| Share page |
|
HASTINGS 349 |
||
|
Bayeux Tapestry, where horses and men fall up and down and round together, are exceedingly spirited and striking.
Lord Thurlow's sonnet about the battle, written early in the nineteenth century, seems singularly lacking in local colour—
"O moon, that shinest on this heathy wild, And light'st the hill of Hastings with thy ray, How am I with thy sad delight beguiled, How hold with fond imagination play !
By thy broad taper I call up the time When Harold on the bleeding verdure lay, Though great in glory, over-stained with crime, And fallen by his fate from kingly sway!
On bleeding knights, and on war-broken arms, Torn banners, and the dying steed you shone, When this fair England and her peerless charms, And all but honour, to the foe were gone!
Here died the king, whom his brave subjects chose But dying lay amid his Norman foes."
Robert of Gloucester tells us—
"King William bithought hym alsoe of that
Folke that was forlorne And slayn also thoru5 hym
In the bataile biforne. And ther as the bataile was
An Abbey he lete rere Of Seint Martin for the soules
That there slayn were."
The story of its foundation shows forth in its proposed inhabitants little of the Benedictine spirit that might reasonably have been hoped for. The monks were of opinion that the hill where |
||