236 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

c h a v. on the fifth of January 1066, in the sixty.fifthm- year of his age, and twenty-fifth of his reign.

This prince, to whom the monks gave thetitle of faint and confessor, was the last of theSaxon line , that ruled in England. Though his ireign was peaceable and fortunate, he owed his (prosperity less to his own abilities than to the 1conjunctures of the times. The Danes, employedin other enterprises , attempted not those incursions,which had been so troublesome to all his predeces- jsors and fatal to some of them. The facility of !his disposition made him acquiesce under the [government of Godwin, and his son Harold;and the abilities, as well as the power of thesenoblemen, enabled them, while they wereentrusted with authority, to preserve domestic 1peace and tranquillity. The most commendablecircumstance of Edward’s government was hisattention to the administration of justice, and hiscompiling for that purpose a body of laws, whichhe collected from the laws of Ethelbert, In a, andAlfred. This compilation, though now lost (forthe laws that pass under Edward’s name werecomposed afterwards 51 ) was long the object ofaffection to the English nation.

Edward the Confessor was the first thattouched for the king’s evil: The opinion of hissanctity procured belief to this cure among thepeople : His successors regarded it as a part of theirstate and grandeur to uphold the fame opinion.

51 Spellm. in verbs Belliva.