Battle of Hastings, The
Page 1
THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2008 by
Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2009 by
Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © Harriet Harvey Wood, 2008
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To my sister
William the Bastard, having driven out the legitimate king of the English, seized the kingdom.
Annales Corbeienses
O fools and sinners! Why did they not ponder contritely in their hearts that they had conquered not by their own strength but by the will of almighty God, and had subdued a people that was greater, and more wealthy than they were, with a longer history: a people moreover amongst whom many saints and wise men and mighty kings had led illustrious lives, and won distinction in many ways at home and on the battlefield?
Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, book IV
CONTENTS
List of Plates
Introduction
The Background
The Contenders
The Prize
The Armies
The Prologue
The Battle
The Aftermath
The Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF PLATES
1. Bayeux Tapestry: Earl Harold talks with King Edward © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
2. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘Where Harold makes his oath to Duke William’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
3. Jumièges Abbey Church courtesy of Nicholas J. Higham
4. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘[Harold] comes to Edward’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
5. Hinged clasp from the Sutton Hoo burial mound © The Trustees of the British Museum
6. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘Here sits Harold, King of the English’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
7. Harold’s coinage © National Portrait Gallery, London
8. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘Here King Harold is killed’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
9. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘And the English turn in flight’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
10. Map of the battlefield drawn by General E. Renouard James
11. The Benedictional of St Æthelwold © British Library Images Online
INTRODUCTION
Very few battles change history. The claim has been made for the battle of Waterloo, but Waterloo merely confirmed the course of a history that was clearly visible before it, but had been rudely interrupted by Napoleon’s re-entry on the European stage. It marked a turning-point; it was not a catalyst. The battle of Britain is, perhaps, a stronger contender. Or the battle of Lepanto. William Golding has, with some justice, claimed the distinction for Thermopylae, on the grounds that it won thirty years’ respite, enabling Athens to develop from a small provincial town to the city of Pericles that was to dominate the Mediterranean for centuries. ‘If you were a Persian,’ he writes, ‘you could not know that this example would lead, next year, to the defeat and destruction of your whole army at the battle of Plataea, where the cities of Greece fought side by side. Neither you nor Leonidas nor anyone else could foresee that here thirty years’ time was won for shining Athens and all Greece and all humanity.’i
Such a claim, if substantiated, means that what Leonidas and his Spartans achieved at Thermopylae ranks that desperate defence higher in its cultural implications than almost any other battle in history. John Stuart Mill claimed a similar distinction for the battle of Marathon, adding that it was more significant than the battle of Hastings, even as an event in English history, since it changed the whole basis of western civilization. It is perhaps impossible to make a comparable claim for the significance of the battle of Hastings but it cannot be denied that it too was a battle that was to change the face of Europe, and cause a fundamental realignment between its major players. It was, wrote one eminent historian of the Anglo-Saxon period, one of the rare battles that have decided the fate of nations. Crécy, Agincourt, Magna Carta and much more lay implicit in the early-morning mist that hung over Caldbec Hill on 14 October 1066. But whatever the consequences of the battle, one fact is undisputed: it wiped out overnight a civilisation that, for its wealth, its political arrangements, its arts, its literature and its longevity, was unique in Dark Age Europe, and deserves celebration. In the general instability, lawlessness and savagery of the times, Anglo-Saxon England stood out as a beacon. Yet the timing of the battle and its result were the consequences of a series of accidents that could not have been predicted by either of the commanders. William, when he fought it, was generally known throughout Europe as William the Bastard. It has been suggested that he might more accurately have been known as William the lucky bastard.
Its outcome was far from a foregone conclusion. Any bookie, invited to give odds on the result a month before, would not have rated William’s chances very high. The betting must always be against the invader of a country, especially when the invasion has to be by sea, and the defender is prepared for it. Had the winds been favourable and William been able to launch his attack even a month earlier, as he had hoped to do, it is highly likely that he would have been repelled with ignominy. Philip of Spain’s later attempt at an invasion of England failed because the winds blew, and his great Armada was scattered. The English lost the battle of Hastings not least because the winds did not blow in the right direction at the right time.
