of London enabled Eadmund, when his father’s death raised him in 1016 to the throne, to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes, a decisive overthrow at Assandun and a treaty of partition which this wrested from him at Olney were soon followed by the young king’s death.  Cnut was left master of the realm.  His first acts of government showed little but the temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful, uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood.  Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at the king’s signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund Ironside, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by his ruthless hate.  But from a savage such as this the young conqueror rose abruptly into a wise and temperate king.  His aim during twenty years seems to have been to obliterate from men’s minds the foreign character of his rule and the bloodshed in which it had begun.

Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that the Norman was a foreigner after him.  His language differed little from the English tongue.  He brought in no new system of tenure or government.  Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king.  He dismissed his Danish host, and retaining only a trained band of household troops or “hus-carls” to serve as a body-guard relied boldly for support within his realm on the justice and good government he secured it.  He fell back on “Eadgar’s Law,” on the old constitution of the realm, for his rule of government; and owned no difference between Dane and Englishman among his subjects.  He identified himself even with the patriotism which had withstood the stranger.  The Church had been the centre of the national resistance; Archbishop AElfheah had been slain by Danish hands.  But Cnut sought the friendship of the Church; he translated AElfheah’s body with great pomp to Canterbury; he atoned for his father’s ravages by gifts to the religious houses; he protected English pilgrims even against the robber-lords of the Alps.  His love for monks broke out in a song which he composed as he listened to their chaunt at Ely.  “Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by” across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their abbey.  “Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear we these monks sing.”  A letter which Cnut wrote after twelve years of rule to his English subjects marks the grandeur of his character and the noble conception he had formed of kingship.  “I have vowed to God to lead a right life in all things,” wrote the king, “to rule justly and piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement to all.  If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was just, through headiness or negligence of youth, I am ready, with God’s help, to amend it utterly.”  No royal officer, either for fear of the king or for favour of any, is to consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor “as