The Anglo Saxons at War 800-1066

by Paul Hill

  Map 4. The Battle of Maldon, 991.

  The poem then, for what it is worth, continues with individual acts of heroism and some thumpingly good warrior antics. Byrhtnoth is soon slain. His followers, Ælfnoth and Wulfmær, also gave their lives alongside their lord, but others chose a different course. Godric had the temerity to take Byrhtnoth’s horse and flee along with others, giving the false impression that it was Byrhtnoth himself whom had fled. The poet, of course, heartily disapproves of all this. Into the fray stepped the men of the ealdorman’s hearthtroop who specifically had vowed to avenge the death of their lord or die in trying. Assisted by their Northumbrian hostage whose weaponry was limited to a bow and arrow, the comrades stepped into the battle and slew many opponents, before giving their own lives.

  The poem, like so many other important Anglo-Saxon literary survivors, is incomplete and ends as the comrades are loyally fulfilling the avenging of the death of their ring-giving lord as their numbers inevitably dwindle. The heroism is of course designed for a certain audience. However, like so much in Anglo-Saxon history, it is as impossible now as it was then to divorce the ideal from the reality. This is because the values being vaunted by the poet were so deeply rooted in the psychology of the warriors of the day. Æthelred’s long and complex reign would include more military defeats and a general collapse of English morale until his son Edmund began to fight in a way perhaps echoing the heroics of Byrhtnoth and his hearthtroop in 1016. But in 991, somewhere in the region of South House Farm on the flat land opposite Northey Island to the south of Maldon, there took place a struggle that typifies all that was honourable about the Anglo-Saxon spirit.

  1066: Stamford Bridge–the Secret of Surprise

  Of all the campaigns in 1066, the Battle of Stamford Bridge demonstrates a good number of themes explored in this book. The importance of hostages to the leaders, the influence of terrain on the battle at a tactical level and, above all, the importance of descending upon an enemy when he is not expecting it. Another aspect of warfare is also brought out by a study of the battle. This is the question of how far a Viking army of the period can be from its reinforcements and supply before suffering the consequences of over-stretching itself.

  The Battle of Stamford Bridge has garnered plenty of attention over the years. Its immediate predecessor, the Battle of Fulford Gate, has received less. Nevertheless, Fulford Gate is just as important a battle. The political events leading up to the campaigns of 1066 are very well documented. Suffice it to say that on the one side was the newly crowned King Harold of England, supported locally by his new brothers-in-law Earls Edwin and Morcar, and on the other was Harold’s by now estranged brother Tostig, whose loss of his earldom of Northumbria had all but consumed him while he was in exile. Tostig had found himself an ally, a man already a legend in the Viking world. Harald Sigurdsson (later named ‘Hardraði’ or ‘ruthless’) had been in the Varangian Guard serving the Byzantine emperor and was now the Norwegian king. He was a man of extraordinary physical stature. His claim to the English throne was based on a promise made by King Harthacnut of England to King Magnus of Norway that who ever died first, the other should inherit his kingdom. It was Harthacnut who died first, but Magnus never really prosecuted his claim and so now in 1066, very much at the request of an insistent Tostig, Harold Sigurdsson of Norway sailed to the Humber Estuary with a colossal fleet of up to 500 ships. His wars with Swein Estrithson the king of Denmark were getting him nowhere, and now would be the time he would take the English throne instead.

  It is probable that Sigurdsson came to England via the Orkneys where he picked up Earls Paul and Erland and probably Tostig and his Flemish mercenaries, who were by now in Scotland. Scarborough was ransacked on the journey around the coast to the south, after which the combined fleet sailed up the Humber Estuary and then up the Ouse to Riccall where they moored ready to take York. This was on or around 16 September. Edwin and Morcar sent to King Harold the news of the landing and raced to York. The brothers got to York and gave battle to the south of the city at Fulford on 20 September. They appear to have formed up along the Germany Beck, a water feature feeding into the river, pinning one of their flanks on the river itself. It was an ideal defensive position in that this was where route ways into York from the south converged. The Vikings knew they had to defeat the brothers to get to York. On the west flank nearest the river the Norwegians had most of their muscle and it was here they prevailed in the end. Earl Edwin’s forces suffered greatly as they were retreating with their backs to the river in places. Morcar’s men seem to have recoiled as far as Heslington, a mile away to the north-east. The way was open now for Harald and Tostig to take York. Edwin and Morcar, although defeated, would later play a part in the campaign, but for now the speedy response of the new king of England would bring on the next stage.

