The Battle of Hastings

The Fall of Anglo-Saxon England

Harriet Harvey Wood

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848873094
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Harriet Harvey Wood's original and fascinating book shows that, rather than bringing culture and enlightenment to England, the Normans' aggressive and illegal invasion destroyed a long-established and highly-developed civilization which was far ahead of other European peoples in its political institutions, art and literature. It explores the background and lead-up to the invasion and the motives of the leading players, the state of warfare in England and Normandy in 1066, and the battle itself.

By all the laws of probability, King Harold ought to have won the battle of Hastings without difficulty and to have enjoyed a peaceful and enlightened reign. That he did not was largely a matter of sheer bad luck. The result could just as easily have gone the other way. This gripping and highly-readable book shows how he came to be defeated, and what England lost as a result of his defeat and death.

CONTENTS

List of Plates

Introduction

The Background

The Contenders

The Prize

The Armies

The Prologue

The Battle

The Aftermath

The Sources

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF PLATES

1. Bayeux Tapestry: Earl Harold talks with King Edward © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

2. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘Where Harold makes his oath to Duke William’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

3. Jumièges Abbey Church courtesy of Nicholas J. Higham

4. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘[Harold] comes to Edward’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

5. Hinged clasp from the Sutton Hoo burial mound © The Trustees of the British Museum

6. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘Here sits Harold, King of the English’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

7. Harold’s coinage © National Portrait Gallery, London

8. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘Here King Harold is killed’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

9. Bayeux Tapestry: ‘And the English turn in flight’ © Bayeux/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

10. Map of the battlefield drawn by General E. Renouard James

11. The Benedictional of St Æthelwold © British Library Images Online

INTRODUCTION

Very few battles change history. The claim has been made for the battle of Waterloo, but Waterloo merely confirmed the course of a history that was clearly visible before it, but had been rudely interrupted by Napoleon’s re-entry on the European stage. It marked a turning-point; it was not a catalyst. The battle of Britain is, perhaps, a stronger contender. Or the battle of Lepanto. William Golding has, with some justice, claimed the distinction for Thermopylae, on the grounds that it won thirty years’ respite, enabling Athens to develop from a small provincial town to the city of Pericles that was to dominate the Mediterranean for centuries. ‘If you were a Persian,’ he writes, ‘you could not know that this example would lead, next year, to the defeat and destruction of your whole army at the battle of Plataea, where the cities of Greece fought side by side. Neither you nor Leonidas nor anyone else could foresee that here thirty years’ time was won for shining Athens and all Greece and all humanity.’ⁱ

Such a claim, if substantiated, means that what Leonidas and his Spartans achieved at Thermopylae ranks that desperate defence higher in its cultural implications than almost any other battle in history. John Stuart Mill claimed a similar distinction for the battle of Marathon, adding that it was more significant than the battle of Hastings, even as an event in English history, since it changed the whole basis of western civilization. It is perhaps impossible to make a comparable claim for the significance of the battle of Hastings but it cannot be denied that it too was a battle that was to change the face of Europe, and cause a fundamental realignment between its major players. It was, wrote one eminent historian of the Anglo-Saxon period, one of the rare battles that have decided the fate of nations. Crécy, Agincourt, Magna Carta and much more lay implicit in the early-morning mist that hung over Caldbec Hill on 14 October 1066. But whatever the consequences of the battle, one fact is undisputed: it wiped out overnight a civilisation that, for its wealth, its political arrangements, its arts, its literature and its longevity, was unique in Dark Age Europe, and deserves celebration. In the general instability, lawlessness and savagery of the times, Anglo-Saxon England stood out as a beacon. Yet the timing of the battle and its result were the consequences of a series of accidents that could not have been predicted by either of the commanders. William, when he fought it, was generally known throughout Europe as William the Bastard. It has been suggested that he might more accurately have been known as William the lucky bastard.

Its outcome was far from a foregone conclusion. Any bookie, invited to give odds on the result a month before, would not have rated William’s chances very high. The betting must always be against the invader of a country, especially when the invasion has to be by sea, and the defender is prepared for it. Had the winds been favourable and William been able to launch his attack even a month earlier, as he had hoped to do, it is highly likely that he would have been repelled with ignominy. Philip of Spain’s later attempt at an invasion of England failed because the winds blew, and his great Armada was scattered. The English lost the battle of Hastings not least because the winds did not blow in the right direction at the right time.

