by Ed West
Harald was a superstitious man, and before setting sail he went to the tomb of St Olaf, unlocked it, clipped his nails and hair, an old Viking custom, locked the tomb and threw the keys in the river. Before they set off there were lots of nightmares and omens among the Vikings. Hardraada apparently dreamed of his brother, who warned him there was a difference between an honorable death fighting for a birthright, and falling in battle trying to take from someone else, and telling him this whole expedition would end badly. One of Harald’s sidekicks, Gyrd, also had a nightmare, where he saw an English army led by a huge troll woman riding a wolf which had a man’s body in its jaw and blood in the corner of its mouth. And after it ate the man, the troll-woman consumed them all. Which was either a sign of doom, or that he’d been drinking far too much. Despite all this Harald seemed to treat the thing as any good Viking should, as one big adventure.
They first sailed to the Shetlands and Orkneys, where Harald left one of his wives, which suggests he may have not expected to come home and wanted this one safe away from his other wife (like most Viking rulers, he hadn’t entirely conformed to Christian rules just yet). There some dynastic marriages were arranged with the local Viking rulers, and the fleet headed south, with some Orcadians joining the expedition.
In fact once this all started everyone began claiming the throne of England. Conan of Brittany now threw his hat in, on some spurious grounds; however he ended up mysteriously dying from poisoning later in the year.
The English army, or fyrd, had spent the summer guarding the south coast, waiting for the Normans to arrive, but as September went on the chances of invasion were starting to fade, since the sea would get too rough to cross. The big problem with an army made up of farmers was that if they didn’t return home in time the crops would rot and they’d starve.
On September 8, thinking it was getting too late for the Normans to cross, Harold sent the army home. A few days later he returned to London with a huge pain in his leg, and two days afterwards was told that the Norwegians had landed in Northumbria and burned down Scarborough, a town on the Yorkshire coast.4 Harald had built a large bonfire at the top of the hill there, and then pushed it all down onto the roofs of houses below, setting fire to it. As one historian explained: ‘There was really not much point in it, except that it was fun’.5
In Yorkshire the invading army was met by a pitiful English force led by Edwin and Morcar at a village called Fulford, easily beating them; after the battle the invaders walked over English heads lying in the river ‘like stepping stones’. Had the northern earls more faith in the king they might have retreated behind the nearby walls of York, but they did not expect help so soon, Harold’s army being in the south.
Tostig had told all the Norwegians he was really popular in York, but when they arrived Harald found that his English ally was in fact hated by everyone. In the city not a single person came out to greet the former earl, so the invaders left and went back to their base in nearby Riccall for a celebration. They expected that it would be many days, if not weeks, before King Harold arrived.
In fact the English army was marching along Roman roads at speed and on September 24, as York surrendered, Godwinson was only a day’s hike away. The following day the second battle of the year took place. The Vikings were so confident they wouldn’t face opposition that they walked to Stamford Bridge without their mail coats and just wore shirts, expecting to arrive in the village to be given money and hostages. They were in merry mood, but when they arrived saw a large body of men meeting them. Tostig, deluded as always, assumed they were coming to surrender, until it dawned on them that the southern army had reached them in record time, covering up to fifty miles a day.
Before the two sides fought there was a dramatic meeting between the Godwinson brothers. Much of this story comes down to us from a fourteenth-century Icelandic saga, Hemings þáttr, which draws on older Norwegian stories, and Norse tales often feature brothers who are deadly rivals.6 In the story Harold pretends to be a messenger from the English leader, and approaches the Norwegians where, spotting his brother, ‘a big strong man, and a man of many words,’7 calls out in English that King Harold offers him a third of his kingdom if he changes sides. Tostig replies that he could not desert Hardraada and asked what he could offer the Norwegian king. Harold replies: ‘Since he was not content with his own kingdom, I’ll give him six feet of English ground—a little more, perhaps, since he’s a tall man. But nothing more than that, since I don’t care about him.’
Tostig refuses this offer, and his brother departs. Only afterwards does Hardraada learn who the messenger is, and is angered because his enemy had been in arrow’s range. As it was, Harald would soon have seven feet of ground, and the Viking age was going to come to a very abrupt end. The next the world hears about Norwegians they’re handing out peace prizes.
Before the battle Hardraada was thrown from his horse while reviewing troops, a bad portent, but when the English tried to cross the bridge they were held up by one enormous Viking who stood firm and defended it single-handedly, killing as many as forty English soldiers, until he was speared from below by an Englishman who had sneaked under the bridge. The saga has the defenders apologizing for this discourteous way of killing the enemy, which seems very British.
After the shield wall was broken Harald launched into a trademark Viking berserker fury, where one man almost in a state of supernatural possession would charge forward to attack the enemy—except that he was immediately killed with an arrow in the windpipe, a rather anticlimactic ending.
