The saintly king, with his pink cheeks, his long white beard, his wavy hair and his delicate hands that healed the diseases of his people by their magical touch, would startle his courtiers with a strange laugh now and again, and then recount some vision which had come to him while they thought he slept. "He had seen the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus suddenly turn from their right sides to their left, and recognized in this omen the sign of war, famine, and pestilence for the coming seventy years, during which the sleepers were to lie in their new position."[4] He had given a precious ring, "large, royal and beautiful," off his finger, to a beggar who implored alms of him in the name of St. John. The beggar vanished. And the ring was brought back to him from Syria by two English pilgrims, to whom an aged man had confided it, telling them that he was St. John the Evangelist, "with the warning that in six months the king should be with him in Paradise." The six months have ended. The Abbey Church of St. Peter is finished, while hard by, in his palace of Westminster, Edward, the last Saxon king, lies dying. On Wednesday, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, or Childermas, the dying king rouses himself sufficiently to sign the Charter of the foundation: but Edith his queen has to represent him at the consecration. And the first ceremony after the consecration of the glorious minster he loved so well, is the Confessor's own burial. In his royal robes, a crown of gold upon his head, a crucifix of gold on his breast, a golden chain about his neck, and the pilgrim's ring on his hand, he lies before the High Altar with an unearthly smile upon his lips. A great horror and terror had fallen upon the people of England--and well it might. Well might the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus turn uneasily in their slumber--for within a year William the Norman was standing before that same High Altar--standing on the very gravestone of King Edward, "trembling from head to foot"[5] for the first time in his life amid clamor and tumult, as Aldred, the Saxon Archbishop of York, put the crown of England on his head, and made him swear to protect his Saxon subjects, while the fierce Norman cavalry were trampling those Saxon subjects under their horses' hoofs outside the Abbey gates. For one hundred and fifty years England was under foreign kings. And although the Norman Conquerors were crowned in Edward the Saxon's Abbey Church at Westminster, not one of them was laid within its walls. But with the fall of the Norman and Angevin kings, better days dawned for England. The Barons at Runnymede had forced King John, the last English Duke of Normandy and Anjou, to grant them the Great Charter--the glory and pride of all English-speaking people. And at John's death his son Henry the Third came to the throne in 1216 as the first English king of a free English people.