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398 broken up. Within their own borders, however, various Welsh chieftains remained as independent as ever.

During the course of the next year an untoward mishap befell Harold. For some reason or other he had occasion to take a sea trip in the Channel, and, as he was sailing from his paternal seat at Bosham in Sussex towards Dover, a storm caught him and drove his ship ashore on the coast of Ponthieu in France. Guy, the count of the district, when he heard of the wreck, gave orders for Harold's arrest, and being a vassal of William, the Duke of Normandy, handed him over to his overlord at Rouen as a captive. Harold thus became an unwilling guest at the Norman court. As such he accompanied the duke on a campaign into Brittany, but though he was outwardly treated with honour, he was informed that he would not be allowed to return to England unless he would become the duke's man and take an oath to assist William in the future, should he make a claim to the English throne on Edward's death. Seeing no other way of regaining his liberty, Harold had perforce to take the oath demanded of him, whereupon he was permitted to sail for England. On his return he made as little as possible of the misadventure, and no doubt regarded the oath extracted from him by force as of no validity; but he had none the less placed himself in a very false position, considering his own aspirations to be Edward's successor.

Harold came back to find a very disturbed state of affairs in the north of England. For nine years his brother Tostig had been Earl of Northumbria, but he had ruled harshly and had especially provoked discontent by treacherously causing the deaths of Gamel, son of Orm, and Ulf, son of Dolfin, two members of the old Bamborough house, and appropriating their estates. The result was that the kinsmen of the murdered men started an intrigue with the young Edwin of Mercia, and in 1065 broke into open insurrection. A little later they seized York and declared Tostig outlawed. They then elected Morkere, Edwin's younger brother, to be earl in Tostig's place, and putting him at the head of the Northumbrian forces, advanced into Mercia, where they were joined by Earl Edwin and his thegns and also by a body of Welshmen. Marching further south, the combined armies overran in succession Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, until at last they were met by Harold in the Thames valley. All this time Tostig had remained well out of the way, hunting in Clarendon forest in Edward's company. Harold intervened, it appears, with insufficient forces to risk a battle, and being reduced to negotiate had to accept the conditions demanded by Edwin and his Yorkshire allies.

As a result Morkere was officially recognised by King Edward as earl north of the Humber, whereupon Tostig retired in high dudgeon to Flanders to seek assistance from his father-in-law, Count Baldwin V (1036-1067). As part of the resettlement the youthful Waltheof, the