A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  Just how Harold saw his position on his return from the disastrous stay in Normandy will always remain obscure. Whatever his motives for the voyage, it seems inconceivable that, with Edward ailing, there was not some intention of talking over the glaringly critical issue of the succession with William. The most likely scenario is that Harold intended to try to reconcile the duke to his succession and perhaps even assumed that the exchange of brides would seal their alliance. But at some point (as not infrequently happens in the indirect course of informal negotiation), misunderstandings hardened, and Harold, not at all a free agent, found himself in the position of talking not about his own succession but the duke’s!

  Once he had returned, though, there was absolutely nothing in his conduct to suggest that he now thought of himself as William’s deputy in England. What we do know is that the decision he took in the winter of 1065 on the fate of the earldom of Northumbria was so shockingly at odds with the entire tradition of Godwine clan solidarity that it makes sense only in terms of Harold planning a bid for the throne of England himself. What he did was to sell his brother Tostig down the river.

  In eleventh-century Europe, of course, brothers were perfectly capable of behaving like Edgar and Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear if a throne was at stake. Harold merely evicted Tostig from the earldom of Northumbria where he had been installed a decade earlier. But since he turned his brother into an implacable enemy he might just as well have killed him outright. And this was more than a domestic row. The war between the Godwine brothers, so little noticed in so many of the textbook histories, was as bloodily fateful as anything in the epics or sagas. In the end, the enmity of Tostig would cost Harold his throne and his life. The family feud killed off Anglo-Saxon England.

  Of course, Harold knew he was taking a huge risk in alienating his brother, but in 1065 he may have felt he had no choice. A serious rebellion had broken out in the north (always a field of opportunity for Scottish kings and Viking earls), a rising largely provoked by Tostig’s own misplaced zeal in insisting on abolishing the laws of Cnut that permitted the blood feud. It didn’t help that Tostig was also busy creating his own personal army and that he robbed religious houses and bled the country for taxes to pay for it. Nor was he much of a protector to Northumbria. The earl, who had been off on pilgrimage to Rome and on the Welsh campaign in 1063, seemed to have no military answer to the cross-border raids mounted by Malcolm III from Scotland. Worse than being a bully was being an impotent bully. In the inevitable uprising all 200 of Tostig’s guards were hunted down and killed, and Tostig himself was declared outlaw. The rebel thegns then invited Morcar, the young brother of the Earl of Mercia, to be their new earl. Harold was sent by King Edward to negotiate an end to the revolt rather than to crush it by force. Once it was clear that the thegns wouldn’t countenance Tostig’s return, Harold must have calculated that, with Edward old and ailing, it would be suicidally imprudent to alienate the leading nobles, especially if he was going to have to face an invasion threat from Norway.

  Tostig, who for some time had been suspicious about where his brother’s loyalties lay, was furious to learn that Harold had agreed to his removal and replacement by Morcar. He went into exile, consumed with rage, bent on revenging himself on Harold who had committed what he called the ‘unnatural act’ of betraying a brother. In Flanders, a guest of his father-in-law, the count, Tostig must have remembered his father’s brief spell in limbo, the careful creation of a fleet of retribution and the triumphal return to power, and must have supposed that he would follow in old Godwine’s steps.

  It was not to work out quite as Tostig planned. But nothing in the year ahead, 1066, was to work out quite as planned. The end of 1065, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was marked by a ferocious tempest, which destroyed churches, houses and halls and uprooted great ancient trees, sending them flying through the air. At such a time men were prone to visions and forebodings, especially if, like Edward the Confessor, they were plainly coming to the end of their days.

