nit, and the teeth
clenched.

BOOK IV.
THE HEATHEN ALTAR AND THE SAXON CHURCH.

CHAPTER I.

While Harold sleeps, let us here pause to survey for the first time the
greatness of that House to which Sweyn's exile had left him the heir.
The fortunes of Godwin had been those which no man not eminently versed
in the science of his kind can achieve. Though the fable which some
modern historians of great name have repeated and detailed, as to his
early condition as the son of a cow-herd, is utterly groundless [99], and
he belonged to a house all-powerful at the time of his youth, he was
unquestionably the builder of his own greatness. That he should rise so
high in the early part of his career was less remarkable than that he
should have so long continued the possessor of a power and state in
reality more than regal.

But, as has been before implied, Godwin's civil capacities were more
prominent than his warlike. And this it is which invests him with that
peculiar interest which attracts us to those who knit our modern
intelligence with the past. In that dim world before the Norman deluge,
we are startled to recognise the gifts that ordinarily distinguish a man
of peace in a civilised age.

His father, Wolnoth, had been "Childe" [100] of the South Saxons, or
thegn of Sussex, a nephew of Edric Streone, Earl of Mercia, the
unprincipled but able minister of Ethelred, who betrayed his master to
Canute, by whom, according to most authorities, he was righteously,
though not very legally, slain as a reward for the treason.

"I promised," said the Dane king, "to set thy head higher than other
men's, and I keep my word." The trunkless head was set on the gates of
London.

Wolnoth had quarrelled with his uncle Brightric, Edric's brother, and
before the arrival of Canute, had betaken himself to the piracy of a sea
chief, seduced twenty of the king's ships, plundered the southern coasts,
burnt the royal navy, and then his history disappears from the
chronicles; but immediately afterwards the great Danish army, called
Thurkell's Host, invaded the coast, and kept their chief station on the
Thames. Their victorious arms soon placed the country almost at their
command. The traitor Edric joined them with a power of more than 10,000
men; and it is probable enough that the ships of Wolnoth had before this
time melted amicably into the armament of the Danes. If this, which seems
the most likely conjecture, be received,