XLIII
The battle was over, after more than nine hours’ continued fighting; and now William’s tent was pitched upon the spot where the English standard had been planted. There he supped, and there, amid the thousands of dead and dying, he slept. On the morrow the mutilated body of Harold was found; but neither the bribes nor the entreaties of his aged mother, Gytha, who had now lost all her sons in battle, could induce William to yield it to her or any other. The perjurer, the excommunicate, he swore, should not have religious sepulture. Harold’s body should rest in unhallowed ground, beneath a cairn of stones on the rocks of Hastings, and should thus in death guard the Saxon shore he had guarded in life. And so to the shore at Hastings, wrapped in a purple robe, his body was borne. And truly, no other burial could be so fitting for the hero whose life was given for his trust. The Duke of Normandy was no sentimentalist, and to the minds of that age unconsecrated interment was a thing to be thought of only with a shudder; but he was chivalrously poetic here, without a suspicion of it himself, for no hero was ever laid in more fitting place than Harold, by the salt selvedge of the coast he had sworn to protect, and did protect to his last moment: and as for consecration—why, there be those who dare to think that the laying there of this man’s body, who shed his life-blood for the land that gave him birth, was itself hallowing and consecration transcendent for that rocky marge.
But the epic fitness of Harold’s resting-place was not perceived by that age, or was thought a thing of lesser moment than that he should be accorded religious burial; and thus it happened that, when the fury of the Conqueror’s first rage had died down, permission was accorded for Harold’s body to be translated to Waltham Abbey, the great minster himself had founded in Essex. The last days of the terrible year of 1066 were drawing in when that re-interment took place, and Sussex lost the bones of her patriot.
This is pre-eminently the era of national memorials, when heroes of to-day and of yesterday and other personages whom we are not all agreed to call heroes are honoured in effigies of bronze. ’Tis but yester-year since Alfred the Great was duly, and properly, commemorated in this shape, in his city of Winchester, and a statue of William of Orange—our William the Third—was erected, not so long since, on the spot where he landed, at Brixham, in Tor Bay; but Harold yet awaits his turn. For the why of it, I know not; unless indeed it be that we English are ever a thought too practical, and honour, not so much endeavour, as success. Alfred was successful; Harold in the end was crushed, and his England broken. Yet it was not himself was lacking; it was his rash irregulars, who, by their headlong zeal, lost him the day. He strove his utmost, and that utmost was, beyond rivalry, noble.
To say, “He did his best,” is the noblest epitaph we can give any man, and none should grudge Harold posthumous honour. We “Englishmen,” as we may still call ourselves, are not yet so indisputably the masters of the world that we can afford to disregard our national heroes, and Harold’s statue, of appropriate heroic size, surely should stand prominently over Hastings, to show newer generations how we can honour even endeavour that has won to no position, and that we can remember even our defeated heroes.
The Conqueror, as we must call him, despite his studied avoidance of that title, inimical to his “legal” claim, fully redeemed his vow to build a great abbey upon the field of battle. He built the Abbey, which he dedicated to St. Martin of the Place of Battle, on the place where so many had been slain to satisfy his ambition, rearing the High Altar, the holiest spot, on the exact position where Harold had fallen. William Faber, that Fabricius, or smith, turned monk, who was present at the great battle, and had been at the Duke’s side when he vowed the Abbey here, would, when it came to the actual building of it, have chosen another site; for here, he urged, on the hill-top, water was lacking. Let him and his brethren from the Abbey of Marmoutiers build in the valley, where the springs were never dry. But this suggestion outraged the Conqueror’s sense of the dramatic fitness of things, which, as we have already seen in his selection of Harold’s seashore resting-place, was a very keen sense indeed. No: he would build upon the actual field of battle, or not at all; and if the Almighty spared his life, wine should be more plentiful in that Abbey than water elsewhere.
Battle Abbey very soon began to rise on that field of blood. The King of England, as he was now become, spent money freely on it from his treasury; ship-loads of the fine building-stone of Caen came continually across Channel from Normandy, until, by one of those miraculous dreams dreamt at need in those times, a bed of stone was discovered, and a quarry opened, in the neighbourhood. The rising Abbey was richly endowed with manors far and near, and was made the centre of a three miles’ circuit exempted from all other jurisdictions, ecclesiastical or civil. Its abbots, moreover, were mitred and seated in the councils of the realm, and beside holding the privilege of sanctuary, theirs were the rights of free warren, inquest, and treasure-trove. Were they merciful men and pitiful, then those dispositions could be humoured to the full, for they were given the prerogative of pardoning any criminal they met on his way to execution: a prerogative that meant much in those days, when execution was done upon criminals for a large variety of offences.
More interesting than all others among William’s gifts to the Abbey were his sword and his coronation robes, which, stripped of their gold and silver chains and amulets in the reign of Rufus, for centuries remained objects of the greatest curiosity. But the Abbey was long a-building, and twenty-eight years had flown since the battle and William himself had been seven years in his grave, before it was completed and finally consecrated.