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 the knot of stern men swinging their Danish axes on the Hill of Senlac, until the last went down, and the battle was lost. Harold fell at six in the evening, after the fight had raged for nine hours. The slaughter and pursuit continued until far into the hours of darkness, and until 60,000 Englishmen had perished.

Instead of at once marching upon London, the conqueror waited on the south coast until he had burnt Romney, by way of chastisement to its inhabitants for having interfered with his reinforcements, and until he had besieged and taken Dover.

The story of how William completed his conquest needs telling here only so far as it falls directly within the limits of naval history. He had not been a year upon the throne ere one of the three sons of Harold, who had sought refuge in Ireland, and who, after the fall of their father, behaved much as Prince Rupert behaved after the fall of Charles I., undertook a piratical expedition into the Bristol Channel. At Bristol he was beaten back to his ships, but in Somersetshire he landed, and fought an indecisive battle, in which he killed, among others, Ednoth, William's Master of the Horse. He does not seem, however, to have been very successful, and he returned to Ireland without having accomplished much. The exiled princes made another descent in the following year, when they landed in the Tavy with sixty-four vessels, but were so badly used by the Devonshire people, that scarcely two ships' crews escaped to sea.

Far more formidable was an attempt made, in 1069, to disturb the new order of things in England. Sweyn, King of Denmark, conceiving himself to have inherited some right to the crown, and being encouraged by the Dano-Saxon party in England, as well, apparently, as by the sons of Harold, who had again sought refuge in Ireland, equipped a great fleet of two hundred and forty ships, and put it under the command of his brother Osbern and his sons Harold and Canute. Edgar Atheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside, who, after the Conquest, had been kindly received at the court of William, had already been removed thence by his friends to Scotland, where one of his sisters, Margaret, presently married King Malcolm III. (Canmore). Edgar was only eleven years of age,