Editorial note — APPENDIX.
Reading edition
The writer very ingeniously brings a religieux from the minster founded by Harold to reconcile Hereward to a submission to the Conqueror; he was not a monk however. Waltham was not then an Abbey. Harold rebuilt a church there, established a College of secular Canons, with a Dean at their head, and brought over from the continent a learned man, named Adelhard, as a lecturer in this college. (Here is an indication that Harold was a man of progress.)
Now of course an appeal from one attached to Harold’s minster at Waltham would be as forcible as any that could be conceived, and especially when it was attended by the assurance that Harold’s dead body lay within the precincts of the church.
Waltham was erected into an Abbey in the reign of Henry II. and it is notable that the body of Edward the First was buried by the side of that of Harold, in 1307—(though it was afterwards translated to Westminster Abbey); “the king with whom England fell might greet his first true successor in the king with whom she rose again.”—(Freeman.)
The devastations of other centuries have swept away all traces of the tomb of Harold from Waltham—as they have also every vestige of the tomb of Waltheof or of Hereward at Crowland—or even the shrine of Ætheldreda at Ely.