But he round whom their quarrels keep,
Lies still and takes no heed.
No strife can mar a dead man’s sleep,
And this is rest indeed.
Now Asselin at length is won
The land’s full price to take,
And let the burial rites go on,
And so a peace they make.
When Harold, king of Englishmen,
Was killed in Senlac fight,
Duke William would not yield him then
A Christian grave or rite.
Because he fought for keeping free
His kingdom and his throne,
No Christian rite nor grave had he
In land that was his own.
And just it is, this Duke unkind,
Now he has come to die,
In plundered land should hardly find
Sufficient space to lie.
THE DEATH OF WILLIAM RUFUS
The Red King’s gone a-hunting, in the woods his father made
For the tall red deer to wander through the thicket and the glade,
The King and Walter Tyrrel, Prince Henry and the rest
Are all gone out upon the sport the Red King loves the best.
Last night, when they were feasting in the royal banquet-hall,
De Breteuil told a dream he had, that evil would befall
If the King should go to-morrow to the hunting of the deer,
And while he spoke, the fiery face grew well-nigh pale to hear.
He drank until the fire came back, and all his heart was brave,
Then bade them keep such woman’s tales to tell an English slave,
For he would hunt to-morrow, though a thousand dreams foretold
All the sorrow and the mischief De Breteuil’s brain could hold.
So the Red King’s gone a-hunting, for all that they could do,
And an arrow in the greenwood made De Breteuil’s dream come true.
They said ’twas Walter Tyrrel, and so it may have been,
But there’s many walk the forest when the leaves are thick and green.