foot by Norman conquerors; and so dear became his memory that liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in his name.  Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or Henry called for the “good laws of Eadward the Confessor.”  But it was as a mere shadow of the past that the exile really returned to the throne of AElfred; there was something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his transparent womanly hands; and it is almost as a shadow that he glides over the political stage.  The work of government was done by sterner hands.

[Sidenote:  Godwine]

Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England lay in the hands of its three Earls, Siward of Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of Wessex, and it seemed as if the feudal tendency to provincial separation against which AEthelred had struggled was to triumph with the death of Cnut.  What hindered this severance was the greed of Godwine.  Siward was isolated in the North:  Leofric’s earldom was but a fragment of Mercia.  But the Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of England, seized district after district for his house.  His son Swein secured an earldom in the south-west; his son Harold became earl of East-Anglia; his nephew Beorn was established in Central England:  while the marriage of his daughter Eadgyth to the king himself gave Godwine a hold upon the throne.  Policy led the earl, as it led his son, rather to aim at winning England itself than at breaking up England to win a mere fief in it.  But his aim found a sudden check through the lawlessness of his son Swein.  Swein seduced the abbess of Leominster, sent her home again with a yet more outrageous demand of her hand in marriage, and on the king’s refusal to grant it fled from the realm.  Godwine’s influence secured his pardon, but on his very return to seek it Swein murdered his cousin Beorn who had opposed the reconciliation and again fled to Flanders.  A storm of national indignation followed him over-sea.  The meeting of the Wise men branded him as “nithing,” the “utterly worthless,” yet in a year his father wrested a new pardon from the King and restored him to his earldom.  The scandalous inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in a struggle which soon arose with Eadward himself.  The king was a stranger in his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally with the home and friends of his youth and exile.  He spoke the Norman tongue.  He used in Norman fashion a seal for his charters.  He set Norman favourites in the highest posts of Church and State.  Foreigners such as these, though hostile to the minister, were powerless against Godwine’s influence and ability, and when at a later time they ventured to stand alone against him they fell without a blow.  But the general ill-will at Swein’s inlawing enabled them to stir Eadward to attack the earl, and in 1051 a trivial quarrel brought the opportunity of a decisive break with him.  On his return from a visit to the court Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the