He wrote a famous letter about his pilgrimage, directed to the archbishops, and bishops, the great men, and all the people. He tells whom he saw in Rome—the Pope, and the German Emperor, and other great lords of the earth; and says, with pride, that every one has treated him handsomely, and what fine presents he has had given him to carry home. He had come to Rome for the good of his people, and for the salvation of his own soul, he tells them seriously; and one thing he did for England was to complain of the heavy taxes the church had put upon it, and the Pope promised that such injustice [Pg183] should not happen any more. There is something very touching in the way that he says he had made a great many good resolves about his future life, and that he is not ashamed to own that he has done wrong over and over again, but he means, by God's help, to amend entirely. He vows to Heaven that he will govern his life rightly, and rule his kingdom honestly and piously, and that neither rich nor poor shall be oppressed or hardshipped. There never was a better letter, altogether, and Cnut kept his promises so well that the old Anglo-Saxon chronicle, which aches with stories of war and trouble, grows quite dull now in the later years of his reign. There was nothing to tell any more, the monks thought who kept the record; but we know, for that very reason, that the English farms flourished, and the wheat fields waved in the summer wind, the towns grew rich, and the merchants prosperous; and when the English-Northman king died, it was a sad day for England. Cnut was only forty years old, but that was a long time for a king to live. His son, Harold Harefoot, reigned in his stead, and many of the old troubles of the country sprang up at once, as if they had only been asleep for a little while, and were by no means out-grown or ended.