  It seems that after the initial hostage exchanges, Tostig may have prevaricated at York. Northumbria after all was an earldom Tostig had recently held and there must have been room for some negotiation. A total of 150 hostages were exchanged and supplies given to the allied army. Harald and Tostig then returned to their ships at Riccall. By Sunday 24 September, King Harold had arrived at Tadcaster, 8 miles south-west of York. Here he is said to have ‘marshalled his fleet’, a possible reference to some English deserters from Tostig’s fleet who would have found themselves hemmed in by the allies at Riccall. Alternatively, it is just possible that the ships might have been crewed by the Danes sent by the king of Denmark to aid the English against Harald Sigurdsson. Nevertheless, Harold of England swept into York on Monday 25 September apparently unopposed.

  King Harold quickly stifled any means of alerting his enemies to his presence. The two allied commanders Tostig and Harald were dividing their forces into those who would stay behind with the ships and those who were to go out to the junction of the roads to the east of York and meet with the expected regional leaders for hostages and tributes to be paid. They cannot have been anticipating King Harold of England to arrive so quickly. Earls Paul and Erland stayed at Riccall and Harald and Tostig travelled to claim their hostages. When the latter two got to Stamford Bridge at the junction of the regional roads, they were 11 miles from Riccall. Not only would this distance prove to be a fatal miscalculation, but according to legend the Norwegians had left their armour on shipboard, so fine was the weather.

  The account given of the Battle of Stamford Bridge by the thirteenth-century historian Snorri Sturluson is shot through with anachronisms and inaccuracies. It still provides us, however, with a flavour of the subsequent battle that is difficult not to include in any modern observation of it. As the allies approached York from where they had been they saw a large cloud of dust raised by horses’ hooves. Shields and white coats of mail shone beneath the cloud. Harald Sigurdsson asked Tostig who these people might be, but Tostig was unsure. So they waited. ‘The closer the army came’, says Snorri, ‘the greater it grew, and their glittering weapons sparkled like a field of broken ice’.

  There was no way Tostig could get back to the ships at Riccall as the realisation dawned upon him that the approaching force was that of his brother. He and Harald instead fell back across the Derwent over the bridge. Harald had sent three messengers to Riccall for reinforcements, but these men were several hours march away at best. It was during the falling back operation that a famous holding action is supposed to have occurred at Stamford Bridge itself. Inserted by a later hand into the Abingdon version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the following fascinating account:

  There was one of the Norwegians who withstood the English people so that they could not cross the bridge nor gain victory.

  Map 5. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066.

  Then one Englishman shot with an arrow but it was to no avail, and then another came under the bridge and stabbed him through under the mail-coat. Then Harold, king of the English, came over the bridge, and his army along with him, and there made a great slaughter of Norwegians and Flemings . . .

/>   Just before the full battle commenced Snorri recalls that an English horseman enquired of a man whether Earl Tostig was in the army. The earl answered the man in person. The rider told Tostig that the king of England would offer Tostig his earldom back and a third of his kingdom. But this did not impress the earl who told the rider of the damage done to him by his brother during his exile. Tostig then asked the mystery rider what his new lord, King Harald Sigurdsson, could expect from the English king. The rider’s famous answer (according to Snorri) was emphatic: ‘King Harold has already declared how much of England he is prepared to grant him: seven feet of ground, or as much more as he is taller than other men’. Tostig knew the rider all too well. Brothers cannot successfully disguise themselves from one another. When he revealed the identity of the rider to his new lord Harald, the Norwegian berated him for not alerting him sooner, but did at least admit to his men that King Harold of England, although ‘little’, sat ‘proudly in his stirrups’. The story Snorri spins is a wonderful yarn, but what happened next was very grim for those who lost their lives. There followed one of the most comprehensive annihilations in Medieval history. Upon these battle flats to the east of York would be piled the bones of thousands of warriors. They could still be seen in the twelfth century according to Ordericus Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk.

