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Rh son of Earl Siward, was made Earl of Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire, as some compensation for the fact that his hereditary claims to Northumberland were a second time ignored. Harold's share in these transactions has sometimes been represented as an act of justice to the Northerners, done at the expense of his family's interests without any real necessity. Be that as it may, Tostig never forgave him for not rendering more effective support, and from this time forward became his bitterest enemy. It certainly looks as if Harold was thinking more of his own interests than Tostig's, and saw in Tostig's fall an opportunity of making the house of Mercia more friendly to himself in the future and less inclined to oppose him, should he make a bid for the crown. For now it was hardly concealed that Harold and his friends, in the event of the king's death, would seek to set aside the direct line of the house of Alfred and would propose that the house of Godwin should be put in its place. If, however, this was to be effected by general consent, without an appeal to force, it could only be by the action of the national assembly, in which Edwin and Morkere and their supporters would have a very influential vote. Harold, therefore, had very good reasons for making terms with them, as it clearly would be more advantageous to him to win the crown by consent than by force.

Questions as to Harold's motives are, however, a problem so complex as to defy our best efforts to unravel them, and all that can be said with certainty is that events were soon to shew that, in abandoning Tostig's cause and favouring the Mercian aspirations, he had taken the most prudent course. For in the winter following Tostig's fall Edward became seriously ill while superintending the building of the new abbey at Westminster, which he had recently founded. And here, in his manor house on the banks of Thames, he died on 6 January 1066, leaving the succession an open question. To his own contemporaries he was never the saintly person that later historians have depicted, but just a pious and often misguided ruler, who had attempted to bring the English into closer connexion with their continental neighbours than was desirable, and had rather wilfully undermined the insularity of his dominions without knowing how to bring them peace and security. It was only by later generations, who venerated him as the last of the line of Cerdic and Alfred, that he came to be honoured as a saint, and it was only in 1161 that the bull was issued by Pope Alexander III which conferred on him the title of "Confessor" which has become so familiar.

In tracing the political developments under Aethelred, Knut and Edward, little has been said about the economic or social side of English life; but it must not be thought that the period of ninety years from 975 to 1065 was a period devoid of social developments, or that materials are lacking for forming an estimate of the amount and character of the changes which were going on. On the contrary, did space permit, much might be said on such topics as the distribution of wealth and territorial