_Rogers._ The latter days of Edward the Confessor were embittered by the prospect of those evils which he saw were coming upon England. On the Easter day before he died he held his court at Westminster. William of Malmesbury tells us that “While the rest were greedily eating, and making up for the long fast of Lent by the newly-provided viands, he was absorbed in the contemplation of some divine matter, when presently he excited the attention of the guests by bursting into profuse laughter.” On earnest enquiry being made of him as to this unusual circumstance, he said “that the seven sleepers in Mount Cœlius, who had lain for two hundred years on their right side, had now turned upon their left; that they would continue to lie in this manner for seventy-four years, which would be a dreadful omen to wretched mortals. Nation would rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; earthquakes would be in divers places; pestilence and famine, terrors from heaven, and great signs; changes in kingdoms; wars of the gentiles against the Christians, and also victories of the Christians over the pagans.”[59] This was not the only vision he had. On one occasion he had lain two days speechless; on the third, sadly and deeply sighing as he awoke from his torpor, he said, that two monks from Normandy whom he had known in his youth had appeared to him, and had spoken to the following effect:--“Since the chiefs of England, the dukes, bishops, and abbots, are not the ministers of God, but of the devil, God, after your death, will deliver this kingdom, for a year and a day into the hands of the enemy, and devils shall wander over all the land.”[60] Borne down by these painful anticipations, Edward rapidly sank. Feeling death approach, he hastened the completion of the abbey church of Westminster, in which he designed that his body should be laid. He lived to realize this his last care. Roger of Wendover says, “Edward King of England, held his court at Christmas (1065) at Westminster; and, on the blessed Innocents’ day, caused the church which he had erected from its foundations, outside the city of London, to be dedicated with great pomp in honour of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles; but both before and during the solemn festival of this dedication, the King was confined with severe illness.” At length “the pacific King Edward, the glory of England, the son of King Ethelred, exchanged a temporal for an eternal kingdom, in the fourth indiction, on the vigil of our Lord’s Epiphany, being the fifth day of the week. The day after his death the most blessed King was buried at London, in the church which he himself had built in a new and costly style of architecture, which was afterwards adopted by numbers.”[61]