Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/82

 affixed to the summit, and ornamented with large silver-headed rivets round the edge.

Found at Benty Grange, near Monyash, Derbyshire. Public Museum, Sheffield

At Hastings the thegns and house-carles fought round their doomed king, swinging the long-hafted axe, splitting the bodies of Norman knights and shearing horse-heads at the neck. This axe was the traditional weapon of the house-carles; those of Cnut's body-guard bore it. Long after the conquest of England, when lance and sword were the knightly weapons, the memory of those great axes was in men's minds. In ancient rolls of blazonry, made so late as the beginning of the XIVth century, they are painted as charges upon shields, and still named as haches daneis, the Danish axes. The old Surrey family whose surname was Huskerley, bore three such axes in their shield, showing that two or three centuries after the last house-carles died with Harold and his brothers, there was a dim fancy that an axe of Danish fashion was the only symbol of one who took his name from some ancestral house-carle.

The bronze and iron helmets of the English thegns resembled those of the Norman invaders. No complete specimen is known to the writer; indeed, our national treasure house, the British Museum, fails us in even an incomplete example. There was formerly, however, in the collection of Mr. Thomas