under the tender care of Editha, might be safely proceeding to the distant fane, his haven of refuge. 1066 probable or 17. If we compare the different narratives But not imconcerning the inhumation of Harold, we shall impossible. find the most remarkable discrepancies. It is evident that the circumstances were not accurately known; and since those ancient writers who were best informed cannot be reconciled to each other, the escape of Harold, if admitted, would solve the difficulty. I am not prepared to maintain that the authenticity of this story cannot be impugned; but it may be remarked that the tale, though romantic, is not incredible, and that the circumstances may be easily reconciled to probability. There were no walls to be scaled, no fosse was to be crossed, no warder to be eluded; and the examples of those who have survived after encountering much greater perils, are so very numerous and familiar, that the incidents which I have narrated would hardly give rise to a doubt, if they referred to any other personage than a King. In this case we cannot find any reason for supposing that the belief in Harold's escape was connected with any political artifice or feeling. No hopes were fixed upon the usurping son of Godwin. No recollection dwelt upon name, as the hero who would sally forth from his seclusion, the restorer of the Anglo his 1066 Saxon power. That power had wholly fallen -and if the humbled Englishman, as he paced the aisles of Waltham, looked around, and, having assured himself that no Norman was near, whispered to his son, that the tomb which they saw before them was raised only in mockery, and that Harold still breathed the vital air-he yet knew too well, that the spot where Harold's standard had been cast down, was the grave of the pride and glory of England. CHAPTER VII. ENGLAND AT THE TIME OF THE CONQUEST. aspect of § 1. WILLIAM and his army, when they spread Physical themselves over this fertile and much-coveted England. realm, beheld a country whose aspect differed strangely from the prospects which hill and stream and plain offer at the present day. What did England possess? riches-yet not such as ours. Theirs was not the age of great cities: none of those centres of civilization and corruption, then existed in portentous magnitude; huge agglomerations, ramifying into the meads and pastures, where the green grass, and the sweet cowslip, and the bright ox-eyed daisy, shrink away from hard pavement and smoky sky. The landscape was not adorned and varied, as now, by the villa, the workhouse, the manufactory, the gaol: nor were there existing then any of the signs and wonders produced by modern science and art, the viaducts, the railroads, the canals, at once the causes and the effects of our activity and opulence. But were the differences confined to the works of man ? Not so. They extended to the features and characters affecting the whole has varied. climate and region of the land. We have remarkable evidence that, within such limits as are consistent with the fulfilment of the covenant made by the Creator, the face of the globe, in so far as it depends upon the distribution of moist and dry, heat and cold, nay, even hill and dale, and land and sea, has sustained extensive change. Temperature We are warranted in asserting, from various incidental notices, too minute to be suspected of inaccuracy, too simple to be the result of exaggeration, that, even as late as the twelfth century, the general temperature of the midland and southern parts of the island was not very unlike that of Canada at the present day.Enter the vineyards flourishing at Glastonbury, whose fruit produces a sweet and grateful wine; ascend the mountains of Craig-Eyriri, covered with unmelting snows, which then might have been called perpetual, from whence they derive their English or Saxon name; and you thus may mark the extremes of temperature prevailing within a comparatively narrow zone. Prevalence of uncultivated soil. § 2. Probably one-third of the face of the island was covered with wood; another third, uncultivated heath and moor. Marshlands were very extensive. Towards the German Ocean, East Anglia was almost separated from the Mercian shires by the fen country, extending more than an hundred miles in length, a waste of waters interspersed with sedgy shelves and islands, On the spreading its bleakness far around. the sea. In other places within the limits of the Recession of Northfolk and the Southfolk, the recession of the waters-which seems to have taken place much about the time that the ocean, bursting over the Belgian lowlands, formed the Zuyder Zee-though less extensive, is very remarkable. In the quiet village of Reedham, on the banks of the sluggish Yare, we could hardly recognise the coast where, in the tenth century, Bruern Brocard, the Scandinavian, was cast ashore by the tempest. Did we not possess the united testimony of charters and parliamentary proceedings, and of historians, we might doubt that, in the reign of Richard II., Lake Lothing was the Kirkley road-the haven in which the navies of England assembled in days of yore; and the ineffectual attempt which has been |