by Marc Morris
Harold was thus aware of William’s arrival, and William of Harold’s return to London. As such, we have little difficulty in believing the various chroniclers who tell us that in the days that followed messages were exchanged between the two men. Both the Carmen and William of Poitiers purport to give the content of these messages as spoken by the monks who delivered them; what they are actually doing is rehearsing the arguments of both sides for possession of the English throne. In the case of William of Poitiers, in particular, his account becomes a rhetorical exercise to justify the Norman invasion; quite probably he was drawing on the legal case that had earlier been prepared for the pope. We hear, once again, of a grateful Edward the Confessor making William his heir; of oaths sworn and hostages given; of Harold’s visit to Normandy and his promise to uphold the duke’s claim. In fairness to Poitiers, we also hear Harold’s counterargument, namely the story of the Confessor’s deathbed bequest and its historic legitimacy. Naturally we don’t have to believe that all of these arguments were revisited in the course of these exchanges, though no doubt some of them were. Certainly we can believe the Carmen that offers were made by both sides in the hope of avoiding conflict. William, we are told, offered to let Harold hold the earldom of Wessex if he resigned the kingship; Harold, rather less generously, promised to let William return to Normandy unmolested if he made reparations for the damage he had caused.16
That the Normans had already caused extensive damage is beyond doubt. ‘Here the horses leave the boats’, says the Bayeux Tapestry, above the fleet’s arrival, ‘and here the knights hurry to Hastings in order to seize food.’ While they waited in France, William’s army had been forbidden to live off the land; once in England, they could start to plunder the surrounding countryside. On the Tapestry this requisitioning operation looks fairly innocuous; more space is devoted to the preparation of the tasty sit-down meal than the manner in which it was obtained. Of course, as with the creation of castles at Pevensey and Hastings, the damage involved in the search for food could be considered as collateral, but our sources leave no room for doubt that the Normans were also engaged in deliberate and indiscriminate destruction. In the Carmen, Harold is informed that William ‘has invaded the land, wastes it and sets it on fire’. The Tapestry famously shows two Norman soldiers torching a house from which a woman and a child are seen trying to flee.17
Indiscriminate it may have been, but this was devastation with a purpose. William, for the first time in his career, was engaged in a battle-seeking strategy. Had Harold decided to remain in London, the duke would have been in a difficult fix. His only option would have been to leave the security of his camp and lead a march into hostile territory, with all the dangers that implied. An army forced to live off the land would be vulnerable to attack as it spread out to forage, or death from disease or hunger if it failed to do so. Far better, then, from William’s point of view, to have the English king come to him and decide their dispute in a decisive battle. In William’s devastation, therefore, we discern a deliberate attempt to provoke a fight. It no doubt helped in this regard that the Normans had landed in Harold’s own territory, and were therefore terrorizing the king’s own tenants.
Harold, it seems, rose to the bait. In the opinion of several sources, the English king set out from London too soon: ‘before all his host came up’, says the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a comment later amplified by John of Worcester to ‘half his host’. Another later writer, Orderic Vitalis, relates a dramatic conversation in London between the king and the rest of his family. His mother Gytha, already lamenting the loss of Tostig, tried to dissuade Harold from riding to war for a second time. His brother Gyrth also urged caution, saying ‘You have just returned worn out after the war against the Norwegians; are you now hastening to move against the Normans?’ According to Orderic, Gyrth volunteered to lead the army on Harold’s behalf, on the rather unlikely grounds that he had sworn no oath to William. These representations, however, came to nothing: Harold flew into a violent rage, rebuked his relatives and hurried off to do battle.18
It has been fairly observed that all of these sources are English (or, in Orderic’s case, has clear English sympathies), and it might therefore seem reasonable to assume that all were making excuses for Harold ahead of his impending defeat. Yet it is William of Poitiers who tells us that ‘the furious king was hastening his march all the more because he had heard that the lands near to the Norman camp were being laid waste’. Naturally Poitiers, given his own sympathies, does not endorse the view that a speedy departure in any way diminished Harold’s fighting strength; like the other Norman writers, he maintains that the king’s army was enormous. But it is precisely the fact that Poitiers so often disagrees with our English sources at other times that makes his agreement on the point of Harold’s haste so significant, and suggests that the king did indeed set out too soon.19
Besides his desire to stop the Norman devastation, Harold set out at speed to confront William for another reason. He was, according to William of Jumièges, ‘hastening to take him by surprise’. As William of Poitiers explains more fully, the English king ‘thought that in a night or surprise attack he might defeat [the Normans] unawares’. We should have no difficulty in believing these statements. Harold had just won a great victory at Stamford Bridge by launching exactly such a surprise attack on his enemies. Of course, the situation differed somewhat in that the Norwegians appear to have been wholly unaware of the king’s approach. Yet the fact that William and Harold exchanged messages with each other in the days before the battle does not preclude the possibility of the English launching an attack sooner than expected, or falling on the Normans under cover of darkness. Harold could still hope to catch William off guard, especially if he moved quickly.20
