of the island, to seek refuge among the fens and marshes of Lincolnshire, and of the other counties around.  Here, as has been already stated in a previous chapter when describing the Abbey of Croyland, were a great many monasteries, and convents, and hermitages, and other religious establishments, filled with monks and nuns.  The wretched fugitives from the expected scene of war crowded into this region, besieging the doors of the abbeys and monasteries to beg for shelter, or food, or protection.  Some built huts among the willow woods which grew in the fens; others encamped at the road-sides, or under the monastery walls, wherever they could find the semblance of shelter.  They presented, of course, a piteous spectacle—­men infirm with sickness or age, or exhausted with anxiety and fatigue; children harassed and way-worn; and helpless mothers, with still more helpless babes at their breasts.  The monks, instead of being moved to compassion by the sight of these unhappy sufferers, were only alarmed on their own account at such an inundation of misery.  They feared that they should be overwhelmed themselves.  Those whose establishments were large and strong, barred their doors against the suppliants, and the hermits, who lived alone in detached and separate solitudes, abandoned their osier huts, and fled themselves to seek some place more safe from such intrusions.

And yet, after all, the whole scene was only a false alarm.  Men acting in a panic are almost always running into the ills which they think they shun.  The war did not break out on the banks of the Thames at all.  Hardicanute, deterred, perhaps, by the extent of the support which the claims of Harold were receiving, did not venture to come to England, and Emma and Godwin, and those who would have taken their side, having no royal head to lead them, gave up their opposition, and acquiesced in Harold’s reign.  The fugitives in the marshes and fens returned to their homes; the country became tranquil; Godwin held his province as a sort of lieutenant general of Harold’s kingdom, and Emma herself joined his court in London, where she lived with him ostensibly on very friendly terms.

Still, her mind was ill at ease.  Harold, though the son of her husband, was not her own son, and the ambitious spirit which led her to marry for her second husband her first husband’s rival and enemy, that she might be a second time a queen, naturally made her desire that one of her own offspring, either on the Danish or the Saxon side, should inherit the kingdom; for the reader must not forget that Emma, besides being the mother of Hardicanute by her second husband Canute, the Danish sovereign, was also the mother of Edward and Alfred by her first husband Ethelred, of the Anglo-Saxon line, and that these two sons were in Normandy now.  The family connection will be more apparent to the eye by the following scheme: