In the fateful year of 1066, there were signs in the sky that something momentous was about to happen. Halley’s Comet, although not known by that name then, flashed across the heavens on its once-every-75-years’ journey past our planet. The undisputed English king, Edward the Confessor, had just died, leaving the question of who should succeed him very much in doubt. There were multiple rivals and claimants to the throne, some of whom the Confessor may have encouraged in their aspirations. Among them were Edward the Exile, son of the former King Edmund Ironside, deposed by Danish invaders under King Cnut (Canute) in 1016. But Edward had died in 1057, which left Harold Godwin(e)son, the Earl of Wessex and the king’s brother-in-law, and William, Duke of Normandy, the king’s first cousin once removed, whose lands lay across the English Channel in France.
The Confessor fell into a coma after Christmas 1065 but recovered a couple of days later and was able to speak: “He told of a dream about two monks he had once known in Normandy, both long dead. They gave him a message from God, criticising the heads of the Church in England, and promising that the kingdom within a year would go to the hands of an enemy: ‘devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of war.’”1 Contemporaneous chroniclers report that it was at this time that he bequeathed his kingdom to Harold, and thus unleashed the devils with fire and sword and the havoc of war that he had foreseen. England and Europe, and thus America and the rest of the world, would never be the same.
Accordingly, Harold took the throne a week after Edward’s death on January 6, 1066. Images of him depict a man who looked every inch a king, with finely chiseled features, blond hair, and a regal mien. Still, despite his wishes, Edward’s demise set off a free-for-all for the throne. England, as its name implies, was at the time the object of contention between the Anglo-Saxons, the Norman French, and various Scandinavian Viking kingdoms, including Denmark and Normandy.2 Almost from the moment of his coronation, Harold would have to fight for his throne. And for nine short months, he did, with skill and determination.
The first rival to be disposed of was Harold’s own exiled brother, Tostig, who landed on the Isle of Wight, just off the south coast of England near Portsmouth and about 85 miles west of Hastings, in May 1066 with a fleet of an estimated 60 ships. That invasion was repelled, and Tostig fled, later to join forces with another claimant, the ruthless Harald Sigurdsson, known as Hardrada (“hard ruler”), the king of Norway,3 who together with Tostig launched his own invasion, landing near York in September of 1066. A quick victory over the northern English earls at the Battle of Fulford got Harold Godwinson’s attention, and the king organized a rapid response, moving his army from the south of England—where he had been anticipating an assault from William4 the Bastard—to York.
The opening salvo in what became the Battle of Hastings in October 1066 turned out to be the Battle of Stamford Bridge on September 25—an all-important prelude to Hastings, without which Harold might well have defeated the Normans, and Anglo-Saxon England might have survived for centuries longer than it did. Before investigating both battles, let us pause for a moment to consider what would have been the ramifications of an Anglo-Saxon victory the following month.
For one thing, you would not be reading this book in this language—or even at all. The Norman Conquest changed not only the administration of England and Ireland (invaded by Strongbow in 1170, although not fully subjugated until the Act of Union in 1800 went into effect in 1801 and, in 1603, by the merger of the Scottish and English crowns), but also the nature of the English language. Without the infusion of the Latinate Norman French, English would be little more than a variant of Low German, something akin to Dutch or Frisian perhaps, and we would be without everything from The Canterbury Tales to Shakespeare to Dickens, and even Harry Potter.
Neither would our legal or political systems be the same, nor the immediate subsequent history of Europe, especially that of France and England. From our contemporary vantage point, it seems as if countries such as “England” and “France” have somehow always existed, and in their present forms. And yet the borders and boundaries of “England” and “France” remained fluid through the end of the Angevin empire of the Plantagenets of Richard the Lionheart (who spoke French), himself the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the early thirteenth century. The enmity between England and France, reflected most recently in the British decision to exit the European Union, stems from the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest.
