The passing from the scene of the strangely unsubstantial and shadowy figure of the sainted Eadward ‘the Confessor’ was the signal for the bursting of the storm that was to overwhelm Anglo-Saxon England. For the last thirteen years of his reign the country had been practically governed by his great minister, Harold Godwineson, Earl of Wessex. Harold’s character has suffered much at the hands of Norman chroniclers; there is no real reason to think that he was morally worse than most men of his age. His practical ability was of a high order, and while administering the realm with success, he also gave proofs that he possessed tact and moderation. At the same time, his general success cannot hide the fact that England lacked political unity; it was a group of great family earldoms, whose heads looked upon each other with jealousy and distrust. Harold seems to have behaved with remarkable forbearance and friendliness towards the rival house of Leofric, and though he had more than one opportunity of aggrandizing his family at their expense, the death of Eadward the Confessor found Eadwine and Morkere, grandsons of Leofric, still ruling over his broad lands. Eadward the Confessor’s fondness for the Normans among whom he had been brought up was natural enough, and it is quite possible that the dominating personality of his cousin, William of Normandy, on the occasion of his visit in 1051, so impressed him that he made some sort of promise of leaving him his heir. At any rate when Harold, in 1064, after his shipwreck in the Channel, became William’s unwilling guest, the Duke had no scruple in exacting from him an oath of support. The decorative adjuncts--‘holy’ relics, and so forth--which he contrived in order to impress the superstitious bystanders, certainly had the desired effect on contemporary public opinion. Harold left as a hostage with William his hapless youngest brother Wulfnoth, destined to die in captivity. But when Eadward the Confessor died on January 5, 1066, he, according to the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,’ left his realm to Harold. The ‘Vita Eadwardi’ says much the same. It seems, also, that the Witan had already chosen Harold, for he was crowned the next day in the new Abbey Church of Westminster. It is a curious reflection that the great church, which was consecrated as the old king lay dying, was, in a sense, the funeral monument of early English times.