Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/88

74 cousin (first cousin once removed) of Edward, a claim which he strengthened by an early expression of Edward in his favor and by an oath which he had exacted from Harold to support his candidacy. The exact facts are not known regarding Harold's oath, made during an involuntary visit to Normandy two or three years before, but it enabled William to pose as the defender of a broken obligation and gave him the great moral advantage of the support of Pope Alexander II, to whom he had the question submitted. At Edward's death Harold had himself chosen by the witan, or national council, and crowned, so that he had on his side whatever could come from such legal forms and from the support which lay behind them. We must not, however, commit the anachronism of thinking that he was a national hero or even the candidate of a national party. There was in the eleventh century no such thing as a nation in the sense that the term is understood in the modern world, and the word could least of all be applied to England, broken, divided, and harried by Danish invasions and by internal disunion. Even the notion of the foreigner was still dim and inchoate, and the reign of Canute, to cite no others, had shown England that she had nothing to fear from a king of foreign birth. The contest between Harold, who was half-Danish in blood, and William, big as it was in national consequences, cannot be elevated to the rank of a national struggle.