How long the essential “Saxonness” of Britain resonated in English hearts and minds is clear from reading Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles. Writing in the middle of the Victorian era (Victoria, whose mother was German, married a non-English-speaking German in Prince Albert, and was fluent in German herself), Creasy repeatedly refers to Britain’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and remarks how preferable it is to the Franco-Norman overlay that arrived with the Conquest—or indeed, in his opinion, to the “oriental” despotisms of Persia or the Semitic civilizations of Phoenicia, Carthage, and the Arab lands. Writing of the Punic wars, for example, he says:
On the one side is the genius of heroism, of art, and legislation: on the other is the spirit of industry, of commerce, of navigation. The two opposite races have everywhere come into contact, everywhere into hostility.… It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered: his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world.
And, referring to the Teutoburg Forest:
The narrative of one of these great crises, of the epoch A.D. 9, when Germany took up arms for her independence against Roman invasion, has for us this special attraction—that it forms part of our own national history. Had Arminius been supine or unsuccessful, our Germanic ancestors would have been enslaved or exterminated in their original seats along the Eyder and the Elbe; this island would never have borne the name of England, and “we, this great English nation, whose race and language are now over-running the earth, from one end of it to the other,” [Arnold’s Lectures on Modern History] would have been utterly cut off from existence.
Such jingoism—we might today term it “racism”—is today frowned upon. But “racism” is a comparatively modern notion, and one that is useless in a historical perspective. The Greeks would not have understood it, nor the Persians, nor the Romans. Encountering peoples different from themselves in culture, customs, and even physiognomy, the Romans would have seen, and called them, barbarians or foreigners. And this terminology would have been applied equally to Celtic Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, or sub-Saharan Africans. The Romans treated all barbarians with equal cultural (not “racial”) disdain. “It may sound paradoxical, but it is in reality no exaggeration to say … that England owes her liberties to her having been conquered by the Normans,” writes Creasy. “As [John, 1st Baron] Campbell boldly expressed it, ‘They high-mettled the blood of our veins.’” Hard to imagine any historian writing that today.
Anglo-Saxon Britons of 1066 were facing invaders from both Norway (their Viking half-brothers and cousins) and Normandy (land of the Northmen, descendants of the Vikings, intermingled with the Gallic French). In essence, the struggle for Britain that took place that year—twice—was familial as well as external. And yet … the English are correct in maintaining that modern Britain was forged at both Stamford Bridge and Hastings, setting the English forever apart from their Scandinavian and Frankish relatives. The inter-Scandinavian wars that saw first Denmark, then Norway, then Sweden battle for supremacy in the north are of great interest to the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes but of little interest to the rest of Europe and the world. Because what emerged from the defeat of the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge and the Anglo-Saxon loss to the Normans at Hastings was not only a country, later a larger political entity known as “Britain,” and later an empire, but also a language—the English language. Modern English, combining the Latinate French of the Normans and the sturdy Saxon tongue in a way that would never have been possible without the Norman Conquest, provided the linguistic mechanism for the eventual triumph of British notions of law, culture, colonization, and civilization. These sometimes took root by colonization, as in America, Canada, and the Antipodes; by force, as in Ireland and India; or withered, as in central and, latterly, South Africa, but English shows no signs of relinquishing its linguistic hegemony as the voice of literature, commerce, pop culture, air travel, and international finance.
And so, in the early fall of 1066, it was a fight to the death—a last stand not only for the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, whose rout and demise near York ended the Viking threat to the British Isles; not only for the English king, Harold Godwinson and his Huscarls (housecarls, specially armed and trained fighting men attached to his person; a kind of Saxon Praetorian Guard) on Battle Hill, near Hastings, who left their bones but not their glory on the south coast; but also for Saxon England, which, by losing, enjoyed the fruits of the Norman victory for the next thousand years.
These twin battles are among the most written-about and analyzed in all of military history. From various primary sources—whose accuracy is, of course, much debated by scholars—beginning with the Bayeux Tapestry5 and various contemporary or near-contemporary accounts by both Saxon and Norman historians, we have a fairly clear idea of the sequencing of events. We need not concern ourselves overmuch here with the lineal jockeying for position that preceded the conflicts of September and October. For the purposes of this study, two things in particular stand out.
The first is that, some thousand years plus after Cannae, how little the Western way of battle had really changed: death still largely came in hand-to-hand combat. The second is why Harold Godwinson, who had been expecting a challenge from William along his south coast for months, should have rushed exhausted from the fight against Harald Hardrada so quickly to meet his doom at Hastings.
