consecrated "Abbot of St Martin's of the place of Battle." Beside
the extraordinary gifts and privileges which the Conqueror
had bestowed upon the Abbey in his lifetime, upon his death he
bequeathed to it his royal embroidered cloak, a splendid collection of
relics and a portable altar containing relics, possibly the very one
upon which Harold had sworn in his captivity in Normandy to support
his claim to England. William is said to have intended the monastery
to be filled with sixty monks. We do not know whether this number ever
really served there. In 1393, but that was after the Black Death,
there appear to have been some twenty-seven, and in 1404 but thirty.
In 1535, on the eve of the Suppression, Battle Abbey was visited by
the infamous Layton who reported to Thomas Cromwell that "all but two
or three of the monks were guilty of unnatural crimes and were
traitors," adding that the abbot was an arrant churl and that "this
black sort of develish monks I am sorry to know are past amendment."
Little more than two years later the abbot surrendered the abbey and
received a pension of one hundred pounds. The furniture and so forth
of the house was then very poor. "So beggary a house I never see, nor
so filthy stuff," Layton writes to Wriothesley. "I will not 20s. for
all the hangings in this house...." In August 1538 the place was
granted to Sir Anthony Browne, who is said to have removed the cloak
of the Conqueror and the famous Battle Abbey Roll to Cowdray. This
rascal razed the church and cloisters to the ground, and made the
abbot's lodging his dwelling. It is said that one night as he was
feasting a monk appeared before him and solemnly cursed him,
prophesying that his family should perish by fire. To the fulfilment of
this curse Cowdray bears witness even to this day.

[Illustration: BATTLE ABBEY]

What spoliation, time and neglect have left of the Abbey is beautiful,
especially the great fourteenth century gateway which faces the Market
Green. Nothing save the foundations is left of the great church. From
the terrace, doubtless, we look across the battlefield, but all is so
changed, the bleak hill-top has become a superb garden, that it is
impossible to realise still less to reconstruct the battle, and indeed
since we can only visit the place amid a crowd of tourists, our present
discomfort makes any remembrance of the fight or of the great and
solemn abbey which for so long turned that battlefield into a sanctua