elect as a matter of course, one who was not of the stock of Cerdic
and who was a stranger into the bargain. Out of England it would
not seem strange when William set forth that Edward, having no
direct heirs, had chosen his near kinsman William as his successor.
Put by itself, that statement had a plausible sound. The
transmission of a crown by bequest belongs to the same range of
ideas as its transmission by hereditary right; both assume the
crown to be a property and not an office. Edward's nomination of
Harold, the election of Harold, the fact that William's kindred to
Edward lay outside the royal line of England, the fact that there
was, in the person of Edgar, a nearer kinsman within that royal
line, could all be slurred over or explained away or even turned to
William's profit. Let it be that Edward on his death-bed had
recommended Harold, and that the Witan had elected Harold. The
recommendation was wrung from a dying man in opposition to an
earlier act done when he was able to act freely. The election was
brought about by force or fraud; if it was free, it was of no force
against William's earlier claim of kindred and bequest. As for
Edgar, as few people in England thought of him, still fewer out of
England would have ever heard of him. It is more strange that the
bastardy of William did not tell against him, as it had once told
in his own duchy. But this fact again marks the transitional age.
Altogether the tale that a man who was no kinsman of the late king
had taken to himself the crown which the king had bequeathed to a
kinsman, might, even without further aggravation, be easily made to
sound like a tale of wrong.

But the case gained tenfold strength when William added that the
doer of the wrong was of all men the one most specially bound not
to do it. The usurper was in any case William's man, bound to act