In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  THE PLAN

  What should Harold do? When he arrived in London the news he would have received was clearly that William was at Hastings and devastating the land. Should he therefore attack immediately? Or delay, as Athelstan did before Brunanburh? The troops at his disposal were very limited for an immediate attack, unless Harold had already set in motion some organisation under the shire reeves, to raise troops south of the Thames as soon as William landed, enabling him to call on a force in arms as soon as he returned south. But we have no evidence for that, and we know the West-Saxon levies had been on active service all summer. Unless the king personally called them out, they may have been unwilling to respond.

  Harold’s plan is clearer, and may reveal something of his resources as it clearly does about his impetuous, confident disposition. Our evidence suggests that he left London on 12 October and arrived on the battlefield not on the evening of 13 October as most authorities have alleged, but on the morning of 14 October, the actual day of the battle. The Norman writer William of Jumièges specifically says that having ridden through the night, Harold reached the battlefield the next morning. His rendezvous point seems to have been ‘the hoar apple tree’, which stood on what is now Caldbec Hill north of Battle village: a junction of old tracks where the London road comes out of the forest of the Weald, seven miles from Hastings. Harold was clearly trying to repeat the successful strategy of Stamford Bridge: a fast advance to take the Normans by surprise. Possibly he intended to nullify William’s mounted troops by a dawn attack on their stockade, using his heavily armed axemen to storm the palisade, a tactic used many times by West-Saxon armies against the Danes in the tenth century. However the plan went disastrously wrong. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle it was William who advanced on Harold unexpectedly and fought with him before his whole army had arrived, and before he had it in battle order. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also implies there were those who were unwilling to fight for Harold. Florence of Worcester’s Chronicle is more precise: only a third of the English army was in order when the battle started and only half assembled at all. Florence also says the reason for the desertions was that the narrowness of the position chosen by Harold did not allow some of the professionals to use their weapons properly. William of Malmesbury in his Deeds of the Kings also blames the desertions on Harold’s appropriation of the loot from Stamford Bridge; it would be a mistake to exaggerate the English numbers, he says, ‘they were few in number and brave in the extreme’. Though not primary sources, William and Florence cannot be ignored on this point.

  The pictures on the Bayeux Tapestry give us a further clue. They show us the housecarls, whose equipment is essentially indistinguishable from the Norman, but they also show poorly equipped troops fighting alongside them who cannot be members of the royal fyrd, the thegnly class, but who must be general levies, the home guard. This detail suggests that Harold had called out the shire levy of Sussex. Indeed if they had been summoned to meet at the hoar apple tree, then this could have been the reason for the failure of the plan. The rendezvous was too close to the Norman camp, and on the evening of the thirteenth William would have been alerted by his scouts to events in the Weald north of him, and would have stood his army to arms all night expecting an attack. From that moment it was William who was to be in charge, and when his scouts revealed the state of the English army, he immediately ordered an advance out to the hoar apple tree.

  HAROLD’S POSITION

  Dawn rose on 14 October 1066 at around 5.30 am with a less than half moon waning in the southern sky. The English army was in no position to launch an attack, as it was probably stretched out down the London road. The Normans, who, if William of Poitiers is right, had stood to arms all night fearing a night attack, immediately moved off when it was light and when their scouts had reported (say, around 6 o’clock). They would have caught their first glimpse of the Anglo-Saxon army from Telham Hill within an hour. Harold, not William, was taken by surprise, as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler admits, and his extremely dangerous gamble had failed. There was nothing to do now but form a battle array and meet the Norman attack while waiting for the rest of the army to come up. This is what Harold did.

  A thousand yards south of Caldbec Hill and the site of the apple tree, a pronounced ridge falls away with watersheds on either flank. In front of it the road from Hastings crossed the marshy bottom of a depression which made it difficult for an army to deploy. On the ridge in the centre of which the abbey now stands, Harold placed his standards – the famous dragon of Wessex, and his own banner depicting a fighting man (a warrior saint or a figure from classical myth, an Ajax or a Hector?). Around him were his housecarls and other Danish mercenaries, and the retinues of his brothers with other thegns and supporters, along with the terrified members of the Sussex levy, men with no body armour, ‘straw hats’ and wielding ‘stones fastened to pieces of wood’. The heavily armed were grouped round the king, but also formed the front line, so that the best trained and equipped took the main onslaught. There was no support from Mercia or Northumbria, but the position was still a strong one. Even today it is possible to stand on the abbey terrace and see the battlefield sloping away from the English line: though the building of the abbey has levelled the top of the hill considerably (especially in the area where Harold stood) it would still be a big impediment to heavily armoured horsemen.

  THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS

  The battle began at the third hour (9 am) by which time William had deployed his army along the north side of the brook in the depression below the English position under cavalry and archery cover. The size of the armies is unknown, but there is some reason to think the Norman army could have been 7000 or 8000 strong. The French and Flemings were on the right, the larger Breton contingent on the left, and the Norman – stronger than the other two combined – in the centre. We have no means of knowing the size of the English army, though if the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Florence are correct about Harold’s parlous state when the battle opened, it is not impossible that he was outnumbered, at least at the start.

  The battle began with the Norman archers moving up to within a hundred yards of the English line and opening fire with their short bows to shake up their opponents’ formation and morale. In this they were not successful, most of their arrows being taken on the housecarls’ shields. When the supply of arrows gave out, they were withdrawn and the heavily armed infantry brought forward. These troops were to open up the English line prior to the planned third phase, the assault of the cavalry who would exploit the breaks and drive the English into flight. But when the Norman infantry advanced, they were met by a hail of missiles of all kinds which shocked the attackers by its sheer weight and ferocity. When the lines came together, the English and Danish professional frontline troops handed out a heavy beating to the Normans, whose mail and shields could not resist the two-handed axes. On the western sector, where the slope was gentlest, the Bretons, who probably reached the English first, panicked and fled back into the marshy valley bottom, carrying with them the cavalry units waiting behind them. At this point, seeing their enemies recoiling in confusion, the troops on Harold’s right wing, which may have been, as the Tapestry suggests, ill-armed fyrdmen, raced after them. For a moment the Norman army fell back and the tremor of fear spread to their baggage guard. But William, showing himself to his troops, brought in cavalry from the centre and cut off the pursuers, most of whom were cut down in the open field between the marsh and a prominent hillock below the English position which is shown on the Tapestry and which can still be seen on the battlefield. Some of the trapped fyrdmen climbed onto the hillock and defended it for a while before being overwhelmed, an incident again depicted on the Tapestry. In fact the Tapestry suggests that this incident was more serious to Harold than even the severe weakening of his right wing, for with this stage of the battle it associates the deaths of both Gyrth and Leofwine, the king’s brothers, who were killed in a melee fighting on foot against mounted Norman troops. The loss of G
yrth and Leofwine and some of their hearth troops was a disaster, and for the rest of the day the crippled English army hung on as reinforcements trickled in and deserters withdrew into the weald.

  THE GREAT CAVALRY ATTACK: ‘HERE ENGLISH AND FRENCH FELL TOGETHER IN BATTLE’

  William had to decide what to do next, for things had not gone at all according to plan. His decision may have come as a surprise to everyone, not least the battle-hardened mercenary commanders in his host. He determined to launch a full-scale attack on the unbroken English line with his main cavalry force, which would normally have been retained for the pursuit. All along the line squadrons of mounted knights climbed up the hill, gritting their teeth and spurring their frightened horses as they came within range of the renewed hail of spears, throwing axes and stone-headed clubs. William’s were not authentic cavalry, they were mounted spearmen who jabbed or threw their javelins rather than using them couched as lances. Consequently the combination of the slope, the storm of missiles and the longswords and axes of the housecarls deprived them of any impetus and after a desperate struggle to close with the English line, in which they suffered heavy losses in men and horses, the Norman cavalry fell back in disarray. Once more, however, part of the English line went after the Normans, and Duke William was able to bring a cavalry unit against their flank and wipe them out. After these ill-advised sorties, the English line became so weakened that it was no longer possible to hold the whole ridge, and the army became concentrated around the standards on the top of the hill.

  THE LAST STAND

  As the battle wore on into the afternoon William used his archers, and his mounted and dismounted troops in conjunction. By now the Norman army had probably forced its way onto the flanks of the ridge and the English position had contracted to the area where the abbey stands today. The housecarls maintained their discipline, according to Norman writers who were clearly impressed by their fighting skill and steadfastness. But now William was able to support his attacks with his archers, whose supply had been replenished from wagons which are shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, and they could now get up close and fire up into the air over their own cavalry onto the heads of the defenders. That this added a final and decisive torment to the already desperate defenders seems clear. The Tapestry margins in this phase are full of archers moving forward with arrows on their bow strings, and the main narrative plainly shows several men in the English army suffering face wounds just as in the English flight fyrdmen are seen running away clutching arrows in neck and eyes. According to a now immutable legend, Harold himself was one of those struck in the eye. The evidence for this was written later and is possibly dependent on a famous scene in the Bayeux Tapestry which shows a man holding an arrow in his eye above which the commentary reads ‘Here King Harold was killed’. But is this man Harold? Or is the king, as modern scholars think, the figure next to him who falls, struck on the thigh by a Norman horseman? It now appears that modern scholars are wrong and the old story right after all. The Tapestry artist is invariably clear in labelling his figures, and the name Harold comes exactly above the man pulling the arrow out of his face. Elsewhere the artist also portrays the same figure twice in one scene, as is apparently the case here. It seems too that the arrow-in-the-eye story was current in England in the next generation independently of the Tapestry. In this case we should accept the story of Harold’s wounding, one of the best-known traditions in British history. In this scene the Tapestry artist is probably showing us Harold both struck by the arrow and then being cut down by the Norman horseman.

