"Let his corpse," said William the Norman, "let his corpse guard the coasts, which his life madly defended. Let the seas wail his dirge, and girdle his grave; and his spirit protect the land which hath passed to the Norman's sway."
And Mallet de Graville assented to the word of his chief, for his knightly heart turned into honour the latent taunt; and well he knew, that Harold could have chosen no burial spot so worthy his English spirit and his Roman end.
The tomb at Waltham would have excluded the faithful ashes of the betrothed, whose heart had broken on the bosom she had found; more gentle was the grave in the temple of heaven, and hallowed by the bridal death-dirge of the everlasting sea.
So, in that sentiment of poetry and love, which made half the religion of a
Norman knight, Mallet de Graville suffered death to unite those whom life had
divided. In the holy burial-ground that encircled a small Saxon chapel, on the
shore, and near the Spot on which William had leapt to land, one grave received
the betrothed; and the tomb of Waltham only honoured an empty name. [The Interment
of Harold : Here we are met by evidences of the most contradictory character.
According to most of the English writers, the body of Harold was given by William
to Githa, without ransom, and buried at Waltham. There is even a story told
of the generosity of the Conqueror, in cashiering a soldier who gashed the corpse
of the dead hero. This last, however, seems to apply to some other Saxon, and
not to Harold. But William of Poitiers, who was the Duke's own chaplain, and
whose narration of the battle appears to contain more internal evidence of accuracy
than the rest of his chronicle, expressly says, that William refused Githa's
offer of its weight in gold for the supposed corpse of Harold, and ordered it
to be buried on the beach, with the taunt quoted in the text of this work—"Let
him guard the coast which he madly occupied;" and on the pretext that one,
whose cupidity and avarice had been the cause that so many men were slaughtered
and lay unsepultured, was not worthy himself of a tomb. Orderic confirms this
account, and says the body was given to William Mallet, for that purpose. {This
William Mallet was the father of Robert Mallet, founder of the Priory of Eye,
in Suffolk (a branch of the House of Mallet de Graville).—Pluquet.. He
was also the ancestor of the great William Mallet (or Malet, as the old Scandinavian
name was now corruptly spelt), one of the illustrious twenty-five "conservators"
of Magna Charta. -- Lord Lytton