By sundown on Saturday, 14 October 1066, events on a previously obscure Sussex hillside had decisively altered the course of English history, as indeed of world history. Surveying the scene of carnage, even those eyewitnesses who could hope to gain most from the day’s events were appalled by what they saw. As William of Poitiers, in all likelihood a chaplain attached to the army of the Duke of Normandy, later put it, ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood.’ Pitched battles were rare events in the Middle Ages. Too much could turn upon a single moment’s hesitation, upon false rumour or an imperfectly executed manoeuvre. Only if prepared to gamble with fate, or absolutely certain of victory, would a general commit himself to battle. William of Normandy did precisely this in October 1066, not because he commanded overwhelming odds or could be certain of God’s favour, but because he had just staked the wager of a lifetime. By crossing the Channel with a vast army of Frenchmen, not only his own Norman followers but large numbers of knights and mercenaries from as far north as Flanders and as far south as Aquitaine, he risked everything on a single roll of the dice. Should his army fail in battle, should the enemy refuse combat, cut off the possibility of retreat and leave the French to stew in their own mutual recriminations, then William would go down in history as one of the most reckless gamblers of all time. As it was, his outrageous manoeuvre succeeded not so much through his own skills but because of the hubris of his enemies.
The English commander, Harold Godwinson, had just celebrated victory in the north of England, having butchered an entire army of Norwegian invaders at the Yorkshire settlement of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Clearly, God was an Englishman, and Harold was God’s appointed instrument. In these circumstances, when news reached him of the landing of William’s army at Pevensey, three days after his victory, Harold packed up his troubles and marched his army southwards for what he clearly expected to be yet another great celebration of English martial superiority. Not for the first time, nor the last, a sense of manifold destiny and of the invincibility of England in the face of foreign threat, lured an English army onwards to disaster.
Yet the battle about to be fought at Hastings would be a disaster unprecedented even on the scale of other such events, for example the English defeat at Maldon in 991 (when an English commander, once again convinced of his destiny and of the impossibility of negotiating with foreign terrorists, preferred his entire army to be massacred by Viking raiders rather than surrender to the heathens), or in Essex, at ‘Assendon’ in 1016 (when the English King Edmund ‘Ironside’ had been decisively defeated by Cnut of Denmark). In the whole of European history, Hastings finds few parallels either in the scale of the slaughter or the finality of the consequences. Like all such epics, it was fought on a scale and over a period of time that were appropriately vast. Like Waterloo, it was a close-run thing, lasting from about nine in the morning until dusk, nearly nine hours of fighting. At Hastings died not just Harold Godwinson but an entire civilization. Not just Harold’s army but the whole 500-year-old panoply of Anglo-Saxon England went down before the swords of a new Norman invader. Why was this so, and what were the consequences?
What we know about events in the Middle Ages depends upon a surprisingly narrow source base. We need to imagine a stage with ninety per cent permanently in darkness. An occasional spotlight flickers upon this corner or that, suddenly revealing details and colours that we might not otherwise imagine existed. A vague half-light enables us to discern some broader outlines, a few darker and lighter shadows. For the most part, however, we depend upon inference and imagination to establish what is there. It is no coincidence that those trained as medieval historians have occupied a disproportionately significant role in both MI6 and the CIA, precisely because the medievalist’s training ensures that the bare minimum of detail is employed to the maximum effect in intelligence gathering. For the Middle Ages, a very large part of our intelligence emerges from one key source. Our spy network on the past is dominated by churchmen, which is to say by monastic chroniclers and the occasional bishop or parish priest, setting down their accounts of past events, virtually all of them men, most of them with a particular line to toe in respect to their own monastery or locality and their wider allegiance to the Church. Such men wrote not so much to illuminate the broader stage, to flatter kings, or to celebrate secular society, but for quite other purposes, above all to demonstrate the unfolding of God’s plan for mankind, with the Church or churches as God’s principal instrument.
To understand the Anglo-Saxon past and the society doomed to destruction at Hastings we need to go back to the eighth century, to Bede, Monk of Jarrow in the far north of England and his great Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. Bede wrote almost three hundred years since the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had first crossed the North Sea from their German homelands, in the aftermath of the collapse of Roman rule. It was more than a century since at least some of these pagan invaders had first accepted Christianity, a Mediterranean religion closely associated with the pomp of Roman imperial government, reintroduced to a now pagan England via the more European-leaning parts of Kent. It was nonetheless Bede’s historical narrative which for the first time attempted to impose a pattern upon this chaos of conquest and conversion. In the very opening lines of his History, he proclaimed that ‘Britain is an island of the furthest west’, deliberately echoing the words of the Roman geographer Pliny, and thereby setting the stage for at least two key concepts central to Bede’s vision of Britain and its place in the wider world. Firstly, Bede believed that for all its physical insularity, Britain was linked intellectually and in terms of its peoples and their racial descent, to a mainland that had once formed part of the wider empire of Rome. Secondly, being an island supplied Britain with a compact unity that should have ensured, over time, a unified sense of purpose under a single monarchy.
Bede did not invent the idea either of Christian kingship or of nation. He nonetheless brought these two concepts into a new and powerful conjunction, arguing that through their acceptance of Christianity, and hence through their willingness to unfold God’s master plan, the Anglo-Saxons had progressed to having one supreme King from having several. Kingdoms and peoples were pounded in the mortar of Christ’s Roman Church to form a single ‘England’ under a single race of English kings. The English, like the Jews of the Old Testament, might have good or bad kings, but they were now a nation united under kingly rule. In turn, and with the advice of churchmen, their kings gave them laws, just as the kings of Israel had dispensed a Deuteronomy and the laws of Moses. Upon the pillars of kingship and the law was the nation founded.
There was much in this that was pure nonsense. But strongly expressed opinions often make for the most interesting writing about the past, and Bede, with his prejudices, racism and religious bigotry, was unquestionably a great historian, writing in a sophisticated and highly personal voice. According to his own lights, he was pursuing truth, on hunting down and verifying source materials that, but for his History, would be entirely lost to us. He wrote on an epic scale, and long books have always had the advantage in the bestseller lists. As a result, it was Bede’s highly literary, highly prejudiced and resolutely misleading account of Anglo-Saxon history that was adopted as the master narrative. In due course, it was this same History that was fed back into the historical process, used by later Anglo-Saxon kings, especially the rulers of Wessex, to justify their own kingly authority. Faced with a Viking onslaught in the middle of the ninth century, King Alfred of Wessex responded by appealing to an English sense of identity, king, law and nation, founded squarely upon the twin pillars of the Bible and Bede. A phenomenon observable from Homer to Mein Kampf, a book of history became crucial in shaping the fate of subsequent historical events. Bede’s History was translated into the vernacular English language at Alfred’s court, and Alfred himself sponsored the writing of a new history in continuation of Bede, the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, again in the vernacular, recording the events of more recent times on a year by year basis, copies of it being sent out to each of the major centres of West Saxon culture, the greater monasteries of Wessex, Kent and Mercia, from Winchester via Canterbury to Worcester.
It would be easy to deconstruct large parts of Bede’s narrative and the mythology founded upon it. For a start, the English had never been a single people. They were always, in Bede’s day as later, a mixture not just of Angles and Saxons from across the North Sea, but of those already settled in the island long before the Romans came, most obviously the Celtic peoples, still independently ruled in large parts of Wales, Scotland and the Lake District. Even these Celts had been superimposed upon a population of far more ancient settlement. Unless we assume wholescale genocide, either when the Celts arrived in the fifth century bc, or again with the coming of the Germanic Angles and Saxons from the 400s onwards (and in neither case has the idea of genocide found favour with the scientists, from DNA or blood-test analysis), it seems certain that the population consisted for the most part of a mixture of long-established peoples, ruled over from the top end of society by war bands of Celts, Romans or, later, Saxons. To this already rich mix, the ninth and tenth centuries added further migrants. In the century after 800, most of England north of the Thames was conquered and settled by pagan Vikings, who established for themselves an entire ‘Danelaw’ independent of West Saxon control. The modern regions of Norfolk and Suffolk might continue to be known as East Anglia, after their original ‘Anglian’ settlers, yet for the entire period 800–1000, a period for which we have less than a dozen recorded ‘facts’ about this region, they were entirely overrun by Viking settlers. Indeed, it is questionable whether, for this period at least, East Anglia and large parts of the Danelaw are to be considered, in historical, linguistic or cultural terms, still parts of a political entity that we can call ‘England’.
Even beyond the Danelaw, and here ignoring the Celtic enclaves of Wales or Scotland, the peoples of Cornwall continued to look as much to Brittany as to Winchester for ideas and leadership. Those of Cumberland, as late as the days of William Wordsworth, if not later, took few instructions from any authority beyond the Pennines and were more closely integrated with the worlds of Dublin, Strathclyde and even Norway than they were with those of Canterbury or London. This was a Britain, even an England, as it was to remain throughout the Middle Ages, of fiercely independent local identities, accents and even languages, in some ways more akin to modern-day Switzerland or to eighteenth-century France than to the peaceful and law-abiding chequerboard of green fields and pastures that is celebrated in myth and still visible, in places, from the air. Although by the year 1000 East Anglia and the Danelaw were Christianized and subsumed within the kingdom of Wessex, using precisely those dissolving myths of England’s Christian destiny and kingly virtue which Bede had first employed to suggest a united ‘English’ kingship leading a united ‘Engalond’, it is questionable whether a united England itself became any sort of political or historical reality even then. England was a myth, constructed in the four hundred years either side of the Norman Conquest on the basis of a powerful series of ideas, of racial, religious, historical and linguistic cohesion, yet still a myth well beyond the comprehension of most of those that we would consider ‘Englishmen’ in 1066.
The idea that ‘England’ was a fully Christianized nation, as opposed to an assembly of semi-Christian peoples loosely ruled over by Christian kings, is itself wishful thinking. The Roman Empire had no concept of England, not least because the ‘English’ themselves had yet to cross the German ocean to their new homeland. England as we now know it is contiguous with the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York, and it might be supposed that, like other regional or national divisions, the formation of England was in some way the outcome of the formation of these two archbishoprics, from the sixth century onwards. Yet, through to the twelfth century, the archbishops of York claimed jurisdiction north of the border in what then, as today, was considered Scotland. The archbishops of Canterbury claimed authority not only over southern England but over Wales, not subjected to English rule until the late thirteenth century, and even then seen as a land distinct from England. Canterbury also claimed authority, albeit disputed, over the Church in Ireland. Furthermore, although the reader of Bede might assume that Church and nation were one indivisible unity, in truth the Church as often sought to oppose or ignore the dictates of kings as ever it did to encourage kingly authority. Anyone who supposes that the Church was a tame creature of secular authority, even in the centuries before the year 1000, ignores the fact that the Church was principally concerned not with political order but with eternal salvation. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, and the most influential political theorist of the early Middle Ages, St Augustine, had taught that it was false to identify any city or empire, even the Christianized empire of Rome, with the true City of God.
With regard to law, although we have law codes issued by successive Anglo-Saxon kings, from Ethelbert of Kent through to the Danish King Cnut, and although these codes are eloquent upon such matters as feuding and the control of violence, the punishment of arsonists and rapists and other ‘public’ crimes, they ignore ninety per cent of the law as we would understand it today. The vast majority of property disputes seem to have lain beyond the control of the King’s courts, or at least beyond the competence of those lawyers and churchmen who wrote the King’s law codes. Moreover, although the public declaration of law, through the courts of the counties and the hundreds, and through the regular reissuing of royal codes, was clearly of great significance, it is questionable to what extent it was actually the King’s law that was applied in practice or at key moments of crisis.
There is perhaps a tendency to look upon Anglo-Saxon England through the rose-tinted lenses of one its most famous students, J.R.R. Tolkien. For nearly forty years as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, Tolkien occupied his time not so much in studying the Anglo-Saxons known to history as in inventing an entirely fictitious parallel universe in which the world of Beowulf rubbed shoulders with a peculiar brand of late-Victorian Catholic piety. Tolkien’s vision continues to dominate much thinking about the Anglo-Saxons, relocated in a Tolkienesque England of well-governed and law-abiding make-believe: a Shire of freedom-loving hobbits writ large. Yet the definition of a law-abiding society must surely be one in which the law is widely known and applied, not only in peacetime but in time of disorder or war. The greatest crisis in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, which emerged in the 1050s and 60s over the question of an heir to the English King, was to be settled, not by lawyers or law codes, but by acts of violence and usurpation which themselves suggest that a large part of Anglo-Saxon law-making was mere window-dressing, intended to mask a rather more primitive and brutal reality. These were hobbits with swords and an attitude far from peaceable. Law codes, like the Deuteronomy of the Old Testament, gave the impression that the kings of Anglo-Saxon England were law-makers and law-givers in the mould of David or Solomon. Whether in practice such laws were applied, widely used or even widely read, remains a much more difficult question to answer.
If we remove the three pillars of a united kingship, Christian nation and law, then a very large part of the substructure imagined by Bede and his successors vanishes from our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. This leaves instead quite another unifying principle, one that in reality may have played a much more significant role in the idea of an entity named England. Just as modern Italy or Switzerland or Belgium are divided nations in terms of language, regional loyalties, culture or even administration, but united in the sense that they represent powerful trading communities with a single national economy, it is arguable that it was the wealth, rather than the religion or even the language of the English, that served as the principal unifying feature before 1066. England was precocious not only in terms of its sense of national identity, but in terms of its wealth. It was this potential bounty, over and above any other considerations, that first drew foreign invaders, Phoenicians and Romans of antiquity, Angles, Saxons and Jutes of the fifth century, Vikings of the ninth and tenth, and Normans and Frenchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to stake their claims to rule or own the land. There is every sign that England was extremely wealthy. There is very little proof of the source from which this prosperity derived.
It came perhaps from the mining of metals, above all tin, but lead too, and gold and silver, which, though now confined to a single gold mine in Wales, were in the early Middle Ages possibly abundant in the Mendips and the hills of Cumberland. These mineral resources probably first drew Britain into contact with the Mediterranean world, as long ago as the fifth century bc, when a Phoenician admiral reported the mineral wealth of Cornwall, long before Julius Caesar conceived of a Roman military conquest of Britain. The British Isles are formed of every conceivable rock and sediment heaved up from each of the great convulsions of the vanished continents of prehistory. England may have been the Gold Coast of early medieval Europe, dependent upon the export of those same two commodities, gold and slaves, upon which a much later British Empire was to be founded. Bristol was almost certainly a centre for the trade in slaves to and from Ireland and Wales, and perhaps for silver from Wales or the Mendips, long before it became involved in the trade in gold and slaves from Africa or sugar from the Caribbean. St Patrick, one of the most mythologized yet significant figures in Irish history, may have begun his life as a slave, captured in what is today south-west England and traded to the Irish c. 410 AD.
More likely, however, the wealth of the Anglo-Saxons derived from animal rather than from mineral or human resources, in particular from the export of wool. Wool exports can be meaningfully measured only from the late thirteenth century, but this was a trade in all likelihood much more ancient. It was English wool, spun and dyed, sometimes in England, more often by foreign weavers and dyers, that supplied the English with many of their best-known exports: Lindsey blankets, Worsted from Norfolk, and above all, the most precious of products made from English wool, Scarlet, woven with twisted yarns according to techniques originating in Central Asia, dyed white, blue, green but most often carmine red. If the Bayeux Tapestry was produced in England, as most modern commentators suggest, then the very variety of the colours supplies testimony, not only to the wealth that first drew William of Normandy to the idea of conquering England, but to the trade that already linked England to the European and Mediterranean worlds.
We have no firm proof that it was wool which made England rich before 1066. Nonetheless, there is powerful circumstantial evidence to this effect, not least the rise of neighbouring Flanders. If England was rich, then Flanders in the centuries before 1066 was growing richer still. Flanders itself was a great blank of flatlands and bogs, much of it undrained as late as the seventeenth century. Yet this unlovely corner of northern Europe already by the eleventh century boasted flourishing towns and an extraordinary density of knights, the elite ‘haves’ in a society of ‘have nots’. Flemish knights, the ‘Brabanters’ and ‘routiers’ of the twelfth century, were to provide the staple of many a mercenary army in English and continental history. Flanders flourished probably as a consequence of its position on the trade routes between north and south, and in particular on the trade routes to England. In the two centuries after 1200, it was English wool, purchased by Flemish merchants, that fuelled the economies of both England and Flanders. There is every reason to suppose that this was a much more ancient phenomenon, and that the rise of Flanders tells us much about the rise of the English wool trade. Without sheep, and without Flemish merchants to trade their wool, the very idea of England might have been just one of those good ideas left unfinished on the cosmic drawing board.
By the eleventh century, across the continent, from northern France down to southern Italy, England was famed not only for its wools but for its role in associated luxury trades: precious metalwork, intricately painted manuscripts, and perhaps above all for the manufacture of ‘Opus Anglicanum’, literally ‘English Work’: luxuriously decorated vestments, painted by needle with silks, pearls and the most precious of gold and silver thread, that through to the fifteenth century and beyond kept the English brand current upon the luxury export markets of the world. The Canterbury monk Eadmer, accompanying his archbishop to the papal court at Bari in southern Italy in the 1090s, was amazed to be shown a cope, a liturgical vestment, worn by the Archbishop of Benevento, trimmed all around with gold, apparently made of the most precious Opus Anglicanum. The cope had been presented to the archbishop in England many years before in part-payment for a most precious relic, the arm of the apostle St Bartholomew, sold to relieve a famine in Italy. That an Italian archbishop, in the 1020s or 30s, should regard England as a potential source of famine-relief tells us much about perceptions of English wealth. That he accepted and treasured such a gift for more than sixty years tells us that such gifts were particularly sought. In the same way, the English desire to acquire Mediterranean relics tells us much about England’s cultural dependence upon Europe and in particular upon Rome, a much battered city but still viewed as the cradle of European civilization. An inventory of the Pope’s treasures, drawn up at the end of the thirteenth century, lists no less than 113 pieces of English embroidery, exchanged for who knows what sort of reciprocal benefits to the English.
The wealth of England, like all medieval wealth, was ultimately invested in land. Buying or acquiring an estate was just as much a symbol of status and a guarantee of future prosperity as buying a house remains today. It was such land, inherited, purchased or acquired, upon which the sheep were fattened to supply wool, and from which grain was harvested to feed the men and women who sheared, milked and fed the sheep.
The land and the landscape of England into which William of Normandy came were, of course, very different from those which a visitor to England, even two centuries later, would have found. England in the year 1000 was above all a land of forests and woods. Some of the greatest of these stretched across the southern counties, from Kent through to Dorset. The Battle of Hastings was itself fought on the edges of the great forest of the Weald, known in the Anglo-Saxon period as ‘Andredes weald’, from the Roman name for Pevensey (‘Anderida’), precisely the port where William of Normandy landed on his arrival in England in September 1066. Elsewhere, however, regions that we think of as sparsely wooded, not least the Cotswolds and the Wolds of Lincolnshire (derived from the same Germanic root, ‘wald’, as the Kentish ‘Weald’) took their name from the rolling hills left behind when ancient forests that had once rivalled the extent of the German ‘Schwarzwald’ or ‘Odenwald’ were cleared. The clearance of these forests was already a longstanding process, even before the Angles and Saxons first arrived. By 1066, nonetheless, it had made only a relatively minor impact upon a landscape that was still dominated by large, uncultivated tracts of land.
Within the woods themselves, an extraordinary variety of wildlife continued to thrive. Brown bears, hunted in Neolithic times, had almost certainly vanished from England under the Romans, but wolves and wild cat, boar and red deer remained. In the 960s, the English King Edgar is said to have imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolf skins upon the Welsh, and grey wolf populations, recorded in the 1160s, did not become extinct in England until the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Wild boar, threatened with extinction by the thirteenth century, were still maintained for hunting as late as the reign of Charles I. In the 1220s, the bishop of Winchester is to be found hunting for ‘pigs’, by which we can almost certainly assume ‘wild boar’, in his park at Taunton. In the wetland regions of the east, particularly in the fens, still undrained and inhabited by a semibarbaric population, wildfowl flocked the air in numbers similar to those to be found today in the most remote wildernesses of the Danube estuary or the Carmargue. Custodians of the bishopric of Ely, in the thirteenth century, were regularly required to send vast quantities of wildfowl and fish for the King’s feasts: 50 pike each of three feet, 50 of two and a half feet, 50 of two feet, 200 ‘steilung’, 50 sticks of shaft-eels and 4,000 smaller eels for a single royal banquet in 1257. Besides kings, species such as the eagle owl, or even the European vulture, today confined to the northern and easternmost reaches of the continent, may well have fed upon this extraordinary diversity of English wildlife.
