incolnshire, 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