A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  On 14 October Harold took up position on a hill ridge at Senlac some seven miles (11 km) from Hastings and prepared to engage the enemy – even though other English forces were on the road to rendezvous with the royal army. Accounts of the battle are piecemeal and confused. M. K. Lawson (2003) tends to accept one source formerly discounted, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’) by Guy, bishop of Amiens. It begins by comparing William to Julius Caesar and many of the sources make classical allusions. There is a much disputed account of how Taillefer, a juggler, threw his sword into the air in front of the French lines and killed an Englishman who rushed forward against him.

  Harold’s battlefield position was well chosen, as it seems Duke William was unable to turn either flank. Accounts speak of ditches, one of them large and well concealed, which suggests that the English position extended with field defences beyond the ridge. Later pro-English chroniclers report the inadequate size of the English force. As to numbers, Lawson comments, ‘How large a “large” army may have been there is no way of knowing.’14 William of Poitiers, on the other hand, speaks of the ‘immense size’ of Harold’s army with reinforcements from Denmark, while the ‘D’ text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports Harold as assembling a ‘great host’ (presumably swelled by local shire levies), which the Normans attacked ‘before his people were set in order’ (‘ær his folc gefylced wœre’). Had they been delayed by the preparation of the field defences? Was the shield wall still being marshalled? Was it because the local levies were still being mobilized into the main army? Or was it because they had been carousing the night before?

  William of Poitiers speaks of indiscipline, recording that the English forces three times left their sound defensive position, the third time to be surrounded and cut down by those it thought in flight. The English fought under Harold’s banner of ‘The Armed Man’ (‘homo armatus’), worked in purest gold apparently, which was sent to the pope after the battle as spoils of victory. This was appropriate since Pope Alexander II seems to have sent William the banner that his people fought under, ‘the standard of St Peter the Apostle’ as Orderic Vitalis called it. The English shield wall held against repeated Norman cavalry charges and arrow fire. Towards the end of the day the Norman foot fell back in what proved a tactical feint. The shield wall broke; the enemy returned to the attack. The English faltered and then tried to flee. Many were cut down as they ran. Accounts of the battle are scant and confused. According to the Carmen the Normans were already stripping the bodies of the dead when Harold was seen on the ridge of the hill still fighting. When four Normans attacked and killed him one speared him through his shield; one hacked off his head; one split his entrails; a fourth hewed off his thigh. William ordered that Harold’s corpse be buried on the seashore.

  At the end of the day Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine and many of the Anglo-Saxon nobility lay dead on the place of slaughter. The pro-English twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury is among those who records the tradition of Harold’s death by arrow shot. Apparently the English army only abandoned the fight as reports of the king’s death spread through the ranks. An arrow shot, whether in the eye or not, seems probable. Harold’s prowess was such, men said, that he could overthrow a horse and its rider with a single blow, so that no one could approach near enough to kill him. Discounting the legends that he survived the battle (they are explored in Appendix B), death by arrow shot (whether in the eye or not) seems probable.

  Resistance

  Like Waterloo, Hastings, it seems, was a near run thing. The length of the battle from morning till dusk indicates evenly matched opponents, whether or not there was an imbalance in numbers. Had he fought out the day to a stalemate, with nightfall Harold would still have been king of England and William looking to bivouac in hostile country with a bleak prospect for the morning. As it was, the English defeat was total, and the systematic rape of the southern counties stubbed out immediate resistance. But resistance there was.

  After a week spent on a savage punitive expedition to the south and west of London, William paused at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire to receive the leading citizens of London, Edgar the ætheling, Archbishop Ealdred of York and the earls Edwin and Morcar, and accept their hostages and allegiance.

