HKB
poured into the English court, she herself was followed by those who claimed kindred with her race, until even the very language of the Norman usurped that of the Saxon.
The Norman costume now became fashionable; those who were ambitious of rising in the king's favour, or who wished to stand high in the estimation of his favourites, began to speak in broken Norman, until, in the neighbourhood of the court, the Saxon seemed to have grown into an unfashionable language. One man alone, and he, the most powerful in the kingdom, still stuck sturdily to the old Saxon habits, and openly expressed his dislike of the Norman favourites. This was the cowherd, the son of Ulfnoth, whose daughter the king of England had married; and he, with his sons, who had proved themselves second to none in valour in the hard-fought field, rose up, and made head against the Norman encroachments. The Saxon earl, and his tall sons, boldly shouldered their way through the crowded court, where their sister and daughter reigned as queen; they lowered their helmets to no one, but rudely jostled as they passed the groups of knaves and place-seekers who infested the palace. Thus, without, at the folk-moots, and the guilds, the Saxon earl and his sons were the favourites of the people; while within, and about the palace, they were bitterly hated by the Norman favourites. Such was the state of parties at the English court nearly a thousand years ago, and it will be necessary for the reader to bear them in mind, for the better understanding of the changes which they lead to--the invasion of England by the Normans--a period at which we are now rapidly arriving.
Whether Edward believed that his mother Emma had a share in the death of her son Alfred, or was stung with the remembrance that she had left them to the mercy of a strange court, and that his position in England was rendered uneasy by those who had followed him with their clamorous claims across the ocean, or he disliked her for the favour which she had shown to her Danish son, Hardicanute, or envious of the immense wealth and possessions she is said to have accumulated during the reckless reign of the hard-drinking sea-king--whether led by one or another of these motives of dislike and suspicion, or actuated by a wish to resent the neglect with which she had treated him, he seized upon her possessions, lessened her power, and either confined her in the abbey of Wearwell, or limited her residence within the compass of the lands he granted her near Winchester. This act was countenanced by Godwin, who, though he studied his own aggrandisement, seems never wholly to have neglected the interests of the Saxons. Her alleged intercourse with the bishop of Winchester--her passing through the ordeal of fire unscathed, with naked feet over burning plough-shares, are dim traditions entirely unauthenticated by any respectable historian, although such trials were not uncommon, as we shall show, when we come to treat of the manners and customs of the Anglo-Saxons. After this period, Emma of Normandy is scarcely mentioned again by our early historians.