A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (52 page)

Raising his army had presented problems for William too. It is not clear that his vassals owed him service outside the duchy. From
outside, Eustace of Boulogne was his principal ally but he also recruited soldiers from Brittany, Maine and even Aquitaine. He was able to hire mercenary archers and crossbowmen. It seems that the building of the fleet and troop transports did not begin until after news of Edward’s death reached Normandy. He seems to have sailed with a fleet of between 500 and 700 ships. His delayed sailing played in his favour in so far as Harold was in the north of England during the vital days that the Normans crossed the Channel. This gave them time to deploy from the old Roman fort at Pevensey to Hastings.

The Battle of Hastings

Again Harold of England traversed his kingdom, he and a number of his troops no doubt on horseback. By 7 October he was in London. There a family conference is said to have ensued and, among other things later tradition tells us, his mother urged him not to fight and his brother Gyrth proposed that he, not Harold, should command the army because he was an oath-breaker.
¹²
Contemporary English sources say nothing about the oath and the story is first found in Orderic Vitalis, who may have had in mind the oath supposedly sworn to William in 1051/2.

It seems that Harold spent the best part of a week in London assembling an army. One presumes this entailed dispatching writs for the raising of levies through the southern counties, for we are told that men came in as he rode through Kent and Sussex. The chronicle of Abingdon Abbey records that the thegns owing duty to the abbey fought at Hastings and as we have noted Abbot Leofric of Peterborough was there, presumably with the men at arms owing service to the abbey.

William of Malmesbury records that the night before the battle the English were carousing. Supposedly the English thought the Normans must be priests because they lacked the flowing
moustaches of true warriors; and the Normans thought the English a womanish bunch with their combed and pomaded hair.
¹³
If Wace is to be believed the Normans’ battle cry at Hastings, the semi-Latin ‘
Deus aïe!
’ (‘With God’s help’) was answered by the Anglo-Saxon cry ‘
Ut!
’ (‘Out!’)

On 14 October Harold took up position on a hill ridge at Senlac some seven miles (11 km) from Hastings and prepared to engage the enemy – even though other English forces were on the road to rendezvous with the royal army. Accounts of the battle are piecemeal and confused. M. K. Lawson (2003) tends to accept one source formerly discounted, the
Carmen de Hastingae Proelio
(‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’) by Guy, bishop of Amiens. It begins by comparing William to Julius Caesar and many of the sources make classical allusions. There is a much disputed account of how Taillefer, a juggler, threw his sword into the air in front of the French lines and killed an Englishman who rushed forward against him.

Harold’s battlefield position was well chosen, as it seems Duke William was unable to turn either flank. Accounts speak of ditches, one of them large and well concealed, which suggests that the English position extended with field defences beyond the ridge. Later pro-English chroniclers report the inadequate size of the English force. As to numbers, Lawson comments, ‘How large a “large” army may have been there is no way of knowing.’
¹⁴
William of Poitiers, on the other hand, speaks of the ‘immense size’ of Harold’s army with reinforcements from Denmark, while the ‘D’ text of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports Harold as assembling a ‘great host’ (presumably swelled by local shire levies), which the Normans attacked ‘before his people were set in order’ (‘
ær his folc gefylced wœre
’). Had they been delayed by the preparation of the field defences? Was the shield wall still being marshalled? Was it because the local levies were still being mobilized into the main army? Or was it because they had been carousing the night before?

William of Poitiers speaks of indiscipline, recording that the English forces three times left their sound defensive position, the third time to be surrounded and cut down by those it thought in flight. The English fought under Harold’s banner of ‘The Armed Man’ (‘
homo armatus
’), worked in purest gold apparently, which was sent to the pope after the battle as spoils of victory. This was appropriate since Pope Alexander II seems to have sent William the banner that his people fought under, ‘the standard of St Peter the Apostle’ as Orderic Vitalis called it. The English shield wall held against repeated Norman cavalry charges and arrow fire. Towards the end of the day the Norman foot fell back in what proved a tactical feint. The shield wall broke; the enemy returned to the attack. The English faltered and then tried to flee. Many were cut down as they ran. Accounts of the battle are scant and confused. According to the
Carmen
the Normans were already stripping the bodies of the dead when Harold was seen on the ridge of the hill still fighting. When four Normans attacked and killed him one speared him through his shield; one hacked off his head; one split his entrails; a fourth hewed off his thigh. William ordered that Harold’s corpse be buried on the seashore.

