In the year 1055, there was a funeral in the Church of St. Olaf, York. The corpse was conveyed through the streets of the city with great barbaric splendour and pomp. The procession, consisting of stalwart and bronzed warriors, was strikingly illustrative of the dead hero. Swords flashed in the sun; armour, pikes, and battle-axes glittered; and captured pennons, with other trophies of war, were borne along in triumph. Although all these warriors were mourners, the chief, and, indeed, the only one of the blood who followed, was a stripling of fifteen, young in years, but displaying muscular proportions, a military bearing, and features betokening valour, determination of purpose, and invincible resolution in the accomplishment of his will. The warrior was laid in his tomb with all due ceremonial, the priests closed their books, the soldiers who had followed him to many a battlefield, gathered round the open grave to take a last look at his coffin, and then dispersed, whilst the young mourner returned to the vice-regal castle, which now seemed so solitary and desolate without the sound of his father's voice. The defunct warrior was stout old Siward, the Northumbrian Earl, who had scorned "to die the death of a cow," and the mourner who followed his remains was his sole surviving son, Waltheof; his elder son, Osbert, having been slain in battle. Eadward the Confessor was then King, and he, deeming Waltheof too young and inexperienced to rule so ungovernable a people as the Northumbrians, appointed Tosti, a younger son of Earl Godwine, and brother to Harold, afterwards King, to the Earldom. Tosti, however, ruled the people with such intolerable cruelty and oppression that the people of York broke into his mansion, plundered it, and murdered his house-carles; they then assembled in a folkgemôte and formally deposed him, electing Morkere of Mercia in his room. This was an illegal act, but the King, when he heard the circumstances of the case, confirmed it, as did also the Witan-Gemôte of Westminster. Morkere constituted Osulf, Waltheof's uncle, his deputy in Bernicia, on whose death he was succeeded by his brother, Gospatric.