As far as desertions are concerned, there are desertions in all battles, especially in a battle lasting so many hours, and on the losing side and after the leader is killed. If any rumour had been current that Harold had been excommunicated, this would certainly account for desertions, since no man was bound to fight for an excommunicated leader; but there is no evidence for that whatever. In the first place, it seems at least unlikely that there was any question of his having been formally excommunicated. Secondly, if he had been, William would certainly have made what capital he could out of the fact, and one would expect it to be referred to in Chronicle entries written after the battle, since it would support the idea, clearly widely prevalent, that the judgement of God had been given on William’s side. It would have been a particularly appropriate justification of the usual formula, used by the Chronicle to record any English defeat from the wars of Alfred against the Danes onwards, that the Normans won ‘as God granted it to them for the sins of the people’ – or in this case the sins of the king. None the less it remains likely that there were desertions that cannot be ascribed to the king’s death: the statement in the D Chronicle that the king fought bravely ‘with the men who would remain with him’, implies inescapably that there were some who would not, as does Florence of Worcester’s statement that ‘inasmuch as the English were drawn up in a narrow place, many retired from the ranks, and very few remained true to him’. William of Malmesbury’s story that Harold refused to share out the Norwegian booty captured at Stamford Bridge among his men and placed it in the custody of Archbishop Ealdred until after the encounter with the Normans could offer another motive. If this were true (and William of Malmesbury is the only credible authority for the story, and a late one at that), it could indeed have caused some men to fall away from him and refuse to serve an ungrateful lord, even if the king had strategically a good reason for his refusal to distribute the loot immediately. No army marches fast or fights well when laden with booty, and he knew he would have to march fast and fight hard. The causes of the desertions can only be guessed at; the main point is that the entries in the English chronicles, especially the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, would have been written by men who were as dependent as anyone else on reportage and hearsay after the event amid all the confusion of defeat. We cannot know how reliable their sources were.
A much more serious accusation is that Harold’s choice of ground was poor. It was, in fact, peculiarly suitable for the kind of battle we must suppose him to have had in mind. It was so perfect that one can only suppose that, having been brought up in Sussex and knowing it as well as he did, he had picked it deliberately.
A longish watershed, roughly marked today by the course of Battle High Street, runs south, dipping slightly to a cross-ridge (rather like the head of a hammer). On either side of the watershed the ground fell away steeply; behind it to the north on Caldbec Hill was the site of the hoar apple tree, a distinctive local feature marking the boundaries of three different hundreds; behind that and all around was the primeval forest of Andredesweald. Such trees as this hoar apple frequently marked significant boundaries and were used as markers; they were easy places to appoint as a rendezvous for troops. The battle of Ashdown against the Danes in 871was fought around an equally venerable thorn tree that was the meeting-place of the local hundred. The cross-ridge south of Harold’s apple tree lay squarely across the London road. At its centre, the gradient was 1 in 15; at its west end, 1 in 33; at the east end, 1 in 22. At its foot, in front, was a brook, later dammed to form fishponds, presumably for the monks of Battle Abbey built by William after the battle, then presumably boggy, especially when pounded by cavalry for several hours. Indeed, as a result of the drainage of streams from the higher ground, both Caldbec Hill (on Harold’s side of the field) and Telham Hill (on William’s), much of the ground between the two armies seems to have been marshy and uncultivated.
It was along this cross-ridge, about eight hundred yards in length as far as one can tell today (the site has been altered by the building of the abbey), that Harold deployed his army. No surviving English chronicler tells us how he disposed of his men, but we know roughly where he set up his standards since the place was marked by the high altar of Battle Abbey, and it would have been on the slightly higher ground behind his front line, where he could see over his men’s heads to the enemy lines. It was a superb defensive position. His main front, where the gradient was shallowest, would be occupied by the housecarls, his crack troops, with shire levies behind them, and the levies would presumably have defended the ends of the line where the declivity was steepest, possibly with a stiffening of housecarls and the Danish troops sent (according to William of Poitiers, probably accurate in this case) by his cousin, King Sweyn Estrithson. The normal English shield-wall formation was, in the words of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, ‘an essential one for infantry against cavalry relying on shock’xcvii. This was where he may have been influenced by his experience of the Norman cavalry when he had campaigned in Brittany. The shire levies are described in many accounts of the battle as unarmed peasants, equipped only with sticks and stones; there may have been many such present, burning to revenge the harrying the Normans had inflicted on them during the past fortnight, but the shire levies proper were, as we have seen, seasoned soldiers, mostly thegns or king’s thegns, whose armour and equipment (as is testified by the Bayeux Tapestry) were virtually indistinguishable from that of the Norman infantry. It was no amateur army.
Harold seems to have sacrificed his archers, whom he had certainly had at Stamford Bridge, in his rapid march south. If he had any, it is likely that the king would position them on his flanks where they would have the best chance of aiming at the charging enemy without wounding their own comrades, but this is guesswork only. In the absence of any documentary evidence, it must be assumed that they can have contributed little to their side of the battle. Under normal conditions, the Normans would have expected to reprovision themselves with the arrows shot by the enemy, but judging by William of Poitiers’ emphasis on the hail of arrows in the later stages of the battle, they must have been adequately supplied by their own reserves.
