The Normans who had entered into the English inheritance were a harsh and violent race. They were the closest of all western peoples to the barbarian strain in the continental order. They had produced little in art or learning, and nothing in literature, that could be set beside the work of Englishmen. But politically they were the masters of their world.cxvi
It is impossible not to try to guess what would have happened if the battle had gone the other way, as it so easily might. If King Harold had thrown the Normans back into the Channel, he would probably have been secure for the remainder of his reign, as Cnut was. After his death, there would almost certainly have been another disputed succession. He had sons by Edith, who would not have been accepted by the Church as legitimate, and he had at least one much younger posthumous son by Aldyth, sister of Earls Edwin and Morcar, who was legitimate. The former would certainly have put in a claim for themselves, and the claim of the latter would have been supported by his uncles. Depending on when Harold died, there would also have been a strong case for the Atheling Edgar, who would probably have been much of an age with Harold’s illegitimate sons, and no older than his great-uncle Edward the Confessor had been when he had succeeded. Harold’s election had been prompted by the exceptional dangers threatening England when Edward died, and with those dangers safely surmounted, there would have been nothing against and much to be said for returning to the old royal line. The speed with which the remaining chief men of the kingdom turned to Edgar as soon as Harold’s death at Hastings was known indicates that his claim would probably have been strongly supported, especially if the alternative was an internecine contest between members of the Godwinson family. And Edgar, if elected, might perhaps have proved as durable as his great-uncle, as canny a king, and might have done better in the matter of providing an heir. Even as a homeless exile, a wanderer through England, Scotland and France, he outlived almost all the other players in this tragedy.
What would not have happened is easier to guess. The empire constructed by William did not outlast his own life. Normandy was inherited by his rebellious eldest son, Robert; England, which, as he had acquired it by his own efforts he believed (despite his hypothetical deathbed speech) to be his to dispose of at will, went to his second son, William Rufus, and, when William Rufus died childless, to his third son, Henry. Robert’s desire to reunite Normandy and England under himself led to a continuous state of war between him and his younger brothers, ending in his loss of Normandy altogether and, eventually, its acquisition by the rival house of Anjou. The fratricidal wars between Robert and his siblings in which England was perforce involved placed the new English aristocracy in a very difficult position. Most of them, certainly the most powerful nobles, held land in both Normandy and England. Those who fought for William Rufus or, after him, Henry risked having their ancestral Norman possessions confiscated by Robert; those who fought for Robert equally risked the loss of their new English lands. Prudent fathers who were able to do so divided their inheritance between two sons, Norman to one, English to the other, thus saving each of them the trouble of choosing sides, though risking the possibility of their later meeting, like the brothers they served, face to face on the battlefield. Many could not or did not do so, and to the curse of being ruled by an alien governing class was added the problem of absentee landlords who expected their English tenants to fight for their masters’ lands on the other side of the Channel. The family feuds fought out first between William and his eldest son and, after his death, between all his sons and, indeed, his grandchildren, dragged the English into continuous wasteful and irrelevant warfare, for which in general England paid in lives and money. The situation was not much improved by the accession of Henry II, the first of the Angevin kings and the one who contributed most to the post-conquest development of England, since his continental and family feuds and those of his successors were as incessant as those of his Norman predecessors. England, unconquered, would have been spared all these continental squabbles, although it might have had some succession contests of its own. It is highly unlikely that, on past showing, they would have been as destructive as the civil wars between Stephen and Matilda, after which the direct Norman line died out. More importantly, there would almost certainly have been no Hundred Years War, no English claim to the throne of France, no Agincourt, no burning of Joan of Arc. It might all have been relatively peaceful for England.
