the Danes and the English live peaceably together, Dunstan avoided one mistake which it is very easy to fall into. Many people are very anxious to improve others who do not know so much as themselves, or are not so good as themselves, but they do not succeed because they want everybody to do exactly as they do, and to think exactly as they think. Dunstan did not try to make the Danes exactly like the English. He wished the Danes to keep their own laws and customs and the English to keep theirs.

3. Dunstan brings in Schoolmasters.-Dunstan tried to unite men by teaching them to love what was true and beautiful. He was himself a lover of books, and music, and art. He was a great encourager of education. In the long wars the English had forgotten much that their forefathers knew. Dunstan sent abroad for schoolmasters, and nothing pleased him so much as to find a man who was fit to teach. If he encouraged the schoolmasters, he encouraged the monks as well. Monks, in those days, were not lazy as many of them afterwards beBede, who many years before had written a history of the country, was a monk. The men who wrote the Chronicle, that wonderful record in which the deeds of our forefathers were told in their own tongue, were also monks.

came.

4. Ethelred the Unready.-Edgar and Dunstan died and evil days came upon England. Edward, the next king, was murdered. Then came Ethelred, rightly named the Unready, or the man without counsel. Fresh Danes from Denmark and Norway

came to plunder and conquer England. In some places resistance was made, but the King did nothing to help the people who resisted. His only idea was to give the Danes plenty of money to go away. They went away, and of course they came back again and asked for more money to go away again.

5. Elfheah the Martyr.-There were brave men in England; but the bravest was Elfheah, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was taken prisoner by the Danes, and set in their midst as they were feasting. They asked him for money. He told them it was not his to give, because he could only find money by taking it from the poor people on the estates belonging to him as archbishop. They grew so angry that they pelted him with beef-bones to make him yield. He would not yield, and at last they killed him with the hard bones. The English Church wisely counted him as a martyr and a saint. Long afterwards, one of his successors, the pure and holy Anselm, was asked whether a man could really be a martyr who did not die for the faith. 'Yes,' he answered, he who dies for right

eousness dies for the faith.'

6. The Danish Conquest.-Brave men like Elfheah, or like others who fought and died, could not beat off the Danes unless they had a better king than Ethelred. The Danes, this time, wanted to conquer all England. They had a king, Swend, at their head, who knew how to fight, and when he died his son Cnut, who succeeded him after his death, fought as well as his father. At last Ethelred died and was

succeeded by a brave and vigorous king, Edmund Ironsides. So fiercely did he fight with Cnut that the Danish king agreed to share England with the English king. Not long afterwards Edmund died, or was murdered, and Cnut got the whole country. 7. The Reign of Cnut.-Cnut's reign was like Edgar's over again. Dane though he was, he let the English keep their own laws. He kept peace and established order with a strong hand. Though he was himself neither priest nor monk, he reverenced monks and priests as Dunstan had done. Once when he was rowing on those broad waters of the fens which have since been turned into rich pasture-land and corn-land, he heard the monks of Ely singing. He bade the boatmen row to the shore that he might listen to their song of praise and prayer. At another time he went on pilgrimage to Rome, that he might see the place which was reverenced through all the West of Europe. as containing the burial-places of the Apostles Peter and Paul. He had learnt gentleness and righteousness since the old cruel fighting-days of his youth were over. He wrote a letter from Rome to his subjects. I have vowed to God,' he wrote, to live a right life in all things, to rule justly and piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgment 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.'

8. The Sons of Cnut. Cnut's sons who came after him were not like their father. They were wild and

headstrong young men, and when they died Englishmen and Danes agreed to send beyond the sea for a son of Ethelred named Edward, who became king, and was afterwards known as Edward the Confessor, a name given by the Church to men of great piety, even when, as in Edward's case, piety was not accompanied by wisdom.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

1. The Normans in France.-Edward had been brought up in childhood in his mother's countryNormandy. Many years before, the Normans, as the Danes were called on the Continent, had seized the part of France which is on both sides of the mouth of the Seine, just in the same way as the Danes had seized the North of England. There had been a treaty which, like the Treaty of Chippenham, allowed them to keep the country they had taken. Their chief, Rollo, became Duke of the Normans. The Normans, after two or three generations, learned to speak French and to live as Frenchmen lived. But they did not become subjects of the French king in the way that the Danes in England became subjects of the English king. The French king was weak and could not conquer Normandy. The Norman duke treated him with all respect as his lord. Whenever a duke died, his successor acknowledged

himself to be the French king's man, as was the phrase. He then knelt down and, placing his hands between the French king's hands, swore to be faithful to him. But, for all that, he did not obey him unless he chose to do so, but behaved as if he were an independent ruler.

88

A NORMAN KNIGHT.

2. Englishmen and Normans.—In Normandy the duke had other men who were noblemen or gentlemen, who had their lands from him in the same way that he had his from the French king. They did homage to him and swore to be faithful to him. These men were called knights, and fought on horse