  Around the deathbed of the last of the sons of Aethelred the Ill-Advised, at his newly completed palace at West Minster (if the Bayeux Tapestry is to be believed) were gathered those who mattered: Queen Edith, Harold’s sister, restored, somewhat, to favour, wiping away a tear with her veil; Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury; and, not least, Harold himself. The king stretches out his hand and touches Harold’s fingers, signifying some gesture of delegation. But for what – as regent, subregulus or as king? If he were really designating Harold successor, Edward would have set aside the claim of his own great-nephew Edgar the Atheling. Whatever he did would be trouble. According to the later author of the Vita Aewardi, before he died Edward managed to rouse himself to make an utterance. But instead of speaking his mind on the succession, the Confessor unburdened himself of a dream or, rather, a nightmare. Two monks whom he had known in an earlier life had come to his deathbed, warning that the sins of the English had been so grievous that God had given the realm to evil spirits for a year and a day. The king asked the monks if penance and sincere contrition would commute the sentence and was told that this would not happen until a growing tree, felled halfway down the length of its trunk, came together of its own accord and grew green with leaf. This was interesting but unhelpful in resolving the succession problem. So when the witan behaved predictably and offered Harold the throne, he accepted, and the funeral of one king on the Feast of Epiphany 1066 was followed, later the same day, by the coronation of another, Harold II. The new king, hoping for the best, issued coinage bearing the word PAX (‘peace’) on its face. But in April 1066, the hairy star, Halley’s comet, was seen in the sky (not, as the Tapestry melodramatically has it, on the night of Harold’s coronation!) and no one supposed this could be anything but an ill omen.

  England had a new king before most of its people were aware that the old king had died. Although the historian John of Worcester, writing in the next century, praised Harold for repealing unjust laws and legislating just ones, virtually the entire helter-skelter nine months of his reign were overwhelmed by a sense of crisis. Harold’s first act was to make sure that the northern earls, to whom he had sacrificed his brother, would now live up to their end of the bargain and behave loyally. To bind them closer he took the sister of the Earl of Mercia as a new wife. And for a while the strategy seemed to have paid off. With the north secure, Harold could concentrate his defences in the south, and it was there that Tostig made an appearance in the spring, with ships acquired in Flanders. But the coast was so well defended that he got no further than the Isle of Wight. Repelled in southern England, Tostig sailed up the east coast to his old duchy of Northumbria. However, instead of being greeted by ‘welcome home’ signs, he was smartly seen off by the troops of Harold’s new loyalists, Earl Morcar and Earl Edwin. Faced with desertions, Tostig carried on going north to seek refuge with the Scots king Malcolm III. With his brother out of the way, Harold concentrated on dealing with his main headache: the Duke of Normandy.

  A Norman historian, William of Jumièges, describes how William heard the news of Harold’s coronation at Westminster while hunting in his ducal forest at Quévilly near Rouen:

  going forth to the chase with many pages and esquires . . . when the Duke . . . learned all the truth, how that Edward was dead and Harold made king he became as a man enraged and left the craft of the woods. Oft he tied his mantle and oft he untied it again; and spoke to no man, neither dared any man speak to him. Then he crossed the Seine in his boat and came to his hall and entered therein: and sat down at the end of a bench, shifting his place from time to time, covering his head with a mantle and resting his head against a pillar.

  Whatever the truth of this wonderfully vivid account, it’s certain that William took the affront personally. The Earl of Wessex was his sworn vassal, had put his hands in his. And in all likelihood, William, who had been building a formidable bloc of territories, had jumped the gun by letting it be known that before too long England would be added
to them. Now his claim looked like an empty boast.

  His first action was to send an indignant protest to Harold at the outrageous violation of his oath. A later English source has Harold replying that he had been chosen king by the witan (as must certainly have been the case) and that he could never have promised anything that he was patently unauthorized to alienate. The Bayeux Tapestry shows that work was immediately under way to build an invasion fleet, but the legal and political preparation was as important to William as the military planning since, once the rage abated, he must have known that an attempted invasion of England would be a huge gamble. Consulting his feudal magnates did not produce the unanimous enthusiasm he was looking for. To many of them, the risks far outweighed the incentives. When William then stood on his ducal authority and attempted to levy a feudal host, he was told that the obligations of his vassals went as far as the water’s edge.

