Harefoot

1 It was this difficulty that prevented Harthacanute from appearing promptly in England in the winter of 1035-1036, when Harold Harefoot was planning to seize the throne.

2 In 1036, when Harold Harefoot was king, Alfred the son of Ethelred was travelling from Normandy to join his mother at Winchester.

3 Edmund Iron-side, Harold Harefoot, Edward the Confessor; but this is exceptional, and the Anglo-Saxon, as a rule, was satisfied with one name.

4 Other matters were then introduced, and Shanty endeavoured to wind about Harefoot, but with little success; for, deep as he thought himself, he had one deeper to deal with.

5 He was a brutal King, whose first public act was to order the dead body of poor Harold Harefoot to be dug up, beheaded, and thrown into the river. 

6 Soon after the coronation of Harold Harefoot, they received a letter purporting to come from their mother, Emma, widow of Knut, inviting them to assert their claim to their father's throne.

7 He had murdered, or at least caused to be murdered, horribly, Alfred the Etheling, King Ethelred's son and heir-apparent, when it seemed his interest to support the claims of Hardicanute against Harefoot.

8 "When Harold Harefoot reigned king, About my neck he put this ring."

9 And, indeed, we have something parallel to these in modern times, such as the names of Harold Harefoot, Edmund Ironside, Edward Longshanks, Edward the Black Prince, &c.

10 He was such a fast runner at this, his favourite sport, that the people called him Harold Harefoot.

11 When Harold Harefoot seized his rival, Alfred, with six hundred followers, he "had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled."

12 Within seven years Harold Harefoot and Hardicanute, who succeeded him, had died as foully as they lived; and Godwin's turn had come.

13 At Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040.