It has been suggested that Harold’s reign would have turned England politically and culturally more in the direction of Scandinavia, further from the influence of France that was to mean so much to England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This need not have been the case. Harold himself appears to have been a man of some culture, who travelled widely and spoke several languages easily. The English language would almost certainly have developed differently – possibly into something much closer to German or Dutch. Before 1066, English was still heavily inflected; when it re-emerged from obscurity after the conquest, it had lost most of its inflections and agreements. This might have happened spontaneously anyway, though the example of German throws some doubt on the idea. What literature might have been written in it can only be guessed at, but there is no reason to suppose that it would not have been receptive to the new literary fashions on the Continent. Anglo-Saxon England had never been closed to continental influence. Before the conquest, there was (as far as we know) so little vernacular literature elsewhere in Europe that the question hardly arose, but in the other arts there was certainly no isolation. The few artefacts that survive indicate an openness to what was happening elsewhere in Europe that would probably have continued just as easily after 1066 if there had been no invasion – indeed, possibly, much more easily, given the cultural insensitivity of the Norman conquerors in all spheres except architecture. The Carolingian influences in the stole and maniple of St Cuthbert and the work of the extraordinarily beautiful Winchester school of illumination as illustrated in the benedictional of St Æthelwold show to what extent continental examples affected pre-conquest English workmanship.
From the literary point of view, it is less easy to guess what would have happened. It has been suggested that it was the Norman Conquest and the events that followed from it that opened England to the new tide of literary innovation that came from France. This seems unlikely. The Normans were most improbable conduits for any form of culture, and it would be difficult to prove that they were responsible for anything cultural that happened in England in the century that followed 1066; in fact little did, except an outbreak of distinguished historiography, much of it the work of men of dual English and Norman heritage like Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. A burst of the writing of history frequently follows upheavals such as a conquest; a similar outbreak occurred in Scotland after the Union with England of 1707. It is, perhaps, a way of making sense of the incomprehensible. The tearing apart of the country in the civil wars between Stephen and Matilda left little opportunity for anything in the way of literature or culture to flourish. It was the Angevin court of Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, that deserves most of the credit for bringing the songs of the troubadours to England and thus for their influence on English lyric poetry, but it is arguable that this would have happened anyway. The absence of anything remotely comparable to the Norman Conquest in Germany and the low countries proved no impediment to the spread of romance and troubadour culture there, any more than in earlier centuries there had been any resistance to the spread of chansons de geste on the exploits of Old Germanic heroes like the Volsungs, Attila and the Niblung kings, and Hildebrand and Walther of Aquitaine, in Merovingian or Carolingian France or indeed the rest of western Europe. The twelfth-century lays of Marie de France reached Norway, even Iceland, a country particularly remote from continental influence, without difficulty, certainly without the assistance of any event comparable to the Norman invasion. Poetry, especially oral poetry and song, is notoriously resistant to frontiers.
But perhaps it is appropriate to
finish on a vaguely poetic note. We started with the question, how did King Harold contrive to lose a battle that it might rationally have been thought impossible for him to lose. There may be a way of accounting for it, perhaps not in historical or practical terms but in a way that is to some extent artistically and poetically satisfying. To understand it, it is necessary to go back again to the Old Germanic heroic tradition and the concept of heroism, as illustrated in so many of the old legends and, more specifically, in Old English poetry. Heroism, as it is understood in poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, is a quality only achieved in death. There is no such thing as a live hero, because there is always the possibility of his fame being tarnished by an unheroic action. Only after death is his heroism fixed and immutable. This is the point of the long speech by Hrothgar to Beowulf, in which he adjures him to avoid the errors of Heremod, an earlier king of the Danes, who in youth performed heroic actions, as Beowulf had done, but later turned to vice and cruelty. It follows that, to attain a heroic reputation, the only kind worth having for a warrior, death in heroic action was to be, if not sought, at least not avoided, even if it was at the expense of prudence or common sense. N. F. Blake makes this point in his essay on the battle of Maldon, and reminds us ‘that heroes are not ordinary men. Judged by the standards of rational human behaviour, their gestures are stupid and they provoke comments of apparent criticism’, adding that ‘rational human behaviour does not provide the appropriate standard to judge by’.cxvii It was not sensible for Roland to refuse to blow his horn for help when overwhelmed by superior numbers. It was not sensible for Beowulf, as an old man, to insist on fighting the dragon single-handed; it was certainly not sensible for Byrhtnoth to allow the invading Danes to cross the Blackwater so that they could fight on equal ground. ‘God alone knows who shall rule this battlefield,’ he says, but one feels he knew. All three were fey: they knew instinctively that the consequences of their actions would be disastrous and that fate had spoken against them, but all knew equally that the challenge with which fate had presented them required them to accept it and die or lose honour and live. The situation faced by Harold was not so very different. From the moment he steps on board the ship that will take him to the swearing of his oath to William, he seems, like them, to move with a dreadful inevitability towards the fate that is waiting for him. It is perhaps fitting that, at the very end of the heroic age, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England should have met his death in a way that his remoter ancestors would have understood and applauded.