  What changed their mind? In a word, the Church. William’s second strategy had been to get to Westminster by way of Rome and to turn the cause of England into an internationally authorized crusade. Deeply influenced by his friend Lanfranc of Bee, Abbot of Caen (and later Archbishop of Canterbury), William had already positioned Normandy as the friend and ally of the papacy in its struggle against the domination of lay rulers. The hottest issue of the eleventh century was whether secular rulers should be able to appoint and invest bishops or whether this right belonged to the successors of St Peter in Rome. Bishops were not, after all, just senior clergy. They had immense power, wealth and influence in their sees, and the struggle over their appointment was as much a matter of politics as of theology. By siding with Rome, William felt sure he could depend on a friendly reception when he sent Lanfranc to seek papal blessing for a campaign against Harold. Lanfranc was known to consider the English as little better than barbarians or quasi-pagans, and he would have had no hesitation in (mis)representing the Godwine supremacy in England as a classic example of the thuggish bullying of the Church by over-powerful magnates. Lanfranc could produce a roll call of infamy. The Godwines had despoiled the Church; they had kicked out the lawful Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, appointed by King Edward, and replaced him by the Bishop ofWinchester, Stigand, who had been excommunicated by five popes and who was in such bad odour that even Harold thought it prudent to be crowned instead by the Archbishop ofYork.

  The record of Godwineson diplomacy in Rome had, in any case, not been encouraging. In 1061 Harold had sent Tostig to try to persuade the ardently pro-Norman Pope Nicholas II that the English Church was not the sink of corruption it was commonly thought to be in Rome. The mission would have been an outright disaster had not Tostig’s train been set upon by a Tuscan bandit-nobleman on his way back, giving him the unforeseen opportunity to upbraid the pope on law and order. The memory of this, however, might not have predisposed his successor Alexander II to look kindly on the Anglo-Saxons. In any event, the pope gave William his formal blessing, invested the duke with the papal banner and ring and even allowed him to wear one of the holy relics on which it was said Harold had committed perjury.

  It is quite impossible to understand the events of 1066 without comprehending the immense significance of the religious and Roman dimension. Between them, William and Lanfranc had managed to convert a personal and dynastic feud into a holy war, and once this was known, many of the nobles who had fought shy of the original proposal flocked to William’s sanctified banner. There were not just Normans, but also Bretons and Flemings. The matter of England had now become the cause of Christian Europe, and nothing good could come of this for its new king.

  This was all the more ironic since it appears that during the first months of his reign Harold was acutely solicitous towards the Church and took steps to restore unlawfully taken land and property. But he was too late. Blissfully ignorant of what had happened in Rome, he busied himself with the practical needs of defence. And here he proved one of the most phenomenal military organizers in British history. As the crack troops of his army he could call on an elite of 3000 or so huscarls, professional soldiers trained to wield a two-handed axe that, if swung with enough momentum, could slice through a horse and rider at a single blow. The huscarls fought on foot, although many of them might come to the battle on horse, and they were protected by hide-covered wooden shields, both circular and kite-shaped, by conical helmets with nasal protectors and trousered chain-mail hauberks, which were a prized possession. The mass of the English army, though, was made up by the fyrd, the part-time troops supplied on demand by Harold’s 4000 thegns and, in any event, obliged to serve for forty days every year. This would give Harold at least 10,000 to 13,000 soldiers, in addition to the huscarls. The core of the army could be stationed on the south coast, close to the fleet, which Harold had rapidly requisitioned from the Kent and Sussex ports. This was, after all, Godwine country, where every abbey, village and harbour was known intimately. So if William was going to come, he would have to launch himself at the king’s strongest defences.

  Whether he understood this or not, the duke was not taking any chances. At the mouth of the river Dives in northern France he had put together an immense expeditionary force, the biggest since the Emperor Claudius’s army of invasion. There may have been as many as 6000 horses, three for each knight: the destrier, the great war-horse charger, and two smaller animals, one to carry the knight’s squire and a third to carry his weapons. The fleet numbered 400 ships, packed tight with men and mounts, and smaller supply boats with the army’s initial provisions, although they intended to live off the land in England just as soon as they could. By 10 August this vast armada was ready. Two huge fighting forces, bent on each other’s annihilation, faced each other across the Channel.

