The Battle of Hastings 1066: The Uncomfortable Truth

Revealing the True Location of England's Most Famous Battle

John Grehan, Martin Mace

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781399013192
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781599846
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This historical study upends the traditional narratives surrounding the Norman Conquest by revealing the true location of its most important battle.

The Duke of Normandy's victory at the Battle of Hastings on October 14th, 1066, was one of the most important events in English history. As such, its every detail has been analyzed by scholars and interpreted by historians. Yet one of the most fundamental aspect of the battle—the ground upon which it was fought—has never been seriously questioned, until now. Could it really be that for almost 1,000 years everyone has been studying the wrong location?

In this in-depth study, the authors examine both early sources and modern interpretations, unravelling compulsive evidence that historians have chosen to ignore because it does not fit the traditional narrative of this foundational event. Most importantly, the authors investigate the archaeological data to reveal the exact terrain on which history was made.

Chapter 1

The Contradictory Evidence

“Few subjects in English history have been studied more and for longer than the Norman Conquest, and few have been more bent in the process by biased interpretations based upon unhistorical prejudices.”

R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest

In 1070 four Monks from the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutier on the Loire arrived at a place close to the Andresweald some eight miles or so to the north of Hastings. They were there on the orders of King William I of England. Following a visit to London by the representatives of Pope Alexander II, William agreed to pay a penance for the terrible slaughter he had caused when he invaded England. That penance was the building of a great monastery on the site of the battle where he had won the English crown. This part of Sussex was thinly populated and William wanted to ensure that no invader would be able to land as easily as he had and march upon London, so this monastery was granted special privileges to help it attract settlers to its extensive lands.

These four monks duly built a fine monastery on the site where the ruins of Battle Abbey now stand. Though these men had not been present at the battle four years earlier they were apparently able to positively identify the battlefield amongst the rolling hills of the Weald with astonishing precision, laying the stone of the high altar on the very spot where King Harold had been killed.

From that time onwards the site of the battlefield has been set and few have dared to suggest otherwise. Yet many historians have conceded that our knowledge of the Battle of Hastings is far from perfect. “Few things are more difficult to describe than the events of a battlefield,” wrote Mark Anthony Lower in a paper read at Battle Abbey in 1852, “… it must be a matter of great difficulty to frame an intelligible history of the sanguinary conflicts of ancient times from the materials furnished us by partial and often incompetent chroniclers, and written from oral traditions at periods considerably subsequent to the transactions themselves.”¹

The main problem for historians is that there is no eyewitness testimony to be found. Indeed, as Brigadier C.N. Barclay was quick to point out, the slaughter amongst the leading English characters was so great that most of them were killed in the battle. We therefore have, with few exceptions, evidence from only one side of the conflict and that is drawn from individuals who were not present at the battle.²

Edwin Tetlow, after half a century of research on the subject, realised that “the picture built up upon scanty original evidence by nine centuries of historians, novelists and romantics is a distorted one, often influenced by prejudice and propaganda.”³ David Howarth made a similar observation: “Strictly speaking, every sentence in a story nine centuries old should include the word perhaps: nothing is perfectly certain.” He also accepts that whilst the Battle of Hastings “has been fought on paper innumerable times” strictly military accounts of it “have always had to leave some mysteries unsolved.”⁴ Two decades later, R. Allen Brown also conceded that the only really undisputed fact about Hastings was that the Normans won!⁵ Harriet Wood acknowledged that the story of the Battle of Hastings is compounded by “its insoluble puzzles and ambiguities.”⁶

Matthew Bennett agreed. In the Preface to an investigation into the sources of the Battle of Hastings, he wrote that “enshrined as it is in historiography as a pivotal event in English history … described in numerous contemporary accounts, and remarkably celebrated pictorially in the Bayeux Tapestry, unique by its survival, can still only at this great distance of time, be dimly perceived.” In the same book, Doctor Stephen Morillo concedes that, whilst the main sequence of events, leading up to and including the battle itself is generally agreed upon, “it is the details and the speculation about possibilities and probabilities that continues to generate heat.” He concludes that “much speculation must go into even a basic reconstruction of the battle.”⁷

