religion and set up a force of hus-earls to terrify local magnates and
enforce obedience to the English laws which he re-enacted. His division
of England into four great earldoms seems to have been merely a casual
arrangement, but he does not appear to have checked the dangerous
practice by which under Edgar and Ethelred the ealdormen had begun to
concentrate in their hands the control of various shires. The greater
the sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced the
monarchy and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen to
pieces under his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line in
the person of Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead under
whose nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and
East Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at length
for the crown itself. The strife resolved itself into a faction fight
between the Mercian house of Leofric and the West Saxon house of
Godwine, whose dynastic policy has been magnified into patriotism by a
great West Saxon historian. The prize fell for the moment on Edward's
death to Godwine's son, Harold, whose ambition to sit on a throne cost
him his life and the glory, which otherwise might have been his, of
saving his country from William the Norman. As regent for one of the
scions of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation of
his rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on the
veiled or open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him,
and were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader from
France.

The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument.
Anglo-Saxondom had only been saved from Danish marauders by the
personal greatness of Alfred; it had utterly failed to respond to
Edmund's call to arms against Canute, and the respite under Edward the
Confessor had been frittered away. Angles and Saxons invited foreign