CHAPTER I.
While Harold sleeps, let us here pause to survey for the first time the greatness of that House to which Sweyn's exile had left him the heir.
The fortunes of Godwin had been those which no man not eminently versed in the science of his kind can achieve.

Though the fable which some modern historians of great name have repeated and detailed, as to his early condition as the son of a cow-herd, is utterly groundless [99], and he belonged to a house all-powerful at the time of his youth, he was unquestionably the builder of his own greatness.

That he should rise so high in the early part of his career was less remarkable than that he should have so long continued the possessor of a power and state in reality more than regal.
But, as has been before implied, Godwin's civil capacities were more prominent than his warlike.

And this it is which invests him with that peculiar interest which attracts us to those who knit our modern intelligence with the past.

In that dim world before the Norman deluge, we are startled to recognise the gifts that ordinarily distinguish a man of peace in a civilised age.
His father, Wolnoth, had been "Childe" [100] of the South Saxons, or thegn of Sussex, a nephew of Edric Streone, Earl of Mercia, the unprincipled but able minister of Ethelred, who betrayed his master to Canute, by whom, according to most authorities, he was righteously, though not very legally, slain as a reward for the treason.
"I promised," said the Dane king, "to set thy head higher than other men's, and I keep my word." The trunkless head was set on the gates of London.
Wolnoth had quarrelled with his uncle Brightric, Edric's brother, and before the arrival of Canute, had betaken himself to the piracy of a sea chief, seduced twenty of the king's ships, plundered the southern coasts, burnt the royal navy, and then his history disappears from the chronicles; but immediately afterwards the great Danish army, called Thurkell's Host, invaded the coast, and kept their chief station on the Thames.