THE SOURCES
The existing accounts pose many problems, one of the most important of which is the degree of authority of the sources that have survived, combined with the impossibility of knowing what has been lost, and what light it might have cast on what we now have. The source closest in time to the battle and most generally relied on by historians (William of Poitiers) has survived in a single seventeenth-century text, with material missing at both ends, which was in turn printed from an original, now lost. This gives some idea of the scale of the problem; who knows how corrupt the text may have become between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries? In addition to the depredations of time there is the silence imposed by political censorship in the period immediately following the conquest. It would not have been prudent for any English chronicler to write down his true feelings about the events of 1066 for many decades after them (although in fact one or two took the risk, as the Waltham Chronicle indicates), nor for any Norman chronicler to write about them other than sycophantically, as most of them did.
None of the surviving sources was written by an eyewitness of the battle. This is not necessarily a disadvantage. Even in periods much nearer our own day, it has generally proved impossible for those taking part in a battle to have more than a very partial, confused impression of what went on. A dispassionate overview could hardly be expected from anyone below the rank of commander-in-chief, and even he could speak only of the actions of his own side. He could only guess at the imperatives that underlay the strategy of his opponent. William of Poitiers (see d. below) excuses himself from mentioning the deeds of all the Normans who took part by making the very fair point that even an eyewitness could hardly have followed everything. This means that all the sources that have survived depend, directly or indirectly, on memory. The memories of two bystanders who witness a road accident are likely to differ, even a very short time after the event; how much more unreliable must be the memories of those who had taken part in so complicated and agonizing an event as a battle lasting many hours.
Some of the sources listed below were written so long after the event that in a different context one might hesitate to trust them at all. In general, testimony as late as that, for example, of William of Malmesbury (see j. below) might not be taken very seriously. But we do not know on what sources William based his account, and that goes for many others of similar date. They might have been good, they might have been bad. In William’s case, his version is corroborated in enough cases to make one hesitate to discard his testimony on uncorroborated details too rashly.
With these provisos, let us look at the most important of what has survived more or less in order of date, in so far as any accurate dates can be established.
a. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The Chronicle, which was reputedly founded by King Alfred towards the end of the ninth century and is written in Old English, was maintained in various monasteries in England, the different surviving versions being distinguished now by letters. The only versions that were still being kept up in 1066 were at Abingdon (C); Worcester (D – this is generally known as the northern version since at that time the episcopal sees of Worcester and York were closely linked but it was more probably written at Worcester); and Peterborough (E), which was probably written at Canterbury, at least during the period with which we are concerned here, and reveals much more detailed information of what was going on in the south of England. It is a feature of the Chronicle generally that different versions tended to include material relevant to the place where they were being maintained that is not found in others, and that each has its own particular bias. E, for example, is notably supportive of the Godwin family; C, by contrast, is anti-Godwinist. Each at various points has irritating silences at points of interest; other sources may tell us that important events happened during these silences, and we can only guess at the reasons why the Chronicle does not notice them. When a version was continued after the conquest, as E was, it may be assumed that some care had to be taken over what was or was not recorded. Thus, it is never safe to assume that, when nothing is recorded in the Chronicle, nothing happened. Examples could be adduced to prove that this was not the case. Of the versions that were being kept up in 1066, E survives only in a twelfth-century copy. C, perhaps surprisingly, does not mention Hastings at all, but ends with the battle of Stamford Bridge, the entry being followed by a short note in a different, later and much less educated hand on the valour of the lone Norwegian who held the bridge while Hardrada’s army got itself into fighting order. The entry in the D version has been quoted in the Introduction. E, after a brief description of Stamford Bridge, continues:
In the meantime Earl William came by sea to Hastings on Michaelmass day and Harold came from the north and fought with him before all his host had arrived, and there he fell, and his two brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, and William overran this land.
