The body of Harold himself, grievously disfigured, but recognised, according to a well-known story, by his lady-love, “Edith with the swan’s neck,” is said to have been given by the Conqueror to William Malet, a nobleman half Norman and half English, and a kinsman of the house of Leofric, with instructions that it should be buried under a great cairn on the coast of that Sussex which he had vainly professed to guard. According to one story, Gytha, Godwine’s widow, vainly offered to buy her son’s body back from his foe at the price of his weight in gold; but it is probable that William before long relented and allowed the body of his fallen rival to be disinterred and buried with befitting solemnity in the great minster of the Holy Rood at Waltham.
William himself, in fulfilment of a vow made on the eve of the contest, founded on the field of slaughter a stately abbey which bore the name of Battle, and in which masses were long said for the repose of the souls of those who had fallen in the fight, whether conquerors or conquered. The building of the abbey with all its dependencies must have done much to alter the face of the battlefield; and now for near four centuries the abbey itself has been hidden and changed by the manor house reared within its precincts, in Tudor style, by the family to whom it was granted on the suppression of the monasteries. Change upon change has since befallen the noble dwelling-house which still bears the name of Battle Abbey; and its gardens and groves, its tall yew hedges and terraced lawns, though all most beautiful, make it hard to reconstruct with the mind’s eye the eleventh century aspect of “the place of slaughter”. Only the well-ascertained site of the high altar of the Abbey Church on the crest of the hill enables us to say with certainty, in the language of the Bayeux Tapestry—
Hic Harold Rex Interfectus Est.
With the battle of Hastings ends the story of England as ruled by Anglo-Saxon kings. The causes of the change, so full of meaning for all future years, which transferred the English crown from the race of Cerdic to the race of Rollo, cannot be dwelt upon here: perhaps some of them have been sufficiently indicated in the course of the preceding narrative. It is enough to say that a great and grievous transformation had come over the Anglo-Saxon character since the days of Oswald and even since the days of Alfred. The splendid dawn of English and especially of Northumbrian Christianity in the seventh century had been early obscured. The nation had lost some of the virtues of heathendom and had not retained all that it had acquired of the virtues of Christianity. Of its political incapacity the whole course of its history during the last century before the conquest is sufficient evidence; and it is probably a symptom of the same general decay that for two centuries after the death of Alfred no writer or thinker of any eminence, with the doubtful exceptions of Dunstan and Elfric, appears among his countrymen. A tendency to swinish self-indulgence, and the sins of the flesh in some of their most degrading forms, had marred the national character. There was still in it much good metal, but if the Anglo-Saxon was to do anything worth doing in the world, it was necessary that it should be passed through the fire and hammered on the anvil. The fire, the anvil and the hammer were about to be supplied with unsparing hand by the Norman conquerors.
APPENDIX I.
AUTHORITIES.
All that portion of archæological science which deals with prehistoric man is of recent origin, and the conclusions arrived at as to our own island, even by the most careful inquirers, must be accepted provisionally, as liable to much modification by the labours of future students. Meanwhile the results generally accepted by scholars may be found well stated by Professor Boyd Dawkins (Early Man in Britain, 1880), by Dr. John Beddoe (The Races of Britain, 1885), and by the Rev. Canon Greenwell and Geo. Rolleston (British Barrows, 1877). All these authors deal chiefly with the results of excavation in the caves and sepulchral barrows of Britain. The measurement of the skulls disinterred from thence and the character of the vessels found in proximity to the bodies, are the chief criteria by which they decide on the racial character of the occupants. Professor John Rhys (The Early Ethnology of the British Isles, 1890, and Celtic Britain, 2nd edit., 1884) approaches the subject of British ethnology rather from the side of early traditions and the evidence, somewhat meagre and unsatisfactory, of Celtic annalists, but with much help from philology.
Passing from the consideration of prehistoric man to the notices of Britain furnished by the writers of classical antiquity we come first to the Greek and Roman geographers. The chief Greek writers are Strabo and Ptolemy. Strabo, who was a native of Asia Minor, lived at the Christian era, and may be considered a slightly younger contemporary of Augustus. His colossal work on geography was written in his old age, and was probably finished about A.D. 19. Though he was an extensive traveller, he never visited Britain: his knowledge of our island seems to be chiefly derived from Cæsar, and he is altogether wrong as to its geographical position, believing it to lie alongside of the coast of Gaul from the Pyrenees to the mouths of the Rhine. He imagined Ireland to be entirely north of Britain.
Ptolemy, who was a native of Egypt, was a contemporary of the Antonine emperors, and probably wrote about A.D. 150. He was essentially an astronomical geographer, whose object was to fix the latitude and longitude of every place of which he took note. His industry was extraordinary, and his scientific conceptions were somewhat in advance of his age; but owing to the inaccurate information upon which he had often to rely, his results are sometimes very far from correct. Thus, though he gets England and Ireland almost into their true position, correcting the errors of Strabo concerning them, he pulls Scotland so far round to the east that it is at right angles to England, and its northernmost point almost touches Denmark.
Pliny, who was born in A.D. 23 and perished in the great eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, is the only Latin geographer who tells us much about Britain, and his descriptions do not add much to our knowledge, but relate chiefly to natural history and to the cultivation of the soil.
For the Roman conquest of Britain our chief authorities are, of course, Cæsar and Tacitus. The former, in the fourth and fifth books of his history of the Gallic War, describes in a few brief, soldier-like sentences the incidents of his two invasions, hardly attempting to conceal their ill-success. The latter, in the fourteenth book of his Annals, gives us the story of the insurrection of the Britons under Boudicca and its suppression by Suetonius Paulinus. An earlier book in the same series undoubtedly gave the history of the conquest of Britain under Claudius, but this is unfortunately lost. He gives us, however, in his Life of Agricola, a pretty full account of the events which signalised the command of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola (A.D. 78–84), and a slight notice of some events which occurred under his predecessors. Unfortunately Tacitus, superb as he is in delineation of character and scornful summaries of palace intrigues, fails grievously as a military historian, which happens to be his chief function when he is concerned with the history of Britain. Mommsen (bk. viii., chap. 5) says: “A worse narrative than that of Tacitus concerning this war (Paulinus against Boudicca) is hardly to be found even in this most unmilitary of authors”.