A HISTORY OF SURREY 



or churches unsacked between the Thames valley and the Pilgrims' 

 Way, the two main lines for the operation of armies. There can have 

 been but few churls who had not bowed themselves for need to the 

 protection of some strong man. 



There was peace under the strong rule of Cnut and under his two 

 worthless sons. But in the time of Harold the elder a deed of violence 

 was done in Surrey which made great stir at the time and has been 

 since a subject of keen debate. In 1036 Alfred son of Ethelred and 

 Emma came from Normandy to join his mother, who also was the 

 mother of Harthacnut, Harold's rival and half-brother, at Winchester. 

 He sailed from Wissant, no doubt landed in Kent, and was proceeding 

 by the Pilgrims' Way towards Winchester when he was seized at 

 Guildford, handed over to Harold and put to a cruel death. One 

 version of the chronicle and later authorities make Earl Godwine the 

 author of his arrest and impute some sort of treachery to the great earl. 

 Looking to the persistent anti-Norman policy of Godwine there is 

 nothing incredible in this. Alfred was a possible pretender, son of a 

 Norman mother, coming from Normandy, and no doubt, like his brother 

 Edward, of Norman tastes. The want of cohesion in England had 

 made it certain to fall either under direct Scandinavian or Norman- 

 French influence, and Godwine, allied by marriage to Danish and 

 Swedish kings, preferred the former. 



In 1042 the Danish king, Harthacnut, died in Surrey, at Lambeth, 

 when drinking himself drunk at a marriage feast in the house of Osgod 

 Clapa. Ten years later Godwine and his son Harold, returning from 

 exile, came to Southwark, and negotiated thence their return to power 

 and the exile of King Edward's Norman favourites, the first step towards 

 the ill-starred attempt to transfer the crown to their house, which ended 

 in handing over the country entirely to the influence against which they 

 had always striven. Because Harold died like a hero and a patriot at 

 Hastings, we need not forget that a king of either the West Saxon or 

 the Danish royal house would have had a better chance of preserving 

 a native rule of some sort for English and Danes in England, nor that 

 this more nearly kindred rule would have been a worse misfortune in 

 the long run than the rule which united England to western rather than 

 to northern Europe. 



One curious mark of distinction belonged to Surrey in the tenth 

 century : all the West Saxon kings of that century are said by one writer 

 or another to have been crowned at Kingston. Ethelstan was crowned 

 there according to good early authority, Ethelred according to the 

 unimpeachable authority of the contemporary chronicle. The others 

 are included by various later historians. If Edgar was crowned at 

 Kingston he was also crowned thirteen years later at Bath. But he 

 must have been crowned somewhere at the beginning of his reign. It 

 is difficult to assign any reason for the choice of the place of coronation. 

 Kingston was not the capital of the West Saxons, neither was it, like 

 Scone, an early place of crowning, so far as we know, nor, like Reims, a 



338 



