Battle Of Hastings

The English Spirit is Born Out of Conquest

At Christmas, 1065, Edward the Confessor saw the consecration of the great Abbey Church at Westminster, he had moved his Court from Winchester to be near the building, and then died on 5 January, the eve of the Feast of Epiphany on which day he was buried. And, on the day of his burial, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recalls:

And Earl Harold was now consecrated King and he met little quiet in it as long as he ruled the realm.

The haste was certainly great. Edgar the Atheling, a direct descendant of Alfred the Great and a cousin of Edward the Con­fessor, was the legitimate heir to the throne by blood. But he was a minor and the Anglo-Saxon magnates considered that English sovereignty was too fragile a thing to have a young boy on the throne. Twenty-four years before, England had been a part of the Scandinavian empire and the house of Alfred had come into its own with Edward the Confessor only after the death of Hardicanute, the debauched son of the great ruler King Canute. So the English thegns decided that Harold Godwine, the most powerful noble of the south of England, the worthy son of a great father, who had married the Confessor’s sister Edith, should succeed at once and without debate. The Anglo-Saxon lords were not as a rule very united and during Edward’s reign there had been much strife. Harold, however, had played his hand with skill and, just before Edward’s death, had made allies of the great northern thegns, Edwin and Morcar, by support­ing them against his own brother Tosti in a quarrel about lands. Tosti had fled the country and indeed in 1066 was a minor danger to the peace of England, being about to return with a force of Flemish mercenaries and fight for his rights.

The great double danger came from Scandinavia and Normandy. The threat from King Harald Hardraada of Norway was not absolutely certain in the early days of 1066 and the more imminent danger was that from William Duke of Normandy. William’s claim to the English crown, but for the fact that he was himself a bastard, was better than Harold’s. Edward the Confessor had been the son of the sister of William’s father, Duke Robert. William was the more feared in that the weak Edward the Confessor, though accepting Harold as a sort of under-king in the last year of his life, had secretly promised the crown to William and favoured the entry into the kingdom of Normans. There had been a Norman Archbishop of Canterbury. There were many Norman monasteries and, on the Welsh marches, a Norman Baron, Earl Ralph, had even been given lands.

To King Harold, often known as Harold of the Fair Hair, came, a few days after his accession, a messenger from Duke William to remind him of his promise to accept William as King of England. Harold, when at sea, had once been driven on to the French coast and delivered, according to the Bayeux Tapestry which tells the story of the Norman Conquest, by a small piratical baron to the Duke of Normandy. William had treated Harold with honour and kindness. Harold stayed in Normandy to take part in several military expeditions with Duke William, and was even made a knight at William’s hands.

William succeeded in persuading his guest to support his claims to the throne of England and, in a great public ceremony at Bayeux in the presence of many Barons and Bishops, made Harold swear a solemn oath to do so. According to English sources, Harold swore with his hand on a missal and, when the missal was removed, the chest on which it had been standing was seen to contain a collection of bones of saints and other sacred relics; according to the Bayeux Tapestry, there was no trickery and the relics had been there for all to see. The question of the oath was important in those days. Harold himself disregarded its binding quality but, before the Battle of Hastings, one of Harold’s brothers suggested that Harold himself, on account of this oath, should not fight in the battle.

Harold at once took steps to make himself popular in England. Always a good administrator, a chronicler, Florence of Worcester, recounts that:

“He began to abolish unjust laws to make good ones, to patronize Churches and Monasteries and to make himself pious, humble and affable to all good men.”

Early in the summer, he was forced to raise an army and equip ships to drive off Tosti from the south coast. Tosti sailed north and landed at Lindsey in Lincolnshire where he was driven off by the northern thegns Edwin and Morcar. After that he sailed for Scotland. Harold remained on the south coast for he knew already that hundreds of ships were being prepared in the ports of Normandy for invasion. However, in September Harold heard with surprise and dismay the news that King Harald Hardraada, joined by his own brother Tosti, had landed in Yorkshire with a fleet of two hundred warships and three hundred transports and, near York, had routed an English army led by Edwin and Morcar. Harold made a forced march northwards and, in a very bloody battle at Stamford Bridge, routed the Norwegians, both Harald and Tosti being slain.