William, however, got wind of his opponent’s intentions. According to the Carmen, it was the duke’s own envoy, returning from a final parley with the king, who revealed the plan, saying ‘Harold hopes to be able to catch you unawares. He is preparing for a great offensive on both land and sea. He is reported to have sent five hundred ships to obstruct our passage home.’ William of Poitiers, while he echoes the story about the ships, rather more credibly attributes the duke’s foreknowledge to good military practice. ‘Experienced knights, who had been sent out scouting, reported that the enemy would soon be there.’ (It is important to remember in what follows that Poitiers had himself once been a knight.)21
With each side trying to outfox the other, it is hardly surprising that our sources give no clear account of the timings involved. The likeliest scenario is that Harold set out from London around 11 October, and was drawing near to Hastings on 13 October when William learned of his approach. According to William of Jumièges, the duke, ‘taking precautions in case of a night-time attack, ordered his army to stand to arms from dusk to dawn’. But the night-time attack never came, and early the next morning William set out in search of his enemy.22
Harold’s army had reached a spot about seven miles north-west of Hastings which at that time had no very obvious name. The D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, uniquely, says that the English were at ‘the grey apple tree’ – presumably a significant landmark, long since lost. Orderic Vitalis, writing over fifty years later, insisted that the place had been known since ancient times as ‘Senlac’, though nobody else favoured the term until it was adopted by Freeman in the nineteenth century. After 1066, most people referred to the place by the name that it still bears today – Battle.23
For it was here that the Norman army surprised Harold’s men on the morning of 14 October. ‘William came upon him unexpectedly, before his army was set in order’, says the D Chronicle unequivocally. The duke, thanks to his good reconnaissance, had succeeded in turning the tables. Harold had intended to surprise William by attacking his camp at Hastings, but William had discovered this just in time and advanced to meet him. Although some historians contend he must have set out sooner, the obvious inference from our sources is that th
e duke left Hastings at sunrise on the morning of 14 October – a Saturday – and came upon Harold’s army a few hours later, around 9 a.m. The truly insoluble question is which side was more exhausted. Few modern commentators accept William of Jumièges’ statement that the English had ridden through the night to arrive at the battlefield at dawn, but whenever they arrived the speed of their advance must have taken its toll. At the same time, the Normans, having reportedly stood to arms all night and marched several miles in the morning, can scarcely have been better rested. William of Malmesbury, writing many years later, famously recorded the rumour that the English had spent the whole night singing and drinking, while the Normans had been confessing their sins. Scurrilous, no doubt, but it does fit well with the notion that the English were taken by surprise and the Normans knew what was coming.24
Although William had turned the tables by advancing on Harold, it is clear that this did not enable the Normans to ambush the English. Both sides had spotted each other in advance and there was a sudden rush to arms. Possibly it was only at this stage – i.e. after their early-morning march – that William’s men donned their heavy shirts of mail, or hauberks. According to a story reported by several chroniclers (William of Poitiers alludes to it in passing) the duke, in his haste, put his own hauberk on back to front, and had to laugh off what others took to be a bad omen. He also, says Poitiers, fortified himself spiritually by hanging around his neck the relics on which Harold had sworn his oath.25
There was just enough time for a pre-battle speech. ‘Here Duke William exhorts his knights to prepare themselves manfully and wisely against the English’, reads the caption on the Bayeux Tapestry. Poitiers, who admits with unusual candour that he is paraphrasing, purports to give us the gist: William reminded the Normans of their past victories and his own unbroken record, and exhorted them to prove their valour. He also stressed, with good reason, the do-or-die nature of the imminent conflict, reminding his men that retreat was not an option. Lastly, he played down the martial reputation of the English, saying they had been defeated many times in the past. ‘Never were they famed for the glory of their feats of arms.’ Not terribly fair, of course, but precisely the sort of denigration of an opponent we might expect from a commander about to lead his men into battle.
Poitiers uses the same speech to imply that the Normans were outnumbered by the English, saying ‘men who are inexpert in warfare could easily be crushed by the valour and strength of a few’. It is a line of dubious worth, largely because it is adapted from a maxim of Vegetius, a Roman authority on military matters (though Poitiers may have borrowed it from the Carmen, which says something similar). As we have seen, the English sources make comparable excuses for the size of the English army, with comments to the effect that Harold went into battle before all his host had been drawn up. Both sides would argue over this point for years to come. William of Malmesbury, incensed by the suggestion that Harold had lost despite having a large army, insisted that the English ‘were few in number but brave in the extreme’. Several decades later, the Norman writer Wace found it equally hard to accept that William had fielded the bigger army, and concluded that both armies had been much the same size. As ever with numbers, it is impossible to pronounce with any certainty. No doubt an opposing army often seems daunting to those about to confront it. The most reasonable conclusion, given the nature of the battle that followed, is that Wace was right, and the two sides were more or less evenly matched.26
Fortunately there is less disagreement over where the battle was fought. William had advanced from Hastings by the only viable route, namely the high ground known as The Ridge; the ground to either side would have been mostly impassable forest. The English, once aware of the Norman approach, had moved from the forest and seized a nearby hill – so says Poitiers and so says the Carmen. The hill is easily identified today because, some years later. William caused an abbey to be erected on the site, and its substantial ruins still remain.