We have no way of knowing when the entries in any of the three versions were actually written; it could have been the following month, the following year or several years later. It is possible that the 1066 entry in the D Chronicle was written fairly soon after the year’s end since it finishes after the account of William’s coronation and return to Normandy with the enigmatic words ‘May the end be good when God wills it’.
b. Carmen de Hastingae Proelio Attributed (though this has been hotly disputed) to Bishop Guy of Amiens, this is believed to have been written around 1067 (the date too has been disputed) and certainly not later, if t
he attribution is correct, than Guy’s death in 1074 or 1075. This verse narrative is the most controversial source of all. The attribution is based on the twelfth-century statement of Orderic Vitalis (see h. below) that Guy was the author of a poem in the style of Virgil and Statius describing the battle, and on words in the opening of the poem, ‘L. W. salutat’, which have been interpreted as ‘Wido [i.e. Guy] greets Lanfranc’ – Lanfranc, Abbot of St Stephen’s, Caen, was appointed in 1070 Archbishop of Canterbury. However, this is slender evidence and the claims of the Carmen to be a contemporary record have been convincingly challenged by R. H. C. Daviscxviii who places its date about the middle or second half of the twelfth century. One of his most persuasive arguments is that details in the Carmen not also found in the chronicle of William of Poitiers (see d. below) to which it has marked similarities, such as the legend of Taillefer, are usually found only in later sources such as Henry of Huntingdon and Wace. Another is the sheer incredibility of this version of the death of Harold at the hands of four knights, led by Duke William, which certainly bears all the hallmarks of embroidery on the original story well after the time when all the alleged participants were dead. The elements of the Carmen that seem more credible could all have been derived from earlier accounts such as William of Poitiers’. Davis’s arguments, however, have been equally convincingly disputed by E. M. C. van Houts,cxix who supports the early date of the poem and its association with the bishop. To some extent, the jury is still out on this one. There may, as Orderic Vitalis says, have been a poem on the battle by Bishop Guy of Amiens, and this may be it, but there is some doubt. Since there is a reasonable case for accepting that it is by the bishop, it has been retained in the list of sources, though without accepting its reliability on any uncorroborated points of importance. Guy of Amiens was not a Norman, and one might therefore expect to look to him for a more impartial account of events than might have come from a Norman chronicler; but the bishop was a native of Ponthieu, a county that had been under Norman rule for some years by 1066; his nephew Guy was the Count of Ponthieu who captured Harold on his shipwreck and handed him over to William. His younger nephew, Hugh of Ponthieu, brother of Guy, took part in the battle where his deeds and gallantry lose nothing in his uncle’s account. Hugh was certainly not the only participant in the action whom the bishop would have known, so there is no doubt that he would have had eyewitness accounts to draw on. Assuming that he is indeed the author, the questions are to what extent he felt himself bound by strict accuracy in a poem clearly intended for entertainment, in which he might well have felt that he had a greater degree of artistic licence than in a sober prose chronicle, and how far we can distinguish fact from fiction in his work. He starts his narration at St. Valéry to which William had moved his fleet before the invasion, and where he was weather-bound by contrary winds. He follows him across the Channel, reports the exchange of embassies with the king and then gives a fairly detailed description of the battle, in which he describes many natural features of the field very much as they are known to have been (he speaks, for example, of a hill and a valley on Harold’s side of the field, and of land too rough to be tilled), though his sequence of events is rather confused. He reports, additionally, the fact that the English stood in such dense formation that the dead could not fall, and he also reports the retreats, feigned or real, of the Normans that lured some of the English out of their defensive lines. Finally, he tells of the four knights, Duke William, Guy’s nephew Hugh of Ponthieu, Eustace of Boulogne (brother-in-law of King Edward and another kinsman of the author) and a knight called Giffard (or Gilfard), who cut King Harold down at the foot of his standard. It is this report, above all, that discredits the poem as a reliable account of the battle. Against the improbability of this version of the king’s death must be set the fact that, if Guy were the author, he knew at least three of these knights well; all survived the battle, and would thus have had the opportunity of hearing and if necessary, challenging his version of their deeds. The account then follows William to London and to his coronation on Christmas Day. What he does not cover is any of the period preceding Harold’s accession, though he refers in passing to Harold’s oath to William. He eulogizes William throughout, comparing him to Caesar in the opening lines. His description of the ravaging of the country around Hastings after William’s landing demonstrates his general attitude and tone:
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