Wide reaches of land were covered with wood, thicket and scrub, or consisted of heaths and moor. In both the east and the west there were vast tracts of marsh land; fens nearly one hundred miles long severed East Anglia from the midland counties; sites like that of Glastonbury or Athelney were almost inaccessible. The beaver still haunted marshy hollows such as those which lay about Beverley, the London craftsmen chased the wild boar and the wild ox in the woods of Hampstead, while wolves prowled round the homesteads of the north. But peace, and the industry it encouraged, were telling on this waste; stag and wolf were retreating before the face of man, the farmer’s axe was ringing in the forest, and villages were springing up in the clearings. The growth of commerce was seen in the rich trading-ports of the eastern coast. The main trade lay probably in skins and ropes and ship-masts; and, above all, in the iron and steel that the Scandinavian lands so long supplied to Britain. But Dane and Norwegian were traders over a yet wider field than the northern seas; their barks entered the Mediterranean, while the overland route through Russia brought the wares of Constantinople and the East. “What do you bring to us?” the merchant is asked in an old English dialogue. “I bring skins, silks, costly gems, and gold,” he answers, “besides various garments, pigment, wine, oil, and ivory, with brass and copper and tin, silver and gold, and such like.” Men from the Rhineland and from Normandy, too, moored their vessels along the Thames, on whose rude wharves were piled a strange medley of goods--pepper and spices from the far East, crates of gloves and gray cloths (it may be from the Lombard looms), sacks of wool, iron-work from Liége, butts of French wine and vinegar, and with them the rural products of the country itself--cheese, butter, lard, and eggs, with live swine and fowls. Cnut’s one aim was to win the love of his people, and all tradition shows how wonderful was his success. But the greatness of his rule hung solely on the greatness of his temper, and at his death the empire he had built up at once fell to pieces. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN. [The illegitimate son of Robert, surnamed Le Diable, duke of Normandy, and his father’s successor, born 1027; died, 1087. Claiming right of inheritance under a pretended bequest of Edward the Confessor, the Saxon king of England, he levied a great army of adventurers from all Europe, and in the great battle of Senlac, or, as it is sometimes known, Hastings, he defeated the Saxons and their King Harold, who had been elected by the voice of the _Wittenegamotte_, or Great Council of England, on October 14, 1066. Harold was slain, and the Norman conqueror was crowned. William’s transcendent abilities as a ruler, though stained by cruelty and rapacity, made his reign the greatest epoch in early English history.]