As he lay dying and the English came at him Harald, almost absurdly, dictated a poem to his scribe to be recorded for posterity, at least it was claimed by a saga writer, his last words being: ‘We march forward in battle-array without our corselets to meet the dark blades: helmets shine but I have not mine, for now our armor lies down on the ships.’
With the Norwegians leaderless, Tostig continued the fight until he, too, was killed, according to the sagas with an arrow in the eye (this may have been medieval historians getting confused with the story about Harold’s death three weeks later). Harold solemnly buried his brother at York Minster, and magnanimously allowed the surviving Scandinavians to go home, the pitiful band filling only twenty or so ships out of three hundred; a visitor to the area in the 1120s recalled that there was still a mountain of bones visible on the battle site.8 Among the survivors were Harald’s sons Magnus and Olaf, who also took with them Tostig’s young boys. One of Harald’s men, Styrkar, got away and came upon an English carter wearing a coat. He offered to buy it, but the man taunted him for losing the battle, so Styrkar cut his head off. The moral of the story: if a mad Vikings makes a decent offer, accept it.
Although no one knew it, Stamford Bridge represented the end of the Viking age. The losses would have taken Norway a long time to recover from, and as Christianity became more firmly established and Scandinavian states more centralized the likes of Harald Hardraada became a thing of the past.
Harold Godwinson had won one of the most decisive battles of the medieval era; unfortunately it wasn’t to be even the most important battle that year. On September 28 the Normans landed in Sussex, and Harold would have heard the news four or five days later, most likely while already heading south with his exhausted army. What a year it was turning out to be.
CHAPTER NINE
The Battle of Hastings
William’s invasion fleet comprised between seven hundred and a thousand boats1 and was led by his fifty-five-foot flagship, a gift from his wife which featured on its masthead the leopard of Normandy. The duke brought with him mercenaries from Flanders, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Brittany and France, but it wasn’t all plain sailing—he fell flat on his face as he jumped ashore on English soil; an underling immediately proclaimed that the duke was embracing his new kingdom.2 This was after two of the ships had already been lost at sea, one of which contained the fleet’s official clairvoyant. ‘Not much of a soothsayer,’ William muttered wh
en he was told, ‘couldn’t foretell his own end.’
Back in London, Harold’s brother Gyrth made the sensible suggestion that the king should defend the city while he met the invaders, so that even his defeat and death would not mean the end of the kingdom; when Harold’s mother tried to stop him going to fight William ‘he insolently kicked her’. Harold, out of pride or overconfidence, felt he had to lead his army, and protect his homeland.
The invaders had begun plundering the land in Sussex and terrorizing its inhabitants, a deliberate attempt to provoke the king to come out and fight—and it worked.3 Harold’s family came from Sussex and he may have felt that to allow a foreign army to go around his home county unmolested would make him a failure; had Harold waited he could have had an army twice or three times the size. The king had also suffered a number of desertions from his fyrd after Stamford Bridge, largely it is thought because he refused to let them keep enemy plunder.
And so all of England’s leaders went off to Hastings, except Edgar Atheling, who was all of thirteen. Had Harold listened to his mother then, even an English defeat at Hastings would mean the Normans having to face another battle against a fresh English force, which could draw more men from around the countryside, and their numbers would inevitably be depleted by diseases of various kind. In fact, so much of the Norman conquest was avoidable if Harold had been a bit more cautious.
By the evening of October 13 the two armies were both camped near Hastings and the English, despite their exhaustion, had the advantage in that Harold had found higher ground on a spot called Senlac. William ordered for an attack in the morning, despite the disadvantages of charging uphill.
Norman chroniclers later claimed that the English had spent the evening getting drunk long into the night, as if anyone would have thought the eve of battle was a great time to have a blowout. One said the English ‘as we have heard passed the night without sleep, in drinking and singing … the Normans passed the whole night in confessing their sins, and received the sacrament.’4
The Norman poet Wace went even further: ‘All the night they ate and drank, and never lay down on their beds. They might be seen carousing, gambolling and dancing and singing’ while the Normans ‘betook themselves all night to their orisons, and were in very serious mood’. The Normans liked to paint the English as mindless drunks which, to be fair, they were, but also history is recorded by monks, who always presented any losing side as debauched, to enforce the message that good things come to those who pray.
From nine a.m.5 some seven to eight thousand Englishmen went into battle against a similar number of invaders, the English shouting Ut! (Out!) and the enemy Dex Aie! (with God’s Help!). The English were formed in very tight lines, with the men of Kent at the front and the ‘settled Danes’ of Yorkshire on the left; the men of London stood at the centre, around King Harold and his battle standard of the Wessex dragon, the wyvern, as well as his personal banner, the ‘Fighting Man’. Facing them the invaders were formed into three groups, with Bretons on the left, Normans in the centre, and French on the right.
The English army featured three thousand of the elite housecarls, each carrying an enormous two-handed axe that could chop a horse in half. However the English were on foot, while in contrast the Normans had two thousand cavalry, and one thousand archers—far more than the defenders brought. The fighting went on for most of the day, unusual when battles were usually finished within an hour (indeed pitched battles were rare in this period, as armies tended to try to avoid it in the hope that the other side would go home).
