minority which excluded him from the throne seem cause rather for
rejoicing than grief: and whose rights, even by birth, were not
acknowledged by the general tenor of the Saxon laws, which did not
recognize as heir to the crown the son of a father who had not himself
been crowned [214];--forebodings of coming evil and danger,
originating in Edward's perturbed visions; revivals of obscure and
till then forgotten prophecies, ancient as the days of Merlin;
rumours, industriously fomented into certainty by Haco, whose whole
soul seemed devoted to Harold's cause, of the intended claim of the
Norman Count to the throne;--all concurred to make the election of a
man matured in camp and council, doubly necessary to the safety of the
realm.

Warm favourers, naturally, of Harold, were the genuine Saxon
population, and a large part of the Anglo-Danish--all the thegns in
his vast earldom of Wessex, reaching to the southern and western
coasts, from Sandwich and the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End in
Cornwall; and including the free men of Kent, whose inhabitants even
from the days of Caesar had been considered in advance of the rest of
the British population, and from the days of Hengist had exercised an
influence that nothing save the warlike might of the Anglo-Danes
counterbalanced. With Harold, too, were many of the thegns from his
earlier earldom of East Anglia, comprising the county of Essex, great
part of Hertfordshire, and so reaching into Cambridge, Huntingdon,
Norfolk, and Ely. With him, were all the wealth, intelligence, and
power of London, and most of the trading towns; with him all the
veterans of the armies he had led; with him too, generally throughout
the empire, was the force, less distinctly demarked, of public and
national feeling.