At the end of the day Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine and many of the Anglo-Saxon nobility lay dead on the place of slaughter. The pro-English twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury is among those who records the tradition of Harold’s death by arrow shot. Apparently the English army only abandoned the fight as reports of the king’s death spread through the ranks. An arrow shot, whether in the eye or not, seems probable. Harold’s prowess was such, men said, that he could overthrow a horse and its rider with a single blow, so that no one could approach near enough to kill
him.
Discounting the legends that he survived the battle (they are explored in Appendix B), death by arrow shot (whether in the eye or not) seems probable.

Resistance

Like Waterloo, Hastings, it seems, was a near run thing. The length of the battle from morning till dusk indicates evenly matched opponents, whether or not there was an imbalance in numbers. Had he fought out the day to a stalemate, with nightfall Harold would still have been king of England and William looking to bivouac in hostile country with a bleak prospect for the morning. As it was, the English defeat was total, and the systematic rape of the southern counties stubbed out immediate resistance. But resistance there was.

After a week spent on a savage punitive expedition to the south and west of London, William paused at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire to receive the leading citizens of London, Edgar the ætheling, Archbishop Ealdred of York and the earls Edwin and Morcar, and accept their hostages and allegiance.

Three months after his coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, William left England for Normandy and was attending to business in the duchy until the following December. There were local uprisings in many parts of England but they were not coordinated. Unrest in the southwest, however, was more serious. William may even have had reason to believe that its aim was to put Godwine, Harold’s son by Edith Swanneck, on the throne.
¹⁵
Aged perhaps eighteen at the time of Hastings, he held property in Somerset. The other great old-regime landowner in the region, with large estates in Devon and Wiltshire as well as Somerset, was the young man’s grandmother, Gytha, wife of the old earl and matriarch of the Godwine dynasty, presumably now in her sixties. Exeter, a dower city of her daughter Queen Edith, was the chief rebel centre and it was here that William directed his energies in early 1068. After heavy initial losses the new king took the place after an eighteen-day siege. Gytha and her entourage made good their escape and in due course she arrived at Saint-Omer with sufficient bullion and other
treasures to see her through a comfortable retirement away from the hazards of court politics and attempted comebacks.

Meantime, towards mid-summer 1068 Harold’s brothers and his son Godwine, who had crossed over to Ireland where the family friend King Diarmait of Leinster had helped fit them out, appeared in the mouth of the River Avon with ’a raiding ship army’ and plundered the countryside. The citizens of Bristol fought them off, so they took their loot back to their ships and went up into Somerset before returning to Ireland. The next year they returned with more than 60 ships, landing on the coast of north Devon. Again they were driven back with the loss of many of their best men, this time by the Breton count, the Conqueror’s earl in the district.
¹⁶

In the summer of 1069 a Danish fleet commanded by King Swein II found safe anchorage in the Humber. Even from the records that survive it is clear that England was seething with discontent after Hastings; the explosion came in the north. It was William’s Norman appointee as earl of Northumbria who set the torch to the brushwood. The men of the Durham region surprised him inside the stronghold there and killed him and the 900 men with him. The arrival of the Danish fleet sparked a rising in York. By 20 September the city was lost, Yorkshire was in rebel hands and the entire Norman project in England in jeopardy. Within days the seventeen-year-old Edgar the aethling had arrived in the city, marching south from his exile in Scotland. Since Hastings Edgar had managed to keep out of William’s way while receiving various embassies of support, notably from Brand, the new abbot of Peterborough, ‘because the people there thought he ought to become king.’ He had made his way to the court of Malcolm of Scotland, along with his Hungarian mother Agatha and his sister Margaret, who, much against her will, was obliged to marry the Scottish king.

