but never in a single fight.  Alfred and Edmund had fought battle after battle with the Dane, and men had no mind to submit to the Norman because he had been once victorious.  But Alfred and Edmund, in alternate defeat and victory, lived to fight again; their people had not to choose a new king; the King had merely to gather a new army.  But Harold was slain, and the first question was how to fill his place.  The Witan, so many as could be got together, met to choose a king, whose first duty would be to meet William the Conqueror in arms.  The choice was not easy.  Harold’s sons were young, and not born AEthelings.  His brothers, of whom Gyrth at least must have been fit to reign, had fallen with him.  Edwin and Morkere were not at the battle, but they were at the election.  But schemes for winning the crown for the house of Leofric would find no favour in an assembly held in London.  For lack of any better candidate, the hereditary sentiment prevailed.  Young Edgar was chosen.  But the bishops, it is said, did not agree; they must have held that God had declared in favour of William.  Edwin and Morkere did agree; but they withdrew to their earldoms, still perhaps cherishing hopes of a divided kingdom.  Edgar, as king-elect, did at least one act of kingship by confirming the election of an abbot of Peterborough; but of any general preparation for warfare there is not a sign.  The local resistance which William met with shows that, with any combined action, the case was not hopeless.  But with Edgar for king, with the northern earls withdrawing their forces, with the bishops at least lukewarm, nothing could be done.  The Londoners were eager to fight; so doubtless were others; but there was no leader.  So far from there being another Harold or Edmund to risk another battle, there was not even a leader to carry out the policy of Fabius and Gyrth.

Meanwhile the Conqueror was advancing, by his own road and after his own fashion.  We must remember the effect of the mere slaughter of the great battle.  William’s own army had suffered severely:  he did not leave Hastings till he had received reinforcements from Normandy.  But to England the battle meant the loss of the whole force of the south-eastern shires.  A large part of England was left helpless.  William followed much the same course as he had followed in Maine.  A legal claimant of the crown, it was his interest as soon as possible to become a crowned king, and that in his kinsman’s church at Westminster.  But it was not his interest to march straight on London and demand the crown, sword in hand.  He saw that, without the support of the northern earls, Edgar could not possibly stand, and that submission to himself was only a question of time.  He therefore chose a roundabout course through those south-eastern shires which were wholly without means of resisting him.  He marched from Sussex into Kent, harrying the land as he went, to frighten the people into submission.