ABSTRACT
At the moment of Harthacnut's sudden death his half-brother Edward, the last surviving son of Aethelred the Redeless, was actually present in England. Edward was at the time thirty-seven years old—no king of England since Ecgbert had come to the throne at such a mature age. The sons of the architects who built the Anglo-Saxon churches of Bradford-on-Avon or Earl's Barton in the days of Edward the Confessor, would have been rearing something much more advanced by the year 1100, whether there had been a Norman conquest or no. Harold, the second son, received East Anglia in 1045. Earl Harold, to mark his horror at his brother's crime, solemnly bore Beorn's body from Dartmouth to Winchester and buried it beside the tomb of his uncle Cnut. Surely Harold Godwineson, the wise, the just, the merciful, but also the strong handed, was the kind of ruler under whom the days of Cnut might have come again.
