Norman chivalry. At the head and on the flanks of each division marched several ranks of light-armed infantry, clad in quilted cassocks, and carrying long bows, or arbalets of steel. The duke mounted a Spanish charger, which a rich Norman had brought him when he returned from a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella, in Galicia. From his neck were suspended the most venerated of the relics on which Harold had sworn; and the standard, consecrated by the pope, was carried at his side by a young man, named Toustain-le-Blanc. At the moment when the troops were about to advance, the duke, raising his voice, thus addressed them :

"Remember to fight well, and put all to death; for if we conquer we shall all be rich. What I gain, you will gain; if I conquer, you will conquer; if I take this land, you shall have it. Know, however, that I am not come here only to obtain my right, but also to avenge our whole nation for the felonies, perjuries, and treacheries of these English. They put to death the Danes, men and women, on St. Brice's night. They decimated the companions of my kinsman, Alfred, and took his life. Come on, then ; and let us, with God's help, chastise them for all these misdeeds.'

The army was soon within sight of the Saxon camp, to the north-west of Hastings. The priests and monks then detached themselves from it, and ascended a neighbouring height to pray, and to witness the conflict. A Norman, named Taillefer, spurred his horse forward in front, and began the song-famous throughout Gaul-of the exploits of Charlemagne and Roland. As he sung, he played with his sword, throwing it up with force in the air, and receiving it again in his right hand. The Normans joined in chorus, or cried, "God be our help! God be our help!"

As soon as they came within bowshot, the archers let fly their arrows, and the cross-bow men their bolts; but most of the shots were deadened by the high parapet of the Saxon redoubts. The infantry, armed with spears, and the cavalry then advanced to the entrances of the redoubts, and endeavoured to force them. The Anglo-Saxons, all on foot around their standard planted in the ground, and forming behind their redoubts one compact and solid mass, received the assailants with heavy blows of their battle-axes, which, with a back-stroke, broke their spears, and clove their coats of mail. The Normans, unable either to penetrate the redoubts or to tear up the palisades, and fatigued with their unsuccessful attack, fell back upon the division commanded by William. The duke then commanded all his archers again to advance, and ordered them not to shoot point-blank, but to discharge their arrows upwards, so that they might fall beyond the rampart of the enemy's camp. Many of the English were wounded, chiefly in the face, in consequence of this manœuvre; Harold himself lost an eye by an arrow, but he nevertheless continued to command. and to fight. The close attack of the foot and horse recommenced, to the cry of "Notre Dame! Dieu aide! Dieu aide !" But the Normans were repulsed at one entrance of the Saxon Camp, as far

as a great ravine covered with grass and brambles, in which, their horses stumbling, they fell, pell-mell, and numbers of them perished. There was now a momentary panic in the army of the invaders it was rumoured that the duke was killed, and at this news they began to fly. William threw himself before the fugitives and barred their passage, threatening them, and striking them with a lance; then, uncovering his head, "Here I am," he exclaimed; "look at me; I live, and, with God's help, I will conquer."

The horsemen returned to the redoubts; but, as before, they could neither force the entrance nor make a breach. The duke then bethought himself of a stratagem to draw the English out of their position, and make them quit their ranks. He ordered a thousand horse to advance and immediately take to flight. At the sight of this feigned rout the Saxons were thrown off their guard, and all set off in pursuit, with their axes suspended from their necks. At a certain distance a body of troops, posted there for the purpose, joined the fugitives, who then turned round; and the English, surprised in the midst of their disorder, were assailed on all sides with spears and swords, which they could not ward off, both hands being occupied in wielding their heavy axes. When they had lost their ranks the gates of the redoubts were forced, and horse and foot entered together; but the combat was still warmly maintained, pell-mell, and hand to hand. William had his horse killed under him. King Harold and his two brothers fell dead at the foot of their standard, which was plucked from the ground, and the banner sent from Rome planted in its stead. The remains of the English army, without a chief and without a standard, prolonged the struggle until the close of day, so that the combatants on each side could recognise one another only by their language.