  And then – nothing. William waited for the southerly wind that never came. Harold waited for William, who never came. Neither of them could really afford the delay. William’s horses (which were, literally, in clover) had just about exhausted the local supply of hay, and his men had eaten their way through the harvest. But Harold’s position was even more serious, for by the first week in September he had kept the fyrd and the little navy in battle position for longer than their stipulated forty-day tour of duty. Doubtless he had been impressing on them the imminence of the danger from Normandy. But nothing irks a mass of soldiers more than indeterminate waiting, and the longer they waited, the more grumbling there must have been from men who were eager to be back home, getting in their own harvests and rejoining their wives and children. Eventually this pressure became irresistible, and on 8 September Harold demobilized the fyrd and his flotilla of boats. A week or so later the king left Bosham and returned to London, where, according to one chronicle, he began to suffer from a mysterious and obstinate pain in the leg; not an auspicious omen for a king who fought on foot. Perhaps his cramps were trying to send a message, for on 12 September, just before Harold left the south coast, William’s armada had finally put out to sea. Only a sudden gale, pushing the fleet east, to the mouth of the Somme, prevented it from making the Channel crossing.

  A week later, on 19 September, Harold got bad news from a different and completely unexpected quarter. His estranged brother Tostig, together with the king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, the ‘thunderbolt from the north’, and as many as 10,000 men had landed in Northumbria and had already burned Scarborough, Cleveland and Holderness to the ground.

  Harold must have supposed that he had seen off Tostig in the spring, but during the summer, while Harold was putting his defences in place, rumours had circulated that Tostig was wandering around Europe looking for allies, even going to Normandy to talk to Duke William. Not many of the stories were credible, but one of them was only too true: that Tostig had made contact with the alarming Hardrada in Norway. The Norwegian interest in, and claim on, the throne of England went back at least to the reign of Cnut. Hardrada’s predecessor, King Magnus, had been a great force to contend with in the North Sea world, which then extended from Northumbria, through eastern Scotland
to the Norse earldom of Orkney. One of Harold’s more effective military campaigns on behalf of King Edward in the 1050s had been to prevent Magnus from invading East Anglia. Hardrada claimed that Magnus and Cnut’s son, Harthacnut, had signed an agreement delivering England to whichever of them survived the other, a promise reneged on by the Saxon kings. And no matter how flimsy the Norwegian claim might be, it could hardly be more lightweight than William’s or Harold’s, who had no kin relationship to his predecessors at all. Hardrada also arrived with a fearsome reputation as a warrior of superhuman strength: exceptionally tall – 6 feet 4 inches; a veteran of countless wars, from Scandinavia to Russia and Byzantium; lauded by the bards (including himself) as a hero for the ages; and capable of acts of legendary cruelty. Shortening a siege by tying burning wood chips to the tails of little birds, which flew to their nests in the eaves of houses, thereby setting the town alight, was pretty much Hardrada style. So it was a great coup for Tostig to have enlisted his support, no doubt by persuading the Norwegian king that Harold’s distraction with Normandy offered the perfect opportunity for a surprise attack. In return, he would have his earldom back and perhaps, in the new reign, be his chief man, playing Godwine to Hardrada’s Cnut. They are likely to have met in Orkney, where the two young earls joined the army. When Tostig saw the vast fleet anchored in the Flow, his bitter little heart must have skipped a beat at the thought of the damage that was about to be inflicted on his brother. Their war-machine would be invincible and unstoppable, a legend to be sung by the bards.

  The first of the three great battles of 1066 would have done nothing to alter that view. It took place on 20 September at Fulford, just outside York, between a swamp and the river Ouse. To get to York – the prosperous Viking city of Jorvik – where Hardrada planned to winter, his boats had sailed far upriver along the Humber and then the Ouse, anchoring at the village of Riccall. Barring the way to York at Fulford were the forces raised by Edwin and Morcar. They were still teenagers, and their troops were untested, but they managed to do surprisingly well against the wedge of the Norsemen, even advancing from their position until Hardrada personally led a ferocious counter-attack that broke the English line. Their dead lay so thick in the marshes that, as the Norse bard Snorri Sturlasson gloated: ‘the war-keen Norsemen/could cross on the corpses.’