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394 London, which boldly decreed outlawry for Godwin and all his sons. In these circumstances the earl thought it safest to take refuge with his friend Baldwin of Lille, the Count of Flanders, and wait for time to break up the king's party. He accordingly sailed for Bruges, taking his sons Svein and Tostig with him, the latter of whom had married Baldwin's daughter, while his sons Harold and Leofwine rode for Bristol and took ship to Ireland.

The direction of affairs in southern England after Godwin's departure seems to have fallen largely into the hands of the king's foreign friends. Greedy to obtain a share of Godwin's lands and honours, fresh troops of Normans and Bretons soon came flocking to England, and the king's wife Edith was deprived of her estates and sent in disgrace to the nunnery of Wherwell. Earl Leofric, however, was by no means backward in pushing his own interests, and used the crisis to consolidate his position in Mercia by obtaining a grant of Beorn's estates for himself, while his son Aelfgar stepped into Harold's shoes as Earl of East Anglia. As for Svein's estates, in Somerset, Dorset, Devon and the Severn valley, they seem to have passed to a new earl, Odda, whose patrimony lay chiefly in the neighbourhood of Pershore and Deerhurst.

The fall of Godwin's house was thus for the moment pretty complete. His exile, however, lasted but a short time, as a reaction set in when the English thegns realised that Normans and Bretons were the chief gainer's by Godwin's absence; and it quickly gathered strength when the news went round that a yet more powerful foreigner than any who had hitherto come was to visit Edward's court. This was Edward's kinsman William, the young Duke of Normandy. This prince made little secret of the fact that he regarded himself as a possible claimant to the English throne, should Edward die childless, and those who knew what the Normans were now doing in southern Italy naturally regarded him as coming to England to spy out the nakedness of the land, and shook their heads over his advent. His visit, as a matter of fact, was quite uneventful; but Edward had none the less blundered, so that in 1052 Godwin found himself in a position to return and claim back his lost possessions. Landing at Southwark, without having met with any effective opposition in the Thames from the king's ships under Earl Ralf and Earl Odda, he found the Londoners actively on his side as were also the prelates of English birth, led by Stigand, who aimed at obtaining the archbishopric of Canterbury. Neither Leofric nor Siward would now help Edward, and without them he could offer practically little resistance. The result was a panic among his foreign followers, many of whom, headed by Robert the Archbishop and Ulf of Dorchester, fled from London to a castle in Essex, which Robert the son of Wimarc was then building, and