To take the first issue first: in all of the descriptions of the Saxon battle lines, one element is of particular interest. Not their lack of cavalry, for armed equestrians had gone in and out of military fashion from the time of Alexander, but their use of what was essentially a defensive, static phalanx to repel invaders and then wait for an opening to counterattack.6 The Saxons on Senlac Hill fought with shields interlocked, their Dane axes at the ready, an immovable object facing the irresistible force of William’s archers, foot soldiers, and heavy cavalry. And for the best part of the day, they held their ground. Again and again, William’s forces crashed against the Saxon hedgehog, at great cost but to little tactical avail. Until, suddenly, whether through happenstance or circumstance, the Saxons made a fatal mistake.
The second point is one that has resonated down the millennium: why was Harold in such haste to confront William when he had just fought and won a resounding victory against the Norwegians several hundred miles to the north? The Norman invaders were isolated on the coast, still far from London, and would have had to live off the land and deal with a populace not kindly disposed toward them. And yet, marching at double time and raising a fresh force as he went, Harold could not wait to meet his appointment with destiny.
To understand this conundrum, therefore, let us begin near York, with the small but valiant last stand of a Viking warrior whose name has been lost to history, a giant of a man who, alone, held a bridge against Harold and his men until he was finally struck down by, literally, a low blow, thus opening the span across the River Derwent. The Viking host under Harald, allied with Harold Godwinson’s disaffected brother, Tostig, had landed in Yorkshire and quickly defeated the northern earls, the brothers Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria. The city of York capitulated, and Harald had his foothold on English soil.
But in a brilliant feat of military logistics, Harold reacted to the news by moving his army quickly north—two hundred miles in a week—to counter the immediate threat from the formidable Viking king. He moved with such alacrity, in fact, that he caught the Vikings, their English allies, and some Flemish mercenaries on a warm early fall day on the side of the Derwent River with only half their army in camp, and minus their mail-shirt armor; the other half of their estimated 11,000 men were still at the Norse base camp at Riccall, just inland from the North Sea.
Godwinson knew he was facing a formidable opponent. According to the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241),7 Harald Hardrada had been at Constantinople, where he became the commander of the Varangian Guard—the Eastern Empire’s equivalent of the Praetorians—and served across Asia Minor and in Sicily before returning to Scandinavia to press his claim to the Norwegian throne in 1045. Two decades later, assured by Tostig Godwinson that the conquest of England would be a cakewalk, he assembled a fleet of some two hundred ships8 and launched his invasion flying under his personal raven-emblazoned banner: “Land-waster.”
The quick defeat of the earls and the warm reception Harald got from the largely Anglo-Danish nobles of York perhaps disarmed and encouraged him, which is why Hardrada was caught largely unawares by Harold Godwinson’s rapid advance and assault. The lone crossing at the river was a simple wooden bridge, just about wide enough for two men to pass abreast. And it was at this bridge that our lone Viking warrior made the first of what would be a series of last stands that would decide the fate of England. Taken from one of the several extant versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it relates
a story, added in the twelfth century and repeated by several other writers, of how the English were for some time prevented from crossing the bridge over the Derwent by a single Norwegian warrior, apparently wearing a mail shirt, until at length an inspired Englishman sneaked under the bridge and speared the Viking in the one place where such armour offers no protection. This was supposedly the turning point of the battle: Harold and his forces surged over the undefended bridge and the rest of the Norwegian army were slaughtered. Both Hardrada and Tostig were among the fallen.
—Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2012)
With the Norse champion down,9 Harold Godwinson’s men rushed across the bridge and fell upon the Vikings. Harald toppled with an arrow to the throat, and Harold’s brother Tostig was also killed.
The death toll has been placed at six thousand for the Vikings and around five thousand for the English, although the real tally is unknown. Contemporary sources report rivers of blood, the waterways choked with corpses, the shore spattered with “Viking gore.” From our fastidious remove, it is tempting to discount such reports as overwrought. And, in truth (as we believe we know from Herodotus, among others), the estimates of troop strength and casualties in classical and medieval antiquity seem to be off by a factor of ten or more. Still, according to the Chronicle, the remnants of Harald’s army were transported back to Norway in just 24 ships—a far cry from the hundreds that had started the journey.
