afforded him; and on all counts, now or never was his time. He had taken a high moral ground for his invasion, and was come, by his own claim, not as Conqueror, but as one claiming his legal rights, secured on the most sacred of oaths and hallowed by the blessing of the Church. Legal rights are the great standby of the plunderer and the spoiler, and the stirrup for William’s vaulting ambition was legality. It was, as we have seen, the kind of legality we associate rather with the pettifogging attorney than with justice; but he had wrung the blessing of Rome on it, and beside his banner floated the standard consecrated by the Pope. XL William “the Conqueror,” as history styles him, never so styled himself. His astute mind thrust such a warlike thing into the background. He had only come to claim his own, and was unfortunately obliged to fight for it against the perjurer! One can almost in imagination hear the pietistic snuffle of a Pecksniff in this mixture of legal and religious motives. [Illustration: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. _Bayeux Tapestry._] It was about October 5th that Harold reached London. He lay there six days, awaiting the promised reinforcements from his northern Earls, which never came, and in the meanwhile calling in his levies from the near counties. But before he set out for Sussex he paid a last visit to his abbey of Waltham, which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross and had enriched with many gifts—evidences of his piety. For we must by no means believe that William, the self-constituted champion of sacred relics and the Church, alone practised, or professed, religion. Harold’s piety was at least as marked, and it is perhaps not altogether the Englishman’s sympathy for an Englishman, or his chivalrous regret for the vanquished, which sees in the ill-fated King’s abasement before the Holy Rood of Waltham on the eve of that fatal struggle a more sincere approach to the Most High. He lay prostrate upon the pavement in supplication, and the dark, wonder-loving legends of that time tell us that, as he did so, the hitherto raised head of the sacred image bowed itself upon the Cross, as though enacting again the tragedy of Calvary: in token, as the belief of that age ran, that the career of Harold was finished. The English army set forth from London on Thursday, October 12th, and marched inevitably, it being the most direct route, by the line of country through which runs the Hastings Road of our own day. So speedily did the troops set out to meet their foe, that by Friday night Harold had pitched his camp on this hill of Senlac, eight miles from Hastings, on the site of this town of Battle. A very ancient oak, known as the “Watch Oak,” stands in the private garden of a house on the bye-road to the right entering Battle. It is traditionally the spot whence Harold’s scouts watched for the approach of the invaders.