respecting the discovery and the burial of the corpse of our last Saxon king. The main circumstances, though they seem to vary, are perhaps reconcilable.[1] Two of the monks of Waltham Abbey, which Harold had founded a little time before his election to the throne, had accompanied him to the battle. On the morning after the slaughter they begged and gained permission of the Conqueror to search for the body of their benefactor. The Norman soldiery and camp-followers had stripped and gashed the slain, and the two monks vainly strove to recognize from among the mutilated and gory heaps around them the features of their former king. They sent for Harold's mistress, Edith, surnamed "the Fair" and "the swan-necked," to aid them. The eye of love proved keener than the eye of gratitude, and the Saxon lady even in that Aceldama knew her Harold.
The king's mother now sought the victorious Norman, and begged the dead body of her son. But William at first answered in his wrath, and the hardness of his heart, that a man who had been false to his word and his religion, should have no other sepulchre than the sand of the
- ↑ See them collected in Lingard, vol. i. p. 452, et seq.. Thierry, vol. i. p. 299; Sharon Turner, vol. i. p. 82; and Histoire de Normandie, par Lieguet, p. 242.