Dispersed across this landscape, the total extent of the human population cannot be estimated with any real accuracy. Population history is still very much a matter of guesswork, a sort of statistical witchcraft. Figures ranging from one to five million have been suggested for the English population in 1066, with the reality probably lying closer to the lower than to the higher end of this scale. For comparative purposes, the population of ancient Rome is estimated to have exceeded one million people. England was a far from densely populated land. More people lived in villages than in towns, though towns there undoubtedly were, and it was upon towns such as London, Winchester, Norwich and York that much of the economic activity of the countryside was focussed, not only because towns boasted markets, but because the urban population needed to be fed. Merely feeding the population of London, by the thirteenth century, was a major economic enterprise, consuming the surplus foodstuffs of Kent, Surrey, Hertfordshire and Essex and ensuring a large part of the prosperity of the south-east.
The countryside itself was looked upon with far cooler emotions than would be the case later, when English pastoral became a leading theme of English poetry. No one in their right mind would choose to live in the countryside, a dangerous place, thronged with werewolves, fairies and things that went bump in the night. Elves took delight in laming cattle and kidnapping the unwary. Arrowheads found in the fields (in reality Neolithic carved flints) were proof of their existence. Entire books of elf-charms, and of spells intended to counter elvish tricks, formed a substratum of Anglo-Saxon literature. Even after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which drove the elves into semi-retirement, revenants and spirits, almost invariably malevolent, are a constant theme in twelfth-century miracle stories. Against them, only the power of the saints could be invoked to any real effect. In the 1090s, an entire village in Derbyshire was terrorized by a pair of vampires risen from the dead, only appeased through the intercession of St Modwena of Burton.
By contrast to the open countryside, the life of the village implied civilization rather than small-mindedness, and neighbourliness or protection as much as confinement. From the seventeenth century, landowners planning their mansions began by removing peasants and their houses, opening up a prospect of park and woodland of which Horace or Virgil might have approved. In the Middle Ages, only the most ascetic and world-hating of monks behaved like this, for example the Carthusians, who lived as communities of hermits in near perpetual silence, and who, in establishing a monastery in the 1180s at Witham in Somerset, deliberately depopulated and dismantled the local villages, sending their peasants to live elsewhere. By contrast, up to 1100, most monastic communities tended to be established in or close to towns. Under Norman as under Anglo-Saxon rule, the greatest of aristocratic dwellings were built in proximity to villages, with lord and peasant established in close and deliberate symbiosis.
With few roads save for those last properly repaired by the Romans, and with only a few stone bridges, transport over long distances was not only difficult but expensive. Where possible, goods were transported by sea or river rather than by land. It was the extensive English coastline, and the access which its rivers supplied to inland markets, that rendered England itself a land so fit for trade, part of an island whose climate and geology permitted the production of an agricultural surplus, blessed with mineral resources, and with plentiful supplies of timber to serve as fuel, yet with no real extremes of climate, no insurmountable mountain chains, and with no part of the island further than a few miles from a navigable river leading ultimately to the sea. Cotton-in-the-Elms in Derbyshire, reckoned by the Ordnance Survey to be the most ‘inland’ spot in England, is in fact only five miles from the river Trent and only forty-five miles from the start of the river’s tidal estuary.
England’s rivers were not only full of fish but were a major source of power in driving water mills, by 1066 already a regular feature of the landscape. Moreover, in the temperate English climate, these were rivers for the most part free from disease and in particular from malarial mosquitoes. Just as the tsetse fly continues to hold back the agrarian economies of Africa, so in the Middle Ages the malarial swamps of southern France or central Italy served as a barrier to prosperity from which England was for the most part exempt, though tertian malaria or ‘spring fever’ was endemic in certain fenland areas until the nineteenth century. In the meantime, access to rivers and the sea meant that it was easier and cheaper, even in the twelfth century, to ship coals to London from Newcastle and the Durham coal fields, than it was, say, to sell Hampshire grain in the markets of Somerset, or Yarmouth herrings in Warwickshire. Water-borne trade itself served as a major encouragement to the development of English shipping and ultimately of English naval strength. From the eleventh century through to the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, it was the small ships of the many dozens of havens and ports scattered along the southern and eastern coasts that served as the guarantors of England’s defence.
Today, the journey from London to Ipswich by car is only sixty miles, about an hour’s drive on a very dull road. From the air, however, the picture shows a ribboned and shredded coastline, one crucial to English history: many hundreds of miles of tidal mudbanks, monotonous to the eye, but dotted with havens where a boat can be landed, and with easy access to the Essex forests from which came the timber to build boats. It was within sight of these estuarial waters that much of the fate of eleventh century England was decided. It was here that the Viking fleets sought to hide, and it was here, at the battles of Maldon and Assendon, that Viking armies, themselves consisting of so many boatloads of marauders, decisively defeated English armies by land. The sea brought danger and foreign invaders, but it also brought wealth and an opportunity for nautical prowess. Even today, nearly a third of England’s overseas trade enters and leaves via the single great port of Felixstowe. The well-kept lawns and rich wine cellars of the modern University of Cambridge are to a large extent maintained from the profits of Felixstowe’s steel and concrete economy.
In the Middle Ages, it was no coincidence that it was another eastern town, Norwich, with easy access to the profits of North Sea trade, that was perhaps the richest in the kingdom. Nor should it be forgotten that Norfolk was the county of Nelson, himself raised at Burnham Market, within strolling distance of the oozing estuarial mudbanks of Burnham Stathe. Market, harbour and the defence of the realm form a highly significant trinity. The shipping of southern and eastern England was crucial not only to trade but to England’s military reputation overseas. In the eleventh century, one of the most vivid passages in the contemporary life of Edward the Confessor describes a great warship, given to the King. It was with gifts such as this that political disputes were healed. The money to pay for ships and their crews of eighty or more oarsmen was one of the more significant tax burdens placed upon society. Galley service was perhaps even more important to the Anglo-Saxon military than service on land and, already by 1066, ports such as Hastings were obliged to supply regular quotas of ships or men to the King’s service.
From ships came trade and a navy. The sea also fed the English. As one historian has remarked, the herring served as the potato of medieval England. Vast quantities of fish supplemented a diet from which red meat, the ‘roast beef of old England’, was almost entirely absent. Visitors from France to England in the nineteenth century came to regard the English countryside as one vast meat factory for the production of beef. But beef, in the Middle Ages, was a luxury encountered more rarely than venison or herring or eel. Cattle were expensive to feed, especially in the winter months when, before the introduction of the turnip as a common winter crop, there was very little save hay upon which they could be fed. Those that were kept were as often used to pull ploughs and carts as for milk or meat. Oxen were the tractors and trucks of medieval England. There was also perhaps a sense, once again inherited from Bede, that there was something rather awful and un-Christian about the eating of beef. As early as the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, writing to Augustine of Canterbury on the conversion of the English to Christianity, had associated the eating of the flesh of cattle with the feasts of the pagan rather than with the Christian calendar.
Christianity was a Mediterranean religion, from a region where the diet was principally vegetarian. Meat eating was both a characteristic of the barbarian tribes and a symbol of Germanic pagan allegiance. Only in the Celtic regions of Christendom, in Wales and in Cumbria, did cattle remain a staple element of diet, albeit prized as much for their milk as for their meat. Rents in Cumberland were still paid in ‘cornage’, as so many horns of cattle. The Welsh, in the 1260s, serving alongside Englishmen in the armies of the rebel baron Simon de Montfort, were horrified by the greed of the English for grain with which to make bread, just as the English craved to escape from the endless but breadless Welsh diet of cheese, milk and meat. As with modern commercial catering, poultry represented a compromise acceptable to most. Chickens and eggs were consumed in vast numbers. Church rents were sometimes payable as so many chickens, particularly at Christmas, and hard-boiled eggs were blessed in church before the Easter Mass, for distribution amongst the village community, a practice that by the fourteenth century was being condemned in some dioceses as a pagan superstition, but which together with the Christmas fowl has perhaps bequeathed both the modern phenomenon of the Christmas turkey and the Easter egg.
This was a world lit only by fire, fuelled by wood and water, fed and clothed for the most part from the produce of a few surrounding acres of plough and pasture, protected only by the small ships of the southern and eastern coasts, sustained in times of crisis by a myth of nationhood and Christian kingship devised by Bede and exploited by Bede’s Anglo-Saxon successors. Elements of this world are still with us. In 1940, at the height of the last great crisis that threatened to overwhelm the English, Winston Churchill was able to make potent use of the myths of Englishness, of blood and soil, of the ploughman and the sailor of small ships, to conjure up a Dunkirk spirit, itself heir to the mythologizing of Alfred and of Bede. The advocates of English independence and the haters of European conformity, even today, pitch their stand on a similarly mythologized village green of Englishness, proclaiming England’s particular historic destiny. No doubt, if one looked hard enough, it might still be possible to discover, kicking their heels somewhere in the far corners of England, the direct descendants not just of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes but of the Celts, and even of the aboriginals, if not the Neanderthals, who once inhabited this land. For the most part, however, even by 1066, long before the Normans landed their ships at Roman Pevensey, England was a land of myth and make-believe, its people a race of mongrels, its language and inhabitants already an uncertain mixture of German, Scandinavian and Welsh.
At the top end of this world, within the narrow but rich seam between king and commoner, a small elite of church leaders and secular aristocrats dominated Anglo-Saxon society. It is the doings of these men that form virtually the only facts recorded in works of tenth- or eleventh-century history. What emerges from such accounts is a story of political crisis in England provoked by two great threats: firstly, of foreign invasion, and, secondly, of civil war. In the late tenth century, from the 980s onwards, during the reign of King Aethelred II, these threats combined to provoke a collapse in public order. Monastic chroniclers, having one eye always focussed upon God’s dealings with mankind, and aware that the year 1000 was quite likely to mark a millennial watershed in human history, later blamed this collapse upon the King himself. What health could there be in the nation, if the King were a sinner or, in Aethelred’s case, not merely sinful but un-counselled (‘Unread’ or ‘Unready’)? In reality, Aelthelred seems not only to have been well advised but a dynamic and bold military commander, changing his coinage in such a way as to advertise the need for men and weapons, a new portrait image of the King being shown on every one of his several million silver pennies, properly helmeted and armed. The problem lay not with Aethelred but with the coalition of enemies that he faced. Potential invaders from overseas now sought the assistance of traitors nearer to home.
