ord, and the lord in turn being bound, together with his
dependents, to fight for a higher lord, and all at last for the Duke
himself. In England, though, in theory, the relations between the king
and his ealdormen were not very different from those existing between
the Norman duke and his immediate vassals, the connection between them
was far looser. The kingdom as a whole had no general unity. The king
could not control the ealdormen, and the ealdormen could not control
the king. Even when ealdormen, bishops, and thegns met in the
Witenagemot they could not speak in the name of the nation. A nation
in any true sense hardly existed at all, and they were not chosen as
representatives of any part of it. Each one stood for himself, and it
was only natural that men who during the greater part of the year were
ruling in their own districts like little kings should think more of
keeping up their own almost independent power at home than of the
common interests of all England, which they had to consider when they
met--and that for a few days only at a time--in the Witenagemot.
AEthelred at least was not the man to keep them united.

6. =Svend's Conquest. 1002--1013.=--AEthelred, having failed to buy off
the Danes, tried to murder them. In =1002=, on St. Brice's Day, there
was a general massacre of all the Danes--not of the old inhabitants of
Danish blood who had settled in AElfred's time--but of the new-comers.
Svend returned to avenge his countrymen. AEthelred had in an earlier
part of his reign levied a land-tax known as the Danegeld to pay off
the Danes--the first instance of a general tax in England. He now
called on all the shires to furnish ships for a fleet; but he could
not trust his ealdormen. Some of the stories told of these times may
be exaggerated, and some may be merely idle tales, but we know enough
to be sure that England was a kingdom divided against itself. Svend,
ravaging as he went, beat down resistance everywhere. In =1012= the
Danes seized AElfheah, Archbishop of Canterbury, and offered to set him
free if he would pay a ransom for his life. He refused to do so, lest
he should have to wring money from the poor in order to pay it. The
drunken Danes pelted him with bones till one of the number clave his
skull with an axe. He was soon counted as a martyr. Long afterwards
one of the most famous of his successors, the Norman Lanfranc, doubted
whether he was really a martyr, as he had not died for the faith. 'He