[Illustration: FIG. 12.--_Funeral of St. Edward the Confessor, January 5th, 1066. The body, covered with a silken pall adorned with crosses, is carried by eight men, and followed by many priests, to Westminster Abbey, which he had founded. Under the bier are seen two small figures ringing bells._--From the Bayeux Tapestry, worked by Matilda of Flanders, Queen of William the Conqueror, and preserved in the Cathedral at Bayeux--11th Century.]
The funeral of Edward the Confessor was exceedingly magnificent, and the shrine built over his relics, behind the high altar of the glorious abbey which he founded, is still an object of reverence with our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens, who, on St. Edward's Day, are permitted by a tolerant age to offer their devotions before the resting-place of the last of our Saxon Kings. But our first Norman King was buried with scant ceremony. He died 1087, at Hermentrude, a village near Rouen, having been taken suddenly ill on his way to England. No sooner was the illustrious king deceased, than his servants plundered the house and even the corpse, flinging it naked upon the floor. Herleadin, a peasant, undertook at last to convey the body to Caen, where it was to be buried in the Abbey of St. Stephen, Prince Henry and the monks being present. Scarcely, however, was the mass of requiem begun, when the church took fire, and everybody fled, leaving William the Conqueror's hearse neglected in the centre of the transept. At last the flames were extinguished, the interrupted service finished, and the funeral sermon preached. Just, however, as the coffin was about to be lowered into the vault, Anselm Fitz-Arthur, a Norman gentleman, stood forth and forbade the interment. "This spot," cried he, "is the site of my father's house, which this dead man burnt to ashes. On the ground it occupied I built this church, and William's body shall not desecrate it." After much ado, however, Fitz-Arthur was prevailed upon by Prince Henry to allow the body to be buried, on the payment of sixty shillings as the price of the grave. In the 17th Century the Calvinists ravaged the tomb and broke the monument. It was restored in 1642, but finally swept away, together with that of Queen Matilda, in the Revolution of 1793.