Millenium (43 page)

And all the while, beyond the northern seas, the King of Norway was biding his time. Soon enough fateful tidings were being brought to him from London. Edward was dead; and sat upon his throne, conse­crated and crowned with indecent speed, or so it was reported, was no man of royal blood, but Harold Godwinson. Affront and opportunity: Harald Hardrada took the news as both. Dusting down the claim to England that he had inherited long back from his nephew, he duly began to plan for war. The precise object of his task force, however, he still kept close to his chest; for he intended that his hammer blow, when it fell, should come out of the blue. How gratifying it was, then, that emissaries from Tostig should have arrived at his court in the very midst of his preparations, proposing what he had already settled upon.
³⁹
How gratifying as well that even in the skies all things seemed to be moving in his favour: for in the spring there appeared above the lands of the North a mysterious star with a blazing tail. Well might men in England have been filled with dread at the sight, and reported seeing phantom ships out at sea:
⁴⁰
for there existed no more infallible portent of a looming crisis than a comet. By the late summer, when Harald's forces were ready at last to embark, the omens had grown even more pointed. One warrior, a member of the king's own body­guard, dreamed that he saw an ogress holding a knife and a trough of blood; another that he saw a hag riding on a wolf, and that the wolf had a corpse in its mouth.

Admittedly, there were some among Harald's followers who read these sanguinary visions as a foreboding, not of their lord's victory, but rather of his doom: for the old carnivore was fifty, and long in the tooth. Not for Harald himself, however, any pessimistic notions that he might be venturing on an adventure too far - still less that the very era of the sea kings might be slipping him by. Naturally, as befitted the brother of a martyr, he had made sure to pray at Olaf s shrine before departing, and to obtain some keepsakes by giving the saintly hair and nails a trim; but his most potent treasure, as he set sail for England, was one that any of his pagan ancestors would have hailed. 'Land-Waster', it was called: 'a banner that was said to bring victory to whomever it preceded into battle'.'
¹
' Canute had owned one very similar, 'woven of the plainest and white silk', but on which a raven, in time of war, would mysteriously materialise, 'opening its beak, flapping its wings, and restive on its feet'.
⁴²
Deep magic and even deeper time: such ban­ners spoke profoundly to the Northmen of both. Liegemen of Christ they might have become, but in the fluttering of Land-Waster there beat for them the reassurance that they were heroes still, just as their pagan ancestors had been.

By early September, Harald and his monstrous fleet of some 300 ships were doing what so many Viking expeditions had done before them, and slipping down the coast of Scotland bound for Northumbria. Only Tostig, who met up with Harald on his way, had been given due warning of his plans: everyone else in England was taken utterly by surprise. Landing just south ofYork, the invaders dis­covered to their delight that Harold Godwinsson was far away in Wessex, and that only Earl Morcar and his brother, Edwin, were on hand to confront them. On 20 September, 'the thunderbolt of the North'
⁴³
struck at the Northumbrian forces and shattered them. Morcar and Edwin both survived their defeat; but they were now pow­erless to prevent Harald from forcing York into surrender, and taking hostages from among the leading citizens. Next, withdrawing some seven miles east of the city, to a convenient road junction by the name of Stamford Bridge, the Norwegian king paused, to await the submis­sion of all Northumbria. With Morcar's levies safely put out of action, and Harald Godwinson presumed still far away to the south, it seemed

 1066

there was nothing to worry about. Everything was going to plan. Land-Waster, which in the battle against the northern earls had carried all thunderously before it, was once again proving its invincibility.

