tles were then
nearly of the same import--Yric of Northumberland, and Edric of Mercia;
reserving only to himself the administration of Wessex. But seizing
afterward a favorable opportunity, he expelled Thurkill and Yric from
their governments, and banished them the kingdom; he put to death many
of the English nobility, on whose fidelity he could not rely, and whom
he hated on account of their disloyalty to their native prince. And even
the traitor Edric, having had the assurance to reproach him with his
services, was condemned to be executed and his body to be thrown into
the Thames; a suitable reward for his multiplied acts of perfidy and
rebellion.

Canute also found himself obliged, in the beginning of his reign, to
load the people with heavy taxes in order to reward his Danish
followers: he exacted from them at one time the sum of seventy-two
thousand pounds, besides eleven thousand which he levied on London
alone. He was probably willing, from political motives, to mulct
severely that city, on account of the affection which it had borne to
Edmund and the resistance which it had made to the Danish power in two
obstinate sieges.[25] But these rigors were imputed to necessity; and
Canute, like a wise prince, was determined that the English, now
deprived of all their dangerous leaders, should be reconciled to the
Danish yoke, by the justice and impartiality of his administration. He
sent back to Denmark as many of his followers as he could safely spare;
he restored the Saxon customs in a general assembly of the states; he
made no distinction between Danes and English in the distribution of
justice; and he took care, by a strict execution of law, to protect the
lives and properties of all his people. The Danes were gradually
incorporated with his new subjects; and both were glad to obtain a
little respite from those multiplied calamities from which the one, no
less than the other, had, in their fierce contest for power, experienced
such fatal consequences.

[Footnote 25: In one of these sieges Canute diverted the course of the
Thames, and by that means brought his ships above London bridge.]

The removal of Edmund's children into so distant a country as Hungary
was, next to their death, regarded by Canute as the greatest security to
his government: he had no further anxiety, except with regard to Alfred
and Edward, who were protected and supported by their uncle Richard,
Duke of Normandy. Richard even fitted out a gr