  Three months after his coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, William left England for Normandy and was attending to business in the duchy until the following December. There were local uprisings in many parts of England but they were not coordinated. Unrest in the southwest, however, was more serious. William may even have had reason to believe that its aim was to put Godwine, Harold’s son by Edith Swanneck, on the throne.15 Aged perhaps eighteen at the time of Hastings, he held property in Somerset. The other great old-regime landowner in the region, with large estates in Devon and Wiltshire as well as Somerset, was the young man’s grandmother, Gytha, wife of the old earl and matriarch of the Godwine dynasty, presumably now in her sixties. Exeter, a dower city of her daughter Queen Edith, was the chief rebel centre and it was here that William directed his energies in early 1068. After heavy initial losses the new king took the place after an eighteen-day siege. Gytha and her entourage made good their escape and in due course she arrived at Saint-Omer with sufficient bullion and other treasures to see her through a comfortable retirement away from the hazards of court politics and attempted comebacks.

  Meantime, towards mid-summer 1068 Harold’s brothers and his son Godwine, who had crossed over to Ireland where the family friend King Diarmait of Leinster had helped fit them out, appeared in the mouth of the River Avon with ’a raiding ship army’ and plundered the countryside. The citizens of Bristol fought them off, so they took their loot back to their ships and went up into Somerset before returning to Ireland. The next year they returned with more than 60 ships, landing on the coast of north Devon. Again they were driven back with the loss of many of their best men, this time by the Breton count, the Conqueror’s earl in the district.16

  In the summer of 1069 a Danish fleet commanded by King Swein II found safe anchorage in the Humber. Even from the records that survive it is clear that England was seething with discontent after Hastings; the explosion came in the north. It was William’s Norman appointee as earl of Northumbria who set the torch to the brushwood. The men of the Durham region surprised him inside the stronghold there and killed him and the 900 men with him. The arrival of the Danish fleet sparked a rising in York. By 20 September the city was lost, Yorkshire was in rebel hands and the entire Norman project in England in jeopardy. Within days the seventeen-year-old Edgar the aethling had arrived in the city, marching south from his exile in Scotland. Since Hastings Edgar had managed to keep out of William’s way while receiving various embassies of support, notably from Brand, the new abbot of Peterborough, ‘because the people there thought he ought to become king.’ He had made his way to the court of Malcolm of Scotland, along with his Hungarian mother Agatha and his sister Margaret, who, much against her will, was obliged to marry the Scottish king.

  York received the ætheling with jubilation. But William stormed north, retaking York as the ætheling escaped back to Scotland.William celebrated Christmas in its smouldering ruins; he continued northwards to the River Tees through the lands of St Cuthbert and the Lordship of Bamburgh. News came of further risings in Cheshire and Wales. William drove his army southwest across the Pennines in the depths of a bitter winter. Desertification, death and rapine followed him. The harrying of the North that ensued brought the practice of the punitive expedition to the nadir of horror. Fifteen years later the Domesday commissioners were noting ‘laid waste’ against village after village of the region, entry after entry.

  With the country in turmoil, ‘the English people from the Fens’ had flocked to Swein of Denmark, thinking his army was planning to occupy the region. At about this time the monks of Peterborough heard that one of their tenants, Hereward of Bourne, was marching on the abbey because he and his men had heard
that, with the death of Abbot Brand, the Conqueror had handed the place to the Norman soldier/churchman Turold of Fécamp. In what followed the once ‘golden borough’ crashed to ‘wretched borough’, plundered of its treasures by foes and friends alike, claiming to save them from the alien invaders. Pirates, we are told, sailed up to the minster wharf and tried to break in. When the monks resisted the attackers set fires. They then plundered the abbey of its gold, from the crown on the head of the crucified Christ hanging on the rood screen to many other crosses and gold and silver ornaments of all kinds, as well as precious manuscripts. Even the talismanic arm of St Oswald was carried down to the ships and, with the rest of the booty, taken off to Ely – supposedly for safe-keeping away from the depredations of the Normans.

  There Hereward, known to history and legend as Hereward the Wake, joined by Earl Morcar of Mercia and Bishop Ælfwine of Durham, held out with hundreds of desperate rebels, their hope fixed on the Danish fleet in the face of news of King William’s progress. Ely Abbey, on its island among the fenland marshes, was well suited for a stronghold, but as at Alfred’s Athelney resistance could not be indefinite.

