Canute did not hold his kingdom in peace.  Ethelred sent his son across the Channel into England to negotiate with the Anglo-Saxon powers for his own restoration to the throne.  An arrangement was accordingly made with them, and Ethelred returned, and a violent civil war immediately ensued between Ethelred and the Anglo-Saxons on the one hand, and Canute and the Danes on the other.  At length Ethelred fell, and his son Edmund, who was at the time of his death one of his generals, succeeded him.  Emma and his two other sons had been left in Normandy.  Edmund carried on the war against Canute with great energy.  One of his battles was fought in the county of Warwick, in the heart of England, where the peasant Godwin lived.  In this battle the Danes were defeated, and the discomfited generals fled in all directions from the field wherever they saw the readiest hope of concealment or safety.  One of them, named Ulf,[1] took a by-way, which led him in the direction of Godwin’s father’s farm.

Night came on, and he lost his way in a wood.  Men, when flying under such circumstances from a field of battle, avoid always the public roads, and seek concealment in unfrequented paths, where, they easily get bewildered and lost.  Ulf wandered about all night in the forest, and when the morning came he found himself exhausted with fatigue, anxiety, and hunger, certain to perish unless he could find some succor, and yet dreading the danger of being recognized as a Danish fugitive if he were to be discovered by any of the Saxon inhabitants of the land.  At length he heard the shouts of a peasant who was coming along a solitary pathway through the wood, driving a herd to their pasture.  Ulf would gladly have avoided him if he could have gone on without succor or help.  His plan was to find his way to the Severn, where some Danish ships were lying, in hopes of a refuge on board of them.  But he was exhausted with hunger and fatigue, and utterly bewildered and lost; so he was compelled to go forward, and take the risk of accosting the Saxon stranger.

He accordingly went up to him, and asked him his name.  Godwin told him his name, and the name of his father, who lived, he said, at a little distance in the wood.  While he was answering the question, he gazed very earnestly at the stranger, and then told him that he perceived that he was a Dane—­a fugitive, he supposed, from the battle.  Ulf, thus finding that he could not be concealed, begged Godwin not to betray him.  He acknowledged that he was a Dane, and that he had made his escape from the battle, and he wished, he said, to find his way to the Danish ships in the Severn.  He begged Godwin to conduct him there.  Godwin replied by saying that it was unreasonable and absurd for a Dane to expect guidance and protection from a Saxon.