But then, on 25 September, with an unseasonably warm sun stand­ing high in the sky, Harald and Tostig caught sight of a sudden smudge on the western skyline - and realised that it was approaching them fast. Perhaps, they thought at first, a band of Northumbrians was riding in to submit; but soon, as the earth began to shudder, and the glittering of shields and mail coats emerged through the dust, 'sparkling like a field of broken ice',
⁴⁴
the appalling truth dawned. Somehow, impossible though it seemed, Harold Godwinsson had arrived at Stamford Bridge. Frantically, Harald ordered his men to withdraw to the far side of the river. Simultaneously, he sent mes­sengers galloping with furious speed to where his ships lay moored twelve miles to the south, along with their store of mail shirts, and a whole third of his men. But it was too late. For a brief while, it was true, the enemy were held up at the bridge — by a single warrior, according to one account, who kept all at bay with the swinging of his axe, until an Englishman, with underhand cunning, 'came up in a boat and through the openings of the planks struck him in the private parts with a spear'.
⁴⁵
The delay, however precisely it had been achieved, was sufficient for Harald to draw up his men on the flats of the far bank - but not for his reinforcements to join him. Even though the Norwegians fought savagely, they could have no real hope of victory without their armour. Sure enough, the river was soon flowing incarnadine. In the end, the survivors broke and fled for their ships. All the afternoon, the English hunted them down. As the light began to fade and crows wheeled upon the carrion-perfumed breezes of evening, there lay spread out beneath them a scene of quite excep­tional slaughter. The English victory had been a work of almost utter annihilation. Of the three hundred and more ships that had arrived in England with Harald Hardrada, it was said, only twenty ever made it back to Norway.

And Harald himself, along with Tostig, lay among the mangled dead. So too, trampled down and stained with filth and gore, did his famous banner. At the end, Land-Waster's magic had failed - and, as it turned out, failed for good.

Conquest

The carnage at Stamford Bridge would long be remembered by the Northmen. As well it might have been - for never again would they cross the seas with the ambition of conquering a Christian land. The consigning of their most celebrated sea king to a foreign grave was a brutal measure of just how fast their horizons were closing in. Shortly before Harald Hardrada made his last stand, it was said, a party of horsemen had ridden out from the English lines and crossed to where the Norwegians stood facing them, lined up in a shield wall. One of the embassy, calling to Tostig, passed on a greeting from his brother, King Harold, and an offer: 'one-third of all the kingdom'. Tostig, shouting back, demanded to know what his ally, King Harald Hardrada, might expect. 'And the rider said, "King Harold has already declared how much of England he is prepared to grant the Norwegian: seven feet of earth, or as much as he needs to be buried, bearing in mind that he is taller than other men."
⁴⁶

These were the last words ever spoken between the two brothers - for the rider had been none other than Harold Godwinsson himself. Wit and a defiant cool were the authentic qualities of a man who all his life had been passing 'with watchful mockery through ambush after ambush'.'
¹⁷
In Harold's scorning of the invader, however, and the granting to him only of sufficient earth to cover his bones, there had been something more than mere braggart play. The presumption that a land might indeed be sacred to those who trod it was neither an idle nor a novel one. So it was, for instance, that Earl Britnoth, opposing an earlier generation of Vikings at Maldon, had pledged himself ringingly to the defence of
'folc and foldan
: 'people and soil'.
⁴⁸
That the two were synonymous was a presumption widely shared across much of

Christendom. Even in regions where borders and loyalties were infi­nitely more confused, and confusing, than in England, men had long been in the habit of identifying themselves with a
'natio'
— a nation. 'People joined together by a single descent, custom, language and law,'
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one abbot, writing in the Rhineland a whole century before the Millennium, had defined the word.

True, there were certain 'nations', the Normans pre-eminent among them, whose beginnings were so recent that their mongrel character could never hope to be smoothed over — but this was a problem only for parvenus. Generally, among the more venerable peoples of Christendom, it was taken for granted that all those who shared a common homeland necessarily shared a common ancestry too; indeed, that they had been united by blood even back in the most primordial of times, when they too, like the pagans who were rumoured still to haunt the steppelands beyond the frontiers of the Rus, had been wanderers, without any roots at all. A convenient notion: for since no one could actually be certain what had happened in such an obscure and distant age, the field had been left free for the learned to rustle up any number of glamorous ancestors for them­selves. Frankish genealogists, for instance, had traced the pedigree of their people back to the ancient Trojans; the Saxons, not to be out­done, had claimed to be the offspring of the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Most ingenious of all, perhaps, were the Scots, who bragged, with a formidable disregard for plausibility, that they were originally from Egypt, descendants of the same Pharaoh's daughter who had discovered Moses in the bulrushes - and whose name, so they cheer­fully insisted, in a manner designed to clinch their argument, had been Princess Scota.

