sited the ancient crypt of St. Mellon. Here for some
days he lay in pain, though without losing speech or consciousness,
and sent for Anselm from Bec. But the prior himself was too ill to get
further than St. Sever on his journey to his master. So the Conqueror
disposed himself to death, giving much treasure to the rebuilding of
churches both in France and England, bequeathing Normandy and Maine to
Robert, and with a last strange movement of apparent compunction,
leaving the throne of England in the hands of God:

"Non enim tantum decus hereditario jure possedi."

As to the crowning of his son William, he gave the final decision to
Lanfranc. His youngest son, Henri Beauclerc, the truest Norman of them
all, was given five thousand pounds in silver and the prophecy of
future greatness. After releasing all the prisoners in his dungeons,
the Conqueror lay on his couch in St. Gervais and heard the great bell
of the Cathedral of Rouen ringing for prime on the morning of Thursday
the ninth of September 1087. Upon the sound he offered up a prayer and
died.

Within an hour his death-chamber was desolate and bare, and the corpse
lay well-nigh naked. But the citizens of Rouen were sore troubled.
"Malignus quippe spiritus oppido tripudiavit." The news travelled from
Normandy to Sicily in the same day. The archbishop ordered that the
body should be taken to Caen, and by the care of Herlwin this was
done, and the dead Conqueror was floated down the Seine to burial. As
the funeral procession passed through the town the streets burst into
flame, and through the fire and smoke the monks walked with the bier,
chanting the office of the dead. When the corpse reached the abbey, a
knight objected to the burial, because the land had forcibly been
taken from him. So the seven feet of the Conqueror's grave was bought,
and, not without more hideous mishaps, the body of Rouen's greatest
duke was at last laid to rest. In 1793 both the tomb and its contents
were utterly destroyed.

Among the prisoners who were released at William's death was that
half-brother, Odo of Bayeux,[20] to whose skill and knowledge is due
the marvellous pictorial record of the Bayeux Tapestry. Its
inscriptions are in the Latin letters of the time, and its
eleventh-century costumes, the short clothes easy to ride or run or
fight, the arms depicted, the clean-shaved faces, are all very
different to those which Orderic Vital describes as usual in the
twelfth centur