  By the spring William had flayed his rebel kingdom back to obedience. In a campaign that historian David Douglas rated ‘one of the outstanding military achievements of the age’, he was once more master. At this point the Danes came to terms with the Norman king and sailed away to Denmark, with much English booty in their holds. Now, too, the leaders of Ely’s lost cause made what peace they could while Hereward made good his escape into the half-light between legend and history. The Conqueror is said to have pardoned him and he supposedly crossed over to France. There, according to Geoffrey Gaimar, the French historian of the English, writing his Estoire des Angleis for the wife of a Norman lord in Lincolnshire, Hereward was run to ground and murdered by a party of vengeful Normans. It is fitting that the end of his story, whether true or fiction, should be penned so near to Hereward’s home territory. Anglo-Saxon England’s last real, if faint, hope was Edgar the ætheling, Ironside’s grandson, who had been named king in October 1066 by the English bishops and the remnant of the nobility: he survived to join the armies of the First Crusade, where, as a man in his early forties, he would strike a contemporary as ‘handsome in appearance; liberal and noble in eloquence.’

  Aftermath and rebirth

  According to the Vita Edwardi Regis, as he lay dying Edward, indicating the queen, had said to Harold: ‘I commend this woman with all the kingdom to your protection.’ The Chronicle explicitly states that ‘Harold succeeded to the realm of England, just as the king had granted it to him and as he had been chosen to the position.’17 If true it was the first time such a bequest had been made to one not of the royal line. Reports of the deathbed scene come from witnesses who were, by definition, Harold’s supporters. However, one Norman source tacitly accepts that the deathbed nomination was made, by charging Harold with perjury for accepting it. As to his sister, the dowager queen Edith, a Chronicle entry for the year 1076 tells us that the Lady Edith, dowager to King Edward, passed away at Winchester seven days before Christmas and the king had her body brought to Westminster with great ceremony and buried beside her lord. She was the first queen to be buried there, just as her brother was the first king of England to be crowned there.

  The Normans called Harold an oath-breaker and perjurer. But from an English point of view William, the illegitimate descendant of pirates, with no share in the blood royal, who had not been chosen by the councillors or people of the realm and whose claim to be the nominated successor had been superseded by the dead king’s nomination of Harold, could be considered as openly planning a war of usurpation and conquest against the lawfully anointed king of one of Europe’s ancient Christian kingdoms. The pope’s blessing was essential, and for that blessing to be given ‘Harold the Perjurer’ was an important bogey-man. After 1066 some religious establishments deleted the Godwine name from their lists of benefactors.18

  As R.H.C. Davis has stated:

  The most interesting fact about the Norman Conquest is what made it so complete . . . Apparently . . . England received a new royal dynasty, a new aristocracy . . . and virtually a new church, as the result of one day’s fighting . . .19

  In fact the picture was not quite that simple. But the total defeat of the English at Hastings made a reversal of the decision virtually inconceivable.

  Hastings shattered the English army, and William subdued the kingdom by terror. Quite apart from the horrors to come in the north, from the day after Hastings until the week before their master’s coronation William’s soldiery, drawn from Brittany, Picardy, French Flanders and other regions of northern France by the lure of booty in England, carved a swath of devastation across southeast England. But the leading members of this ‘joint stock enterprise’, as his army has often been called, expected more than casual loot: they expected to be rewarded with land.

  The pope, the patron of William’s war, enjoined penances on the army. After the coronation, William issued a writ in English to the bishop and citizens of London (who had been spared the punitive rampage), greeting them as friends, proclaiming his wish that they should continue to enjoy the laws that had governed them in King Edward’s day, and promising to protect them from injury. There now followed a systematic suppression of native English culture that in the emotive rhetoric of our own day would be called cultural genocide.