In 1002, hoping to crush the threat from Denmark and the English Danelaw, Aethelred allowed, perhaps encouraged, a massacre of Danes within his English kingdom, timed for St Brice’s day, 13 November: a pogrom, neither the first nor the last in English history, that was intended for political effect, to draw together friends in the mutual expression of hatred towards a common enemy. Following the destruction of much of Oxford in the ensuing massacre, Aethelred himself issued a charter justifying his actions. The Danes, so he argued, had to be rooted out from England like weeds (‘cockles’) from a field of wheat. Yet ethnic cleansing has never been an effective means of dealing with dissent. Those who choose murder and expropriation over negotiation generally sign their own death warrants. Far from advertising their racial superiority, they often draw attention to their own inadequacy. It is certainly ironic that England’s greatest pogrom should have been timed for the feast day of St Brice, no Englishman but a Frankish archbishop from the Loire Valley, who achieved sanctity in part through his long residence in Rome. According to a much later source, it was the very attractiveness of the Danes to English women that led to the massacre of 1002. The Danes combed their hair daily and began to bathe every week to make themselves more seductive. It was the fact that 13 November 1002 fell on a Saturday, ‘Laugar-dagr’, or ‘Bath-day’, in the Danish language, that determined its choice as a day of slaughter by the unwashed and sexually frustrated English.
The massacre of 1002 was followed by a great famine, in which not just the cockles but the wheat itself came close to failing as the sense of crisis and apocalypse grew sharper. Aethelred’s reign spanned the year 1000, widely believed to mark the imminent second coming of Christ. A fear of imminent apocalypse is inclined to provoke precisely the crisis which its prophets proclaim. Aethelred’s own administrators and officials were disunited, and vied with one another for a greater share of power. The Danish King, Swein Forkbeard, mounted a full-scale invasion of England, no doubt hoping to seize his own spoils from the coming millennium. In 1013, he inflicted a crushing defeat upon Aethelred’s armies, forcing the King himself to seek exile with his wife’s family in northern France. A brief return in 1014 was followed by Aethelred’s death, and the succession of his son, Edmund Ironside, himself fatally wounded at the battle of Assendon in 1016. London was handed over to the Danes.
Aethelred’s former ministers scrambled to make their own settlements with the victors, including Godwin, a minor official from Sussex, now raised up as the greatest of English quislings under Swein and Swein’s son Cnut. Godwin was married to Cnut’s sister-in-law, and in due course gave Scandinavian names to his eldest sons: Swein, Harold and Tostig. The eldest of these claimed to be not Godwin’s son but Cnut’s, suggesting a degree of intimacy between the two families that extended beyond the council chamber to the royal bed. Cnut himself, meanwhile, had married Aethelred’s widow, an act of sexual imperialism intended to stamp his authority upon the ruling English dynasty as upon England itself, now subsumed within a North Sea empire comprising large parts of Britain and Denmark and with ambitions towards the conquest of Norway. Most of those Englishmen whose careers prospered after the 1040s, and who were to play so crucial a role in the Norman Conquest of 1066, came to maturity in this period of Cnut’s reign, in the aftermath of a Danish Conquest itself no less remarkable than that later mounted by William of Normandy.
In particular, the breaking under Cnut of the power of the old English administrative class paved the way for the emergence of an even narrower political elite, founded upon only three or four key families: Godwin and his sons, as earls of Wessex and East Anglia; the Leofricsons as rulers over Mercia and the Midland counties; and the house of Bamburgh in Northumbria, itself locked into a bloody feud with the rival house of Aelfhelm of York. Much of northern England was divided between two great regional loyalties, to Bernicia in the north, and Deira stretching southwards as far as the Humber, divisions that themselves could be traced back to the age of Bede. Any idea that England had been welded into a united nation was given the lie by this division, as late as the 1040s and 50s, into a series of local earldoms themselves tracing their roots as far back as the divided kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, Bernicia and Deira. Moreover, and as with any Mafia-style division of authority between a few oligarchic families of rich and powerful bosses, the fewer the families the greater the storms and hatreds brewed up amongst the elite, and the more vicious the jockeying for position. From this, it was Godwin and his sons who emerged as the richest and most successful players. In a lawless environment, the more powerful the protector, the more those in need of protection will commend themselves to his authority. When the wolves are loosed, the hobbits will run for cover. This is precisely what happened in respect to personal commendations to the Godwin family, England’s greatest godfathers. Increasing numbers of lesser men, even outside the Godwin heartlands, began to commend themselves and their lands to Godwin lordship. As a result, when Cnut died and was succeeded by his son, Harold Harefoot, it was the Godwin family, in title merely earls, in reality the chief power behind the throne, who manipulated the situation to their own advantage.
By his wife, Emma, Aethelred left two sons, Edward and Alfred. These boys, the ‘aethelings’ or ‘throne-worthy ones’, had gone into exile at the time of Cnut’s invasion, and had been brought up at the court of their mother’s family, in northern France. In England, Emma had then been married to Cnut, and had borne a son by him, Harthacnut. Harthacnut claimed to be his father’s only legitimate heir, Cnut’s other son, Harold Harefoot, having been born to an Englishwoman before Cnut’s marriage to Emma. The laws of marriage at this time were far from rigid but it was nonetheless assumed as a matter of course that only a legitimate son could succeed as king. From the time of the founding of the West Saxon dynasty, back in the dim distance of the fifth century, no declared bastard had sat upon the West Saxon throne. Harold Harefoot, so the party of Emma and Harthacnut alleged, was illegitimate and had only seized power in England whilst Harthacnut was preoccupied, in 1035, securing his father’s kingdom in Denmark. Whether this slur was true or not, into the turmoil that followed Cnut’s death stepped Alfred the Aetheling, Emma’s son by her marriage to Aethelred, clearly hoping for his own share of power. Alfred, however, was deceived. Received by Earl Godwin at Guildford, he was seized, taken captive and then blinded, the traditional means, together with castration, of rendering a potential heir unfit for royal power: a technique imported from Byzantium, and in itself yet another indication of England’s contacts with the wider world. Alfred was sent in captivity to Ely, where he soon died. The crime here was horrific, and the taint of criminality extended not just to Harold Harefoot but to Godwin and perhaps even to Emma, who had first encouraged Alfred to enter England. For Godwin to have permitted the seizure and mutilation of a guest of his own hearth was regarded as a particularly vile act. To encompass the death of a royal prince, sprung from the line of Alfred the Great and the house of Wessex, merely compounded the crime. Godwin and his sons were to be haunted by Alfred’s death for the remainder of their lives.
Like most crimes, in the short term Alfred’s murder had distinct advantages for the criminals, consolidating Godwin’s authority in England. When Harold Harefoot died suddenly in 1037, followed only five years later by Harthacnut, it was Earl Godwin who brokered the next stage in this game of kings and crowns, allowing for the return to England of another of Aethelred’s sons, Alfred’s elder brother Edward. Edward has gone down in history as ‘The Confessor’, a milky-white, long fingered and semi-translucent embodiment of everything most saintly; an old man, famed for piety and chastity rather than for worldly strength. Yet this reputation comes to us only from the later years of Edward’s reign, and in particular from the period after his death, when historians were seeking an explanation for recent cataclysmic events. In his lifetime, certainly through to the 1050s, Edward was a more forceful and commanding figure, famed as much for his rages as for his piety, keen on hunting, a jealous accumulator of wealth and precious objects, a patron of the military, not merely of the Church.
Edward’s one overriding problem was his indebtedness to Earl Godwin. Without Godwin he might never have negotiated his return to England, and yet Edward clearly resented not only Godwin’s role in the death of his brother Alfred, but the extraordinary degree to which, over a period of thirty years, Godwin had risen from virtually nothing to establish landed wealth and a military authority rivalling not just that of his fellow earls but the King himself. Like many princes who come to the throne relatively late in life (Edward was at least 38 by the time of his accession), a sense of resentment may have sounded as the keynote of his life. He clearly resented his mother, who had abandoned him in childhood to marry his father’s usurper, Cnut of Denmark. So great was Edward’s sense of injury here that, after 1042, Emma was immediately stripped both of power and of her very considerable wealth. Even more bitterly, Edward resented Godwin. Although he was persuaded in the short term to take Godwin’s daughter, Edith, as his queen, and although Edith and her family publicly proclaimed the marriage to be all that it should have been, Edward himself may have sought, from the moment he succeeded to the throne, to work against the Godwins and ultimately to bring about their downfall.
His great opportunity came in 1051. The election of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, a Frenchman from those regions of northern France where Edward himself had been exiled before 1042, and the welcome that Edward extended to Count Eustace of Boulogne, another Frenchman, married to Edward’s own sister and apparently given or claiming some sort of authority over Dover and its defences, provoked Godwin and his sons to the brink of civil war. With the support of the other English earls, Edward forced the Godwins into exile, Godwin himself to Bruges in Flanders, Harold and others of his sons to Ireland. The precise motivations here are difficult to establish, but, in all likelihood, these events were the outcome of long-fomented hatred. In particular, the involvement of Eustace of Boulogne at Dover and the promotion of a French archbishop of Canterbury suggest a deliberate attempt on Edward’s part to promote northern French allies at the expense of the Godwins. They also suggest that already, as early as 1051, there was a crisis over the future succession to the English throne. Dover and Kent were the keys to England, and it is difficult not to interpret the offer of Dover to Eustace as in some way associated with Edward’s future plans for the throne. Certainly, after 1066, Eustace was to lobby long and loud for possession of Dover castle. In 1067, he was to attempt unsuccessfully to seize Dover as a point from which to launch his own bid for power.
