"Our king is a good king," a squarely-built man,--whose bare arms
with the knotted muscles showing through the skin, and hands begrimed
with charcoal, indicated that he was a smith,--remarked to a gossip
as the little crowd broke up, "but it is a grievous pity that he
was brought up a Norman, still more that he was not left in peace
to pass his life as a monk as he desired. He fills the land with
his Normans; soon as an English bishop dies, straightway a Norman
is clapped into his place. All the offices at court are filled
with them, and it is seldom a word of honest English is spoken in
the palace. The Norman castles are rising over the land, and his
favourites divide among them the territory of every English earl
or thane who incurs the king's displeasure. Were it not for Earl
Harold, one might as well be under Norman sway altogether."

"Nay, nay, neighbour Ulred, matters are not so bad as that. I dare
say they would have been as you say had it not been for Earl Godwin
and his sons. But it was a great check that Godwin gave them when
he returned after his banishment, and the Norman bishops and nobles
hurried across the seas in a panic. For years now the king has left
all matters in the hands of Harold, and is well content if only he
can fast and pray like any monk, and give all his thoughts and
treasure to the building of yonder abbey."

"We want neither a monk nor a Norman over us," the smith said
roughly, "still less one who is both Norman and monk I would rather
have a Dane, like Canute, who was a strong man and a firm one, than
this king, who, I doubt not, is full of good intentions, and is a
holy and pious monarch, but who is not strong enough for a ruler.
He leaves it to another to preserve England in peace, to keep in
order the great Earls of Mercia and the North, to hold the land