I have extended these remarks far beyond my original intention, though I trust that the nature of the subject and its historical and local importance will form a sufficient justification for the length of my essay; which I will now conclude with a few remarks, upon the localities which history and tradition have identified with the battle.
1. I have shown the Hetheland of the Battel Chronicle and Telham Hill to be one and the same spot. Tradition says as much, but corrupts the name to Tellman Hill, because there the conqueror counted his troops!
2. There has been much conjecture as to the original name of the place now called Battel. It has been stated to be Epiton, Sothope, Senlac, St. Mary, Heathfield, &c. I believe that no town or even village existed here in Saxon times. It was probably a down covered with heath and furze—a wild, rough common, without houses and almost without trees. The Saxon chronicler had no better mode of indicating the locality of the hostile meeting than by saying that it occurred at the hoary apple tree (æt thære háran apuldran)[1]—probably from some venerable tree of that species growing near at hand.[2]
3. The portion of the town of Battel which lies eastward of the church is called the Lake, and sometimes Sanguelac, i.e. the "lake of blood." Tradition says, that the Conqueror gave the place this name because of the vast sea of gore there spilt; and the Battel chronicler's account of the conflict would almost
- ↑ Sax. Chron. in Mon. Hist. Brit. But the phrase has been translated in a totally different sense.
- ↑ In Saxon and early Norman times it was very usual to mark places by some particular tree. See the Codex Dipl. Sax. Æv. passim. An instance may be cited in this immediate neighbourhood. According to the 'Battel Chronicle' when William Faber commenced the founding of the Abbey he began to build (as already stated) on a site to the westward of the spot where the battle had taken place, and where the abbey was eventually erected. "The place is to this day called Herst; and a certain thorn-tree growing there is a memorial of this circumstance," p.10. The hoar apple-tree was a common land-mark in the Saxon period. Mr. Hamper, in his elaborate paper on Hoar-stones, in Archæologia, vol. xxv, cites no fewer than fourteen instances in different counties.
