but the unlearned Ulf is emphatically said to have done “nought bishoplike.”  Smaller preferments in Church and State, estates in all parts of the kingdom, were lavishly granted to strangers.  They built castles, and otherwise gave offence to English feeling.  Archbishop Robert, above all, was ever plotting against Godwine, Earl of the West-Saxons, the head of the national party.  At last, in the autumn of 1051, the national indignation burst forth.  The immediate occasion was a visit paid to the King by Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had just married the widowed Countess Godgifu.  The violent dealings of his followers towards the burghers of Dover led to resistance on their part, and to a long series of marches and negotiations, which ended in the banishment of Godwine and his son, and the parting of his daughter Edith, the King’s wife, from her husband.  From October 1051 to September 1052, the Normans had their own way in England.  And during that time King Edward received a visitor of greater fame than his brother-in-law from Boulogne in the person of his cousin from Rouen.

Of his visit we only read that “William Earl came from beyond sea with mickle company of Frenchmen, and the king him received, and as many of his comrades as to him seemed good, and let him go again.”  Another account adds that William received great gifts from the King.  But William himself in several documents speaks of Edward as his lord; he must therefore at some time have done to Edward an act of homage, and there is no time but this at which we can conceive such an act being done.  Now for what was the homage paid?  Homage was often paid on very trifling occasions, and strange conflicts of allegiance often followed.  No such conflict was likely to arise if the Duke of the Normans, already the man of the King of the French for his duchy, became the man of the King of the English on any other ground.  Betwixt England and France there was as yet no enmity or rivalry.  England and France became enemies afterwards because the King of the English and the Duke of the Normans were one person.  And this visit, this homage, was the first step towards making the King of the English and the Duke of the Normans the same person.  The claim William had to the English crown rested mainly on an alleged promise of the succession made by Edward.  This claim is not likely to have been a mere shameless falsehood.  That Edward did make some promise to William—­as that Harold, at a later stage, did take some oath to William—­seems fully proved by the fact that, while such Norman statements as could be denied were emphatically denied by the English writers, on these two points the most patriotic Englishmen, the strongest partisans of Harold, keep a marked silence.  We may be sure therefore that some promise was made; for that promise a time must be found, and no time seems possible except this time of William’s visit to Edward.  The date rests on no direct authority, but it answers every requirement.