It was a battle that was much more fully documented – in itself, in its causes and in its consequences – than almost any other battle that took place in western Europe in the Dark Ages. It is notable that, even at the time, it was recognized as an event of enormous historical significance. There is no shortage of testimony as to the events that led up to it nor to the conduct of the battle. The problem is that – with one exception – all this body of testimony comes from the winning side. The only contemporary English account, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is stark in its simplicity:
Then came William Earl of Normandy into Pevensey on the eve of St Michael’s mass, and as soon as he had disembarked his army, he built a castle at the port of Hastings. When this was told to King Harold, he gathered a great army and came against him at the hoar apple tree. And William came upon him unawares before his men were arrayed. But the king fought bravely against him with the
men who would fight with him and there was much slaughter on either side. There were slain King Harold and Earl Leofwine his brother and Earl Gyrth his brother and many good men. And the Frenchmen held the place of slaughter. All as God granted it to them for the sins of the people.
On the Norman side there is, by contrast, almost a superfluity of accounts, both of the battle itself and of the events that led up to it. It will be important to establish (as far as possible) the status and interrelations of these, and a list of the most significant of them is provided in the Sources chapter. Ideally, it should be read before proceeding too far with the story, to understand the degree of authority of each. Through them it may be easier to see how it came about that King Harold lost a battle that it might have been thought impossible for him to lose and how the conquest and pillage of England took place under the banner and with the blessing of the Vicar of Christ.
This is a story that has often been told, and will go on being told as long as there are readers willing to read about it and writers to be drawn to its characters and events and to its insoluble puzzles and ambiguities. Almost all writers on the subject are partial on one side or the other and I am not less so than most. A recent eminent historian of the period has announced with his customary enthusiasm that, if he had been present, he would have been charging with William; I make no bones about stating that I would have stood beneath the standards of the Dragon of Wessex and the Fighting Man with Harold. For many years now the civilization of Anglo-Saxon England has seemed to me a wonderful and astonishing product of the late Dark Ages, a lamp to illuminate Europe, and its destruction at Hastings a matter for infinite regret. By 1066 it was an old civilization, and old civilizations tend to fall to energetic upstarts. With hindsight, and the advantages of modern research, it is possible to see how much of Anglo-Saxon England did actually survive the conquest, and that the combination of what survived with what was new produced a great deal that was equally worthwhile. But much also was lost.
THE BACKGROUND
The story that ended on the battlefield of Hastings began many years earlier, when the Danes resumed their invasions of England shortly after the accession to the English throne of Æthelred, known ignominiously but not entirely unjustifiably to history as the Unready. Viking raids had become familiar to the English in earlier years, and in a sense had never entirely ceased; but since their defeat by Alfred and his son, Edward the Elder, in the ninth and early tenth centuries and during the triumphant reign of Alfred’s grandson, Athelstan, the Danes established in the north-east of England had gradually settled down into relatively law-abiding citizens. Athelstan’s code of laws had made special provision for the punishment of crimes in their territory (which gradually came to be known – for obvious reasons – as the Danelaw) by Danish, rather than English, custom. Under Athelstan’s immediate successors, such raids as there were seem to have been brief, uncoordinated affairs, designed to procure the maximum return in booty for the least investment in time and risk; during the reign of Edgar, remembered by later generations as a golden age of peace, they seem to have ceased completely. But Edgar died unexpectedly in 975, leaving two sons by successive wives, the elder, Edward, a teenager, and the younger, Æthelred, a child of ten. The character of Edward, despite his later sanctity as Edward the Martyr, appears to have been unattractive and to have boded ill for his future rule; none the less his assassination three years later by a faction supporting Æthelred was carried out in an act of treachery that appalled and sickened a society inured to almost every kind of violence. It would be too much to lay the blame for all that was to follow on the circumstances in which Æthelred began his reign; but there can be little doubt, judging from the contemporary chronicles, that they overshadowed it to an extent from which it never really recovered, and there can be equally little doubt that the temptation offered to the Danes by a wealthy kingdom ruled by a child of thirteen must have been irresistible.
It was not resisted. The first of the new generation of raiders arrived in 980, met only local opposition, ravaged Hampshire, Thanet and Cheshire and departed. More came in 981 and 982, and Devon was invaded in 988. The new Viking settlement of Normandy, established in 911 by a treaty between Charles the Simple of France and the Norwegian Hrolf Ganger (better known to history as Rollo), provided a convenient jumping-off point and refuge for these raiders, and the most notable response to their activities was a treaty in 991, brokered by the Pope, between Æthelred and Rollo’s grandson, Duke Richard I of Normandy, which provided that neither should entertain the other’s enemies. The treaty seems to have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, and it may have been in an attempt to secure a more effective understanding with Normandy that Æthelred in 1001 took as his second wife Emma, sister of Richard II of Normandy, a decision that was to prove fateful to England in future years. In the meantime, the raids continued and intensified. We would probably know little of one of the raids of Olaf Tryggvason, later King of Norway, had it not been the subject of one of the greatest late Old English poems, The Battle of Maldon. Olaf’s herald announced the raiders’ objectives to Byrhtnoth, the elderly ealdormanii of Essex, in what must have been fairly standard terms:
Bold seamen send me to you, and bid me say that you must speedily buy safety with treasure; far better is it for you to buy off this battle with tribute than that we should deal in bitter warfare. We need not destroy each other if you are generous to us; we are ready to establish peace for gold. If you, who are richest here, agree to ransom your people, and to give the seamen goods for truce in accordance with their demands and to accept peace from us, we will go back to our ships with the treasure, return to sea, and keep treaty with you.
