drove out the Germans, concealed in the vast forest of Ardennes, whence they harassed his army with perpetual irruptions, not by means of his own countrymen, but by the confederate Gauls; that, while strangers destroyed each other, he might gain a bloodless victory. Thus, I say, William acted towards the English. For, allowing the Normans to be unemployed, he opposed an English army, and an English commander, to those, who, after the first unsuccessful battle, had fled to Denmark and Ireland, and had returned at the end of three years with considerable force: forseeing that whichever side might conquer, it must be a great advantage to himself. Nor did this device fail him; for both parties of the English, after some conflicts between themselves, without any exertion on his part, left a victory for the king; the invaders being driven to Ireland, and the royalists purchasing the empty title of conquest, at their own special loss, and that of their general. His name was Ednoth,[1] equally celebrated, before the arrival of the Normans, both at home and abroad. He was the father of Harding, who yet survives: a man more accustomed to kindle strife by his malignant tongue, than to brandish arms in the field of battle. Thus having overturned the power of the laity, he made an ordinance, that no monk, or clergyman, of that nation, should be suffered to aspire to any dignity whatever; excessively differing from the gentleness of Canute the former king, who restored their honors, unimpaired, to the conquered: whence it came to pass, that at his decease, the natives easily expelled the foreigners, and reclaimed their original right. But William, from certain causes, canonically deposed some persons, and in the place of such as might die, appointed diligent men of any nation, except English. Unless I am deceived, their inveterate frowardness towards the king, required such a measure; since, as I have said before, the Normans are by nature kindly disposed to strangers who live amongst them.
Ralph, whom I mentioned before, was, by the king's gift, earl of Norfolk and Suffolk; a Breton on his father's side; of a disposition foreign to every thing good. This man, in
- ↑ "Harold's master of the horse. He was killed in 1068, in opposing the sons of Harold, when they came upon their expedition from Ireland."—Hardy.
