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"Shall we go to Exeter, or back to Mercia?" I said. "Exeter they say; but I know not. Why not go and ask Jarl Osmund himself or follow the crowd and hinder no one with questions?" He hurried on; but then some men began to question us about the doings off Swanage, and Kolgrim told them such tales that they shivered, and soon we had a crowd round us listening.
Siward was isolated in the North: Leofric's earldom was but a fragment of Mercia. But the Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of England, seized district after district for his house.
May that mercy be still vouchsafed us! King of England. 1066. William I. In the fen country of Lincolnshire, there lived, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, a wealthy Saxon franklin named Leofric, Lord of Bourn. He was related to the great Earls of Mercia, and his brother Brand was Abbot of Peterborough, so that he, and his wife Ediva, were persons of consideration in their own neighborhood.
But as he is hated in Northumbria, and the earl and his brother of Mercia both have personal enmity against him, he can gather no following there, while Anglia and Wessex are devoted to Harold. Still he and the King of Norway may cause trouble." "The answer of Harold's ambassadors is, of course, a refusal?" "Assuredly," Wulf said.
Less known, save to students, is her husband, Leofric the great Earl of Mercia and Chester, whose bones lie by those of Godiva in that same minster of Coventry; how "his counsel was as if one had opened the Divine oracles"; very "wise," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "for God and for the world, which was a blessing to all this nation"; the greatest man, save his still greater rival, Earl Godwin, in Edward the Confessor's court.
A special court of justice was speedily organised, wherein Edric presided as ealdorman of Mercia, for Oxenford properly was a Mercian city, although, lying on the debateable land, it was frequently claimed by Wessex as the border land changed its boundaries.
Christ is to him true quietnesse and scepter void of end. In the daies of the foresaid king Alured, the kingdome of Mercia tooke end. For after that the Danes had expelled king Burthred, when he had reigned 22 yeares, he went to Rome, and there died, his wife also Ethelswida, the daughter of king Athulfe that was sonne to king Egbert followed him, and died in Pauia in Lumbardie.
Leofric, Earl of Mercia, rebuilt it, and gave the castle the name of the "New Work." But it too fell into decay, and in 1123 the present castle was built, which though much altered and afterwards sadly ruined, has come down to the present time.
"Not so; there is one way, and but one, to reconcile all England to thy dominion to win to thee not the cold neutrality but the eager zeal of Mercia and Northumbria; to make the first guard thee from the Welch, the last be thy rampart against the Scot. In a word, thou must ally thyself with the blood of these young earls; thou must wed with Aldyth their sister."
But in the long and obstinate warfare which they waged against the Britons it was needful to find a common leader whom the various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Wessex or Mercia might follow; and the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into a higher position than that of temporary chieftains.
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