If there was a succession crisis in 1051, then it was perhaps already assumed that King Edward would have no legitimate child to succeed him. The King was by now in his late 40s. His queen, Edith, was much younger. Either Edward was judged incapable of fathering children, or it was widely supposed that he had no intention of producing an heir by a wife sprung from the family of Godwin. Crucially, in 1051, at the same time that Godwin and Harold were exiled, Edith herself was put away in a nunnery. Even her propagandists were forced to concede that her relationship with the King was more like that between father and daughter than husband and wife. In both political and personal terms the events of 1051–2 marked Edward’s great bid for freedom. In both respects, he failed miserably. The Godwins returned. Rather than risk civil war, the other earls backed down, with the memory of Aethelred’s reign constantly in their minds, fearing that the pursuit of vendettas amongst the ruling class might merely pave the way for foreign invasion. Edward was forced to receive back those he most hated, including Edith, now reinstated as queen.
From this point onwards, our knowledge of the last fifteen years of Anglo-Saxon England is clouded, as the sophistication of our sources fails to keep pace with the complexity of events. What was recorded tended either to be too brief, as with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or too verbose, as with the contemporary ‘Life’ of Edward the Confessor. The three surviving versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, maintained in at least three different locations, become extremely patchy, in some years recording few events, in others none at all. The so-called ‘Life of Edward’ (the Vita Edwardi), composed in the 1060s, either shortly before or shortly after the Norman Conquest, was the work of a Flemish monk hoping to please Queen Edith, writing in an obscure and poetic Latin which would be difficult to construe, even if the manuscript itself had survived intact, which it has not. These fragments can be supplemented by sources from across the Channel. But with the continental sources we have to be even more cautious. Virtually everything written about Edward’s reign by foreign chroniclers was set down after the great cataclysm of 1066, on the whole to justify the Norman Conquest of England. It has to be read as propaganda rather than truth. Selecting which items of information to believe, and which to reject, becomes as difficult for the historian of late Anglo-Saxon England as it would be for a modern intelligence officer to construe the political development of China using nothing but official press bulletins.
Amidst the shadows, the outline of certain great events can be discerned. Firstly, although Earl Godwin himself died within a year of his return to England, on Easter Monday 1053 (as legend proclaimed it choking on a piece of bread after having challenged God to strike him dead should he have lied about his role in the death of Edward’s brother Alfred), his power lived on, now invested in two of his sons, Harold who succeeded him as Earl of Wessex, and Tostig, promoted, apparently as the King’s favourite, as Earl of Northumbria. Harold fought a series of prestigious and successful campaigns against the Welsh. Having killed the Welsh King, whose head was sent in tribute to King Edward, Harold then married the Welshman’s widow, repeating a feat already associated with the Danish conqueror Cnut and in the process allying himself to another of the great aristocratic families of England, that of Leofric of Mercia. Tostig fared less well in his attempts to impose royal rule and royal taxation on the far north. In 1065, there was a violent rebellion against him. Tostig appealed for assistance from the English court, but then found himself sidelined, as he saw it betrayed by his brother Harold. Edward’s own promise to suppress the rebels came to nothing. Tostig was left without an earldom but with a burning sense of personal grievance against his own family. Edward’s own authority during these closing years of his life is very hard to assess. Certainly it was he who made earls and who continued to rule, in name at least. It was Edward who commissioned the rebuilding of the church of Westminster, intended as a monastic foundation, pledged in penance, so it was said, for his failure to fulfil a vow to make a pilgrimage to Rome. King Cnut had visited Rome, as probably had both Harold and Tostig. Was Edward’s failure here an indication that the King himself was effectively a prisoner within his own court, able to hunt, to feast, to receive tribute, but in all practical respects eclipsed by his brother-in-law, Earl Harold?
Lacking positive initiatives, Edward seems chiefly to have exercised his authority through passive resistance, above all perhaps through his failure to nominate a publicly recognized successor to the throne. Edward the Exile, the son of Edmund Ironside, was invited back to England from his refuge in Hungary, but died in 1057, only a few days after his return. Some have suspected the Godwins of poisoning him. Edward the Exile left a son, Edgar the Aetheling, a mere boy, perhaps, five or six years old, now brought up at court, living in what appears to have been close contact with the King, but without any real power and without lands. There was certainly no official proclamation that Edgar was to be regarded as Edward’s heir. On the contrary, contacts were maintained with Eustace of Boulogne, Edward’s brother-in-law, and with Edward’s mother’s family in northern France. At no point was any one of these kinsmen promoted as Edward’s clear and undisputed successor.
In 1051, at the height of his authority and with the Godwins exiled, Edward is said, according to one version of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, to have received a man named ‘Count William’ from overseas, generally identified as William, Duke of Normandy, great-nephew of Emma, Edward the Confessor’s mother. Many historians have supposed that this visit by William in 1051 formed part of William’s own bid for the English throne. Contemporary Norman chroniclers, although they mention no visit by William to England, claim that specific promises were made to William in respect to the throne, not only by King Edward but by Harold. One such Norman version of events, famously shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, implies that, at some time in the 1060s, perhaps shortly before Edward’s death, Harold crossed to France and there was persuaded to take oaths to William, sworn on the holy relics of Bayeux Cathedral, no doubt promising to recognize William as Edward’s heir.
The problem with all of these stories is that they date from after 1066, when the Normans had not only scooped the jackpot but were in a position to rewrite the history of recent events, if necessary burying the truth in order that their own actions might be justified. Even the story of Count William’s crossing to England in 1051 is open to dispute. Did the Anglo-Saxon chronicler intend to imply here that William was specifically offered the throne? If so, why did he not mention the fact? Why do none of the Norman sources written immediately after 1066 refer to any visit paid by William to England before the Conquest, especially when we bear in mind the very great incentive that such writers would have had to include something so significant and supportive of Norman claims? Could it be that William of Normandy came to England in 1051 not to receive a promise of the English throne but to render homage to his elder and richer cousin, the newly empowered King Edward, for his own lands in northern France?
Certainly, William’s rule over Normandy was especially insecure at the time, with his enemies gearing up towards a great rebellion. Might it even have been another ‘Count William’, not William of Normandy, who made the visit? In 1051, there was at least one other northern French aristocrat, William, Count of Arques, William of Normandy’s uncle, who might have had an incentive to visit the English court. William of Arques was either already in rebellion or about to rebel against his nephew, William of Normandy, and would in 1051 be forced to seek exile in the territory of another of the players, Eustace of Boulogne. In some ways, William of Arques fits the bill for the 1051 visit to England even better than William of Normandy.
As this suggests, we have very little idea of the reality over which all of the chroniclers, English and Norman, were so keen to varnish. What we do know is that, from the 1050s onwards, the various dukes, counts and lords of northern France began to occupy a more significant place in English history than had previously been the case. It is time therefore that we turn our attention from Anglo-Saxon England to events on the other side of the Channel, and in particular to the rise of one northern French dynasty: the dukes of Normandy.
Normandy enters our story here for the simple reason that Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor and the wife both of Aethelred and Cnut of England, was of Norman birth, the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, himself the grandfather of the future William the Conqueror. Edward the Confessor and William of Normandy were therefore related in the third degree of kinship as second cousins, with Richard I of Normandy, Emma’s father, as their common ancestor. A series of highly significant facts should be stressed here. Edward and William were cousins, but not close cousins, and not a drop of the blood of the West Saxon dynasty flowed in William’s veins. From the 1050s onwards, there were many others who could claim far closer patrilineal kinship to Edward the Confessor, not least Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, and the Exile’s son, Edgar the Aetheling. To some extent indeed, in the 1040s, Edward the Exile, already aged twenty-five in 1040, might have been promoted as a more plausible candidate for the English throne even than his cousin Edward the Confessor. Secondly, William of Normandy was a bastard, born of an extramarital liaison between his father, Duke Robert, and a woman, Herleva, whose own father has traditionally been identified as a tanner from Falaise. Tanning is a trade that in the Middle Ages, as in parts of the Third World even today, involved the use of large quantities of human urine and dog dirt. These less than dainty agents were employed to depilate and soften the hides of animals. What remained thereafter of the rotted flesh and bone was rendered, very messily, into glue. No one who has been near even the most hygienic of animalglue factories is likely to forget the experience. One of the smelliest and most disgusting of trades, tanning was entrusted to workers generally placed beyond the bounds of decent society, in locations as far removed from town or city centres as the local population could ensure. Find the tanneries in any medieval town, and you will generally have found the most squalid of slums.
As a bastard, born to a woman descended from tanners, William would have been even less plausible a candidate for the English throne than Harold Harefoot in the 1030s. By contrast to William, Harold Harefoot was merely alleged to be a bastard: he himself might have denied the charge. Recently, it has been suggested that William’s grandfather was not a tanner, but a furrier, a tailor or more likely an undertaker or embalmer. None of these trades would exactly raise the family to the highest levels of aristocracy. Finally, although we now remember Normandy as a cradle of civilization and as one of the most dynamic regions of eleventh-century Europe, the focus of an entire academic sub-industry of Norman studies, things might easily have been otherwise. Normandy’s rise, whatever William’s propagandists might suggest, was very far from inevitable or straightforward.
Between 900 and 1100, during two hundred years in which the inhabitants of that part of western Europe that we now call France were deprived of strong central monarchy, many regional dynasties emerged. Some of these new families enjoyed the most dramatic and impressive of debuts but few of these dynasties survived for more than a couple of generations in anything other than a very localized position of power. Only the dukes of Normandy, through their conquest of England, prolonged their greatness and came indeed to rival the French kings not only in terms of wealth and majesty but in the sheer extent of the territories over which they ruled. In many ways, however, this was to lend Normandy an artificial significance which but for the accidents of 1066 it would never have possessed. Had it not been for the catalogue of errors that culminated in the Battle of Hastings, Duke William, the tanner’s grandson, and Normandy itself might seem as insignificant to us today as the once powerful counts of Vermandois or Ponthieu.
It was against this background that Normandy first entered English history. It was from Normandy that Aethelred chose his bride, Emma, and it was to Emma’s family that he fled in 1014, after his initial defeat by Swein. Thereafter, it was in Normandy that Aethelred’s sons by Emma, Alfred and Edward, were raised after Emma’s return to England to marry Cnut. In later life, Edward the Confessor commemorated the more than twenty-four years of his exile in Normandy by grants of land in England to the monks of Mont-St-Michel, Fécamp and Rouen. Fécamp came to possess land in Sussex, some years before Edward’s death, including an estate at Hastings, a remarkable indication of the ties that already bound the Confessor’s court to the religious institutions of Normandy, many years before the Norman invasion. St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and its monastery, placed under the protection of the monks of Mont-St-Michel on the Norman–Breton frontier, constitutes another surviving relic of Edward the Confessor’s exile in Normandy before 1040. St Michael himself had battled with Satan and from the high places of the world had thrown him down to hell. Those appealing to the memory of St Michael tended, in the Middle Ages, to have battle in mind. Edward’s gift of a Cornish island to the Norman monks of St Michael, made in the mid-1030s on the eve of his return to England, already describing Edward as ‘King of the English’, thus suggests not only a familiarity with Cornwall (the two ‘mounts’ in Normandy and Cornwall could be mother and daughter) but an intention on Edward’s part to use his Norman alliances to mount an armed campaign against the forces of evil led by Harold Harefoot.