  Snorri gives us an account of the battle but confuses what happened later at Hastings with events at Stamford Bridge. He talks of repeated English cavalry charges against the Norwegians, which although not beyond credulity, smacks of the Normans at Hastings and not the English at Stamford Bridge. He talks too of pauses in the fighting and of the death of a king (Harald) through the firing of an arrow. All we know for certain is that neither Tostig or Harald survived the Anglo-Saxon onslaught. Harald was possibly shot in the neck with an arrow. As for Tostig, William of Malmesbury says the earl was found slumped beneath his banners, capable only of being identified by a wart between his shoulder blades.

  It was all too late for Eystein Orri, the leader of the Riccall relieving force. Notwithstanding their arrival with armour as well as weapons, they were exhausted when they got there. There is even the distinct possibility that Harold’s ‘marshalling of his fleet’ at Tadcaster contained an instruction to fall upon the Viking reserves at Riccall should they get a chance. If this happened it may well explain why just twenty-four ships returned to Norway out of the several hundreds that came. Just Earl Paul and Olaf, the son of Harald, led the sorry remnants home with a solemn promise not to return. The Battle of Stamford Bridge was nothing short of a masterpiece of military planning. The conqueror of the Welsh, Harold son of Godwin, had just one more enemy to defeat to be sure of a permanent grip on the throne of England.

  1066: Hastings–Landscape, Locations and Evidence

  We cannot read about the Battle of Hastings and pretend we do not know the result. Such were the consequences of King Harold’s defeat on 14 October 1066 that more has been written about the battle than any other battle in English history. However, it is interesting that with so much literature at our disposal, there are questions about the battle itself that still remain. For example, where was the battle actually fought? Where was it intended to be fought? How long did it last? Was there a feigned Norman flight on the battlefield? Why did William of Normandy win it against the odds, and that most famous of all Hastings talking points–where did the ‘malfosse’ incident where many Norman horsemen met their doom take place?

  As William’s remarkable invasion fleet stood out to sea on the rising tide at St Valeééry on the evening of 28 September 1066, taking advantage of long-awaited south-westerly winds, we know that he was heading for the south coast of England to claim a kingdom. However, there are disputes even about his intended landing place. William of Malmesbury tells us that the duke had told Harold ‘he would claim what was his by force of arms and come to a place where Harold supposed his footing secure’. To the west of Pevensey lay the rich Sussex estates of Harold’s family. Also, and perhaps more significantly, lay the Steyning estate seized by Harold from the monks of Feéécamp Abbey. It should not be forgotten that the Norman invasion fleet’s original starting point on the other side of the English Channel had been in the Dives Estuary, more or less directly opposite these English target areas. The Norman fleet had been blown by adverse winds to its second launching point at St Valeééry.

  However, on the morning of 29 September 1066 it was at the old Roman fort of Pevensey where William set up his first temporary fortification on the western side of a salt marsh. His appearance on the south coast of England went largely unchallenged save for the unfortunate fate of some errant vessels’ crews which strayed onto the defended shore line at Romney.

  The landscape around Pevensey Bay is no longer like it was in 1066. Land reclamation and drainage have vastly altered its appearance. When William landed it was a salt marsh which had once been a tidal lagoon. It was practically uncrossable and was still penetrated here and there by tidal inlets, some of which stretched almost as far inland as Ninfield and Catsfield, some 5 miles from the sea. To march from Pevensey to Hastings in 1066 involved a circuitous route. Through Standard Hill at Ninfield, then down the 7-mile ridgeway road to Hastings. It seems likely that William left an armoured reconnaissance force at Pevensey surrounded by supplies and equipment and well enough protected. Then, as is also evidenced by The Carmen, the Bayeux Tapestry and William of Poitiers, he sailed to Hastings (‘as soon as they were fit’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). Two hours after setting off at high tide he would have arrived at Coombe Haven alongside the settlement at Hastings. Here began a long road to London which stretched along the ridgeway to the north and penetrated the thickly wooded weald of Sussex. Precisely what happened to the townsfolk of Hastings is not fully recorded but we can expect their experience was not pleasant.