Byrhtnoth rejects the raiders’ demands scornfully (‘Too shameful it seems to me that you should go with our treasure unopposed, now that you are come thus far into our land’). Although he held the causeway to the island where the invaders had landed, and could have defended it with not more than three men, he allows the Vikings to cross the Blackwater to the mainland so that they may fight on equal terms. Battle is joined, Byrhtnoth falls, some of his men desert, but his bodyguard fight around his corpse to the death, in accordance with the old Germanic tradition that held it shameful to survive a fallen leader. Many of the features of the battle of Maldon in 991 foreshadow with almost uncanny accuracy the later battle at Hastings.
Byrhtnoth’s action may not have been as rash and quixotic as it seems in retrospect. If he had not allowed the Vikings to cross the causeway to fight, there was a risk that they might have taken to their ships and landed on a less well-defended part of the coast. It was his responsibility to hold them where there was at least an armed force in being to oppose them. If he had lived to give an account of his actions to the king, this might have been his excuse for his defeat. But in the story of the battle, as it has come down to us in the poem, the blame for the defeat is laid squarely on his chivalrous action – his ofermod, or overconfidence, as it is described in the text. In the immediate future, however, the most significant result of the battle of Maldon was that tribute was paid to the raiders within the next four months. How much was paid is not recorded; we do know that by a treaty later in the year 22,000 pounds of gold and silver was paid to Olaf Tryggvason for peace. When he returned in 994, it was in the company of Sweyn Forkbeard, son of Harold Bluetooth, King of Denmark, and with ninety-four warships. A further 16,000 pounds was paid. The next time the tribute amounted to 24,000 pounds. In 1002, in a political misjudgement that alone would have earned Æthelred the title of Unræd or ‘Unready’ (literally, ‘no counsel’, presumably a pun on the king’s name, which means ‘noble counsel’, though there is no evidence that the nickname was used during his lifetime), he ordered the massacre of all the Danes in England on the grounds that he had heard that they were planning to assassinate him. The order was meaningless, because impossible to implement (in the Danelaw, there was virtually no one but Danes and the English with whom they had intermarried
), but many were killed, among them Sweyn’s sister Gunnhild who was in England as a hostage. To what extent this influenced Sweyn’s later actions we do not know, but it can hardly have had an emollient effect. In 1003 and 1004 Sweyn, by this time King of Denmark, harried again in England. In 1007 he was paid 36,000 pounds. In 1009 he was back again with the most formidable army yet, and stayed. In 1012, 48,000 pounds was paid to them. The fact that these enormous sums could be raised comparatively quickly – by a tax that came to be known as the Danegeld – is testimony alike to the wealth of the country and to the efficiency of the fiscal system inherited by the king. By 1018, the total paid over since 991 came to a staggering 240,500 pounds, including a final payment of 18,500 pounds in 1018 to recompense the Danish army with which Cnut had conquered England. The figures are so vast that many historians have doubted whether they can be accurate, suggesting that they have been exaggerated by chroniclers. Recent research, however, has tended to vindicate the chroniclers.
The events of these disgraceful years are bitterly and sardonically recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; in 1010 the chronicler writes,
for three months they harried and burned, right into the wild fens. And they burned Thetford and Cambridge and then went southward to the Thames and those who were mounted rode towards the ships and then turned westward to Oxfordshire and thence to Buckinghamshire and so along the Ouse until they came to Bedford and so forth to Tempsford and burned everything wherever they went. Then they went to their ships with their plunder. And when they were dispersing to their ships, then our levies should have gone out again in case they decided to turn inland. Then the levies went home. And when the invaders were in the east, then our levies were in the west, and when they were in the south, then were our levies in the north. Then all the Witan [the king’s Great Council] were called to the king to advise him how the land should be protected; but whatever was advised lasted no longer than a month and finally there was no man who would raise levies, but each fled as far as he could. No shire would any longer help its neighbour.