A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  York/Jorvik was now an open city, and Hardrada was shrewd enough to try to rally its population by refraining from sacking the town. The Northumbrians responded by agreeing to join the army on its march south. Hostages were delivered to ensure that promise was kept, but by the terms of the capitulation a further 500 hostages were to be taken from the shire, and the village of Stamford Bridge, 8 miles east ofYork, was chosen as the place where they would be surrendered on 26 September. It must have seemed a perfectly routine business. Hardrada took Tostig along to enjoy the moment, leaving a third of his troops behind at Riccall. But when they got to Stamford Bridge what they saw was not a bunch of shambling, forlorn hostages but a huge army. Snorri Sturlasson wrote that ‘when their weapons glittered, it looked like a sheet of ice’. Hardrada and Tostig duly froze. The Norwegian asked the Saxon what it meant. Tostig replied it meant trouble. It meant Harold.

  The English king had done the impossible. Hearing of Hardrada’s landing on 19 September he had left London the next day, mobilizing his huscarls and the disbanded fyrd en route. Gathering strength, the army moved at an astounding lick, covering 190 miles in five days, a speed conceivable only if at least some of the thegns and weapons were carried on horseback. But many of the fyrd must have jogged brutally north up the Roman road, javelins, axes and all. By 24 September they had reached York, which, Jorvik or not, quietly opened its gates to them. On the morning of the 25th they were ready to surprise Tostig and Hardrada.

  Surprised they certainly were – to the point at which Tostig is thought to have suggested a tactical withdrawal to the safety of the ships at Riccall to regain their full troop strength and armour. Typically, Hardrada rebuffed the advice as chicken-hearted and the melée got under way. There are no reliable eye-witness accounts, either for Stamford Bridge or Fulford, but both Norse and Anglo-Saxon traditions describe the Norsemen fiercely defending the bridge itself, their shield-wall pushed back by the onslaught of the English axes and swords, until the span was held by a single unarmoured ‘berserker’, who was finally removed only when an English soldier floated beneath the timbers of the bridge in a swill-tub and stabbed the Viking from below through gaps in the planking. Once the bridge was cleared, the battle raged on on the other side. Eventually the Viking soldiers summoned from the ships made a belated appearance, but they were too late to affect the outcome. The Norse warriors were so depleted that the English had broken their line. At the end, the surviving warriors gathered around their chiefs, with Hardrada swinging his axe beneath his standard of the Land-Waster, before dying of an arrow in the throat. Tostig is said to have picked up the raven flag before he too was cut down in his turn.

  The carnage was so complete that the Viking remnant ran for their boats, harried as they fled. The young Orkney earls and Hardrada’s sons were spared on condition they departed England and vowed never to return. From the hundreds of boats that had sailed from Norway under the midnight sun, just twenty-four were needed to carry the survivors back home. A year later Hardrada was buried in the Church of St Mary in Niadro in northern Norway. With him was buried the Anglo-Scandinavian state begun in the reign of Alfred. Lying beneath the Land-Waster Harold found his dead brother, and he took what was left of him to be interred in York Minster.

  But Harold had time neither to grieve nor to exult. For on 26 September, a day after the battle of Stamford Bridge, the wind suddenly veered at the port of St-Valéry, at the mouth of the Somme, where William’s fleet had been frustratingly holed up. Priests were firmly of the view that it had been the exhibition of the relics of St Valéry that had worked the miracle. On the 27th William was at sea once more, his fleet sailing due north, as he stood at the helm of the Mora, the ship provided by his wife Matilda. The Bayeux Tapestry shows him wearing an expression of unforgiving command. The next day he needed it, as first light revealed the Mora sailing alone in the swelling sea, not a sail in sight. While his crew and men panicked, William ate breakfast. His ship had, in fact, merely outrun the others, which were weighed down with horses and weapons. Two ships had apparently foundered. ‘Not much of a soothsayer,’ was his response to news that the official clairvoyant of the expedition had been lost along with one of the boats. ‘Couldn’t foretell his own end.’