  So, William set himself up with camp and castle at Hastings and waited. To the west of him was Coombe Haven and to the east the landscape curved around to the north from the Fairlight cliffs. To the north the Brede Estuary stretched as far as Sedlescome. William was, in effect, at the end of a peninsula. There was only one way out of this place and that was directly to the north. For Harold, who had begun his legendary race to the south, the task was to trap his Norman enemy in this bottleneck of land and smash him into the sea.

  It is probable that Harold received the news of William’s landing while he was at York on or about 1 October. The king had just won a thumping victory over Harald Sigurdsson. Within two weeks he was in London. In this time 190 miles had been covered. This amounts to an average of just over 13 miles a day. Interestingly, a similar marching rate has been gleaned from the charter evidence of King Athelstan’s (924–39) campaign to Scotland in 934. Here, the king covered 130 miles between Winchester and Nottingham between 28 May and 7 June, averaging, like Harold after him, around 13 miles a day.

  It is difficult to piece together what was going on in the mind of King Harold during the days between Stamford Bridge and Hastings. There are a number of possibilities, but the sources are quiet about it. William of Malmesbury and Ordericus Vitalis, writing in the twelfth century, give us a possible glimpse at best. Malmesbury tells us that Harold suffered some desertions from his army during this time. This, he says, was down to the king’s reluctance to share out his booty from Stamford Bridge. He had instead instructed the earls Edwin and Morcar to take the spoils to London. This single point is remarkable if it is true. It may explain a line in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s brief but noteworthy account of the Battle of Hastings. The Worcester scribe describes it thus:

  Then this [William’s arrival at Hastings] became known to King Harold and he gathered a great army and came against him at the grey apple tree. And William came upon him by surprise before his people were marshalled. Nevertheless, the king fought very hard against him with those men who wanted to support him and there was a great slaughter on either side.

  This is the only near contemporary English account of
the battle and it contains a reference to some sort of dissent among Harold’s army, giving further weight to Malmesbury’s observations. The fact that there seems to have been disquiet among some of the men in Harold’s army is not often spoken of. It has, however, haunted Harold’s reputation.

  William of Malmesbury, often regarded as something of an eccentric writer, says something else too. He insists that Harold’s army at this particular moment was not as big as everyone else says it was. This is a little more difficult to defend, given the wealth of literature pointing to the huge size of the English army at Hastings, but it still may have something of a kernel of truth in it. He says that the king’s army consisted of just his stipendiary household troops–his housecarls, some mercenaries (possibly Danes) and a few men from the shires. Might this explain the desertions? Mercenaries are far more likely than duty bound fyrdsmen to desert their employer if the spoils of war are not shared out among them.

  Only when Harold reached London did the size of the army swell once again, but even here the king did not wait until he was at maximum strength. The things that were said and done in London hold the key to understanding why Hastings was fought the way it was. In London Harold’s brother Earl Gyrth, according to Ordericus Vitalis, is said to have offered to lead the army into Sussex for the king so he should get another chance at William should things go wrong. Their mother Gytha had also expressed a concern that Harold should not fight against William lest he be seen as an oath breaker. Earls Edwin and Morcar were also present in London during this time, along with Archbishop Aldred. Had the earls been told to wait behind at London with their forces? Was Harold’s strategy to once again be the master of surprise like he had been at Stamford Bridge? It is probable that the English fleet was also being prepared for a blockading action in the English Channel whereby the king would trap the duke in the landscape around Hastings in a hammer-and-anvil manoeuvre.