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