It was Edward’s connection with Normandy, the facts that William of Normandy was his cousin, and that Edward had passed most of his life before 1042 at the Norman court which allowed Norman claims to enter the debate over the succession to the English throne. Whoever Edward actually intended as his heir (and there is no real proof that he opted decisively for any one candidate during the more than twenty years that he sat on the English throne, after 1042), it seems reasonable to suggest that, in the early 1050s, Edward deliberately made use of his Norman connections in an attempt to build up a following for himself in England independent of the English earls. Not only was the archbishop of Canterbury Norman, but other northern Frenchmen, including the bishops of Wells and Hereford, were granted bishoprics or lands in England. Ralph of Mantes, Edward’s nephew, son of Edward’s sister and the Count of Vexin, was granted estates and an earldom in Herefordshire. There is some possibility that, in the 1050s, Edward’s court was partly French speaking. If so, the collapse of Edward’s short-lived period of independent rule, after 1052, would have been even more clearly marked since it led to the expulsion from England of most of his former French protégés. It did not, however, put an end to the claims advanced by William of Normandy for his succession to the English throne. To understand why, we need here to consider the situation of Normandy and its ducal family.
Superficially, by the 1060s, a casual observer might have found little to distinguish Normandy from England. Indeed, for ninety per cent of the human population, bonded to the land in the age-old rhythms of agricultural labour, it is doubtful whether, apart from language and the name of one’s particular lord, there would have been much to distinguish Bedfordshire from Bayeux or St-Lô from St Ives. Normandy’s landscape is similar to, indeed originally was physically attached to that of southern England. Both places have extended coastlines and many rivers allowing access to the sea and hence to seaborne trade. Both were lands of forests as well as of richly productive agricultural land. England came to be defined as the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. Normandy’s frontiers were for the most part coterminous with those of the single ecclesiastical province of Rouen.
England had suffered from Viking attacks from the ninth century onwards, still ongoing in the time of the greatest Viking of them all, King Cnut of England and Denmark. Normandy owed its very formation to the Vikings, since it was a Viking raider, Rollo, accustomed to wintering his ships in the estuary of the river Seine, who had first carved out independent rule over the region around Rouen, negotiated in a series of treaties with the kings of France according to which, by the 920s, the whole of the province of Rouen, from Eu and the river Somme in the far north, to the bay of Mont-St-Michel and the frontiers of Brittany and Maine in the south-west, was placed under the power of Rollo and his heirs, ruling now as independent counts, later as dukes, no longer directly answerable to the heirs of Charlemagne. Just as English history had been founded upon myths of nationhood, so the Normans commissioned their own national history from a French monk named Dudo of St-Quentin. Dudo deliberately followed Bede in his presentation of the Normans as a people united under one ruler through God’s providence and through that ruler’s wise decision to embrace Christianity. Like Bede, he thus glossed over the fact that the Normans were never a racially distinct people, and that their war bands ruled over a local population still to a large extent made up of the aboriginal Gallo-Roman or Frankish peasantry who had for centuries inhabited this particular corner of France.
William of Normandy’s own history to some extent mirrored that of his elder cousin in England, Edward the Confessor. Like Edward, William had been orphaned at an early age. His father, Robert of Normandy, had died in 1035, returning from a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when William was only seven or eight. Like Edward, William was dependent during his youth upon much older and more powerful men. Like Edward, William clearly suffered his own share of indignities, not least the murder of some of his closest counsellors in the ducal court, acts of public violence which suggest, like the murder in England of Edward’s brother or the upheavals of 1051–2, not only a society loosely governed under the law, but one in which the ruler struggled hard and often ineffectively to make his rulings stick. Such was the fear of assassination that William himself had to be hidden by night in the cottages of the poor, to escape the plots of his enemies.
Here, however, the comparisons between England and Normandy end and the contrasts begin to assert themselves. The rulers of Normandy, like those of England, exercised the same late-Roman proofs of public authority: for example, jurisdiction over roads, public crimes such as murder, rape or arson, the minting of coins and the disposal of treasure. Even today, much of the authority invested in the person of Queen Elizabeth II – over the Queen’s highway, treasure trove, the Queen’s counsels and the law courts in which they act, the royal mint – derives from far more ancient precedents than the Roman emperors or even the rulers of ancient Babylon might have recognized as specifically ‘royal’ prerogatives. Yet, in the eleventh century, there was a considerable contrast between Normandy and England, both between the extent to which such prerogatives were exercised and between the instruments by which they were imposed.
Normandy could boast nothing like the wealth of England. The English coinage, for example, with its high silver content, stamped with a portrait of the reigning English King, regularly renewed and reminted as part of a royal and national control over the money supply, has to be contrasted with the crude, debased and locally controlled coinage of pre-Conquest Normandy, at best stamped with a cross, at worst resembling the crudest form of base-metal tokens, the sort of token that we would use in a coffee machine rather than prize as treasure. In Normandy, the dukes had local officials, named ‘baillis’ or bailiffs, but nothing quite like the division of England into shires, each placed under a shire-reeve in theory answerable to the King for the exercise of royal authority through the meetings of the shire moot, the origins of the later county courts. In particular, whilst in England kings communicated directly with the shire by written instruments, known as writs, instructing that such and such an estate be granted to such a such a person, or that justice be done to X or Y in respect of their claims to land or rights, there is no evidence that the dukes of Normandy enjoyed anything like this sort of day-to-day control of local affairs. Not until the twelfth century were writs properly introduced to the duchy, fifty or more years after the Conquest and in deliberate imitation of more ancient English practice. Norman law itself was for the most part not customized or written down into law codes until at least the twelfth century. Above all, perhaps, the dukes of Normandy were not kings. Although they underwent a ceremony of investiture presided over by the Church, intended to emphasize their divinely appointed authority, they were not anointed with holy oil or granted unction as were the kings of England, raising kings but not dukes to the status of the priesthood and transforming them into divinely appointed ministers of God. The Bayeux Tapestry shows William of Normandy wielding the sword of justice, sometimes seated upon a throne, sometimes riding armed into battle. By contrast, both in the Tapestry and on his own two-sided seal, Edward the Confessor is invariably shown seated, enthroned, carrying not the sword but the orb and sceptre, far more potent symbols of earthly rule. William had to do his own fighting. Edward the Confessor, as an anointed king, had others to fight for him.
Thus far, the contrasts between England and Normandy seem all to be to the advantage of England, a much-governed and more ancient kingdom. Yet there is another side to the story. Precisely because they were newcomers, parvenus, risen from the dregs of a Viking pirate army, the heirs of Rollo were spared much of the dead weight of tradition that tended to gather around any long-established dynasty. To take only the most obvious example here, in England no king could afford to ignore the established power of the great earldoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria. Earls were in theory the appointed delegates of the King. In practice, when Edward the Confessor attempted to appoint his own men to earldoms – Ralph of Mantes to Herefordshire, Odda of Deerhurst to western Wessex, Tostig to Northumbria – the fury of local reaction was such that these appointments were either swiftly revoked or risked head-on confrontation with local interests. Normandy had a secular aristocracy, but it was one that had emerged much later, for the most part in direct association with the ruling dynasty, in most instances from the younger sons and cousins of the ducal family. By the 1050s, under William, most of the higher Norman aristocracy were the duke’s own cousins or half-brothers. This tended to intensify the rivalries within a single, all powerful family, and William faced far fiercer and more frequent rebellions against his rule than ever Edward the Confessor faced from the English earls. Yet the very ferocity of this competition tended to focus attention and an aura of authority upon William himself as successful occupant of the ducal throne. The more fighting there is over a title, the greater the authority that such a title tends to acquire. From both of the great crises of his reign, in 1046 when there was concerted rebellion against his rule in western Normandy, and again after 1051, when the malcontents within Normandy threatened to make common cause with outside forces including the counts of Anjou and the King of France, William emerged victorious. At the battles of Val-ès-Dunes in 1047, Mortemer in 1054, and Varaville in 1057, he himself triumphed over his enemies, in the process gaining not just an aura of invincibility but significant practical experience of warfare. Edward the Confessor, by contrast, for all his fury and petulance, had never fought a battle and emerged in 1052 from the one great political crisis of his reign with his authority dented rather than enhanced. There was no Norman equivalent to the Godwins, threatening to eclipse the authority of the throne.
William of Normandy enjoyed distinct advantages, not only in respect of the secular aristocracy, but in his dealings with the Church. In England kings were anointed as Christ’s representatives on earth. Patronage of the greater monasteries and the appointment of bishops were both distinctly royal preserves. King and Church, Christian rule and nationhood had become indivisibly linked. Even in his own lifetime, Edward was being groomed for sanctity. As early as the 1030s, there is evidence that the King, by simple virtue of his royal birth, was deemed capable of working miracles and in particular of touching for the king’s evil (healing scrofula, a disfiguring glandular form of tuberculosis, merely by the laying on of his royal hands). There was nothing like this in Normandy. William, as contemporaries were only too keen to recall, was descended from ancestors who had still been pagans almost within living memory. Ducal patronage of the Church was itself a fairly recent phenomenon: William’s tenth-century ancestors had done more to loot than to build up the Norman Church. And, yet, in the century before 1066, it was this same ducal family that went on to ‘get religion’ and in the process refound or rebuild an extraordinary number of the monasteries of Normandy, previously allowed to collapse as a result of Viking raids.
They also introduced new forms of the monastic life, above all through their patronage of outsiders: men such as John of Fécamp who wrote spiritual treatises for the widow of the late Holy Roman Emperor, and the Italian Lanfranc of Pavia, one of the towering geniuses of the medieval Church, first a schoolmaster in the Loire valley, later prior of Bec and abbot of St-Etienne at Caen in Normandy, promoted in 1070 as the first Norman archbishop of Canterbury.
