his troops with weapons adapted for mountain conflict,
he penetrated to the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country to
complete submission. With the gift of the Northumbrian earldom on
Siward's death to his brother Tostig all England save a small part of the
older Mercia lay in the hands of the house of Godwine, and as the waning
health of the king, the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who had
returned from Hungary as his heir, and the childhood of the AEtheling
Eadgar who stood next in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to his
plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward to the throne.

[Sidenote: Normandy]

But his advance was watched by one even more able and ambitious than
himself. For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the
Norman land which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass nowadays
through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us. The name
of hamlet after hamlet has memories for English ears; a fragment of
castle wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves the
name of the Percy. The very look of the country and its people seem
familiar to us; the Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the
build and features of the small English farmer; the fields about Caen,
with their dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the
very picture of an English country-side. Huge cathedrals lift themselves
over the red-tiled roofs of little market towns, the models of stately
fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of AElfred or Dunstan, while
the windy heights that look over orchard and meadowland are crowned with
the square grey keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of Richmond and
the banks of Thames. It was Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader
like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from the French king,
Charles the Simple, in 912, at the moment when AElfred's children were
beginning their conquest of the English Danelaw. The treaty of
Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession of the
coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore. Hrolf, like Guthrum,
was baptized, received the king's daughter in marriage, and became his
vassal for the territory which now took the name of "the Northman's land"
or Normandy. But vassalage and the new faith sat lightly on the Dane. No
such ties of blood and speech tended to unite the northman with the
French among whom he settled along the Seine as u