in South Lincolnshire, between the great woods of the Bruneswald and the
great level of the fens. It may have been her own paternal dowry, and have
come down to her in right of her Danish ancestors, and that great and
"magnificent" Jarl Oslac, from whom she derived her all-but-royal blood.
This is certain, that Leofric, her husband, went in East Anglia by the
name of Leofric, Lord of Bourne; that, as Domesday Book testifies, his son
Alfgar, and his grandson Morcar, held large lands there and thereabout.
Alfgar's name, indeed, still lives in the village of Algar-Kirk; and Lady
Godiva, and Algar after her, enriched with great gifts Crowland, the
island sanctuary, and Peterborough, where Brand, either her brother or
Leofric's, was a monk, and in due time an abbot.

The house of Bourne, as far as it can be reconstructed by imagination, was
altogether unlike one of the tall and gloomy Norman castles which twenty
years later reared their evil donjons over England. It was much more like
a house in a Chinese painting; an irregular group of low buildings, almost
all of one story, stone below and timber above, with high-peaked
roofs,--at least in the more Danish country,--affording a separate room,
or rather house, for each different need of the family. Such a one may be
seen in the illuminations of the century. In the centre of the building is
the hall, with door or doors opening out into the court; and sitting
thereat, at the top of a flight of steps, the lord and lady, dealing
clothes to the naked and bread to the hungry. On one side of the hall is a
chapel; by it a large room or "bower" for the ladies; behind the hall a
round tower, seemingly the strong place of the whole house; on the other
side a kitchen; and stuck on to bower, kitchen, and every other principal
building, lean-to after lean-to, the uses of which it is impossible now to
discover. The house had grown with the wants of the family,--as many good
old English houses have done to this day. Round it would be scattered
barns and stables, in which grooms and herdsmen slept side by side with