That does not mean, however, that the accounts of the viscera are exaggerated. As we saw at Cannae, the slaughter of tens of thousands of men was not accomplished in the single blinding flash of an atomic bomb but one at a time, at the point of a spear or a sword. Our savage forefathers had a far greater tolerance for the sight and taste of blood. Heads were routinely severed and exhibited as proof of victory. If the only way to kill your man was to dismember him more or less alive, then so be it. Life was, in the memorable words of Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short”—and on the battlefield it was even worse.
By any standards, the Saxon housecarls—the word has a root meaning of “domestic servant” (carl became our English word churl, which acquired an added, invidious resonance)—were a frightening and deadly force. Long gone were the Roman arms of spears and short swords. Foremost among the English weapons was the Dane axe, a lethal armament that could halve a man from his skull to his groin and decapitate both rider and horse when swung with both hands. The Dane axe, however, was still light enough to be wielded with one hand while the other held the kite-shaped shield that formed part of the elite unit’s protective carapace, along with a short mail coat, called a byrnie. A long, double-edged sword with a groove running down the blade on both sides, which made the weapon somewhat lighter to wield, rounded out their fighting kit.
Harold had little time to savor his victory. Almost immediately word came of William’s landing at Pevensey Bay, west of Hastings, on September 28, 1066. The natural harbor protected his ships, while the landing site boasted an old Roman fort, which William fortified as he brought his men and horses ashore. The story goes that upon disembarking from his flagship, the Mora, and hitting the beach, the Bastard—soon enough to be the Conqueror—stumbled, fell, and came up with a handful of wet sand.10 His men were aghast: surely this was a bad omen. But a quick-thinking Norman soldier nearby is said to have called out, “You hold England, my lord, its future king.” To which (according to Creasy’s account) William is said to have replied, “See, my lords! by the splendour of God, I have taken possession of England with both my hands. It is now mine; and what is mine is yours.”11
Never mind the omens: William had landed unopposed. To this day, scholars and historians marvel at the fact that Harold Godwinson knew the Normans would invade and that they would naturally take a relatively direct route from Normandy across the Channel to the southern English coast. (For his part, William didn’t know until he arrived in England which of the two Harold/Haralds—Godwinson or Hardrada—he would have to fight.) And yet he had sent his fleet back to London and, in the wake of his victory at Stamford Bridge, disbanded his army12 around September 8, although he still held his personal troops, his housecarls. Which meant that Harold, even while marching south to confront the Normans, needed to reassemble his army and so levied troops as he went. Today, we might term this an intelligence failure, but in the eleventh century, with its primitive means of communication, it was the bad luck that attended the accelerating pace of geopolitics and military strategy.
It was not that William had had an easy time of it. His naval force of some seven hundred ships had been ready to launch since early August, but unfavorable winds and bad weather in the channel prevented sailing well into the middle of September. Skeptics have charged that William’s delay in leaving Normandy was a calculated gambit: he was just waiting for Harold to disband his forces so he could strike without fear. But, in warfare, one should never be too quick to attribute to skill what can be explained by luck or human error. As Marc Morris writes in his 2012 book, The Norman Conquest,
The duke, it seems, was delayed by contrary winds. For once, William of Poitiers appears to have given us the unvarnished truth. The principal reason for believing Poitiers is that his testimony is corroborated by a new source—the so-called Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, or “Song of the Battle of Hastings.”13 … One thing that makes the Carmen especially interesting is that it was apparently written for the ears of William the Conqueror himself (the first 150 lines or so are written in the second person, i.e. “You did this, you did that”) …
“For a long time tempest and continuous rain prevented your fleet from sailing across the Channel.… You were in despair when all hope of sailing was denied you. But, in the end, whether you liked it or not, you left your shore and directed your ships towards the coast of a neighbour.”