What information is available from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, amounting to seventeen documents, provides us with considerable evidence of some aspects of the battle and the events leading up to the Norman invasion, whilst other elements are neglected. These documents are, generally speaking, one-sided – like so much of history the early story of the Battle of Hastings was written by the victors. Even so, one of these early chroniclers, William of Poitiers, accepts that it is impossible to describe all the exploits of even the most prominent protagonists during the battle.⁸

Equally, despite this comparative wealth of source material there are few genuinely established facts. In the introduction to her translation of one of those early sources, The History of the English People by the twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, Diana Greenway warns us about taking the medieval writers too literally: “Henry was not a collector of facts for their own sake. The idea of objective study of history would have been quite alien to him and his contemporaries. In his world, history was a literary genre, and the writing of history required imagination and rhetorical skills. He did not seek to be a realistic reporter, but rather to represent selected events in an overarching interpretation and in appropriate style.”⁹

This was something noted by Brigadier Barclay, who observed that “no writer could hope to complete a book of this sort [on the Battle of Hastings] based solely on established facts. If he tried he would not get much beyond a short magazine article and it would make very dull reading.” As possibly the most senior military figure to have written in depth about the battle, the brigadier was scathing in his condemnation of modern writers who were “scholars rather than men of military experience”. In his opinion, “modern historians have placed too much reliance on the old records, and assumed to be facts many incidents which are, in my view, clearly in doubt.”¹⁰

To a great degree he is correct and this dearth of hard facts has led to much “interpretation” by historians of the events leading up to and including the battle itself. Because of the scarcity of impartial or even particularly solid facts, people have had to fill in the gaps using what details are available. This has driven historians to make the few known facts about the battle fit the ground and has led to a number of quite remarkable conclusions. The most extraordinary of these is the supposed identification of the hillock depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. The scene in question shows Norman knights coming to grief at the foot of a steep-sided hill. Historians have scrutinised the battlefield in an effort to find such a prominent feature. All that they have been able to find is a low mound which could not have held more than one or two hundred men. Despite this, and the fact that there is no certainty at all that this hillock is the image shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, writer after writer has declared it to be so without qualification.

Others, of course, are more wary. Benton Rain Patterson was troubled with the lack of real evidence when he wrote his Harold & William: “In parts of the story there was not much in the historical record to go on. Authentic scenes would be hard to reproduce without actual details … How much licence could I take to fill the gap?” He answers this question by deciding that “writing history requires at least some speculation, and so I began to feel justified in employing it in the story of Harold and William”. To further justify the literary license he was about to employ he quotes historian Will Durant: “all history should be taken as hypothesis … of yesterday there is no certainty.”¹¹

David Howarth, writing about the Battle of Hastings in 1977, explained how he dealt with this problem: “Any modern historian has to use his judgement pretty freely. When he finds contradictory stories he has to decide which is most probable, which writer had the best reason to know the truth – or which, on the other hand, had reason to distort it.”¹²

Despite such words of caution by wise historians, few have ever thought to question the site of the Battle of Hastings, or, as the pre-eminent early historian Edward Freeman remarked, even to examine the battlefield: “Most of the accounts of the battle show little understanding of the site,” he remarked. “The modern accounts seem to have been written with little or no attention to the ground. If we learn from them that Harold's position was on a hill, it is as much as we do.”¹³

This has led to the almost universally accepted assumption that the battle must have taken place where the ruins of Battle Abbey now sit. Yet some of the historians who have studied the battlefield have clearly been troubled by the obvious flaws in the choice of that particular site as the place where Harold fought in defence of his crown. There are many question marks against placing the site on Battle Hill, and historian Jim Bradbury warns us that “we should keep a more open mind on the matter than has been the case to date.”

