And now followed years of tragedy and strife. Edgar’s elder son, Edward, was very soon murdered by his stepmother, Ælfrida, and the throne passed into the hands of Edgar’s second son, Æthelred the Redeless, or Æthelred of Evil Counsel, the feeblest, most inept, most hopeless of all our monarchs, whether Saxon or English. His reign was to witness the recrudescence of Viking inroad and savage assault, and when, after bleeding the resources of the realm to death in a vain and hopeless effort to buy off the invaders, his foolish brain conceived the wickedness of murdering all the Danes in England--a fatuous and desperate act of villainy, hatched at Winchester and consummated on St. Brice’s Day 1002--the tragedy of misery was exchanged for the ruin of despair, and the terrible vengeance the Danes exacted was only ended by the conquest of the realm and the passing of it into Danish hands, and so Winchester became the capital of a greater empire than ever before or since--the capital of the great Scandinavian empire of Cnut. Most striking of all the figures of this period, more interesting far than the ignoble king, was Æthelred’s queen, Emma, daughter of Richard, Duke of Normandy, the beautiful, fascinating, and designing woman whom for her beauty the Saxons called Ælfgyfu Emma--Emma, the gift of the elves--whom Æthelred married at Winchester in 1002. A rare personality this Ælfgyfu Emma, but not a pleasing one. “I governed men by change, and so I swayed all moods,” she might have said of herself. The wife of two successive kings, and the mother of two more, she was to be for fifty years, and during five successive reigns, the central influence in Winchester history; for Æthelred on the day he married her presented Winchester and Exeter to her as her ‘morning gift,’ or wedding present, and when he died, Cnut the Dane, Æthelred’s successor, wedded her in turn. Of the details of her career we have yet to speak more fully, and after Cnut’s death she ‘sat’ or kept her court at Winchester for many years as the ‘Old Lady,’ the beautiful Saxon phrase for Queen Dowager. Her memory lingers now most closely around the charming old Tudor building, Godbegot House, fronting Winchester High Street, which occupies the site and still re-echoes the name of a little manor which once belonged to her--the little manor of Godbiete. Queen Emma granted it to the prior and convent of St. Swithun, “Toll free and Tax free for ever,” and toll free and tax free it remained for years and years, wherein none had right of access, and even the king’s warrant lost its authority. And so for some hundreds of years the liberty of Godbiete remained a source of division and evil influence, a sanctuary or ‘Alsatia’ right in the heart of the city, where those obnoxious to the law might shelter and defy its terrors. For “no mynyster of ye Kinge nether of none other lords of franchese shall do any execucon wythyn the bounds of ye seid maner, but all only of ye mynystoris of ye seid Prior