Edward, broken with age and infirmities, saw the difficulties too great for him to encounter; and though his inveterate prepossessions kept him from seconding the pretensions of Harold, he took but feeble and irresolute steps for securing the succession to the duke of Normandy.[**] [6] While he continued in this uncertainty, he was surprised by sickness, which brought him to his grave on the fifth of January, 1066, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, and twenty-fifth of his reign.
[* Order.

Vitalis, p.

492.] [** See note F, at the end of the volume.] This prince, to whom the monks gave the title of Saint and Confessor, was the last of the Saxon line that ruled in England.

Though his reign was peaceable and fortunate, he owed his prosperity less to his own abilities than to the conjunctures of the times.

The Danes, employed in other enterprises, at tempted not those incursions which had been so troublesome to all his predecessors, and fatal to some of them.