The Normans, it seems, couldn’t wait to get at Harold and England. The reason, in large part, was due to the bad blood between William and Harold that had originated a year or two before, when Harold had been William’s “guest”—possibly by shipwreck; the historical record is unclear—at his court at Rouen. At that time, perhaps under duress, Harold had been enticed to swear (without his knowledge) on the relics of saints that he would support William’s claim to the English throne and would also become betrothed to William’s daughter, in order to seal the deal. At which point, the story goes, Harold was allowed to sail back to England. (The episode forms an early part of the Bayeux Tapestry.)14
So when Harold renounced his sacred oath upon the death of the Confessor, and accepted the crown of England, William and the Normans were furious. They viewed Harold’s perjury as not only perfidy but apostasy; and on the night before the battle, the Normans were saying their prayers and being absolved by their priests and bishops, determined to meet their maker shriven—while the English were getting drunk.
What a contrast the two armies made: the numerically larger Normans, with their archers and cavalry, short-haired and clean-shaven, versus the smaller English contingent of foot soldiers, who wore their hair long and whose faces bristled with fierce moustaches. The English blood was up—although mindful of Harold’s oath to William, his brothers Gurth and Leofwine both advised him not to personally fight in a battle that probably should not have been fought where and when it was in the first place. No sense provoking the wrath of God. But the king was outraged at the despoliation of the countryside by the Normans as they had made their way eastward, and was not to be dissuaded.15 After all, he and his men had just won a great victory at Stamford Bridge.
According to nineteenth-century French historian Augustin Thierry, a monk named Hugues Maigrot visited Harold in his camp to propose three alternatives to the wholesale slaughter that was sure to come. The first was Harold’s withdrawal of his claim to the English throne. The second was to offer to present the situation to the pope for arbitration. The third was single combat. Harold rejected them all—there was no way he was going to resign his crown, and as far as the pope was concerned, he had already blessed William’s claim, since Harold had sworn an oath on the relics of the saints. And single combat was out of the question—although in retrospect it might have been Harold’s best option, especially against the porcine William.
According to Thierry, during the deliberations there came this poignant plaint, a question with contemporary significance that still resonates today: “We must fight, whatever may be the danger to us,” said one of the English noblemen. “They come, not only to ruin us, but to ruin our descendants also, and to take from us the country of our ancestors. And what shall we do—whither shall we go—when we have no longer a country?”
So to the death it was. Taking up a position atop Senlac (or Battle) Hill, and recognizing from the outset that he was fighting a defensive contest against mobile invaders, Harold Godwinson arranged his forces, on the trot from London and already both blooded and bloodied from their successful battle against the Norwegians under Harald Hardrada, atop a hillock where the Franco-Norman invaders would face an uphill climb. For although William could boast of cavalry and a fleet of archers, both of them were at a tactical disadvantage when charging and shooting uphill. This was not to be a classical battle, fought on a plain. If the English could only weather the shower of arrows and the charge of horsemen, repelling the barrage with their shields and hamstringing the horses and mounted men with their halberds—a long pole with a spiked axe-head at one end—and with their Saxon battleaxes, they could win the day.
For six hours, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, they went at it, with the Franco-Normans trying to breach the near-impregnable Anglo-Saxon shield wall, and the Britons holding off assault after assault. After the initial archers’ barrage, repelled by the Saxon shields—owing to the English position, the arrows were launched high in the sky in order to rain down against the enemy; but this reduced their penetrating power; like the Greeks at Thermopylae, the Britons were “fighting in the shade”—and despite taking casualties, the English were getting the better of it.
All might have been well had the English held their lines. But, early in the fight, a rumor spread among both French and English that William had been killed. The French left—on the English right—turned and fell back. Fatally, the English broke ranks and pursued. Although the struggle would continue for hours, it was in this instant that the battle was lost, and the fate of England was sealed.
Whether the apparent Norman retreat was feigned has been the subject of analysis and dispute for more than a thousand years. Such tactics were not unknown in classical times. By moving his center back in a controlled retreat at Cannae, Hannibal had suckered the Roman legions into his double envelopment; Caesar had used his numerical weakness against Pompey at Pharsalus to his advantage, employing a regiment of hidden infantry wielding pikes to turn Pompey’s superior cavalry on the right flank and force victory as Caesar’s legions destroyed his rival’s center and left. Indeed, Harold Godwinson had used this same ploy against Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge.
