y the
general tenor of the Saxon laws, which did not recognize as heir to the
crown the son of a father who had not himself been crowned
[214];--forebodings of coming evil and danger, originating in Edward's
perturbed visions; revivals of obscure and till then forgotten
prophecies, ancient as the days of Merlin; rumours, industriously
fomented into certainty by Haco, whose whole soul seemed devoted to
Harold's cause, of the intended claim of the Norman Count to the
throne;--all concurred to make the election of a man matured in camp and
council, doubly necessary to the safety of the realm.

Warm favourers, naturally, of Harold, were the genuine Saxon population,
and a large part of the Anglo-Danish--all the thegns in his vast earldom
of Wessex, reaching to the southern and western coasts, from Sandwich and
the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End in Cornwall; and including the
free men of Kent, whose inhabitants even from the days of Caesar had been
considered in advance of the rest of the British population, and from the
days of Hengist had exercised an influence that nothing save the warlike
might of the Anglo-Danes counterbalanced. With Harold, too, were many of
the thegns from his earlier earldom of East Anglia, comprising the county
of Essex, great part of Hertfordshire, and so reaching into Cambridge,
Huntingdon, Norfolk, and Ely. With him, were all the wealth,
intelligence, and power of London, and most of the trading towns; with
him all the veterans of the armies he had led; with him too, generally
throughout the empire, was the force, less distinctly demarked, of public
and national feeling.

Even the priests, save those immediately about the court, forgot, in the
exigency of the time, their ancient and deep-rooted dislike to Godwin's
House; they remembered, at least, that Harold had never, in foray or
feud, plundered a single convent; or in peace, and through plot,
appropriated to himself a single hide of Church land; and that was more
than could have been said of any other earl of the age--even of Leofric
the Holy. They caught, as a Church must do, when so intimately, even in
its illiterate errors, allied with the people as the old Saxon Church
was, the popular enthusiasm. Abbot combined with thegn in zeal for Earl
Harold.

The only party that stood aloof was the one that espoused the claims of
the young sons of Algar. But this party was indeed most formidable; it
united all the old friends of the vi