gold. "Nay," said William, "Harold was a perjurer;
let him have for burial-place the sand of the shore, where he was so
madly fain to rule." Two Saxon monks from Waltham Abbey, which had been
founded by Harold, came, by their abbot's order, and claimed for their
church the remains of their benefactor; and William, indifferent as he
had been to a mother's grief, would not displease an abbey. But when the
monks set about finding the body of Harold, there was none to recognize
it, and they had recourse to a young girl, Edith, Swan's-neck, whom
Harold had loved. She discovered amongst the corpses her lover's
mutilated body; and the monks bore it away to the church at Waltham,
where it was buried. Some time later a rumor was spread abroad that
Harold was wounded, and carried to a neighboring castle, perhaps Dover,
whence he went to the abbey of St. John, at Chester, where he lived a
long while in a solitary cell, and where William the Conqueror's second
son, Henry I., the third Norman king of England, one day went to see him
and had an interview with him. But this legend, in which there is
nothing chronologically impossible, rests on no sound basis of evidence,
and is discountenanced by all contemporary accounts.

[Illustration: Edith discovers the Body of Harold----360]

Before following up his victory, William resolved to perpetuate the
remembrance of it by a religious monument, and he decreed the foundation
of an abbey on the very field of the battle of Hastings, from which it
took its name, Battle Abbey. He endowed this abbey with all the
neighboring territory within the radius of a league, "the very spot,"
says his charter, "which gave me my crown." He made it free of the
jurisdiction of any prelate, dedicated it to St. Martin of Tours, patron
saint of the soldiers of Gaul, and ordered that there should be deposited
in its archives a register containing the names of all the lords,
knights, and men of mark who had accompanied him on his expedition. When
the building of the abbey began, the builders observed a want of water;
and they notified William of the fact. "Work away," said he: "if God
grant me life, I will make such good provision for the place that more
wine shall be found there than there is water in other monasteries."

It was not everything, however, to be victorious, it was still necessary
to be recognized as king. When the news of the defeat at Hastings and
the death of Harold was spread abroad i