CANUTE. The island of Britain, which, compared with more northern countries was rich, fertile, and beautiful, was a constant temptation to the inhabitants of the shores of the Baltic, and of the countries now forming the kingdoms of Norway and Sweden. These Northmen possessed a navy which enabled them to make descents upon the coasts of all the countries bordering on the English seas. Besides these predatory descents upon the coast they had frequently large armies in the field, and disputed with the native princes the entire sovereignty of the southern portion of the island. They had poeseaeed themselves by right of conquest of much of the northern coast of France, where they had a succession of princes, who became at length, in the person of William the Norman (northmau), sovereign of England.
Much of the history of the Anglo-Saxon kings is the history of their contests with these formidable neighbours. The genius and military talents of Alfred for a while saved the country from their oppressions; but when he was dead, and was succeeded by a race of princes inferior to himself, the nation became less able to make an effectual ressietauee. Danes settled in many portions of the island, tribute was paid to them, and finally in the person of Canute, one of the greatest men in the line of this northern sovereignty, they accomplished that which they had so long desired—the entire subjugation of the Anglo-Saxon people, and the extinction for a time of the Anglo-Saxon sovereignty.
This then is the light in which we are to contemplate Canute : the king by birth and inheritance of the people now known as Danes, Normans, and Sweden, and as the man who accomplished the work of his father Sweyn in displacing the posterity of Egbert from the sove reignty of England. On the death of his father in 1014 the Danish army proclaimed Canute king of England, but it was not till after the death of Edmund in 1017 that he became sole king. He reigned about
twenty years (1017-1036), during which period the country was at peace. England of all his possessions be chose for his usual residence. He died at Shaftesbury, and was interred at Winchester, the usual place of interment of the Saxon kings. In the first years of his reign he was cruel, suspicions, and tyrannical; but when he had removed all who seemed to have a claim to the throne, he rifled with mildness, and for the most part with justice. His attention to the observances of religion, and his patronage of ecclesiastics, secured for him the praise of the monkish chroniclers; and iu their writings, Canute, successful in war, in peace appears humane, gentle, and religious. William of Malmeabury eaya of him, that by his piety, justice, and moderation, he gained the affection of his subjects, and an universal esteem among foreigners. The well-known story of the rebuke which he give to the flattery of his courtiers makes his name and his virtue more familiar to the English nation than all the encomiums of our chroniclers, or than his acts of piety in his journey to Rome and in the foundation of the two monasteries of St. Bennet of Holme and St. Edmund's Bury.
The reigns of the two sons of Canute were short and disturbed. In 1041 the posterity of Egbert, in the person of Edward, son of King Etheldred, regained the throne, This was Ed ward called the Confessor.
Hia reign was harassed by the Danes under Sweyn, another son of Canute. They also disputed the sovereignty with Harold, the son of Earl Godwin, who assumed the crown on the death of Edward ; and England might have suffered much longer from attempts of the northern chiefs had it not fallen under the sway of the race of Norman princes, who governed with a more vigorous hand than that of the Anglo-Saxon chiefs.