Far-fetched such stories might have been - and yet they were no less potent for that. Indeed, the myths that peoples told about them­selves, and the sense that they had of themselves as distinctive nations, tended to be much more deeply rooted than the monarchies that ruled them. Not that this, for an upstart dynasty, was necessar­ily a disadvantage. Back in 936, for instance, when Otto I succeeded to his father's throne, he had been able to do so not merely by right of inheritance, but 'as the choice of all the Franks and Saxons'.
³⁰
For Harold Godwinsson, in 1066, the benefits of posing as the people's prince were even more self-evident. Lacking as he did so much as a drop of royal blood, his surest claim to legitimacy lay in the fact that his peers, and perhaps even the dying Edward himself, had all given him the nod.
³¹
Nor, despite the mildly embarrassing detail that both his name and mother were Danish, could there be any doubt as to why he had been considered worthy to rule as the supreme repre­sentative of the English. Harold had been — as even his bitterest enemies acknowledged—'the most distinguished of Edward's subjects in honour, wealth and power'.
³²
No one was better qualified to guard his countrymen against foreign invaders. 'Our king'
³³
he was duly hailed in the wake of his slaughter of Hardrada's army. Harold, at Stamford Bridge, had successfully defended both '
folc and foldan'.

Yet even as he cleaned his sword of Norwegian blood, the circum­stances that had brought him to the throne continued to menace his prospects. Back in 1063, in the wake of a hard-won victory over the Welsh, Harold had been presented with the head of his murdered enemy: a baneful and portentous trophy. Three years on, and his abil­ity to claim the scalps of his adversaries had come to rank as the only certain measure of his fitness to rule. Not even with Hardrada safely fertilising the soil of Northumbria could he afford to relax. Other predators, other invaders, still cast their shadows. All that summer of 1066, Harold had been standing guard on the Channel - and now, with his warriors force-marched up the length of England, he was grimly aware that he had left his southern flank unprotected. Wearily, then, with the crows still flocking and clamouring above the fields of Stamford Bridge, he set about retracing his steps. He could have no doubts as to the urgency of his mission. Long before becoming king, Harold had made it a point 'to study the character, policy and strength of the princes of France'
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- and of one in particular. Grant so much as the sniff of an opening, he had to reckon, and the Duke of Normandy would take it.

For certainly, by 1066, there could be no doubting that William ranked as a truly deadly foe. His apprenticeship was long since over. Seasoned in all the arts of war and lordship, and with a reputation fit to intimidate even the princes of Flanders and Anjou, even the King of France himself, his prime had turned out a fearsome one. So too had that of his duchy. Quite as greedy for land and spoils as any Viking sea king, the great lords of Normandy, men who had grown up by their duke's side and shared all his ambitions, had emerged as an elite of warriors superior, in both their discipline and training, to any in Christendom. For a decade and a half William and his lieu­tenants had been probing southwards, engaging in a uniquely lethal and innovative style of combat, pitting themselves against those most proficient castle-builders, the castellans of Anjou. The buffer zone of Maine, which back in the early 1050s had passed almost entirely into Angevin hands, had been systematically broken to William's will. Patience had been blended with daring; attrition with escapades; months spent ravaging vineyards with sudden midnight surgical strikes. 'Terror had been sown across the land.'
⁵⁵
Nor, even with Maine securely in his grasp, had William been content to rest in his saddle. Campaigning had become a way of life for him, and for all those who followed his standard. Horses still had to be exercised, cas­tles built, estates and towns and riches won. No surprise, then, that England, where the great men still fought on foot, and defended their wooden halls with little more than ditches, and were not organised for ceaseless warfare, should have served to beckon the restless and hungry duke. To most Englishmen, accustomed as they were to look for danger from across the northern seas, the notion that the upstart Normans might represent a genuine menace to their ancient and wealthy kingdom had appeared a fanciful one-but not to Harold. He, at any rate, had taken pains to analyse William at close quarters. He had made sure to observe in the field how the duke's castles were built, and the aggressive use to which they could be put, and the ominous potential of the Norman cavalry. Indeed, he had even ridden with William on a raid into Brittany - and performed so heroically during the course of the expedition that he had been rewarded for his feats with a gift of armour from the duke himself.

