune, were in large measure due to his own personal qualities. Here again we see the power of a great man to bring order out of ceaseless broils and command harmony and unity to be his servants, and how the lack of such men has to be paid for by the inestimable suffering of the many.

Some early records of Canute throw a vivid light upon his character and moods:

But this from a saga two centuries later is in a different vein:

The rise of the Normans - ‘Norsemen’ in Northern France

Meanwhile across the waters of the English Channel a new military power was growing up. The Viking settlement founded in Normandy in the early years of the 10th century had become the most vigorous military state in France. In less than a hundred years the sea-rovers had transformed themselves into a feudal society. Such records as exist are overlaid by legend. We do not even know whether Rollo, the traditional founder of the Norman state, was a Norwegian, a Dane, or a Swede. Norman history begins with the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, made by Rollo with Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks, which affirmed the suzerainty of the King of France and defined the boundaries of the Duchy of Normandy.

Normandy

In Normandy a class of knights and nobles arose who held their lands in return for military service, and sublet to inferior tenants upon the same basis. The Normans, with their craving for legality and logic, framed a general scheme of society, from which there soon emerged an excellent army. Order was strenuously enforced. No one but the Duke might build castles or fortify himself. The Court or “Curia” of the Duke consisted of his household officials, of dignitaries of the Church, and of the more important tenants, who owed him not only military service but also personal attendance at Court. Here the administration was centred. Respect for the decisions and interests of the Duke was maintained throughout Normandy by the Vicomtes, who were not merely collectors of taxes from the ducal estates, but also, in effect, prefects, in close touch with the Curia, superintending districts like English counties. The Dukes of Normandy created relations with the Church, which became a model for medieval Europe. They were the protectors and patrons of the monasteries in their domains. They welcomed the religious revival of the tenth century, and secured the favour and support of its leaders. But they made sure that bishops and abbots were ducal appointments.

It was from this virile and well organised land that the future rulers of England were to come. Between the years 1028 and 1035 the Viking instincts of Duke Robert of Normandy turned him seriously to plans of invasion. His death and his failure to leave a legitimate heir suspended the project, but only for a while.

Viking Emma

The figure of Emma, sister of Robert of Normandy, looms large in English history at this time. She is the key by which the Norman Vikings could claim the throne of England.

Ethelred had originally married her from a reasonable desire to supplement his failing armaments by a blood-tie with the most vigorous military state in Europe. Canute married her to give him a united England. Of her qualities and conduct little is known. Nevertheless few women have stood at the centre of such remarkable converging forces. In fact Emma had two husbands and two sons who were Kings of England.

The death of Canute

In 1035 Canute died, and his empire with him. He left three sons, two by a former wife and one, Hardicanute, by Emma. These sons were ignorant and boorish Vikings, and many thoughts were turned to the representatives of the old West Saxon line, Alfred and Edward, sons of Ethelred and Emma, then living in exile in Normandy. The elder, Alfred, “the innocent Prince” as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler calls him, hastened to England in 1036, ostensibly to visit his again widowed mother, the ex-Queen Emma. The venturesome Alfred was arrested and his personal attendants slaughtered. The unfortunate Prince himself was blinded, and in his condition soon ended his days in the monastery at Ely. The guilt of this crime was generally ascribed to Earl Godwin. In 1017 Canute had divided England down into four Earldoms – Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex. The Earl of Wessex, Godwin, former Thegn of Sussex, was the leader of the Danish party in England. He possessed great abilities and exercised the highest political influence. In 1019 he had accompanied King Canute to Denmark and had subsequently married Gytha, the sister of Earl Ulf, a powerful Dane. The succession being thus simplified, Canute’s sons divided the paternal inheritance. Sweyn reigned in Norway for a spell, but his two brothers who ruled England were short-lived, and within seven years the throne of England was again vacant.

The rise of the Godwin’s

Godwin continued to be the leading figure in the land, and was now master of its affairs. There was still living in exile in Normandy Edward, the remaining son of Ethelred and Emma, younger brother of the ill-starred Alfred. In these days of reviving anarchy all men’s minds turned to the search for some stable institution. This could only be found in monarchy, and the illustrious line of Alfred the Great possessed unequalled claims and titles. It was the Saxon monarchy which for five or six generations had provided the spearhead of resistance to the Danes. The West Saxon line was the oldest in Europe. Two generations back the house of Capet were Lords of little more than Paris and Ile de France, and the Norman Dukes were Viking sea rovers. A sense of sanctity and awe still attached to any who could claim decent from the Great King Alfred, and beyond him to Egbert and immemorial antiquity. Godwin saw that he could consolidate his power and combine both English and Danish support by making Edward King. He bargained with the exile, threatening to put a nephew of Canute on the throne unless his terms were met. Of these the first was the restriction of Norman influence in England. Edward made no difficulty; he was welcomed home and crowned; and for the next twenty-four years, with one brief interval, England was mainly governed by Godwin and his sons – Swegen, Harold, Tostig, and Gyrth. “He had been to such an extent exalted”, says the Chronicle of Florence of Worcester. “as if he had ruled the King of England.”

The English King Edward ‘The Confessor’

Edward was a quiet, pious person, without liking for war or much aptitude for administration. His Norman upbringing made him the willing though gentle agent of pro-Norman influence, so far as Earl Godwin would allow. Norman prelates appeared in the English Church, Norman clerks in the royal household, and Norman landowners in the English Shires. To make all smooth Edward was obliged to marry Godwin’s young and handsome daughter, but we are assured by contemporary writers that this union was no more than formal. According to tradition the King was a kindly, weak, chubby albino. Some later writers profess to discern a latent energy in a few of his dealings with the formidable group of Anglo-Danish warriors that surrounded him. Nevertheless his main interest in life was religious, and as he grew older his outlook was increasingly that of a monk, that of a ‘Confessor.’

In these harsh times he played much the same part as Henry VI, whose nature was similar, during the Wars of the Roses. His saintliness brought him as the years passed by a reward in veneration of his people, who forgave him his weakness for the sake of his virtues.

Meanwhile the Godwin family maintained their hold under the Crown. Nepotism in those days was not merely the favouring of a man’s own family; it was almost the only way in which a ruler could procure trustworthy supporters. The family tie, though frequently failing, gave at least the assurance of a certain identity of interest. Statistics had not been collected, but there was a general impression in these times that a man could trust his brother, or his wife’s brother, or his son, better than a stranger. We must not therefore hasten to condemn Earl Godwin because he parcelled out the English nation among his relations; neither must we marvel that other ambitious magnates found a deep cause of complaint in this distribution of power and favour. His son Swegen was Earl of Hereford and Gloucester and Oxford, Harold was Earl of East Anglia. For some years a bitter intrigue was carried on between Norman and Anglo-Danish influences at the English Court.

A crisis arose in the year 1051 AD, when the Norman party at Court succeeded in driving Earl Godwin into exile. During Godwin’s absence William ‘the bastard’ of Normandy is said to have paid an official visit to Edward The Confessor in England in his quest of the succession to the English Crown. Very likely King Edward promised that William should be his heir. But in the following year Godwin returned, backed by a force raised in Flanders, and with the active help of his son Harold Godwin. Together father and son obliged King Edward to take them back into power. Many of the principle Norman agents in the country were expelled, and the authority of the Godwin family was felt again throughout the land. The territories that they directly controlled stretched south of a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel.

Seven months after his restoration Earl Godwin died, on 14th April 1053 AD. Since Canute first raised him to eminence he had been thirty-five years in public life. Harold, his eldest surviving son, succeeded to his father’s great estates. He now filled his part in full, and for the next thirteen adventurous years was virtual ruler of England. In spite of antagonism of rival Anglo-Danish earls, and the opposition of the Norman elements still attached to the Confessor’s Court, the Godwin’s, father and son, maintained their rule under what we should call a constitutional monarchy. A brother of Harold’s became Earl of East Anglia, and a third son of Godwin, Tostig, who courted the Normans, and was high in the favour of King Edward, received the Earldom of Northumbria, dispossessing the earls of those counties. But there was now no unity within the house of Godwin. Harold and Tostig soon became bitter enemies. All Harold’s competence, vigour, and shrewdness were needed to preserve the unity of England. Even so, as we shall see, the rift between brothers left England a prey to foreign ambitions.

England weakens

The political condition of England at the close of the reign of Edward the Confessor was one of widespread weakness. Illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, metalwork and architecture of much artistic merit were still produced, religious life flourished, and a basis of sound law and administration remained, but the virtues and vigour of Alfred’s posterity were exhausted and English monarchy itself was in decline. A strain of feeble princes, most of whom were short-lived, had died without children.

Even the descendants of the prolific King Ethelred ‘The Unready’ died out with strange rapidity, at this moment only a sickly boy and his sister and an aged sovereign represented the warrior dynasty, which had beaten the Vikings and re-conquered the Dane-law. The great earls were becoming independent in the provinces.

Though England was still the only state in Europe with a Royal treasury to which the sheriffs all over the country had to account, Royal control over the sheriffs had grown lax. The King lived largely upon his private estates and governed as best he could through his household. The remaining powers of the monarchy were in practice severely restricted by a little group of Anglo-Danish notables. The main basis of support for the English kings had always been this select Council, never more than sixty. They, in a vague manner, regarded themselves as the representatives of the whole country. It was in fact a committee of courtiers, the greater Thegns, and ecclesiastics. But at this time in our story, this assembly of “wise men” in no way embodied the life of the English nation. It weakened the Royal executive without adding any strength of its own. Its character and quality suffered in the general decay. It tended to fall into the hands of the great families. As the central power declined a host of local chieftains disputed and intrigued in every county, pursuing private and family aims and knowing no interest but their own. Feuds and disturbances were rife. The people, too, were hampered not only by the many conflicting petty authorities, but by the deep division of custom between the Saxon and the Danish districts. Absurd anomalies and contradictions obstructed the administration of justice. The system of land-tenure varied from complete manorial conditions in Wessex to the free communities of the Dane-law in the North and East of England. There was no defined relation between Lordship and Land. The thane owed service to the King as a personal duty, and not in respect of lands he held. The English nation had come to count for very little on the Continent, and had lost the thread of its own progress. The defences, both of the coast and of the towns, were neglected. To the coming conquerors the whole system, social, moral, political, and military, seemed weak and effete under a weak, lax and over easy manipulated King.

The Norman invasion is foretold by Edward The Confessor

The figure of Edward The Confessor comes down to us faint, misty, frail. The medieval legend, carefully fostered by the Church, whose devoted servant he was, surpassed the man. The sun was slowly going down on Anglo-Saxon England, and in the ever growing darkness a gentle, grey-beard prophet foretold the end. When on his death-bed Edward spoke of a time of evil that was to come over the land his inspired mutterings struck terror into those who heard. Only Archbishop Stiganed, who had been Godwin’s supporter, remained un-moved, and whispered in Harold’s ear that age and sickness had robbed the King of his wits. Thus on January 5, 1066, a very unfortunate and evil year for both the English Nation and its last native King, ended the line of the house of Wessex and the descendants of Alfred. The national sentiment of the English, soon to be conquered, combined in the bitter period that lay ahead, with the gratitude of the Church to circle the Royal memory with a halo. As the years rolled by his spirit became the object of popular worship. His shrine at Westminster was the centre of pilgrimage. Canonised in 1161 AD, he lived for centuries in the memories of the native English folk. The Normans also had an interest in his fame. For them he was the King by whose wisdom the Crown had been left, or so they liked to claim, and some of those of Norman descent today along with those who claim to be pro-Norman, still like to claim the same, to Duke William ‘the bastard’ of Normandy. A show down between William of Normandy and Harold Godwinson – both of who knew each other, was a short while away, at Senlach Hill at Hastings in October 1066.

Hence both sides blessed his memory, and until England appropriated St George during the Hundred Years War St Edward the Confessor was the Kingdom’s patron saint. But Saint George proved undoubtedly more suitable to the needs, moods, and stubborn bloody-minded character of the English people.

C. A. Calladine