Having (says an old historian) rendered all which they owed to their country, the remnant of Harold's companions dispersed, and many died on the roads, in consequence of their wounds and the day's fatigue. The Norman horse pursued them without relaxation, and gave quarter to no one. They passed the night on the field of battle, and on the morrow, at dawn of day, Duke William drew up his troops, and had all the men who had followed him across the sea called over from the roll which had been prepared before his departure from the port of St. Valery. Of these, a vast number, dead and dying, lay beside the vanquished on the field.* The fortunate survivors had, as the first profits of their victory, the spoils of the dead. In turning over the bodies there were found thirteen wearing under their armour the monastic habit these were the Abbot of Hida and his twelve companions; the name of their monastery was the first inscribed in the "Black Book" of the conquerors.

The Normans, according to Rapin, lost six thousand men, and the English above sixty thousand. Hume says the Normans lost nearly fifteen thousand, which, as a fourth of William's army did not answer to the muster roll the morning after the battle, is probably the truest estimate.

The mothers and the wives of those who had repaired to the field of battle from the neighbouring country to die with the king, came to the field to seek for and to bury the bodies of their sons and husbands. The body of King Harold remained for some time on the battle-field, and no one dared ask for it. At length Godwin's widow, named Githa, overcoming her anguish, sent a message to Duke William, demanding his permission to perform the last rites in honour of her son. She offered, say the Norman historians, to give him the weight of her son's body in gold. But the duke refused harshly, saying that the man who had belied his faith and his religion should have no sepulture but the sands of the shore. He, however, eventually became milder, if we may believe an old tradition on this score, in favour of the monks of Waltham-an abbey founded and enriched in his lifetime by Harold. Two Saxon monks, Osgod and Ailrik, deputed by the Abbot of Waltham, made request and obtained leave to transport to their church the sad remains of its benefactor. They then proceeded to the heap of slain that had been spoiled of armour and of vestments, and examined them carefully one after another, but he whom they sought for had been so much disfigured by wounds that they could not recognise it. Sorrowing, and despairing of succeeding in their search by themselves, they applied to a woman whom Harold, before he was king, had kept as his mistress, and entreated her to assist them. She was called Edith, and poetically surnamed the Swan-necked. She consented to follow the two monks, and succeeded better than they had done in discovering the corpse of him whom she had loved.

These events are all related by the chroniclers of the AngloSaxon race in a tone of dejection which it is difficult to transfuse. They call the day of the battle a day of bitterness, a day of death, a day stained with the blood of the brave. "England, what shall I say of thee?" exclaims the historian of the church of Ely; "what shall I say of thee to our descendants? That thou hast lost thy national king, and hast fallen under the domination of foreigners; that thy sons have perished miserably; that thy councillors and thy chieftains are vanquished, slain, or disinherited!" Long after the day of this fatal conflict, patriotic superstition believed that the fresh traces of blood were still to be seen on the ground where the battle was. These traces were said to be visible on the heights to the north-west of Hastings whenever a little rain moistened the soil.* The conqueror, immediately upon gaining the victory, made a vow to erect on this ground a convent, dedicated to the Holy Trinity and to St. Martin, the patron of the soldiers of Gaul. Soon afterwards, when his good fortune permitted him to fulfil this vow, the great altar of the monastery was placed on the spot where the Saxon standard of King Harold had been planted and torn down. The circuit of the exterior walls

* The redness of the water here, and at many other places in the neighbourhood, is caused by the oxidozation of the iron which abounds in the soil of the weald of Sussex. Chronicle of Battel Abbey.

was traced so as to enclose all the hill which the bravest of the English had covered with their bodies. All the circumjacent land, a league wide, on which the different scenes of the battle had been acted, became the property of this abbey, which, in the Norman language, was called l'Abbaye de la Bataille, or Battel Abbey. Monks from the great convent of Marmoutiers, near Tours, came to establish here their domicile, and they prayed for the repose of the souls of all the combatants who perished on that fatal day.

It is said that, when the first stones of the edifice were laid, the architects discovered that there would certainly be a want of water. Being disconcerted, they carried this disagreeable news to William. "Work, work away," replied the conqueror jocularly; "if God grant me life, there shall be more wine for the monks of Battel to drink than there now is clear water in the best convent in Christendom." Thierry's History, p. C8.

