lived and reigned as one who had abjured Christianity. [22]

The priests, especially on the Scandinavian continent, were often
forced to compound with their grim converts, by indulgence to certain
habits, such as indiscriminate polygamy. To eat horse-flesh in honour
of Odin, and to marry wives ad libitum, were the main stipulations of
the neophytes. And the puzzled monks, often driven to a choice,
yielded the point of the wives, but stood firm on the graver article
of the horse-flesh.

With their new religion, very imperfectly understood, even when
genuinely received, they retained all that host of heathen
superstition which knits itself with the most obstinate instincts in
the human breast. Not many years before the reign of the Confessor,
the laws of the great Canute against witchcraft and charms, the
worship of stones, fountains, runes by ash and elm, and the
incantations that do homage to the dead, were obviously rather
intended to apply to the recent Danish converts, than to the Anglo-
Saxons, already subjugated for centuries, body and soul, to the
domination of the Christian monks.

Hilda, a daughter of the royalty of Denmark, and cousin to Githa
(niece to Canute, whom that king had bestowed in second spousals upon
Godwin), had come over to England with a fierce Jarl, her husband, a
year after Canute's accession to the throne--both converted nominally,
both secret believers in Thor and Odin.

Hilda's husband had fallen in one of the actions in the Northern seas,
between Canute and St. Olave, King of Norway (that saint himself, by
the bye, a most ruthless persecutor of his forefathers' faith, and a