When he was celebrating his victory at York, four days after Stamford Bridge, Harold learnt that the Normans had landed in force at Pevensey. His great chance of disputing the Norman landing was now gone. He hurried south, gathering what new forces he could, and set up his standard on a high ridge at Senlac, near Hastings, where are now the ruins of Battle Abbey. Like the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, he held a position with a forest behind it, where, if necessary, he could rally his men.

But Harold’s act was a rash one and he fell into Duke William’s trap in offering battle so quickly. William had purposefully waited on the Kent-Sussex coast, building two great wooden castles, and hoping the English would do just what they had done. What the Normans had to fear was a campaign of small battles fought as they advanced into England against numerically superior forces in which they would exhaust both their men and supplies without being able to replace them. For Harold’s ships, which had been scattered in various ports when William had landed, could at any moment cut communication with Normandy.

William Duke of Normandy, the fruit of an illegitimate union of his father Robert with a tanner’s daughter, was one of the outstanding geniuses of his time. He had had to fight for his succession and, all his life, had been constantly engaged in wars with neighbouring feudal lords, out of which he had emerged successfully.

The Normans were Scandinavians who had settled in Normandy during the ninth and tenth centuries and had adopted Christianity and the French tongue. They were a warlike and cunning race. Both Duke Robert and William were great patrons of the Church and attracted to their kingdom scholars from Italy, of whom such as Anselm and Lanfranc were among the greatest in all Christendom.

The Church gave the Normans their administrators and so the Norman dukedom was at once bellicose, well organized and pre-eminently Christian. For the invasion of England the Normans attracted knights and adventurers from other parts of France who were anxious for lands and gain; these men also believed that they were serving the cause of Christendom in sailing against a relatively barbarous country, ruled by a usurper king who had broken his oath. God, after contrary winds which had long held back their fleet, had at last given them a fair wind. When Duke William himself had stepped ashore in England, he had slipped and fallen forward on his hands. A cry of alarm had gone up throughout the host at this evil sign. But William cried in a loud voice: “See, my Lords, I have by the grace of God taken possession of England with both my hands.”

By 13 October, Harold’s army was drawn up in battle array on Senlac heights, each man close to the other, forming a dense phalanx of warriors armed with battle-axes, javelins, lances and pikes. The Anglo-Saxons always fought on foot, unlike the Norman knights who were mounted. And on that day Harold received another emissary from William whose army was now drawn up just below the ridge, proposing that he should give up the crown in return for lands north of the Humber and the hand of William’s sister Adela in marriage. After this was refused, it was plain that battle would begin the next day. William’s army passed the night in prayer, silence and repose; the Anglo-Saxons in jollity, drinking ale and wine from great horns around their camp fires.

The great battle which was to decide the fate of England began with the terrible sound of trumpets from both sides as the Norman host advanced slowly up the hill. For a long while there was no sound but the clash of weapons and the shrieking of wounded men. The advantage of high ground told against the invaders at first and after a while some Bretons and French foot soldiers broke in flight. The rumour spread that Duke William had been killed and a part of the Norman army was seized with panic as the English left their stockade and poured down the hill. But William rallied his men and the English pursuers were cut down easily by the more heavily armoured Norman knights.

The lesson was plain: the English must remain in close formation rooted to the ground. The battle continued until the afternoon when William ordered all his army to carry out a feigned retreat. This time a far greater part of Harold’s troops left their hill, shouting that victory was theirs, and the lesson of slaughtering the more lightly armed English was repeated on a far greater scale. William returned to the assault of the diminished Anglo-Saxons still gathered round Harold, ordering his archers to fire from a distance into the air; it was with an arrow in his eye that King Harold was killed. Many other English leaders were now dead and by the evening the Normans had captured the King’s gold standard and were on top of Senlac ridge. It was the death of so many English nobles which prevented any rallying in the woods and made the victory decisive.

