Less known, save to students, is her husband, Leofric the great Earl of Mercia and Chester, whose bones lie by those of Godiva in that same minster of Coventry; how “his counsel was as if one had opened the Divine oracles”; very “wise,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “for God and for the world, which was a blessing to all this nation”; the greatest man, save his still greater rival, Earl Godwin, in Edward the Confessor’s court. Less known, again, are the children of that illustrious pair: Algar, or Alfgar, Earl of Mercia after his father, who died, after a short and stormy life, leaving two sons, Edwin and Morcar, the fair and hapless young earls, always spoken of together, as if they had been twins; a daughter, Aldytha, or Elfgiva, married first (according to some) to Griffin, King of North Wales, and certainly afterwards to Harold, King of England; and another, Lucia (as the Normans at least called her), whose fate was, if possible, more sad than that of her brothers. Their second son was Hereward, whose history this tale sets forth; their third and youngest, a boy whose name is unknown. They had, probably, another daughter beside; married, it may be, to some son of Leofric’s stanch friend old Siward Biorn, the Viking Earl of Northumberland, and conqueror of Macbeth; and the mother, may be, of the two young Siwards, the “white” and the “red,” who figure in chronicle and legend as the nephews of Hereward. But this pedigree is little more than a conjecture. Be these things as they may, Godiva was the greatest lady in England, save two: Edith, Harold’s sister, the nominal wife of Edward the Confessor; and Githa, or Gyda, as her own Danes called her, Harold’s mother, niece of Canute the Great. Great was Godiva; and might have been proud enough, had she been inclined to that pleasant sin. And even then (for there is a skeleton, they say, in every house) she carried that about her which might well keep her humble; namely, shame at the misconduct of Hereward, her son. Her favorite residence, among the many manors and “villas,” or farms which Leofric possessed, was neither the stately hall at Loughton by Bridgenorth, nor the statelier castle of Warwick, but the house of Bourne in South Lincolnshire, between the great woods of the Bruneswald and the great level of the fens. It may have been her own paternal dowry, and have come down to her in right of her Danish ancestors, and that great and “magnificent” Jarl Oslac, from whom she derived her all-but-royal blood. This is certain, that Leofric, her husband, went in East Anglia by the name of Leofric, Lord of Bourne; that, as Domesday Book testifies, his son Alfgar, and his grandson Morcar, held large lands there and thereabout. Alfgar’s name, indeed, still lives in the village of Algar-Kirk; and Lady Godiva, and Algar after her, enriched with great gifts Crowland, the island sanctuary, and Peterborough, where Brand, either her brother or Leofric’s, was a monk, and in due time an abbot.