A most nimble, sharp-striking, clear-thinking, prudent and effective man, who regulated this dismembered and distracted England in its Church matters, in its State matters, like a real King.

Had a Standing Army (_House Carles_), who were well paid, well drilled and disciplined, capable of instantly quenching insurrection or breakage of the peace; and piously endeavored (with a signal earnestness, and even devoutness, if we look well) to do justice to all men, and to make all men rest satisfied with justice.

In a word, he successfully strapped up, by every true method and regulation, this miserable, dislocated, and dissevered mass of bleeding Anarchy into something worthy to be called an England again;--only that he died too soon, and a second "Conqueror" of us, still weightier of structure, and under improved auspices, became possible, and was needed here! To appearance, Knut himself was capable of being a Charlemagne of England and the North (as has been already said or quoted), had he only lived twice as long as he did.

But his whole sum of years seems not to have exceeded forty.

His father Svein of the Forkbeard is reckoned to have been fifty to sixty when St.Edmund finished him at Gainsborough.