Indeed after this battle no other large Anglo-Saxon army was raised. William and his knights waited a few days in the neighbourhood of Dover and Hastings, largely to recover from dysentery which afflicted many of them. At Christmas, 1066, William was crowned King of England in London. Though he had to face some revolts in the North and in East Anglia, where Hereward the Wake defied him, King William I, after Hastings, had never cause to doubt his success. He had won all England by a single battle.

The Norman Conquest was extremely thorough. The Anglo-Saxon thegns were gradually deprived of their lands in favour of Normans and Frenchmen. There came a huge immigration of foreigners, principally Normans and Angevins, into England. Norman castles built at first of wood to hold down for a moment the surrounding country and then of stone arose throughout the country. William was not only a warrior but a far-sighted ruler; it was of the greatest importance for the future of England that he never gave his knights huge estates in one place so that, as happened in France, vassals could easily become more powerful than the king.

Anglo-Saxon England had been scarcely administered at all by the King; now each land had its Lord, each Lord his Overlord, the pyramid culminating in the monarch. The great Domes-day Book enumerated the wealth of the country and made possible a system of taxes. And now the Church, which was the guardian of civilization, came into its own and everywhere as in France priests and monks on a much greater scale than in Anglo-Saxon England began the task of educating men. William of Malmesbury, who finished around 1125 a work on the Norman Conquest, wrote of the English before the Conquest that religion was very much decayed in spite of the efforts of Edward the Confessor.

The English nobility, he said, were:

“Given up to luxury and wantonness did not go to Church in the early morning after the manner of Christians but merely in a casual manner. The common people left unprotected became a prey to the more powerful who amassed riches either by seizing the property of the poor or by selling their persons to foreigners. Nevertheless, it is the manner of those people to be more inclined to dissipation than to the accumulation of wealth. There was one custom repugnant to nature which they had adopted; namely to sell their female servants when pregnant by them after they had satisfied their lust, either to public prostitution or to foreign slavery. Drinking in parties was a universal custom, in which occupation they passed entire days and nights. They consumed their whole fortune in mean and despicable houses, unlike the Normans and the French who in noble splendid mansions lived with frugality. The vices attended upon drunkenness followed in due course, and these, as is well known, enervate the human mind.”

Of the Normans, William of Malmesbury writes that:

“They were at that time exceedingly particular in their dress and delicate in their food, but not to excess. They are a race inured to war and can hardly live without it, fierce in attacking their enemies, and when force fails, ready to use guile or to corrupt by bribery.”

As I have said they live with economy in large houses; they envy their equals; they wish to vie with their superiors; and they plunder their subjects though they protect them from others. They are faithful to their lords though slight offence gives them an excuse for treachery. They are the most polite of peoples; they consider strangers to merit the courtesy they extend to each other; and they intermarry with their subjects. After their coming to England, they revived the rule of religion which had grown lifeless.”

It was by civil organization and by the spread of education through the Church that the Norman Conquest proved itself the triumph of a higher civilization over a lower. For a while even Anglo-Saxon English went underground and became the language of underlings and serfs; Norman-French and Latin was the tongue of the ruling class and the educated. But this was only for a comparatively short period. Under the great Angevin kings, Henry I and Henry II, the conquerors gradually came to think of themselves as English and the English sense of liberty and justice became something which both Barons and peasants understood, as did the peoples of the towns which the Norman and Angevin order protected and encouraged to grow.

The language which was to be that of Chaucer and Shakespeare came back, enriched, into its own. When in 1215 King John was forced to sign the Great Charter, England was already born out of the realm of Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror. Indeed the Battle of Hastings in 1066, if it resulted in the falling of the Anglo-Saxons under foreign domination, was in fact the beginning of England, the painful birth of the English spirit.