According to one account, during the first attack the Norman cavalry had foundered on the English shields and swords. The English line pressed forward and, when they saw their foes fleeing, ran after them. Their haste was amplified by the thought that William had fallen: medieval armies generally did not survive the loss of their generals, and often broke ranks in panic. But William came forward on horseback, tearing off his helmet to show his face to his men and shouting: “Look at me. I am still alive. With God’s help I shall win. What madness is persuading you to flee?” (The scene is illustrated in plate 68 of the Bayeux Tapestry.) Seeing their king alive and unarmed, carrying only a baton as the insignia of his command—though he’d already lost two horses that day and needed a third to finish the fight—the Normans rallied.
A second version, as related in the Carmen, says the retreat was feigned at first but then turned suddenly real in the face of the ferocious English onslaught, at which point William rallied the troops and the battle was rejoined. In either case, and upon regrouping, the French cavalry fell upon the exposed English soldiers and slaughtered them. Once broken, the English line was no match for William’s far more flexible three-pronged force of soldiers of foot, bowmen, and heavy cavalry. It was in this moment that the contest was decided.
Late in the afternoon, with the English line buckling—both of Harold’s brothers had likely fallen at this point—William ordered his archers to fire another volley, high in the sky. One bolt struck Harold in his right eye, sending him to his knees in great pain, leaning on his shield. Fighting his way toward the center of the English line, where Harold had stood, cutting down Saxon after Saxon, William and three of his men, by some accounts, fell upon the dying and defenseless Harold, piercing him with a lance, beheading him, and disemboweling him with a spear. The Carmen reports that one of his thighs was hacked off and carted away; historians have taken this to mean his genitalia were severed and removed from the body. Nobody really knows: an English knight is shown on the Bayeux Tapestry receiving an arrow in the eye, but this may not be Harold. And the idea that William himself fought his way to the center of the battle to personally strike down Harold seems more dramatic than historical.16
In his somewhat melodramatic retelling of the battle, based on Robert Wace’s Roman de Rou, Creasy paraphrases the Norman soldiers’ reaction to their great chief: “Such a baron never bestrode war-horse, or dealt such blows, or did such feats of arms; neither has there been on earth such a knight since Rollant [Roland] and Olivier.” In such ways can literature, even fiction, affect events.
What we do know is that, seeing their king fall, the English fled—all but the housecarls, who somehow fought their way back to the body to protect it with their lives, until they too went under the Norman swords. Sworn to protect Harold, they died to nearly a man, fulfilling their duty to their sovereign and their country until both had disappeared into history. Some of the Normans pursued the English past the top of the ridge and into a ditch known as the Malfosse, into which the Normans tumbled unawares, and were butchered by the remnants of Harold’s army before grabbing their horses and riding away. But the victory had already been won.
As was customary, William and his men remained on the battlefield, dining and sleeping among the dead.17 As the English came to identify and collect their naked dead,18 one problem was how to properly identify Harold. The king’s face and body had been so badly mutilated that he was unrecognizable—except to one intimate. Harold’s mistress, known as Edith Swan-Neck, was brought to the field and was able to certify his corpse “by certain distinguishing marks” that only someone as intimate as a lover would know. William ordered Harold’s body buried by the sea, but there is a tradition that it later was exhumed and interred at Waltham Abbey. There is even a legend that Harold somehow survived the battle, was hidden away in a cellar for two years, and then spirited off to Germany.
If so, he never returned. Anglo-Saxon England did not die with Harold and the housecarls but instead was subjugated to the Normans and, as we have seen, was elevated by its contact with them. Within a few hundred years, the Norman and Saxon lineages had fused to form a new tongue, a new country, and a new civilization—one that, a millennium later, would spread far and wide beyond its island origins to encompass the world.
And yet it began simply, in rage over an unfulfilled oath, and ended when the loving eye of a mistress steeled herself to inspect the corpse of her lover and, with the secret knowledge of a woman’s heart, pronounce the words: ecce homo. If the purpose of war is for men to defend their homelands, their women, and their children, even those as yet unborn, then the final act at Hastings, however tragic, stands as its epitome. For there is victory even in defeat. That is the nature of humanity.