  The first sight of England would have been the towering cliffs of Beachy Head, but it would have taken little reconnoitring to find a safe beaching at Pevensey, below an apparently stern Roman fort that, on further investigation, turned out to be an undefended shell. Had the fyrd still been in the positions of three weeks earlier, or had Harold’s defending fleet not been holed up at the Isle of Wight expecting William to sail in that direction, it would have been a different story. But now the Normans were able to unload one of the three prefabricated timber castles they had brought with them and construct it on a mound of earth within the fort, as if in declaration that they were heirs to the Romans.

  Without any organized army to oppose them, the Norman army moved through the Sussex countryside at will, grabbing whatever food they needed but proceeding with the nervous wariness of men in an alien landscape. William himself was anxious about being bottled up amid the boggy watercourses and hills of the area and being thwarted in an effort to move out of their beach-head to the London road. For the time being the Normans took food from the helpless natives as and when they needed it and burned whatever couldn’t be seized. One of the most harrowing scenes from the Bayeux Tapestry (a work full of mutilated bodies) is the picture of a mother and child setting out as fugitives from the burning remains of a building, perhaps their house. It’s the very first image in European art that makes space for the ruin of victims. The Bayeux embroiderers were not, of course, pacifists, but they did go out of their way to see the Conquest as something involving more than the strategies of the powerful. Both in the borders and the main picture space, the embroidery is full of the life of the common people: porters and archers, cooks and spear-carriers; Bishop Odo presiding at a ritual feast almost like Christ at the Last Supper, but also two soldiers whacking each other with shovels.

  By the time the Norman army had settled in around Hastings, Harold was back in London after another brutal, high-speed march. Having beaten back the threat of the Norsemen and his own brother, it must have seemed inconceivable that he was going to have to do it all over again within a week or two. The damage inflicted on the victorious army at Stamford Bridge made it unthinkable to use the surviving part of the fyrd, however high their morale. It would have been equally inconceivable, on the other hand, not to use the huscarls who were indispensable in any force strong enough to have a chance of resisting the Normans. Who would be their commander, though, was a serious question. A tradition has Harold’s brother, Gyrd, asking the king if he, and not his older brother, might lead the defending troops. This was, in fact, a sensible request. Should the battle be won, all well and good; should it be lost, Harold would still be available for a second line of defence, and it would by no means be a simple matter for William to proceed unopposed to London. But Harold may have felt that, when all was said and done, the king had, without question, to be present in person to rally his troops against the invader. To dodge the confrontation with William was to concede, somehow, that there was something illegitimate about his authority. Messages reiterating the charge of perjury that had arrived from the duke in the week before the battle had obviously stung Harold – as had been intended. The quarrel was now something akin to a matter of knightly honour, and Harold evidently felt he had, throughout, behaved entirely honourably.

  Even more important was the issue of when he should engage William’s army. The most reasonable strategy would have been to wait until his army could be reinforced by the huscarls from Northumbria who had survived Fulford and until he could add to the strength of the fyrd from the shires beyond his immediate home base. Potentially, Harold could call on perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 more fyrdsmen, numbers that would, in the end, have made William’s position completely untenable. But Harold believed th
at all these arguments were outweighed by the imperative need to keep William bottled up amid the woods and waters of south Sussex and to prevent him, at all costs, from breaking out and having the freedom to roam at will in the southeast. He may even have thought that the duke might be expecting reinforcements from Normandy and that his best chance of facing him with relatively even forces was to do it at once. And then, perhaps, Harold may have been a little too elated with his success at Stamford Bridge, believing, fatally, in his own invulnerability.

  He must also have believed that the logistics of the likely battle favoured the defending force. All the Saxon army had to do was to stand its ground and prevent William from breaking through to the London road. Once his own army was in Sussex, food and hay would be much harder to come by for the Normans. Winter was not far ahead, and what had happened to Julius Caesar would happen to William. Deprived of freedom of manoeuvre and food, the invasion would lose its momentum, and the invaders would head back to the beaches.