Many writers have been convinced that Harold must have contemplated an attack at some stage, that he could never have intended a purely defensive action. It seems to me perfectly possible that he did just that. William was the aggressor, he was the defender. He must have been well aware that more men would join him as time went on; he certainly expected that the northern earls, his brothers-in-law, would be arriving with whatever forces they had remaining from Gate Fulford and Stamford Bridge (indeed, we know that they had got as far as London by the time the battle was fought); numerically, his position could only improve. William, on the other hand, as far as he knew, could not expect any reinforcements and if the English fleet could get around to Hastings to cut off his retreat, could be attacked from the rear as well. The duke was trapped in a small promontory of land, which he had already devastated with his customary thoroughness, and would soon have been desperate for provisions. The only exits open to him were either to retreat to his ships and move further up or down the coast (a very risky manoeuvre, under his enemy’s eye, and unlikely to succeed), or to advance by the London road, which was blocked by Harold. General Fuller believes that he would have been able to re-embark his men under cover of archery fire. We do not know how many archers William had, he seems to have had a lot, but, with all due respect to so senior and experienced an officer, it seems unlikely that archers, unsupported and, according to the Tapestry, mostly without body armour, could have withstood alone an attack by the full English army.
The corollary, of course, was that, like any animal at bay, he would attack at once. None the less, it may have seemed to Harold a perfectly feasible strategy to hold him in check and block his exit while his own position strengthened. The various chroniclers indicate that if he could have held his troops together and maintained his impregnable position, this would have been a reasonable tactic. If
the situation had become dangerous, he could have withdrawn into the forest behind him to regroup and attack again on a more propitious occasion (allowing, it is true, that retreat along the narrow ridge behind him could have been a risky and slow manoeuvre). As has been pointed out, he did not need an outright victory at this point, he had everything to gain by luring William forward. In the meantime, by keeping him penned in where he was, he was at least preventing any further ravaging of the country. And if he could hold his ground until sunset, he would in effect have won. If William had had to withdraw to his bridgehead at Hastings at the end of the day without victory, with heavy losses, without provisions and with Harold still in possession of Caldbec Hill and the London road, he would have been in a very difficult situation. The only thing that prevented this from happening was Harold’s death.
The insistence of so many historians on William’s consummate generalship in this campaign has always seemed unaccountable. In the first place, he could have had no reason to expect so easy a landing in England, yet there is no evidence of any plan or preparation made by him for the contingency of his landing being strongly opposed other than his reported and prudent determination not to land in the dark. Even if he had known of Hardrada’s and Tostig’s invasion, he could have had no certainty when he sailed that the king would go north to oppose them, leaving the south shore undefended. There was no more than a 50:50 chance that he would do so. Again, even if he had known that Harold had gone, he does not appear to have had any plan of campaign for after his landing. He does not seem to have had any intention of securing strong points like Dover, Canterbury or even London while Harold was in the north. He established his bridgeheads at Pevensey and Hastings and waited. He might have waited in vain, and, as has already been pointed out, he could not have waited indefinitely. If Harold had been content to wait until hunger and low morale among the Norman troops had forced him to move inland, he would almost certainly have been defeated. He seems, in short, to have been in the position of a general who had managed to establish a bridgehead but had no plan of operation beyond it. Nothing but the incredible luck that attended him throughout the campaign saved him.
The one point on which there seems to be unanimity among the Norman chroniclers is the admission that, if the English had maintained their position on the ridge and had resisted the temptation to pursue the fleeing (or supposedly fleeing) enemy, it would have been virtually impossible to dislodge them. William of Poitiers speaks of ‘one side attacking in different ways and the other standing firmly as if fixed to the ground’. Likewise the Carmen also speaks of the serried ranks of English standing as if rooted to the ground, and adds ‘nor would the attackers have been able to penetrate the dense forest of the English had not invention reinforced their strength’. Baudri de Bourgeuil describes the English as massed in a single dense formation, adding that they would have been impregnable if they had held together. Henry of Huntingdon writes that Harold had ‘placed all his people very closely in a single line, constructing a sort of castle with them, so that they were impregnable to the Normans’. Wace condemns the English for having been lured by the feigned retreats into abandoning a position in which they could hardly have been defeated. Add to this the oral tradition that Harold had exhorted his troops before the battle not to be lured from their defensive position, and it will be seen that his tactics were not as foolish or short-sighted as has been suggested. They should have worked.
