ing greater than himself.

Conqueror though he was, the Dane was not exactly a foreigner in
England. The languages of the two nations were almost the same, and a
race affinity took away much of the bitterness of the subjugation,
while Canute ruled more as a wise native King than as a Conqueror.

{32}

But the span of life, even of a founder of Empire, is short. Canute's
sons were degenerate, cruel, and in forty years after the Conquest had
so exasperated the Anglo-Saxons that enough of the primitive spirit
returned, to throw off the foreign yoke, and the old Saxon line was
restored in Edward, known as "the Confessor."

Edward had qualities more fitted to adorn the cloister than the throne.
He was more of a Saint than King, and was glad to leave the affairs of
his realm in the hands of Earl Godwin. This man was the first great
English statesman who had been neither Priest nor King. Astute,
powerful, dexterous, he was virtual ruler of the Kingdom until the
death of the childless King Edward in 1066, when Godwin's son Harold
was called to the empty throne.

Foreign royal alliances have caused no end of trouble in the life of
Kingdoms. A marriage between a Saxon King and a Norman Princess, in
about the year 1000 A.D., has made a vast deal of history. This
Princess of Normandy, was the grandmother of the man, who was to be
known as "William {33} the Conqueror." In the absence of a direct heir
to the English throne, made vacant by Edward's death, this descent gave
a shadowy claim to the ambitious Duke across the Channel, which he was
not slow to use for his own purposes.

He asserted that Edward had promised that he should succeed him, and
that Harold, the son of Godwin, had assured him of his assistance in
securing his rights upon the death of Edward the Confessor. A
tremendous indignation stirred his righteous soul when he heard of the
crowning of Harold; not so much at the loss of the throne, as at the
treachery of his friend.

In the face of tremendous opposition and difficulties, he got together
his reluctant Barons and a motley host, actually cutting down the trees
with which to create a fleet, and then, depending upon pillage for
subsistence, rushed to face victory or ruin.

The Battle of Senlac (or Hastings) has been best told by a woman's hand
in the famous Bayeux Tapestry. An arrow pierced the unhappy Harold in
the eye, entering the brain, and the head which had worn the {34} crown
of England ten