REIGN OF THE CONQUEROR.

FROM 1066 TO 1087-20 YEARS, 10 MONTHS, 25 DAYS.
THE CONQUEROR'S COURTSHIP.

"Duke William of Normandy," says William of Jumièges, "having learned that Baldwin, Earl of Flanders, had a daughter named Matilda, very beautiful in person, and of a generous disposition, sent deputies, by the advice of his peers, to ask her of her father in marriage, who gladly consented, and gave her a large portion." Seven long years, however, of stormy debate intervened before the courtship of William of Normandy was brought to this happy conclusion. Contemporary chroniclers, indeed, afford us reason to suspect that the subsequent conquest of England proved a less difficult achievement to the valiant duke than the wooing and winning of Matilda of Flanders. He had to contend against the opposition of the Courts of France and Burgundy, the intrigues of his rival kinsmen of the race of Rollo, the objections of the Church, and, worse than all, the reluctance and disdain of the lady. The chronicler, Ingerius, declares "that William was so infuriated by the scorn with which Matilda treated him, that he waylaid her in the streets of Bruges, as she was returning with her ladies from mass, beat her, rolled her in the mud, spoiled her rich array, and then rode off at full speed." This teutonic mode of courtship, according to the above authority, brought the matter to a favourable crisis; for Matilda, being convinced of the strength of William's passion by the violence of his behaviour, or afraid of encountering a second beating, consented to become his wife. A different version of this strange episode in the royal wooing is given by Baudoin d'Avesnes, who shows that the provocation which the Duke William had received from his fair cousin was not merely a rejection of his matrimonial overtures, but an insulting allusion to the defect in his birth. According to this writer, the Earl of Flanders

D

received the Norman envoys who came to treat for a marriage between their duke and Matilda very courteously, and expressed great satisfaction at the proposed alliance; but when he spoke of it to the damsel his daughter, she replied with infinite disdain, that she would not have a bastard for her husband.

The earl softened the coarse terms in which Matilda had signified her rejection of Duke William, and excused her as well as he could to the Norman deputies; it was not long, however, before William was informed of what Matilda had really said. He was peculiarly sensitive on the painful subject of his illegitimacy, and no one ever taunted him with it unpunished. Neither the rank nor the soft sex of the fair offender availed to protect her from his vengeance. In a transport of fury he mounted his horse, and, attended only by a few of his people, rode privately to Lille, where the court of Flanders then was. He alighted at the palace gates, entered the hall of presence alone, passed boldly through it, strode unquestioned through the state apartments of the Earl of Flanders, and burst into the countess's chamber, where he found the damsel, her daughter, whom he seized by her long tresses, and as she, of course, struggled to escape from his ruffian-grasp, dragged her by them about the chamber, struck her repeatedly, and flung her on the ground at his feet. After the perpetration of these outrages, he made his way back to the spot where his squire held his horse in readiness, sprang to the saddle, and setting spurs to the good steed, distanced all pursuit.*

In after days, when the quarrel was adjusted, and the bold duke had won his bride, in the midst of the rejoicings at the nuptial feast the Earl of Flanders, waxing merry, asked his daughter, laughingly, how it happened that she had so easily been brought to consent at last to a marriage which she had so scornfully refused in the first instance. 66 Because," replied Matilda, pleasantly, "I did not know the duke so well then as I do now; for" continued she," he must be a man of great courage and high daring who could venture to come and beat me in my own father's palace."

Agnes Strickland's Queens of England, New Edition, vol. i., p. 24.

FORMATION OF THE NEW FOREST.

The Normans, as well as the ancient Saxons, were passionately fond of the chase, and none more so than the conqueror. Not content with those large forests which former kings possessed in all parts of England, he resolved to make a new forest near Winchester, the usual place of his residence. For that purpose he laid waste the country for an extent of thirty miles, expelled the inhabitants from their houses, seized their property, demolished thirtysix churches, besides convents, and made the sufferers no compen

* Although the Norman, French, and Flemish chroniclers differ as to the place where William the Conqueror perpetrated this rude personal assault on his fair cousin, and relate the manner of it with some few variations, they all agree to the fact that he felled her to the ground by the violence of his blows.