M.K. Lawson wisely commented that “the very natural desire to know, and of the informer to inform, has often led to descriptions of the conflict wearing an appearance of certainty which the nature of the primary sources actually does little to warrant … In fact, there is not a single eye-witness to be had, and the primary sources that do exist, relatively plentiful as they are, all suffer from significant limitations which need to be clearly understood before use can be made of them. What emerges from this process … is not that there is nothing that can be known about the battle of Hastings, but that there are many important things that cannot, and never will be known. Thus seekers after easy hard facts – how many men there were on each side, for example, and where they were positioned at different points during the day – will not find them.”¹⁴

Richard Huscroft, in his book The Norman Conquest, recently wrote that “the scope for differing views and interpretations is enormous, as is the amount of space within which a lively historical imagination can wander and speculate.” Such speculation is borne out of the unreliability of the sources, “and it is the problems with the sources and the uncertainty they generate which make the Conquest such a fertile field for ongoing and probably endless scholarly cultivation.”¹⁵

Frank Stenton, in considering the battle and in particular King Harold's position, makes no pretence at knowing more than the original sources reveal: “The only certainty that can be reached about its [the English army's] disposition is that Harold and his best men were grouped around a standard set near the summit of the hill.” Any statements beyond this can only be, at best, considered guesses.¹⁶

Even the very name of the traditionally accepted site of the battle has been the subject of much debate. For a long time, following the writings of Orderic Vitalis in the early twelfth century, what today is called Battle Hill was known as Senlac Hill. The notable Victorian historian Edward Freeman declared that Orderic cannot have invented the word, implying that it was of Anglo-Saxon origin. Others disputed this. Sir George Duckett said that the word was a purely Norman compound of the words “Sang”, i.e. blood, and “lac” or lake. Thus, he claimed, the word was used by Vitalis figuratively and therefore, because of the blood that was shed at the battle, the hill had become the lake of blood. Remarkable though it may seem, this topic has never been satisfactorily settled.¹⁷ This may seem like a trivial point to argue over but, as the medieval historian Jim Bradbury explains, the name of the hill may have a bearing on exactly where the Battle of Hastings was really fought. “Orderic knew a name for the place,” Bradbury recently wrote, but which place? “Senlac means literally ‘sand-lake’, and there is no lake close by Battle Hill … The hill itself would certainly not be called ‘sand-lake’ and there is no reason to think that Senlac means Battle Hill.” However, there was a lake, or at least a pool, close by Caldbec Hill, near Oakwood Gill, this latter place, as we will see, playing a significant part in the final stages of the battle.¹⁸

Though it seems but an insignificant fact, even the date of the battle is misleading. Whilst it is true that the battle was fought on 14 October 1066, this was the date on the old Julian calendar, which was abandoned in 1582. By our present-day calendar, the Gregorian, the battle was fought eleven days later on 25 October.¹⁹

The contradictory aspect of even the smallest of matters relating to the battle can be gauged by the subject of King Harold's death. Apart from the uncertain nature and time of his death, which will be investigated at length later, there is a problem with where he died. As we have already learned it is said with great conviction that the altar stone of the original church that was built on Battle Hill was laid at the precise place where Harold was killed. This is the summit of the hill where allegedly Harold had proudly raised his standards for all to see. We are also told, with equal assurance, that after the battle Harold's body could not be found and that his common-law wife/mistress, Edith Swan Neck, had to be brought to the scene to help identify the fallen king. How, four years later, the monks from Marmoutier were supposed to have known where Harold fell has never been explained.

Yet all such doubt could easily be erased if there was a firm archaeological basis to support the generally accepted view of the battle. “Much of the confusion and contradiction which swirls around the whole story [of the Battle of Hastings] would have been dissipated, if even the battlefield and the rest of the campaigning area of Sussex and Kent had yiel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Contradictory Evidence
• Chapter 2: A Family Affair
• Chapter 3: Swords Around the Throne
• Chapter 4: The Opening Moves
• Chapter 5: Men at Arms
• Chapter 6: The Battle of the Hoar Apple Tree
• Chapter 7: The Sources
• Chapter 8: The Interpretations
• Chapter 9: The Battlefield
• Chapter 10: The Archaeology
• Chapter 11: Rewriting History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates