XIX The Body of Harold
No sooner did Sunday morning dawn than William, having first evinced his gratitude to Heaven for the victory gained, applied himself to ascertain the extent of his loss. Having vowed to erect on the field of battle an abbey, to be dedicated to St. Martin, the patron saint of the warriors of Gaul, the Conqueror drew up his troops, and called over the names of all who had crossed the sea, from a list made at St. Valery.
While this roll was being called over, many of the wives and mothers of the Saxons who had armed in the neighbourhood of Hastings to fight for King Harold appeared on the field to search for and bury the bodies of their husbands and sons. William immediately caused the corpses of the men who had fallen on his side to be buried, and gave the Saxons leave to do the same for their countrymen.
For some time, however, no one had the courage to mention the propriety of giving Christian burial to the Saxon king; and the body of Harold lay on the field without being claimed or sought for. At length Githa, the widow of Godwin, sent to ask the Conqueror’s permission to render the last honours to her son, but William sternly refused.
“The mother,” said the messengers, “would even give the weight of the body in gold.”
“Nevertheless,” said William, “the man, false to his word and to his religion, shall have no other sepulchre than the sands of the shore.”
William, however, relented. It happened that Harold had founded and enriched the abbey of Waltham, and that the abbot felt himself in duty bound to obtain Christian burial for such a benefactor. Accordingly he deputed Osgod and Ailrik, two Saxon monks, to demand permission to transfer the body of Harold to their church; and the Conqueror granted the permission they asked.
But Osgod and Ailrik found their mission somewhat difficult to fulfil. So disfigured, in fact, were most of the dead with wounds and bruises, that one could hardly be known from another. In vain the monks sought among the mass of slain, stripped as they were of armour and clothing. The monks of Waltham could not recognise the corpse of him whom they sought, and, in their difficulty, they resolved to invoke female aid.
At that time there was living, probably in retirement, a Saxon woman known as Edith the Fair. This woman, who was remarkable for her beauty, and especially for the gracefulness of her neck, which chroniclers have compared to the swan’s, had, before Harold’s coronation and his marriage with Aldith, been entertained by him as a mistress; and, on being applied to, she consented to assist the monks in their search. Better acquainted than they were with the features of the man she had loved, Edith was successful in discovering the corpse.
The body of Harold having thus—thanks to the zeal and exertions of the monks—been found, was, with those of his brothers, Gurth and Leofwine, placed at the disposal of their mother, the widowed Githa. With her consent they were buried in the abbey of Waltham. The Conqueror sent William Mallet, one of his knights, to see the corpse honourably interred; and at the east end of the choir, in a tomb long pointed out as that containing the remains of the Saxon king, were inscribed the words—
“HAROLD INFELIX.”
“But here,” says Sir Richard Baker, “Giraldus Cambrensis tells a strange story, that Harold was not slain in the battle, but only wounded and lost his left eye, and then escaped by flight to Chester, where he afterwards led a holy anchorite’s life in the cell of St. James, fast by St. John’s Church.”