  As the mid-October afternoon grew darker the English centre was attacked from both sides. Still the housecarls fought on doggedly, but eventually they were so weakened that a party of Norman knights was able to break through to the king himself. Tradition differs as to who they were: William of Poitiers (On the Deeds of Duke William) names Guy of Ponthieu, Walter Giffard, Hugh de Montfort and Eustace of Boulogne. Guy of Amiens (Song on the Battle of Hastings) may have a more authentic version when – alone among historians of the battle – he names William himself instead of Montfort. The desire to exclude William himself in later records may have been prompted by the barbaric manner of Harold’s death. It appears that the knights came upon the king lying or crouching wounded between the standards and there they hacked him to bits. One stabbed him in the chest, another cut off his head, another disembowelled him, and the last cut off his leg at the thigh and carried it away. According to William of Malmesbury the Duke thought the last of these deeds was ignoble and cashiered the man who did it, which suggests that the word ‘thigh’ is a euphemism, and that in this dreadful moment, one of the Normans, crazy with bloodlust, cut off the king’s genitalia, a piece of atavism almost but not quite unthinkable in the brutal Norman world of the mid eleventh century.

  Harold died on the spot where the high altar of the abbey was later erected in memory of the dead. When the sun set at around 5 o’clock the housecarls were still offering a depleted but organised resistance, some so densely packed, according to Poitiers, that the dead could not fall. But once the news of Harold’s wounding and death had spread, many fled, ‘some on horseback, some on foot, some taking to the main roads, most on by-paths’.

  The battle was lost, and as at Ashingdon, the flower of the English had fallen. The casualties among the ordinary soldiery cannot have been decisive; those among the leadership certainly were. But even in this extremity, as darkness came on, the English household troops had a sting in the tail. Part of their force regrouped in a rearguard position, a steep bank cut with ditches and overgrown with brambles and bushes at a point where an ancient causeway crossed. Between five and six o’clock some Norman cavalry attempted to attack this body and charged into the ravine where they were slaughtered. Only after further losses was the position taken. The site of this disaster was later known as ‘Malfosse’, ‘Evil Ditch’, and a recent search in the Battle Abbey records has identified the place as Oak Wood Ghyll, a quarter of a mile north of Caldbec Hill.

  As Charlemagne had often done, William erected a cairn of stones, a mountjoy, to commemorate the battle; this must have been on the highest point of Caldbec Hill itself at the site of the hoar apple tree, for this locality has always been known as Mountjoy. (Presumably the concrete Ordnance Survey datum marks the spot.) The body of Harold, or rather, its pieces, were identified by his mistress, according to Norman tradition, and it is claimed that they were initially buried on the seashore. If this was ever actually done, the king’s remains were certainly moved later to his own foundation at Waltham, where the site of the grave is still shown today.

  THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND: ‘THE FRENCH HAD POSSESSION OF THE PLACE OF SLAUGHTER, AS GOD GRANTED THEM BECAUSE OF THE NATION’S SINS’

  It is rare that a single battle proves so decisive. Although William had to fight hard over a period of years to secure his hold on England, there was never really any doubt that he would do so, for as a poet wrote a century later, ‘the Normans are good conquerors, there is no race like them’. Clearly there were military factors which go some way to explaining the extraordinary importance of Hastings. The English forces had been badly weakened by the battles in Yorkshire and this made unlikely the raising of a fourth army within such a short time. The leadership of course had been shattered at Hastings. But ultimately it is the dynastic failure of the Anglo-Saxon royal family which lay at the root. The blood line of Cerdic and Alfred had been dissipated and there was no longer now a tightknit royal kin husbanding the patrimony as we saw them do in Alfred’s and Athelstan’s time. It was impossible that a moderately well-born, if extremely powerful, earl such as Harold could command the allegiance once owed to the Cerdicings.

  The chief lay and church leaders met William at Little Berkhampstead north of London and surrendered the kingdom to him. On Christmas Day, amid scenes of riot, he was crowned by Archbishop Ealdred of York at Westminster Abbey in the Confessor’s new church. The coronation service used for his anointing was that of Athelstan
and Edgar. But if the English church establishment thought that William might be another Canute, malleable and deferential, content to rule the old way, they were in for a shock. The next twenty years saw a massive redistribution of wealth in England, as the warriors and above all the magnates who had backed William in the expedition were rewarded by lands and revenues previously received by the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The land of the thegns who fell in the battle of 1066, of those who rebelled against him, and especially of the house of Godwin went to his supporters. In 1069–70 a great rebellion in the Midlands and North was put down with devastation and unparalleled ferocity, and more land fell into Norman hands. By William’s death in 1087 it is estimated that only eight per cent of land was still held by the Anglo-Saxon thegnhood.