The exact truth of events so long ago is hard to reach; but Harold, at any rate, fought under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, and not all his reckless daring, nor the devotion of his brothers and friends, could save his fortunes when on the field of Senlac, standing beneath his dragon-banner, he met the shock of the disciplined Norman forces. Chroniclers relate that the human wall of Saxon archers and foot-soldiers remained unshaken on the hill-side until William, setting a snare, turned in pretended flight. The ruse was successful; for as the Saxons, cheering triumphantly, descended from their position in pursuit, the invaders faced round and charged their disordered ranks. Only Harold and the men of his bodyguard remained firm under the onslaught, until at the last an arrow fired in the air struck the Saxon King in the eye as he looked up, so that he fell down dead. All resistance was now at an end and William, Duke of Normandy, was left master of the field and ruler of England. Here rose the dragon-banner of our realm: Here fought, here fell, our Norman-slandered king. O garden blossoming out of English blood! O strange hate-healer Time! We stroll and stare Where might made right eight hundred years ago. These lines of Tennyson on ‘Battle Abbey’ recall the fact that just as the Danes and Saxons were fused into one race, so would the Norman invaders mingle with their descendants, until to after-generations William as well as Harold should appear a national hero. [Sidenote: Domesday Book] In his own day ‘the Conqueror’ struck terror into the heart of the conquered. In 1069, when the North of England, too late to help Harold, rose in revolt, he laid waste a desert by sword and fire from the Humber to the Tees. When the Norman barons and English earls challenged his rule he threw them alike into dungeons. What seemed to the Saxon mind even more wonderful and horrible than his cruelty was the record of all the wealth of his kingdom that he caused to be compiled. This ‘Domesday Book’ contained a close account not only of the great estates, lay and ecclesiastical, but of every small hamlet, and even of the number of live stock on each farm. ‘So very narrowly did he cause the survey to be made,’ says the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, ‘that there was not a single hide nor a rood of land, nor (it is shameful to relate that which he thought no shame to do) was there an ox, or a cow, or a pig, passed by that was not set down in the account.’