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.