  First, there was the suppression of the language and literature. Secondly, there was the dismantling of the vibrant spirituality of the Anglo-Saxon church tradition and the destruction of many of its buildings.

  The organized wealth of southern England was in the hands of the conquerors and they celebrated their triumph in stone . . . nowhere else in Latin Christendom was so much built in so short a time . . .20

  By dint of ‘unfortunate conflagrations’, combined with ordered demolitions, within fifty years of the conquest Old English cathedrals and minsters had been levelled to the ground, in most cases to be replaced by Norman-style buildings, built under Norman contractors, even using stone from Norman quarries. It was a highly profitable rebuilding programme in which the native participation rarely amounted to more than forced labour, which first demolished its own historic structures and then raised, ‘to the glory of God’, the ‘great churches’ of the conquerors. The architectural glories of England’s Norman/Romanesque architecture are, like the ruined castles that still line the heritage trails, perpetual monuments to an historic act of cultural cleansing.

  In addition there was spiritual vandalism. A particular feature of Anglo-Saxon religious life had been its exceptionally developed cult of the Virgin Mary. (Modern scholars tend to accept that the cult of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham probably began in the last years of Edward the Confessor.) Certain of the Marian feast days, including the Presentation [of Christ] in the Temple and the Conception of the Virgin, seem to have originated at Winchester in the 1030s. From there they found their way to Canterbury, where they were entered in the liturgical calendar of the archdiocese. One of the first acts of the new Norman archbishop Lanfranc, who finally succeeded Stigand in 1070, was to reform the calendar and abolish many of the old feasts of the Anglo-Saxon Church, among them these Marian celebrations. Elsewhere, such as at the great abbey of Abingdon, which in the time of Æthelwold had been adorned with an altar table of gold and silver and texts in silver decorated with precious stones, treasures were destroyed or dispersed after the Conquest.21

  William had made various land grants before his return to Normandy in February 1067. In his train went a number of aristocratic English hostages to be paraded through the streets of Rouen as part of the spoils of victory. According to the chronicler William of Poitiers, ‘these long-haired sons of the North, with their almost feminine beauty’ made something of a stir.

  For William, acceptance as the lawful heir of Edward the Confessor was of critical practical consequence. He had acquired an exceptionally well-run country. The basic unit
, the shire, was in the hands of an administrative team that was ‘literate, active and continuous’. Here the assessment and collection of levies were organized on the basis of a sort of land register. The sheriff, instructed by writ, was responsible for implementing such instructions. His court was the place where local disputes were settled and local big men could be enlisted in support of the king’s business. Only when England’s sheriffs and their staff were satisfied that the alien ruler now in place was duly vested with the authority of a king of the English would they willingly discharge their functions. Their collaboration was essential to ensure the continued services of skilled Anglo-Saxons as scribes in his court writing office (or chancery) and as local officials in the shires and boroughs, to ensure the smoothest possible completion of the conquest, at least until a sufficient number of Frenchmen had been trained to replace them. The shire court lies behind the success of the Norman settlement.

  A Norman granted land by the king need only present himself before the court with a sealed writ to that effect. If inspected and found authentic it was then read to the assembly. The leading men of the shire, thus made witness to the royal will in the matter, were duty bound to see it implemented. The alien intruder had to be duly informed of the lands that were now his and assisted, if need be, in taking possession of them. Not all the beneficiaries were best pleased. Orderic Vitalis tells us that while some were astounded by the extent of the lands awarded to them, others complained about ‘domains depopulated by war’. (‘Tant pis to you’, any Anglo-Saxon with a smattering of Norman French might no doubt have been heard to mutter.)

  Yet when it suited him William was scrupulous in paying respect to the old ways. At a famous trial held on Pinnenden Heath in Kent in the 1070s, Æthelric, bishop of Selsey, ‘a man of great age and very wise in the law of the land’ was brought on William’s order in a wagon to the place of the trial so that ‘he might expound the ancient practice of the laws.’