The slaughter at this period of the day must have been fearful. The chronicler of Battle Abbey says, “Amid these miseries there was exhibited a fearful spectacle: the fields were covered with dead bodies, and on every hand nothing was to be seen but the red hue of blood. The dales around sent forth a gory stream, which increased at a distance to the size of a river! How great think you must have been the slaughter of the conquered, when the conquerors’ is reported, upon the lowest computation, to have exceeded ten thousand? Oh how vast a flood of human gore was poured out in that place where these unfortunates fell and were slain! What a dashing to pieces of arms, what a clashing of strokes; what shrieks of dying men; what grief; what sighs were heard! How many groans; how many bitter notes of direst calamity then sounded forth, who can rightly calculate! What a wretched exhibition of human misery was there to call forth astonishment! In the very contemplation of it our heart fails us.”[102] Notwithstanding the horrors of the scene, and the hopelessness of their efforts, the courage of the Saxons failed not; sometimes fleeing, and sometimes making a stand, they slaughtered their pursuers in heaps. The place where this havoc took place is probably the southern front of the eminence on which Battle Abbey was afterwards placed. The whole site of the contest has sometimes been denominated “Sanguelac,” or the “Lake of Blood,” but this designation properly belongs to that part in which the street of the modern town of Battle called “the Lake” is situated. Until a very recent period this place was supposed still occasionally to reek with human gore. “Thereabout,” says Drayton, “is a place which after rain always looks red, which some have attributed to a very bloody sweat of the earth, as crying to heaven for revenge for so great a slaughter.” “ ... Asten once distained with native English blood; Whose soil, when wet with any little rain, Doth blush, as put in mind of those there sadly slain.” The truth is “the redness of the water here, and at many other places in the neighbourhood, is caused by the oxydation of the iron which abounds in the soil of the Weald of Sussex.”[103]