The mind of William was just now mainly given to the affairs of his island kingdom.  In the winter of 1083 he hastened from the death-bed of his wife to the siege of Sainte-Susanne, and thence to the Midwinter Gemot in England.  The chief object of the assembly was the specially distasteful one of laying on of a tax.  In the course of the next year, six shillings was levied on every hide of land to meet a pressing need.  The powers of the North were again threatening; the danger, if it was danger, was greater than when Waltheof smote the Normans in the gate at York.  Swegen and his successor Harold were dead.  Cnut the Saint reigned in Denmark, the son-in-law of Robert of Flanders.  This alliance with William’s enemy joined with his remembrance of his own two failures to stir up the Danish king to a yearning for some exploit in England.  English exiles were still found to urge him to the enterprise.  William’s conquest had scattered banished or discontented Englishmen over all Europe.  Many had made their way to the Eastern Rome; they had joined the Warangian guard, the surest support of the Imperial throne, and at Dyrrhachion, as on Senlac, the axe of England had met the lance of Normandy in battle.  Others had fled to the North; they prayed Cnut to avenge the death of his kinsman Harold and to deliver England from the yoke of men—­so an English writer living in Denmark spoke of them—­of Roman speech.  Thus the Greek at one end of Europe, the Norman at the other, still kept on the name of Rome.  The fleet of Denmark was joined by the fleet of Flanders; a smaller contingent was promised by the devout and peaceful Olaf of Norway, who himself felt no call to take a share in the work of war.

Against this danger William strengthened himself by the help of the tax that he had just levied.  He could hardly have dreamed of defending England against Danish invaders by English weapons only.  But he thought as little of trusting the work to his own Normans.  With the money of England he hired a host of mercenaries, horse and foot, from France and Britanny, even from Maine where Hubert was still defying him at Sainte-Susanne.  He gathered this force on the mainland, and came back at its head, a force such as England had never before seen; men wondered how the land might feed them all.  The King’s men, French and English, had to feed them, each man according to the amount of his land.  And now William did what Harold had refused to do; he laid waste the whole coast that lay open to attack from Denmark and Flanders.  But no Danes, no Flemings, came.  Disputes arose between Cnut and his brother Olaf, and the great enterprise came to nothing.  William kept part of his mercenaries in England, and part he sent to their homes.  Cnut was murdered in a church by his own subjects, and was canonized as Sanctus Canutus by a Pope who could not speak the Scandinavian name.