M. K. Lawson suggests that Harold’s position was not confined to the ridge but may well have extended on his right flank to take in the hillock to the south-west of it; E. A. Freeman implies the same thing in his account of the battle. This hillock may be the mound depicted in plate 66 of the Bayeux Tapestry; the watercourse that the Tapestry shows as running close by it may have been the little stream that gave the battle its alternative name of ‘Senlac’ (sand lacu or sandy stream). He points out that there are serrations protruding from it that might indicate that it had been staked; if it had been, it would certainly have helped to bring down the horses that are portrayed as having fallen beside it. He supports the idea by reference to the Carmen, which describes the English position as comprising both a mons, which could describe the ridge, and a vallis, which could describe the declivity between the ridge and the hillock. It is an interesting theory, but not one that is easy to accept. In the first place, when would the English have had a chance to stake the water, if they only arrived exhausted late the previous evening (if indeed the serrations shown in the Tapestry are stakes. As Lawson says, they might just as well be reeds or foliage of some kind)? In the second, Harold would surely have been mad to put light-armed infantry (none of the English shown on the mound is wearing body armour) where they would have been unsupported by the housecarls and particularly vulnerable to the Norman cavalry. It is more likely that this plate shows the English who broke ranks to pursue the fleeing Bretons before taking refuge on the hillock and being cut down.
William would have had much less of a choice of ground and the site on which he did fight was particularly disadvantageous for the cavalry that were his greatest advantage over his enemy, since they would be obliged to charge uphill across what seems to have been very marshy and broken ground. His deployment is described by William of Poitiers, who is the best authority we have on the battle and who had the advantage of having served as one of William’s knights before he took holy orders:
He placed foot-soldiers in front, armed with arrows and cross-bows,xcviii likewise foot-soldiers in the second rank, but more powerful and wearing hauberks; finally the squadrons of mounted knights, in the middle of which he himself rode with the strongest force, so that he could direct operations on all sides with hand and voice.xcix
The Carmen supplements this information by saying that William positioned the Breton and other mercenaries on his left, the French and other mixed troops on his right, with the Normans led by himself in the centre, and this is corroborated to some extent by William of Poitiers who says a little later that the ‘Breton knights and other auxiliaries on the left wing turned tail’. The Carmen opens the actual battle with what is probably the best known if most totally apocryphal story connected with it:
Meanwhile, with the result hanging in the balance and the bitter calamity of death by wounds still there, a juggler, whom a brave heart ennobled, putting himself in front of the duke’s innumerable army, with his words encourages the French and terrifies the English, while he played by throwing his sword high in the air. When one Englishman saw a single knight, just one out of thousands, juggling with his sword and riding away, fired by the ardour of a true soldier and abandoning life, he dashed out to meet his death. The juggler, who was named Taillefer, when he was attacked spurred on his horse and pierced the Englishman’s shield with his sharp lance. He then with his sword removed the head from the prostrate body, and turning to face his comrades, displayed this object of joy and showed that the opening move of the battle was his.
Strangely, the Carmen does not give the information that Taillefer rode towards the English singing the song of Roland; this detail is first supplied by Wace, never one to lose anything that would contribute to a good story. But it is William of Poitiers who gives by far the clearest and most convincing account of the actual fighting, as one would expect from a former soldier. It started ceremonially at 9 a.m. with the blare of trumpets from both sides, following which, by his account, the Norman archers and foot-soldiers closed to attack the English, killing and maiming many with their missiles and suffering many casualties in return. The Tapestry glosses this by showing a hail of arrows from William’s archers, most of which are being caught on the shields of the English. Shooting uphill, most of their shafts would either have been caught on the shields or passed over the heads of the defenders. The assaults of the archers and the infantry were unable to make any impression on the tightly packed ranks of English, so the cavalry, who had presumably been waiting for openings in the English lines to make their charge, were ca
lled into action earlier than would have been usual. The English, says William, were greatly helped by the advantage of the higher ground, which they held in serried ranks without sallying forward, and also by their great numbers and densely packed mass, and moreover by their weapons of war, which easily penetrated shields and other armour. This is presumably an allusion to the much-feared two-handed axes of the housecarls, which were reputedly capable of cutting down horse and rider together at a single blow. Horses are not stupid, and it is extremely difficult to ride them straight at a line bristling with offensive weapons, as Napoleon’s cavalry found at Waterloo, when they attempted to charge the unbroken British squares. If, in addition to the axes of the housecarls, the horses had been confronted with English spears positioned as Snorre Sturlason described, William’s cavalry would have had quite as difficult a job at Hastings.
It was at this stage, with even the Norman cavalry repelled without any significant advantage gained, that the first noteworthy event of the battle took place. The Bretons in the left wing of the Norman army broke ranks (William of Poitiers says frankly that they turned tail), and retreated, carrying part at least of the central section of the army with them. Indeed, he says, almost the whole of the duke’s battle line gave way, a disgrace he excuses by explaining that the Normans believed the duke had been killed. This may have been one of the occasions on which he was unhorsed, rendering him temporarily invisible. The situation was saved only by his presence of mind. Raising his helmet so that his face could be seen, he halted the retreating men and forced them back into the fight again with the flat of his sword, leading the counter-attack against the English right wing that had broken formation to pursue the fleeing enemy.
Battle of Hastings, The Page 17