An English king, Ethelred, in the hope, as we are told, of making the Northmen his friends instead of his persecutors and pirates, married the daughter of the Duke of Normandy. This Normandy is the Normandy that you will see on the maps of to-day and lies just across the English Channel. The Duke and his Normans (or Northmen) were of the same kin as the ravagers of the English coast. Therefore Ethelred seemed to be likely to gain peace for his kingdom when he married a daughter of this race. What did happen is that about sixty years later (he was married to the Duke's daughter in 1002) another Duke of Normandy, William, established himself as King of England. It is with this marriage of Ethelred's that the influence of Normandy in England begins. The Normans did not come upon England all of a sudden in 1066, the year of their conquest. There had been some preparation leading to it. [Sidenote: Massacre of the Danes] Unfortunately for Ethelred's hope of peace, he formed, or was led to agree to, a design of exterminating the Danes in England by a wholesale massacre. It was a design in which the English were the more ready to take a hand because of their hatred of the Danish troops which several of the kings had been keeping in their pay. These mercenaries were very insolent and high-handed in their dealings with the civil inhabitants, and on the signal given the inhabitants readily rose against them. Thus a general massacre took place; but then followed that which, with a people of the fierce and resolute character of the Danes and Northmen, was sure to follow. A great force came over the sea, and, though twice bought off by payment of the Danegeld, they came again in 1013, and yet again, and finally, two years later, under Canute they came to stay. Canute, victorious, was first acknowledged king of the old Danish possessions in the {122} east of England and a few weeks later of the entire country. Within a year he too married that sister of the Duke of Normandy who had been married to Ethelred and was now a widow. And so, once more, the Norman influence came in. Canute, who reigned close on twenty years, was followed by two kings of Danish race whose reigns only covered seven years together, and then followed the last of our Saxon kings, the first Edward. He was Saxon on the father's side; for his father was that Ethelred who married the Duke of Normandy's sister. On the mother's side, therefore, he was Norman. The right of this Edward, called the Confessor, to the kingdom was not undisputed, but he had the support of a certain Earl Godwine, who, with his sons, had become so great a power that he claimed, and was able to maintain, lordship over half the realm of England. This great earl consolidated his power by marrying his daughter to King Edward, and one of the sons of Earl Godwine was that Harold who became king after Edward, and who was defeated and killed by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.