It is to be regretted that Henry of Huntingdon did not explain what this royal "Standard," for which he has no exact Latin equivalent, was like. He tells us that Harold also had a "Standard" (_signum regium quod vocatur Standard_) at the Battle of Hastings, and that a band of Norman knights bound themselves by oath to seize it: an effort in which they were successful, although many were slain. This Standard was apparently the "Dragon" seen in the Bayeux Tapestry in the hands of Harold's standard-bearer[76]. According to William of Malmesbury[77], Harold, who was fighting on foot, placed himself with his brothers near his _vexillum_, which was in the likeness of a man fighting, and was sumptuously adorned with gold and precious stones. After the battle William presented it to the Pope. Probably this fighting man was the emblem of the South-Saxons, for on the Sussex Downs above Wilmington--once the home of Earl Godwin, Harold's father--may be seen the outline of a gigantic figure armed with a staff or lance in either hand[78]. Evidently Harold's position was between the Dragon standard, and his personal ensign, a position similar to that occupied "according to custom" by Eadmund fifty years before. Of these two the "signum regium," or principal "standard" appears to have been fixed in a central position or rallying point, while the other, the Dragon, was carried in the hands of a standard-bearer chosen for his personal strength and prowess. In September of the year 1191 when Richard was fighting in the Holy Land in company with the French under the Duke of Burgundy, and the crusading army was drawn up for battle, Richard fixed his standard in the midst of the forces and handed the Dragon to Peter des Preaux to carry, despite the claim of Robert Trussebut to bear it by hereditary right[79]. By this time the royal "standard" supported an heraldic banner that displayed the lion which Richard placed upon his first great seal and which on his return to England he multiplied by three; but why did a symbol so obviously pagan as the Dragon survive the Conquest and that greater attention to religion--or at any rate to its outward observance--that the Conquest had brought in its train? William of Normandy had conquered England beneath the aegis of the gonfanon with golden cross that the Pope had blessed for him, yet we hear no more of it. The battle of the Standard in 1138 was fought around a ship's mast bearing aloft the banners of St Peter, St John of Beverley and St Wilfred of Ripon. The very crusade in which Richard was engaged had been inaugurated with the solemn assumption of coloured crosses by the combatants at the hands of the Archbishop of Tyre, white for the English, red for the French, and green for the men of Flanders[80]. Yet the standard under which the English crusaders were led to the attack was none of these, but the same Dragon under which the Parthians had fought the Romans and the men of Wessex had beaten the men of Mercia.