In England, the West Saxon kings might have their own royal foundations and their own close contacts with monasteries such as the three great abbey churches of Winchester, or Edward’s own Westminster Abbey, but members of the ruling dynasty were not promoted within the church. To become a bishop, a man had first to accept the tonsure, the ritual shaving of a small patch of scalp. Perhaps because the tonsure was associated with the abandonment of throne-worthiness (in the Frankish kingdoms it had been the traditional means, more popular even than blinding or castration, of rendering members of the ruling dynasty ineligible for the throne), there is little sign that any West Saxon prince was prepared to accept it.
In Normandy, by contrast, William not only patronized the church and founded new monasteries, but promoted members of his own family as bishops. At Rouen, for example, the ecclesiastical capital of the duchy, Archbishop Robert II (989–1037), son of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, and founder of a dynasty of counts of Evreux, was succeeded by his nephew, Archbishop Mauger (1037–54), himself son of Duke Richard II. William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Odo, was promoted both as bishop of Bayeux, in all likelihood future commissioner of the Bayeux Tapestry, and as a major figure in ducal administration. As the Tapestry shows us, not only did Odo bless the Norman army before Hastings, but he rode into the battle in full chain mail. For priests to shed blood was regarded as contrary to their order. Odo therefore went to war brandishing not a sword or spear but a still very ferocious looking club. The Tapestry shows him at the height of battle, as its contemporary inscription tells us ‘urging on the lads’. In the aftermath, Odo was appointed Earl of Kent. His seal showed him on one side as a bishop, standing in traditional posture, tonsured, dressed in pontifical robes and carrying a crozier. On the other side, however, he is shown as a mounted knight riding into battle with helmet, lance and shield, unique proof of the position that he occupied, halfway between the worlds of butchery and prayer.
William himself might not have been anointed as Duke of Normandy, but in the eyes of the Church he commanded perhaps an authority not far short of that wielded by the saintly Edward the Confessor. In particular, the fierce penitential regime of William and his father lent an aura of religiosity to what might otherwise be construed as their purely secular acts of territorial conquest. William’s father, Duke Robert, died whilst returning from a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the ne plus ultra for anyone concerned to advertise their Christian piety and remorse. Jerusalem at this time, of course, was still firmly under Islamic rule. To visit it, and to walk in the places where Christ had trod, was both an arduous and an expensive undertaking. William himself, by marrying his own cousin, Matilda of Flanders (thereby forging an alliance with the greatest of the magnates on Normandy’s northern frontier), was obliged to undergo penance by the Church. It was penance, however, that both broadcast a particularly powerful image of the duke himself and paved the way for further acts of territorial expansion. To atone for his sins, William built the massive Benedictine monastery of St-Etienne at Caen. Matilda, at the same time, paid for the construction of a sister house, a no less massive monument on the other side of Caen, intended for nuns, the abbey of La Trinité. In the space between these two great monasteries, William laid out a vast ducal castle, surrounded by ramparts, the whole complex of abbeys and castle itself surrounded by a new town wall. As an advertisement of ducal power, the planning and construction of Caen took place on a truly epic scale. To lead his new abbey, William promoted the outsider Lanfranc: a clear bid to demonstrate his commitment to the reforming party within the Church as a whole, and a means of strengthening ties between Normandy and the reforming Church in Rome.
By the 1060s, the Norman Church basked in papal approval. The English Church, however, became ever further severed from continental tendencies, not least through the promotion by Queen Edith of Stigand, Bishop of Winchester and a member of the Godwin affinity, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Thereafter he ruled both Canterbury and Winchester as a pluralist, against the dictates of the Church, and, more seriously still, blessed as archbishop of Canterbury not by the rightful pope of the reforming party but by a rival, whom the Roman aristocracy had briefly established on the papal throne. In the eye of the papacy, Stigand was a scandal. William of Normandy, by contrast, was later to claim that his invasion of England was undertaken as a holy war, intended to cleanse the polluted Anglo-Saxon Church and to bring enlightenment to a nation sunk in sin. The Pope, Alexander II, certainly sent William a banner, as a token of friendship and special favour. Whether Alexander realized that William would use this banner to lead his men in the conquest and slaughter of fellow Christians across the English Channel is another matter entirely. The banner, like William’s close relations with Rome, was a powerful tool of propaganda. Propaganda itself, however, does not necessarily accord with ‘truth’.
So to 1066 itself, and the sudden conjunction of political crisis in England with Norman ambition and Norman military might. So far as we can tell, the reign of Edward the Confessor ended in chaos and confusion. The expulsion of the King’s earl, Tostig, from Northumbria, was followed by no effective royal counterattack. Edward may have raged against the treachery of the northerners, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that he raged, but he was powerless to act. His rage indeed may have brought on the final illness from which he died, at Westminster, on 5 January 1066. From here on, we can trust neither the English nor the Norman account of events, since both were written posthumously, after the Battle of Hastings, and with a clear intention to justify what took place.
According to the English, and to some Norman sources, on his deathbed Edward commended both his widow Edith and his kingdom to the keeping of Harold Godwinson, Edith’s brother. Harold was duly crowned King, probably within a day or two of the late King’s death, but certainly not at Easter 1066, despite the fact that Easter was the traditional, some have argued immutable date of Anglo-Saxon coronations, being the feast of the risen Christ and therefore the most suitable feast-day for the crowning of Christ’s representatives on earth. Harold was crowned perhaps on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, associated with kingship since it marked the arrival of the Magi, the three wise men from the East, at Christ’s nativity. Even so, the failure to observe an Easter coronation suggests a sense of urgency, perhaps of panic, about Harold’s crowning. Not just the mythologized King Herod who had tricked the Magi, but the flesh and blood rulers of several northern European peoples were now likely to turn murderous eyes upon the English. The Bayeux Tapestry, as if to signal such panic, reverses its otherwise standard chronological narrative at this point, placing Edward’s funeral cortège before his death, and on this unique occasion superimposing two scenes, of deathbed and funeral, immediately before Harold’s coronation in a way that may have been intended to emphasise the speed and sudden disjunction of events. Under its depiction of the crowned Harold, the border of the Tapestry reveals a scene of three ships, unmasted, ghostly, yet clearly the threat of an invasion fleet that the English not only feared but expected. Harold himself is shown inclining his head to the right, as a courtier whispers in his ear news of the sighting of Halley’s Comet, always an omen of change and ill-fortune. As he listens, Harold’s crown tilts sideways, threatening to slip from his head. The portents here were far from favourable.
From the moment of his crowning, Harold faced at least two threats of invasion. The first, led by his disgruntled brother Tostig, in alliance with Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, was both the first to materialize and the first to be suppressed. The Norwegian army was cut to pieces by Harold at Stamford Bridge, eight miles east of York, on 25 September, five days after their short-lived victory against the northern earls Edwin and Morcar at Fulford, just across the Ouse from the modern York racecourse. No one claimed that the Norwegian invasion was anything other than opportunistic, provoked no doubt by Harold Godwinson’s mishandling of his brother, Tostig.
With the Norman invasion that burst upon England a few days later, things were rather different. Across northern Europe, virtually everywhere except within Normandy itself, Duke William’s attack was treated as an act of violent usurpation, an unprovoked onslaught upon a Christian opponent, the rape rather than the conquest of England.
Within Normandy, however, William’s propagandists rapidly got to work to justify the invasion according to the laws both of God and of man. Edward, so it was argued, had promised the throne to William since long before 1066 (a claim for which there is no real proof). Harold had sworn oaths to William, shown indeed on the Bayeux Tapestry, placing his hand on holy relics, perhaps in the presence of the consecrated host, the body of Christ, promising to support William’s claims. Harold may well have crossed to Normandy at some time shortly before King Edward’s death, but quite why and with what outcome remains unclear. Possibly he went to negotiate not over the succession but over the release of hostages, including his own younger brother, held by William apparently since 1052, given up by Earl Godwin not in respect of the succession but in the aftermath of his return to court as guarantors for his own future good behaviour in respect of Edward the Confessor. If so, if William were holding English hostages against the will of the English King, and if Harold was forced to swear an oath rather than volunteering to do so, then even under canon law and the tenets of the Church, nothing that Harold had been made to do in Normandy could be held against him afterwards. An oath sworn under compulsion, like a marriage into which either of the parties was forced, was not in any way to be considered binding. ‘He made me do it’ has always been an acceptable excuse for misbehaviour, whether in the playground or a court of law.
In any event, and despite the subsequent Norman claims, Harold’s visit to northern France might not have been intended to take him to Normandy. Even the Bayeux Tapestry seems to imply that Harold’s ship drifted off course and that his landing in the county of Ponthieu, at the mouth of the Somme, was unplanned. Perhaps, rather than being sent to swear oaths to William, Harold went to France on his own account, to negotiate alliances with other northern French magnates, the Count of Boulogne perhaps, or the Flemings to whom his father, Godwin, had fled at the height of the crisis of 1051. Rather pathetically, one English source later alleged that Harold was not heading for France at all, but rather blown off course on a fishing trip along the Sussex coast. If so, and given that the Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold’s men loading hawks and hounds on board his ship – traditional aristocratic gifts offered to foreign princes – one has to wonder what sort of fish he was hoping to catch. What is perhaps most surprising about Harold’s brief period as king, from January to October 1066, is that he secured not only coronation but the apparent assistance of the other English earls, most notably the earls of Mercia, against both of the foreign threats now facing England. This does indeed suggest, contrary to Norman propaganda, that Harold’s claim to the throne was widely acknowledged and that the deathbed dispositions of Edward the Confessor were treated as a legitimate bestowal of the late King’s succession.
In Normandy, meanwhile, the preparations for invasion involved an immense expense of money and effort. Alliances with other French lords had to be negotiated to secure an army sufficient to the task. One modern commentator has calculated that an army the size of William’s represented a logistic miracle. Allowing for 10–15,000 men, and 2–3,000 horses, the force that waited throughout August and early September on the estuary of the river Dives to the north of Caen would have consumed a phenomenal quantity of grain and other foodstuffs. Had the troops slept in tents, then these alone would have required the hides of 36,000 calves and the labour of countless tanners and leather workers. The horses would have produced 700,000 gallons of urine and 5 million tons of dung. We seem to be back in the world of the tannery, far from the more exalted claims that were advanced on William’s behalf and a long way from the shadow of the papal banner under which William’s army is supposed to have marched. Even if we treat these figures as inflated or wildly speculative, the sheer scale of the operation cannot be ignored. That there was indeed an epic quality to William’s preparations is suggested by the Life of William by William of Poitiers, which deliberately echoes the words of both Julius Caesar and Virgil in its account of William’s Channel crossing, here likened to the expedition of Caesar to conquer Britain, and to Aeneas’ flight from Troy to Rome, to the foundation of a new world order.