It was a battle that was much more fully documented – in itself, in its causes and in its consequences – than almost any other battle that took place in western Europe in the Dark Ages. It is notable that, even at the time, it was recognized as an event of enormous historical significance. There is no shortage of testimony as to the events that led up to it nor to the conduct of the battle. The problem is that – with one exception – all this body of testimony comes from the winning side. The only contemporary English account, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is stark in its simplicity:

Then came William Earl of Normandy into Pevensey on the eve of St Michael’s mass, and as soon as he had disembarked his army, he built a castle at the port of Hastings. When this was told to King Harold, he gathered a great army and came against him at the hoar apple tree. And William came upon him unawares before his men were arrayed. But the king fought bravely against him with the men who would fight with him and there was much slaughter on either side. There were slain King Harold and Earl Leofwine his brother and Earl Gyrth his brother and many good men. And the Frenchmen held the place of slaughter. All as God granted it to them for the sins of the people.

On the Norman side there is, by contrast, almost a superfluity of accounts, both of the battle itself and of the events that led up to it. It will be important to establish (as far as possible) the status and interrelations of these, and a list of the most significant of them is provided in the Sources chapter. Ideally, it should be read before proceeding too far with the story, to understand the degree of authority of each. Through them it may be easier to see how it came about that King Harold lost a battle that it might have been thought impossible for him to lose and how the conquest and pillage of England took place under the banner and with the blessing of the Vicar of Christ.

This is a story that has often been told, and will go on being told as long as there are readers willing to read about it and writers to be drawn to its characters and events and to its insoluble puzzles and ambiguities. Almost all writers on the subject are partial on one side or the other and I am not less so than most. A recent eminent historian of the period has announced with his customary enthusiasm that, if he had been present, he would have been charging with William; I make no bones about stating that I would have stood beneath the standards of the Dragon of Wessex and the Fighting Man with Harold. For many years now the civilization of Anglo-Saxon England has seemed to me a wonderful and astonishing product of the late Dark Ages, a lamp to illuminate Europe, and its destruction at Hastings a matter for infinite regret. By 1066 it was an old civilization, and old civilizations tend to fall to energetic upstarts. With hindsight, and the advantages of modern research, it is possible to see how much of Anglo-Saxon England did actually survive the conquest, and that the combination of what survived with what was new produced a great deal that was equally worthwhile. But much also was lost.

THE BACKGROUND

The story that ended on the battlefield of Hastings began many years earlier, when the Danes resumed their invasions of England shortly after the accession to the English throne of Æthelred, known ignominiously but not entirely unjustifiably to history as the Unready. Viking raids had become familiar to the English in earlier years, and in a sense had never entirely ceased; but since their defeat by Alfred and his son, Edward the Elder, in the ninth and early tenth centuries and during the triumphant reign of Alfred’s grandson, Athelstan, the Danes established in the north-east of England had gradually settled down into relatively law-abiding citizens. Athelstan’s code of laws had made special provision for the punishment of crimes in their territory (which gradually came to be known – for obvious reasons – as the Danelaw) by Danish, rather than English, custom. Under Athelstan’s immediate successors, such raids as there were seem to have been brief, uncoordinated affairs, designed to procure the maximum return in booty for the least investment in time and risk; during the reign of Edgar, remembered by later generations as a golden age of peace, they seem to have ceased completely. But Edgar died unexpectedly in 975, leaving two sons by successive wives, the elder, Edward, a teenager, and the younger, Æthelred, a child of ten. The character of Edward, despite his later sanctity as Edward the Martyr, appears to have been unattractive and to have boded ill for his future rule; none the less his assassination three years later by a faction supporting Æthelred was carried out in an act of treachery that appalled and sickened a society inured to almost every kind of violence. It would be too much to lay the blame for all that was to follow on the circumstances in which Æthelred began his reign; but there can be little doubt, judging from the contemporary chronicles, that they overshadowed it to an extent from which it never really recovered, and there can be equally little doubt that the temptation offered to the Danes by a wealthy kingdom ruled by a child of thirteen must have been irresistible.

It was not resisted. The first of the new generation of raiders arrived in 980, met only local opposition, ravaged Hampshire, Thanet and Cheshire and departed. More came in 981 and 982, and Devon was invaded in 988. The new Viking settlement of Normandy, established in 911 by a treaty between Charles the Simple of France and the Norwegian Hrolf Ganger (better known to history as Rollo), provided a convenient jumping-off point and refuge for these raiders, and the most notable response to their activities was a treaty in 991, brokered by the Pope, between Æthelred and Rollo’s grandson, Duke Richard I of Normandy, which provided that neither should entertain the other’s enemies. The treaty seems to have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, and it may have been in an attempt to secure a more effective understanding with Normandy that Æthelred in 1001 took as his second wife Emma, sister of Richard II of Normandy, a decision that was to prove fateful to England in future years. In the meantime, the raids continued and intensified. We would probably know little of one of the raids of Olaf Tryggvason, later Ki...