The public events that form the history of the reign of the Confessor resolve themselves for the most part into a contest between two great parties or interests which divided the court and the country. The connection between England and Normandy had commenced forty years before the accession of this king by the marriage of Ethelred ; but it became very intimate after the accession of Edward, who had spent in Normandy all his life since his childhood, whose tastes and habits had been formed in that country, and all whose oldest personal friends were necesnarily Normans. In fact Edward himself, when he came to the throne, was much more a Norman than an Englishman; and he not unnaturally surrounded himself with persona belonging to the nation whose language and manners and mode of life were those with which he had been so long familiar, rather than with his less polished fellow-countrytnen. Many Normans came over to England as soon as he became king, and some of the highest prefermouta in the kingdom were bestowed upon these foreigner& But while the incli nations of Edward were probably from the first with the Normans, he MU to a great extant in the hands of the opposite, or English party, from his connection with Earl Godwin, its head. Besides the influence which he derived from having his daughter on the throne, this power ful nobleman held in hie own hands, and in those of his sons, the government of more than the half of all England. The eldest of these sons, Sweyn, very early in the reign of Edward, had been obliged to fly from the vengeance of the law for the daring crime of violating the person of an abbess; but after some time Edward consented, or found himself obliged, to pardon him, and to restore him to all his estates and honours. It was not till the year 1051 that the strength of the English and Norman parties was tried in any direct encounter; but that year, on occasion of a broil which arose out of the visit to England of Edward's brother-in-law, Eustace, count of Boulogne, their long-accumulated enmity broke forth into a violent collision. The first effect was the banishment of all the Godwin family, and the degra dation and imprisonment of the queen. At this crisis William, the young duke of Normandy, afterwards king of England, came over with a powerful fleet, and prepared to render Ede lard what assistance ho might have needed. The following summer however witnessed the complete overthrow of all that had been thus accomplished. Godwin and his son Harold forced their way back to the country at the head of armaments which they lied prepared—the former in Flanders, the latter in Ireland : a negociation was entered into with the king, and the issue was, that the earl mad his party were restored to greater power than ever ; the queen was re-established in her possessions and her place, and the Normaus were all expelled from the kingdom.
Earl Godwin only survived this counter-revolution a few months; he died suddenly as he sat at the royal table, on the 15th April 1053. His son Harold however inherited his possessions and his power, and the ascendancy of the family under its new head continued as great as over during the remainder of the Confessor's reign. In 1055 a dispute arose between Harold and the rival family of Leofric, earl of Leicester, which disturbed the kingdom for nearly two years. Leofrie died in 1057; but tho fend was continued by his son Alfgar, who called in to his assistance Griffith, or Griffin, king of the Welsh. This drew down the vengeance of Harold upon that prince and his subjects; and the issue was, that, after some fighting, Griffin consented to swear fealty to Edward. This event is assigned by the Saxon chronicle to the year 1056. The war with the Welsh was renewed in
1063: Harold had again the command, and prosecuted hostilities with so much mimes, that king Griffin's heed was cut off by his own sub jects, and sent by them to the English king in token of their submit'. mien. In 1065 the publio tranquillity was for a short time disturbed by an insurrection of the Nor but this was quelled out bloodshed. Edward died on the 5th of January 1066, and was buried the following day in the now Abbey of Westminster, which had just been finished and consecrated with great pomp about a week before. On the same day Earl Harold was solemnly crowned King of England. [Ewan Arnett:co; Hanoi.° 11.) England undoubtedly made a considerable advance in civilisation during the reign of the Confessor. For this it was indebted partly to the intercourse which Edward's accession opened with Normandy and Franco, but perhaps in a still greater degree to the freedom which the kingdom enjoyed from those foreign invasions and internal wars which had distracted it, with the exception of some short intervals of tranquillity, for the greater part of a century preceding. The only events, as we have seen, which disturbed the public peace during the reign of Edward, were one or two border wars and local insurrections, none of which occasioned any general disquiet, or lasted for any considerable time. This period accordingly was long traditioually remembered as the happiest that England had known. It formed in the national imagination the bright spot between the timo of the Danish rule on the one hand, end that of the Norman on the other ; the ago of English freedom and independence which succeeded the deliverance of the country from the one foreign conquest, and pre ceded its subjection to the other. For many generations after the establishment of the Norman power in the island, the constant demand of the great body of the people to their raters was for the restoration of the laws and customs of the Confessor. Hut we have no reason to oppose that this king was the author of any entirely new code of laws, or even that he made any material additions to the laws that had been in force before his time. On coming to the throne he was required by the Witenegemote to promise to observe the laws of King Canute, which seem to have been then universally held to be the fairest and the beet the nation had known. Edward took an oath iu conformity with this demand at his coronation. There has been preserved, both in Latin and in Romance, or Romanic! French, a body of laws and oonetitutious which the Conqueror is said to have granted at an assembly of the most distinguished of his English subjects, held about four years after his seizure of the crown, and they are described in the title as the same which his predecessor and cousin, King Edward, had before observed. The French text, preserved in Iugulphus, has generally been held to be the original; but Sir Francis Palgrave has stated reasons which throw considerablo doubt upon this supposition. Both versions are given in the most correct form, and accompanied with a learned and valuable commentary, in the Proofs and illustra tions appended to Sir Francis Palgrave's Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth,' pp.lxxxviii—exl. (See also Kembles 'Scions in England?) Edward the Confessor has the credit of being the first of our kings who touched for the king's evil. lie was canonised by Pope Alex ander III. about a century after his death, and the title of the Confessor was first bestowed upon him in the bull of canonisation. It may also be mentioned, that the use of the Great Seal was first introduced in this reign.