An even more ancient myth may have been present in William’s own mind. In June 1066, shortly before embarking for England, William had offered his own infant daughter, Cecilia, as a nun at the newly dedicated abbey of La Trinité, Caen. Was he thinking here, perhaps, of the sacrifice of a daughter by an earlier king, by Agamemnon of his daughter Iphigenia, intended to supplicate the Greeks and hence to supply a wind to speed the Greek expedition against Troy? If so, then by associating himself with the Greeks, outraged by the abduction of Helen, William not only broadcast his own sense of injury against the treacherous King Harold but trumped even Virgil in his appeal to classical mythology. Aeneas had founded Rome as an exile from ravaged Troy. William would be the new Agamemnon, precursor to the exploits of Alexander, fit conqueror not just of Troy or Rome but of the entire known world.
Medieval rulers were rarely blind to the classical footsteps in which they trod, or blithely unconscious of the epic nature of their deeds, and the Norman Conquest of England was certainly an expedition of epic scale. Having mustered his army in early summer, and camped at the mouth of the river Dives for over a month, presumably on the river’s now vanished inland gulf, protected from attack by sea, some say waiting for a wind, others for news that Harold’s fleet had dispersed or been diverted northwards, William moved his army to St-Valéry on the Somme and from there set sail on the evening of 27 September, hoping that a night-time crossing would enable his fleet to slip past whatever English force was waiting for them in the Channel. Once again, it was surely no mere coincidence that his landing at Pevensey took place on 28 September, the vigil of the feast day of Michaelmas, commemorating the same warrior Saint Michael, the scourge of Satan, whom Edward the Confessor had honoured thirty years before, while in exile in Normandy, in the hope of Norman support to secure him the English throne.
The ensuing campaign, in so far as there was one, can be briefly told. William immediately embarked on a scorched-earth policy, harrying and foraging as was the general rule for medieval warfare, burning villages, terrorizing the local population, advertising his own position and at the same time assembling the sort of resources in food and provender that would be required to maintain his vast army should the enemy refuse immediately to engage. The harvest was newly gathered in, so resources were not hard to find. But the prospects, if the English held back, were not propitious. A Norman occupation of Sussex might dent Harold’s pride, not least because his own family stemmed from precisely that part of England, but would not in itself have delivered a fatal blow to the English state. By contrast, the chances that William’s army could be held together for any period of time without proper supplies and without engaging the enemy, were slim indeed. Even the greatest warriors have to eat, and no lord in the eleventh century could afford to leave his own estates unprotected for long, especially at harvest time when the pickings were richest. The Norman army was now in entirely foreign territory. Very few, even of its leaders, had any experience of England. Without the benefit of Ordnance Survey maps or signposts, they would have depended entirely upon local spies and intelligence-gathering, but the local people no more spoke French than William’s soldiers could read Anglo-Saxon.
William moved east towards Hastings, building a temporary castle at Hastings itself, positioning his own army across the main road to London. Hastings was already a major centre of English naval operations, and its occupation was to some extent equivalent to the later seventeenth-century Dutch burning of the Medway dockyards. But this in itself was not sufficient to provoke Harold to battle. Rather, hubris persuaded Harold, having just marched his army southwards from Yorkshire, to leave the safety of London and immediately embark upon another campaign, risking the third pitched battle in three weeks. Perhaps precisely because battle was so rare, and because Stamford Bridge had proved so total a victory, Harold, the experienced commander of more than a decade of warfare in Wales, believed himself invincible.
Given the number of books describing the Battle of Hastings in the minutest of detail, it may come as a disappointment to learn that the vast majority of our ‘facts’ concerning the battle are nothing of the sort. The Bayeux Tapestry, combined with the account by William of Poitiers and the Latin ‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’, generally attributed to Guy, bishop of Amiens, and written very shortly after 1066, give us the main gist of the action but surprisingly little specific detail. We cannot even be sure of the ground or the extent to which the battlefield has been altered out of all recognition since October 1066. One of the more important contemporary accounts, by William of Jumièges, threatens to overturn all traditional understanding of the battle by claiming that Harold was killed early in the day, rather than at the battle’s final climax. Nonetheless, if the high altar of Battle Abbey was indeed built on the site of Harold’s final stand, then we can assume that the two armies faced one another across a shallow valley, with Harold and his shield wall of housecarls and axemen to the north, blocking the road to London. It is clear that William was obliged to take the offensive and that the first charges by both cavalry and infantry failed to strike home. The cavalry charge misfired to such an extent that the Bretons on the Norman flank panicked and came close to causing a rout. We should remember here that the Bretons were traditional enemies of the Normans, and they enlisted in 1066 as temporary allies only from mutual self-interest. It would have been perfectly natural for Norman writers to have blamed the Bretons for any failings in their own attack.
The English may have sought to exploit the disorder caused by poor discipline within the French army by pursuing the fleeing horsemen, allowing William to launch a second attack against the now weakened English defences. Rumours circulated that William himself had been killed, but he was deftly able to reassure his troops by raising the visor of his helmet, a scene very clearly shown on the Bayeux Tapestry. Had the stakes not been so high, and had the French the possibility of a retreat to recoup their strength, then it is possible that the battle might have ended at this point, as an inconclusive draw. Desperation alone drove William on to a final attack upon the English position which now, at the very end of the day, began to crumble.
Harold was killed still fighting in the shield wall. Precisely how will never be known. The Bayeux Tapestry famously shows him, or someone near to him, blinded by an arrow in the eye, but this detail was not necessarily recorded in the Tapestry when it was first embroidered. It may be the result of repairs and restitching as recently as the eighteenth century. Several twelfth-century chroniclers, including the Norman poet Wace, refer to Harold’s blinding. Wace, writing in the 1170s, had almost certainly seen the Tapestry in his role as a canon of Bayeux, but, like modern commentators, he may have misinterpreted the Tapestry’s meaning, already a century old by the time that he saw it, which in any case seems to show merely that Harold was blinded, not killed, by the arrow. The blinding, indeed, may be yet another Biblical echo, of the story of the Hebrew King Zedekiah, blinded by Nebuchadnezzar for violating an oath of fealty, thereby, like Harold after him, bringing destruction upon himself and his people. The ‘Song of Hastings’ and most twelfth-century accounts state that Harold was killed by the sword, the ‘Song’ paying particular attention to the three French knights who in company with William of Normandy butchered his body. With night falling, the Normans found themselves victorious by sheer desperate persistence.
Around them lay the dead and dying. Before the discovery of penicillin, even a flesh wound could prove fatal. Internal injuries or anything that risked peritonitis or blood-poisoning were more likely to kill than to be cured. The physical effects of several hours of head-on violence, in which two groups of heavily armed men sought to bash the life out of one another with sharp pieces of metal, are difficult for us to imagine, in spite of Hollywood images of gore and guts. The psychological consequences are perhaps easier for us to grasp. Some modern writers suggest that medieval men came, if not from a different species, then certainly from a different psychological universe. Emotions such as anger and grief, or such physical states as exhaustion or jubilation, they say, might have been experienced and expressed in quite different ways a thousand years ago. Much of this sort of writing reeks of poppycock. We must never shut our ears to the differently pitched voices of the past, but no more must we close off our capacity for emotional engagement with humanity’s common experience. The dehumanized, unemotional history of which some modern historians dream, the desire to assess the past as if it were a set of data to be graphed and computed, seems to be an utterly inadequate response to events such as the Battle of Hastings.
First after the battle came a sense of relief for William’s army. A victory had been won that to those still living seemed epic in its proportions. This was no ordinary battle, and the victors were well aware of the fact. Most chroniclers in northern Europe, from the Loire to the Elbe, recorded the events at Hastings in some way. After the relief came exhaustion. William’s army seems to have halted in Sussex for a full two weeks. The assumption has been that they were waiting for what remained of the Anglo-Saxon leadership to offer their surrender. In reality, sheer exhaustion combined with the after-effects of anxiety, injury and disease provides a more likely explanation. A large number of the Norman army had been killed. The dead had to be buried. There were many arrangements to be made. Eyewitnesses to another bloody victory, at Waterloo in June 1815, report a similar sense of aftershock, anticlimax and grief. Perhaps already William himself had begun to fall ill. Dysentry as a result of weeks of insanitary camp life and almost unbearable tension might explain the sickness that now gripped the army as a whole. Disease might also, to the medieval mind, symbolize sin and its consequences. Certainly, whatever rejoicing took place on the evening of 14 October would have been tempered with a sense of the need to give thanks to God.
William is said to have pledged the battlefield itself to religion, even before the battle began. The site was subsequently given to the monks of Marmoutier on the Loire, on the understanding that they would found there an abbey to commemorate the day’s events. Within a few years, penance was officially imposed upon all of those who had fought at Hastings. We know the precise terms here, and they speak of a Norman army as much bewildered by its own success as boastful of its victories. For every man that he had slain in the battle (and we might note here that Hastings was already being described not just as a battle but as ‘The Great Battle’), the killer was to fast on bread and water for a year; for every man struck but not necessarily killed, forty days of penance; for everyone not sure of the number that they had slain, a day of penance for every week remaining to them for the rest of their lives. Those who fought motivated only by greed were to be treated as murderers, sentenced to three years of fasting. No doubt there were many at Hastings who had kept no exact tally of the number they had killed or wounded, or who were not entirely sure, even in their own minds, whether they had fought for personal gain or for the glory of God. To such people, perhaps the majority of William’s army, the battle was a great victory, but a victory earned only at peril to their immortal souls. Summing up the guilt and bloodshed of Hastings, a monk of the monastery later founded on the battle site reported that ‘the fields were covered with corpses, and all around the only colour to meet the gaze was blood red. It looked as if a river of blood filled the valleys.’ The blood shed at Hastings was to stain the next four centuries of English history.