William wore around his neck the relics that Harold supposedly swore on, trying to goad his men to fight, but being Normans they were goaded enough. The duke gave an eve of battle speech to his men and ‘the knights were so excited that they rushed impetuously off before he had finished and left him speaking alone’. Then William put his mail coat on backwards, again seen as a bad omen—but then such bad omens are common in stories.
Before the battle proper, Duke William called for a knight to take on a Saxon in one-to-one combat, a suicide mission, which was taken up by Taillefer, who was not just a military adventurer but also a professional juggler. He killed the Saxon who challenged him and then charged at their shield wall, being killed instantly, and rather predictably.
The battle began with the Normans firing a volley of arrows aimed at the faces of the opposition; few of them made any impact on the heavily-protected housecarls, and so the invaders tried wave after wave of attacks. Duke William was so involved in the fighting he had three horses cut from below him during the day.
Things could have gone either way; at one point rumors spread that the duke was dead, and William threw back his helmet to show his men otherwise. At this point they were on the verge of panic, and he shouted at them that if they fled they would all die.
The Normans charged and charged, but there was deadlock. At one point the Bretons on the left side began a retreat and, thinking that the enemy were in tatters, the English chased them and broke formation. This gave the Normans the idea of feigning a retreat and when they did so again the English lost their formation and the high ground, and Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine were killed.
Now William ordered four knights to go after the king, who hacked him to death, the first stabbing him in the chest, two more attacking his head and arms, before the last knight cut off his leg, or possibly his genitals. According to one account William thought this action was a bit excessive even for his standards and he sent the offending soldier home without any reward.6 Emasculation was surprisingly common, even though it was seen as rather beyond the pale.
Harold may or may not have been hit in the eye: the story first appears one hundred years later, and the arrow shaft on the famous Bayeux Tapestry may have been only added in the eighteenth century by bored nuns. It’s possible also that the eye story was Norman propaganda, since blinding was the biblical punishment for oath-breakers; but either way he was dead. One story has William leading this death squad but it is extremely unlikely he’d have done something so risky; likewise with a later tale that Gyrth unhorsed William before the duke killed him, which is most likely borrowed from The Iliad.
By the end of the day the Normans had lost 2,500 men, the English 4,000, including most of the country’s nobility. After the battle William didn’t bother to bury the defeated, and it was left to Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, to identify him by a part ‘known only to her’, as his face had been so badly mutilated. However the indignity continued; William wouldn’t give up the body, even after Harold’s mother offered him her son’s weight in gold if she’d return him, and to this day no one knows where England’s last English king lies. One story has William giving him an ironic headstone on the shore to guard England from invasion, the deed carried out by William Malet,7 one of nineteen ‘companions’ of the duke who can be identified with certainty. 8 There were also legends of Harold surviving the battle and becoming a sort of wandering hermit.9
The site of the battle is marked by a derelict monastery, built after the fight in thanksgiving by the victor in the hope that perhaps God might overlook the thousands of people he’d killed in the conquest. The pope had insisted they build it as a condition of his support for the morally dubious invasion, and William put up the high altar on the spot where Harold was struck dead, dedicating the church to St Martin, patron saint of soldiers and alcoholics. The monastery was destroyed in the Reformation, but is today open to the public, thousands of whom visit every day.10
Afterwards the Normans lost many men chasing the surviving Saxons into an area where they died in an ‘evil ditch’, the malfosse as they called it. The invaders also believed a fresh English army was arriving in the morning: they had not yet won the kingdom, and in London the thirteen-year-old Edgar was hastily declared king. William’s army now went from town to town, and after a few atrocities Dover surrendered to them; England at the time had only twelve quite basic castles, and so was unable to do much ag
ainst an army like this. Then in Canterbury William got dysentery and could have died, in which case the whole expedition would still have been a waste of time. However he recovered and after they circled London and rampaged to the west, Archbishop Ealdred of York submitted at Wallingford on the Thames; soon Edgar, the bishops and the other leading men accepted William as king.
On Christmas Day 1066 the monumentally expensive Westminster Abbey started paying its way when William was crowned king of England in a service said in English and French. The native crowd, keen to have no trouble with their new overlords, cheered him sycophantically with cries of ‘Vivat Rex’—Long Live the King. William’s nervous, trigger-happy army mistook the insincere cheers for an uprising and fired on the crowd, before setting fire to the surrounding buildings. It was not a good start, PR wise, and it was not going to get any better. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle groaned: ‘They built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse.’
The Tapestry
Much of what we know about the Battle of Hastings comes from possibly the first comic book in history, known as the Bayeux Tapestry although strictly speaking it’s an embroidery. It tells the story from Harold’s visit of 1064 to the battle itself, with Latin text above the pictures, and was made soon after—although it lay hidden in the cathedral in Bayeux until discovered in the 1720s.