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 th