Whether the statement that William, by a feigned retreat, drew the Saxons from their entrenchments in pursuit and then turned on them with success, is true or not, may be open to doubt. Harold’s tactics and his method of entrenchment all point rather to passive than active defence. His best armed and best equipped men were in the centre, round his royal standard, armed with javelin, axe, and sword, and covered close by the large Saxon shield; on his flanks were the less reliable and poorly armed “ceorls,” who could not be trusted to meet the main brunt of battle. It is quite possible, however, that these less disciplined troops may have been decoyed into a pursuit which was counter attacked by the cavalry, and thus the flank was turned, and with it the line of obstacles along the front, whatever they might have been. Be that as it may, it is most likely that the traditional termination of the battle is in the main correct, and that William, by his “high angle” fire of arrows, was able to “search” the ground behind the stockade, and that the last Saxon king received his death-wound in the eye from one of these missiles. It would have been better strategy on his part to have fought a merely rearguard action at Hastings, and, falling back, have both weakened his adversary by the guards he must have left on the coast, and increased his own power of resistance by the aid of the reinforcements that were coming up. So night went down on the bloody field of Senlac, where Harold lay dead with fifteen thousand Normans and “threescore thousand Englishmen,” though the latter statement is, on the face of it, exaggeration. But the fight had broken the Saxon power, and the Conqueror--as William of Poictiers says--refused his royal brother burial, swearing “that he guarded the coast while he was alive, let him thus continue to guard it after death.” None the less, it is believed he was buried eventually at Waltham, and William the duke passed on to cross the Thames at Wallingford, seized London, and become William the king.