Edward the Confessor

Heir, a person with the right to receive a title, position, or property.

For example, "Edward the Confessor had no obvious heir to the English throne".

Claimant.

Claimant, someone who says they have a right to something.

Cnut ruled a North Sea empire.

His empire included England, Denmark, and Norway.

The political situation in England became particularly complicated when Edward the Confessor became King of England in 1042.

Edward was an Anglo-Saxon king, but he had spent much of his early life in Normandy.

The Walker, yeah.

And in the next episode, we are going to see what happens when a storm blows a ship off course in the channel, and it lands on the coast of Ponthieu, and out of it, wet and furious, climbs the most powerful man in England, the Earl of Essex, brother-in-law of the king, and the man everyone in England expects to rule when the childless Edward the Confessor dies.

And this changes the entire course of William the Bastard's life and changes the entire course of English history.

That is very familiar stuff, uh, but what you've told us, Eleanor Barraclough, is not.

It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown, that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the tide.

for the victor was not then the king but only the king's younger brother there is from the first something humble and even accidental about alfred he was a great understudy the interest of his early life lies in this that he combined an almost commonplace coolness and readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of all that period with the flaming patience of saints in times of persecution while he would dare anything for the faith he would bargain in anything except the faith he was a conqueror with no ambitions an author only too glad to be a translator a simple concentrated wary man watching the fortunes of one thing which he piloted both boldly and cautiously and which he saved at last he had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph and settlement and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the parrot towards those wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been driven by fate itself but alfred as he himself wrote in words that are his challenge to the period held that a christian man was unconcerned with fate he began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the broken levies of the western shires especially the men of somerset and in the spring of eight seventy eight he flung them at the lines before the fenced camp of the victorious danes at ethandume his sudden assault was as successful as that at ashdown and it was followed by a siege which was successful in a different and very definite sense guthrum the conqueror of england and all his important supports were here penned behind their palisades and when at last they surrendered the danish conquest had come to an end guthrum was baptized and the treaty of wedmore secured the clearance of wessex the modern reader will smile at the baptism and turn with great interest to the terms of the treaty in this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong he must support the tedium of frequent references to the religious element in this part of english history for without it there never would have been any english history at all and nothing could clinch this truth more than the case of the danes in all the facts that followed the baptism of guthrum is really much more important than the treaty of wedmore the treaty itself was a compromise and even as such did not endure a century afterwards a danish king like canute was really ruling in england but though the dane got the crown he did not get rid of the cross it was precisely alfred's religious exaction that remained unalterable and canute himself is actually now only remembered by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power as the king who put his own crown upon the image of christ and solemnly surrendered to heaven the scandinavian empire of the sea end of chapter four this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org a short history of england by g. k. chesterton chapter five saint edward and the norman kings the reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given to the name which stands first in the title of this chapter i put it there as the best way of emphasizing at the beginning of what we may call the practical part of our history an elusive and rather strange thing it can only be described as the strength of the weak kings it is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well as to learn i would ask the reader to forget his reading and everything that he learnt at school and consider the english monarchy as it would then appear to him let him suppose that his acquaintance with the ancient kings has only come to him as it came to most men in simpler times from nursery tales from the names of places from the dedications of churches and charities from the tales in the taverns and the tombs in the churchyard let us suppose such a person going upon some open and ordinary english way such as the thames valley to windsor or visiting some old seats of culture such as oxford or cambridge one of the first things for instance he would find would be eton a place transformed indeed by modern aristocracy but still enjoying its medieval wealth and remembering its medieval origin if he asked about that origin it is probable that even a public schoolboy would know enough history to tell him that it was founded by henry the sixth if he went to cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the college chapel which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral he would probably ask about it and be told it was king's college if he asked which king he would again be told henry the sixth If he then went into the library and looked up Henry VI in an encyclopedia, he would find that the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him, was in history an almost invisible pygmy.

Amid the varying and contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher.

The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods.

His desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied.

And yet his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, and remain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all the ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon the wind.

Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI, was not only an invalid, but almost an idiot.

It is said that he was wan, like an albino, and that the awe man had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mental deficiency.