 in the government, but his warmest supporters could not pretend that he was a kinsman of King Edward; William was already a ruler whose fame had spread far beyond the borders of his own duchy, and in the third generation he could claim a common ancestor with the dead king. Lastly, we should remember that the fact which tinder modern conditions would outweigh all other considerations, the fact that William was a foreigner, was less important in the eleventh century than at any later time. It was certainly a disadvantage, but one which was shared in a less degree by both William's competitors: if he was a pure Norman, Harold was half a Dane, Edgar was half a German. The example of Cnut showed that there was nothing to prevent a man of wholly foreign blood from receiving general acceptance as long of England ; and if the racial differences which existed in the country prepared the way for his reception, something of the same work was done for William by those Normans who had flocked into England under King Edward's protection.
In all those cases in which the late king had left no single, obvious, heir to the throne, the succession would naturally be settled by the great men of the land by that informal, fluctuating body known as the "witan." So fax as we can tell, the witan would be guided in part by the preva.ili.Tig popular opinion, but more effectually by the known wishes of the dead sovereign with respect to his successor; we know, for instance, that both these influences contributed to the election of Edward the Confessor himself.  It is, however, probable that, so far from the elective nature of the monarchy having been a main principle of English institutions from the earliest date, the idea was really an importation of the eleventh century. It has recently been suggested that the action of the witan in early times with regard to the choice of a new king was something which would be much better described as "recognition" than as election in any modern sense, that there is no evidence to prove that the witan behaved as a united body, and that it was the adhesion of individual nobles to the most likely heir which really invested him with the royal power.  According to this account, such traces of election in the wider sense as are discernible in the eleventh century may with probability be set down to Danish influence, for the three Scandinavian nations had advanced much further than other Teutonic peoples in the development of their native institutional forms. But, even so, there is much in the history of the year 1066 to suggest that the older ideas still prevailed: William claimed the throne by hereditary right and it was the submission of Stigand, Edwin, Morcar, Edgar the Etheling, and the citizens of London, not the vote of any set assembly, which gave sanction to his claim.
In the light of this anticipation we may now consider the most perplexing question in William's life, the truth underlying the famous story of Harold's visit to Normandy and the oath which lie there swore to William. Unlike most questions relating to the eleventh century, the difficulty in the present case arises from the wealth of our information on the subject; with the exception of those purely English writers Florence of Worcester and the authors of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the significance of whose silence will be seen shortly, every historical writer of the fifty years succeeding the Conquest tells the story at length, and no two writers tell the same story. And yet we cannot safely reject the tale as fabulous for two reasons: the silence of those who wrote with native sympathies proves that there was an element of truth in the Norman story which they did not feel themselves at liberty to deny, while the rapid diffusion of the tale itself among writers widely separated in point of place and circumstance would be unintelligible if it were the result of sheer invention. Nor is a story necessarily suspicious because its details are romantic.
The skeleton of the tale is that Harold, happening, for reasons diversely stated, to be sailing i