York received the ætheling with jubilation. But William stormed north, retaking York as the ætheling escaped back to Scotland.
William celebrated Christmas in its smouldering ruins; he continued northwards to the River Tees through the lands of St Cuthbert and the Lordship of Bamburgh. News came of further risings in Cheshire and Wales. William drove his army southwest across the Pennines in the depths of a bitter winter. Desertification, death and rapine followed him. The harrying of the North that ensued brought the practice of the punitive expedition to the nadir of horror. Fifteen years later the Domesday commissioners were noting ‘laid waste’ against village after village of the region, entry after entry.

With the country in turmoil, ‘the English people from the Fens’ had flocked to Swein of Denmark, thinking his army was planning to occupy the region. At about this time the monks of Peterborough heard that one of their tenants, Hereward of Bourne, was marching on the abbey because he and his men had heard that, with the death of Abbot Brand, the Conqueror had handed the place to the Norman soldier/churchman Turold of Fécamp. In what followed the once ‘golden borough’ crashed to ‘wretched borough’, plundered of its treasures by foes and friends alike, claiming to save them from the alien invaders. Pirates, we are told, sailed up to the minster wharf and tried to break in. When the monks resisted the attackers set fires. They then plundered the abbey of its gold, from the crown on the head of the crucified Christ hanging on the rood screen to many other crosses and gold and silver ornaments of all kinds, as well as precious manuscripts. Even the talismanic arm of St Oswald was carried down to the ships and, with the rest of the booty, taken off to Ely – supposedly for safe-keeping away from the depredations of the Normans.

There Hereward, known to history and legend as Hereward the Wake, joined by Earl Morcar of Mercia and Bishop Ælfwine of Durham, held out with hundreds of desperate rebels, their hope fixed on the Danish fleet in the face of news of King William’s progress. Ely Abbey, on its island among the fenland marshes, was
well suited for a stronghold, but as at Alfred’s Athelney resistance could not be indefinite.

By the spring William had flayed his rebel kingdom back to obedience. In a campaign that historian David Douglas rated ‘one of the outstanding military achievements of the age’, he was once more master. At this point the Danes came to terms with the Norman king and sailed away to Denmark, with much English booty in their holds. Now, too, the leaders of Ely’s lost cause made what peace they could while Hereward made good his escape into the half-light between legend and history. The Conqueror is said to have pardoned him and he supposedly crossed over to France. There, according to Geoffrey Gaimar, the French historian of the English, writing his
Estoire des Angleis
for the wife of a Norman lord in Lincolnshire, Hereward was run to ground and murdered by a party of vengeful Normans. It is fitting that the end of his story, whether true or fiction, should be penned so near to Hereward’s home territory. Anglo-Saxon England’s last real, if faint, hope was Edgar the ætheling, Ironside’s grandson, who had been named king in October 1066 by the English bishops and the remnant of the nobility: he survived to join the armies of the First Crusade, where, as a man in his early forties, he would strike a contemporary as ‘handsome in appearance; liberal and noble in eloquence.’

Aftermath and rebirth

According to the
Vita Edwardi Regis
, as he lay dying Edward, indicating the queen, had said to Harold: ‘I commend this woman with all the kingdom to your protection.’ The
Chronicle
explicitly states that ‘Harold succeeded to the realm of England, just as the king had granted it to him and as he had been chosen to the position.’
¹⁷
If true it was the first time such a bequest had been made to one not of the royal line. Reports of the deathbed scene come from witnesses who were, by definition, Harold’s supporters. However, one
Norman source tacitly accepts that the deathbed nomination was made, by charging Harold with perjury for accepting it. As to his sister, the dowager queen Edith, a
Chronicle
entry for the year 1076 tells us that the Lady Edith, dowager to King Edward, passed away at Winchester seven days before Christmas and the king had her body brought to Westminster with great ceremony and buried beside her lord. She was the first queen to be buried there, just as her brother was the first king of England to be crowned there.