Hereward, The Last of the English | Page 5

it was answered, 'The kingdom of the
English belongs to God. After you, He will provide a king according to
his pleasure.'" But those who will look at the facts will see in the holy
Confessor's character little but what is pitiable, and in his reign little
but what is tragical.
Civil wars, invasions, outlawry of Godwin and his sons by the Danish
party; then of Alfgar, Leofric's son, by the Saxon party; the outlaws on
either side attacking and plundering the English shores by the help of
Norsemen, Welshmen, Irish, and Danes,--any mercenaries who could
be got together; and then,--"In the same year Bishop Aldred
consecrated the minster at Gloucester to the glory of God and of St.
Peter, and then went to Jerusalem with such splendor as no man had
displayed before him"; and so forth. The sum and substance of what
was done in those "happy times" may be well described in the words of
the Anglo-Saxon chronicler for the year 1058. "This year Alfgar the
earl was banished; but he came in again with violence, through aid of
Griffin (the king of North Wales, his brother-in-law). And this year
came a fleet from Norway. It is tedious to tell how these matters went."
These were the normal phenomena of a reign which seemed, to the eyes
of monks, a holy and a happy one; because the king refused, whether
from spite or superstition, to have an heir to the house of Cerdic, and
spent his time between prayer, hunting, the seeing of fancied visions,
the uttering of fancied prophecies, and the performance of fancied
miracles.
But there were excuses for him. An Englishman only in name,--a
Norman, not only of his mother's descent (she was aunt of William the
Conqueror), but by his early education on the Continent,--he loved the
Norman better than the Englishman; Norman knights and clerks filled
his court, and often the high dignities of his provinces, and returned as
often as expelled; the Norman-French language became fashionable;
Norman customs and manners the signs of civilization; and thus all was
preparing steadily for the great catastrophe, by which, within a year of
Edward's death, the Norman became master of the land.

Perhaps it ought to have been so. Perhaps by no other method could
England, and, with England, Scotland, and in due time Ireland, have
become partakers of that classic civilization and learning, the fount
whereof, for good and for evil, was Rome and the Pope of Rome: but
the method was at least wicked; the actors in it tyrannous, brutal,
treacherous, hypocritical; and the conquest of England by William will
remain to the end of time a mighty crime, abetted--one may almost say
made possible, as too many such crimes have been before and since--by
the intriguing ambition of the Pope of Rome.
Against that tyranny the free men of the Danelagh and of Northumbria
rose. If Edward, the descendant of Cerdic, had been little to them,
William, the descendant of Rollo, was still less. That French-speaking
knights should expel them from their homes, French-chanting monks
from their convents, because Edward had promised the crown of
England to William, his foreign cousin, or because Harold Godwinsson
of Wessex had sworn on the relics of all the saints to be William's man,
was contrary to their common-sense of right and reason.
So they rose and fought: too late, it may be, and without unity or
purpose; and they were worsted by an enemy who had both unity and
purpose; whom superstition, greed, and feudal discipline kept together,
at least in England, in one compact body of unscrupulous and terrible
confederates.
But theirs was a land worth fighting for,--a good land and large: from
Humber mouth inland to the Trent and merry Sherwood, across to
Chester and the Dee, round by Leicester and the five burghs of the
Danes; eastward again to Huntingdon and Cambridge (then a poor
village on the site of an old Roman town); and then northward again
into the wide fens, the land of the Girvii and the Eormingas, "the
children of the peat-bog," where the great central plateau of England
slides into the sea, to form, from the rain and river washings of eight
shires, lowlands of a fertility inexhaustible, because ever-growing to
this day.
They have a beauty of their own, these great fens, even now, when they
are diked and drained, tilled and fenced,--a beauty as of the sea, of

boundless expanse and freedom. Much more had they that beauty eight
hundred years ago, when they were still, for the most part, as God had
made them, or rather was making them even then. The low rolling
uplands were clothed in primeval forest: oak and ash, beech and elm,
with here and there, perhaps, a group of ancient pines,