  First, though, the decisive blow had to be struck. On 12 October, without waiting to see if the northern earls would join him, Harold left London with his two brothers, Gyrd and Leofwine (whom he foolishly insisted join him in a display of dynastic solidarity), and 2000 or 3000 huscarls. A fresh batch of the fyrd was to be mobilized through the thegns and was to assemble by an old grey apple tree, the ‘hoar tree’, which stood at the crossing of the tracks leading out of Hastings and towards London. There, by the blasted tree, Harold would plant his banner of the Fighting Man; there, on the ridge of Senlac, ready or not, the English would make a stand against William of Normandy.

  It was the morning of Saturday, 14 October 1066, Julian Calendar, the feast-day of St Calixtus, the slave-born convict pope. If you had been a Saxon huscarl, you would be standing on the brow of the hill (it was a great deal steeper than it is now), looking down at the opposition some hundreds of yards away. You’re exhausted from the gruelling march the king forced on you – 58 miles in three days! Perhaps he wanted to surprise the Normans as he had surprised Hardrada. But they had been quite unsurprised. Either side of you, in a long line, the shield-wall is strung out, perhaps a thousand paces, flank-to-flank, battle-axes and javelins whetted. They had better be sharp. Behind you are the men of the fyrd. They have seen some action, and they keep their swords and helmets at home for just such an occasion as this. In the centre you can see the king with his brothers standing at their banners: the Wyvern, the Golden Dragon of Wessex, and the king’s own standard of the Fighting Man. You believe in this king. He has courage and good sense. You saw him destroy Hardrada, and you know he will be steadfast. Down below, you can hear the Norman horses. You have never faced a charge of knights before. But then, they have to ride uphill. Perhaps that’s why you think you hear them chanting psalms.

  If you were a Norman foot soldier you would be praying that the gentlemen on horses know what they’re doing. All around you is the scraping of metal: the sharpening of swords; the mounting of horses. You peer up to the brow of the hill and see a thin, glittering line. You cross yourself and toy with the linked rings of your coat of mail. Can they dull the blow of an axe? You’ve never faced axes in battle before. You turn about and watch the archers check the tautness of their bowstrings. Other foot soldiers are shuffling into place behind the archers. No one seems to care very much where they stand. You take your spear and sword. Behind you are the gonfalons (the pennants of the knights): Bretons to the left, Flemish to the right. You feel better that you are in the centre, with the duke and his brothers. And better still when you see the banner of the Holy Father, reminding you that God is fighting with you and that the duke is going into battle with the pope’s ring.

  It would be nice if the most poetic accounts of battles happened to be true and if this one had actually begun the way the chronicler Wace described it, with the minstrel Taillefer arrayed for combat, riding out from the Norman ranks and singing the Chanson de Roland, throwing his sword high in the air, catching it by the hilt and then charging full-tilt at the English line, killing three before being struck down in a hail of spears. But the reality was probably more prosaically deliberate: a slow advance of archers as they got within range and unloosed their arrows, then the foot soldiers breaking into a run, and finally the knights, charging to the sound of Norman trumpets and battle cries of Dex aie (‘God is our help’). Before they were on the English line, they could hear the rhythmic drumming on the shields and the shouts of Goddemite (‘God Almighty’), and then just the murderous smashing and crashing of horses and the thrusting of weapons, the thud of arrows and swords on leather-covered shields and men hitting the ground and screams of the wounded: a grinding labour in progress.