This startling feat of espionage had been achieved only a couple of years before the fateful testing time of 1066. Quite what it was that had brought Harold to Normandy in the first place would later be much debated. The Normans would insist that he had been sent by Edward to promise William the succession; the English that he had travelled there of his own volition in order to negotiate a marriage alliance or perhaps the release of a hostage. It is not impossible that both claims were true. Altogether more certain, however, is that Harold, after a calamitous initial journey to Normandy - one that had featured both a shipwreck and a spell in the dungeon of a local princeling — had ended up as William's guest. Though this might have been awkward for him, Harold was not his father's son for nothing: and so it was, smoothly and with a fine show of Godwin opportunism, that he had set himself to a close study of the man whom he would long since have fingered as his likeliest rival for the English throne. Carefully veil­ing his own ambitions, he had encouraged William to spill out everything. Sure enough, the duke had openly acknowledged to his charming and attentive guest how he did indeed intend to press his right to England, by virtue of his relationship to his long-dead great- aunt, the Lady Emma, and by sundry blessings that he claimed to have received from King Edward. Harold, more than content to play his rival for a fool, had duly sworn to support and advance William's cause. His reward had been yet further gifts, and a ship back home to England. 'Watchful mockery' indeed.

No wonder, then, in the early weeks of 1066, that William should have responded to the news of Harold's accession with icy and bitter rage: he felt the fury of a man who had been cheated as well as robbed. Particularly shocking to him was the memory of how his guest, pledging his support, had done so with a gesture of awful and public solemnity, his hand laid on a relic box, a deed of fateful bold­ness: for what was an oath if not a challenge flung directly at God?

'But alas' — as those who knew the new king had long appreciated — 'he was a man always too quick to give his word'.
⁵⁶
It was all very well for Harold to claim that his oath of loyalty to William had been extorted from him under duress, and that he had been crowned entirely by right, according to the wishes and customs of the English people. Such details did not serve to absolve him, for there existed laws more awesome and binding than those of any mortal kingdom. William, at any rate, understood this well enough. Indeed, he had always capitalised powerfully upon it. He was a man, after all, who had turned the Peace of God so thoroughly to his own advantage, and imposed it with such an iron fist, that other princedoms, in com­parison with Normandy, could appear to the Normans themselves mere bear pits, 'rife with unbridled wickedness'.
⁵⁷
No surprise, then, that the duke, in his determination to secure his right to England, should have moved quickly to explore what else God might be able to do for him. He was acutely sensitive, in a way his wily but light- hearted rival was not, to the changing spirit of the times—a spirit that set a premium on the universal over the local. Certainly, he had no doubts that the laws of England could be made to seem as nothing when compared with the awful majesty of the one supreme law: that of God Almighty Himself. William, whose stern religiosity had always been combined with a talent for spotting trends, was a ruler surpass­ingly well fitted to appreciate the new enthusiasms that were animating the highest reaches of the Church - and what they might mean for himself. One of his bishops had sat alongside Leo IX at the Council of Reims. One of his abbots had been a school friend of Alexander II, the reigning Pope. The mighty tide of reform, which far from subsiding with Leo's death had continued to swell and surge and advance, could hardly help, then, in the great crisis of 1066, but be a matter of surpassing interest to William.