  For about an hour William sent his triple-formation troops – archers, infantry, cavalry – uphill. Some of the horses made it all the way to the shield-wall, where they crashed against it like a reef. But most of the Norman horsemen, especially in the early stages of the battle, were not especially eager to make contact with the English axes. So they rode close enough to the English line to be able to unloose their javelins, which they hoped would pierce the shields, but then wheeled about under a protective shower of arrows and retired downhill to await another charge. Nothing much was going to come of this, and by midday nor had it. The Saxon shield-wall hadn’t budged an inch. And there was a limit, perhaps, as to how many charges the Norman cavalry could make. It was, in fact, exactly this gathering sense of elation in the English ranks that the cavalry attacks were faltering that led to a crisis. The left flank ofWilliam’s army, the Bretons, recoiled in such disarray, with horses stumbling back over infantry, that a part of the fyrd were unable to resist the temptation to turn the moment into a rout. They broke ranks and followed the Bretons down the hill. At this critical moment in the early going, the English army might indeed have won the whole day if a concerted attack, led by the king, had been made. But Harold was conservative in his tactics, knowing that neither the Flemish right nor the Norman centre had broken and remaining convinced that the essential requirement for his army was to maintain its strength and let the enemy simply exhaust itself, against the shield-wall. Failing to take the lead in a concerted advance, Harold momentarily lost control of crucial sections of his army. As they ran down the hill, William, who had been rumoured to be dead and who had, indeed, had horses cut from under him, threw back his helmet to show he was very much alive, regrouped the ranks of the Norman centre and wheeled around to encircle the pursuing Saxons, cutting them off from their own line. They retreated to a little hillock, fighting as best they could without heavy armour, but were cut down, one by one.

  The battle was a long way from being over. It would be six hours before it was decided – one of the longest battles in all medieval history – but the rally of the Norman knights was surely a turning point. It demonstrated the difference in flexibility in the two armies: William adapting the different elements of his forces to shifting circumstances; Harold locked into his stolid defence, soaking up punishment until the enemy was so weakened that it could be pushed over. Towards the middle of the afternoon, however, it seems to have been the English, not the Norman, army that was being ground down by attrition. William deliberately sent what Norman historians insist were ‘feigned’ retreats by his knights. Feigned or not, they had the effect of shortening the English frontline where huscarls had fallen. Very gradually the more lightly armed and protected fyrd had to take their place, and those behind them became more exposed to Norman arrows shot high in the air and falling behind the front rank. Thinned out or not, the Saxon line remained glued to its hill until quite late in the day. At some stage, though, weak points were sufficiently exposed for some of the Norman cavalry to get up on the western brow of the hill, from which point it charged the depleted Saxon line directly. Right in the thick of it was Harold, probably with his brother Gyrd, and when the king was struck in the eye with the arrow (for the tapestry leaves no room for ambiguity) the wound was fatal, not just to the king
but to his army, especially since both of his brothers died in the fighting as well, Leofwine probably much earlier, Gyrd at the end. Around them were the bodies of countless huscarls, who fought to the bitter end as light faded from the field.

  Once the banners had fallen, what was left of the English line disintegrated. For the surviving members of the fyrd it was time to save their necks, find their families or just to get out of harm’s way. The fighting was not quite over with, though. A company of Norman knights, who were pursuing stragglers at full gallop, charged into the wooded gully of the ‘Malfosse’, were ambushed and their horses chopped down. Many knights were killed, and Eustace of Boulogne, their leader, was hit so hard that ‘blood ran from his nose and mouth’ so that he had to be carried from the field.

  Harold’s mutilated body was identified by his mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, who was walking through the heaps of dead. She recognized the dead king ‘by marks on the body, known only to her’. William had the body buried on the beach, beneath a stone slab, as if permanently confronting the inevitability of his doom. Harold’s mother, Gytha, offered gold to the duke to reclaim her son’s body but was contemptuously rebuffed. At the exact point where Harold had planted his standard, William determined to make good his oath to God that, should he be given a victory, he would build an abbey of thanksgiving. But before he could indulge himself in these grandiose gestures, he had to make sure that he had won, not just a single battle, but the war for England. He had lost at least a quarter of his army in the carnage at Senlac ridge, and not long after the rest were stricken by a violent epidemic of dysentery. And if William had supposed the remnant of the English nobility would come flocking to him at Hastings, offering submission and allegiance, he was going to be badly disappointed.