Having seized the hilltop, the English arranged themselves in their favoured formation. ‘They dismounted and left their horses in the rear’, says the Carmen, with a hint of incredulity. ‘For that people, unskilled in the art of war, spurn the assistance of horses: trusting to their strength they stand fast on foot.’ This was, indeed, the way in which English armies had traditionally deployed for centuries – standing in a long line, several men deep, shields to the fore, forming the so-called ‘shield-wall’. Harold, we are told, took his place in the centre of the line, planting his standard on the summit of the hill. According to a local tradition dating back to the late twelfth century, this spot is marked by the abbey’s high altar.
William, at the foot of the hill, had adopted a more sophisticated arrangement – three lines, according to the knowledgeable William of Poitiers. The first line, at the front, consisted of foot soldiers ‘armed with arrows and crossbows’ (in other words, the archers). The second line also consisted of foot soldiers ‘but more powerful and wearing hauberks’ (i.e. mailed men-at-arms, probably carrying swords). Finally, says Poitiers, came the cavalry – ‘the squadrons of mounted knights’ – in the middle of which rode the duke himself, ‘so he could direct operations on all sides with hand and voice’. Poitiers, naturally, describes this deployment as ‘a well-planned order’, and perhaps that was the case. For the record, however, the Carmen implies that William had originally intended to place the cavalry behind the archers – i.e. in the second line – ‘but was prevented from doing so from the onset of battle’.27
That onset was signalled on both sides by ‘the harsh bray of trumpets’, says Poitiers, and followed by a thick cloud of arrows – ‘a shower of blows like a storm of hail’, in the words of the Carmen. To read the accounts of both writers, one might assume that the use of arrows was confined exclusively to the French side, for neither mentions English archers. Some later chroniclers went even further, and insisted that the English did not know about archery at all: Baudri of Bourgeuil, for example, spoke of the English at Hastings dying by ‘the arrow, which they had not known before’. Of course, this is patently ridiculous – cavemen hunted with bows and arrows – and hence historians have tried to square the circle by assuming that Baudri was talking about crossbows, which were indeed something of a novelty in 1066. But this is to put a rather strained reading on the evidence. Most likely Baudri had come to believe that at the time of Hastings the English knew nothing of conventional archery probably because earlier accounts of the battle, like the Carmen and William of Poitiers, not only fail to mention English archers, but also insist that the English were ignorant when it came to military matters. Thus Henry of Huntingdon, also writing in the twelfth century, has Duke William describe the English in his pre-battle harangue as ‘a people accustomed to defeat, a people devoid of military knowledge, a people that does not even possess arrows’. In fact, the silence about English archers at Hastings is not quite total: the Bayeux Tapestry shows a man armed with a bow and arrow lining up with the soldiers who formed the shield-wall. At the same time, this lone figure is the only evidence that Harold had brought any bowmen with him, compared with the abundant references to French archers in the chronicle accounts, and indeed the two dozen Normans depicted with bows on the Tapestry. The reasonable conclusion is that the English king, perhaps because of his haste, had not managed to assemble archers in any great numbers.28
The shower of arrows thus fell disproportionately on Harold’s men, striking and destroying shields (says the Carmen), killing and maiming many (Poitiers). Yet the English remained, in the Carmen’s words, ‘rooted to the ground’. They were not about to rush down the hill and forsake the advantage of the high ground – the point of the shield-wall was that it should remain intact and impenetrable. Hence it was the Normans who were obliged to advance in order to engage the English in hand-to-hand fighting. Once the volley of arrows had ceased, the Norman heavy infantry (‘helmeted soldiers’, as the Carmen calls them) rushed forward ‘to crash shields against shields’
. According to Poitiers, these men immediately got into difficulty, for the English ‘resisted bravely, each one by any means he could devise. They threw javelins and missiles of various kinds, murderous axes and stones tied to sticks.’ The Norman cavalry therefore rode to the rescue, engaging the enemy with their swords. ‘The loud shouting, here Norman, there foreign, was drowned by the clash of weapons and the groans of the dying’, says Poitiers. ‘So for a time both sides fought with all their might.’29
At some point during this initial clash, according to the Carmen, there was a remarkable episode. A Norman knight named Taillefer rode in front of the duke’s army, encouraging them both with his words and with his dextrous swordplay, for as he spoke he juggled his sword, throwing it high into the air. These antics so irritated one Englishman that he broke ranks and ran forward to attack the juggler, but Taillefer was too quick: he turned, spurred his horse at his assailant and ran him through with his lance. Then, to the delight of his watching comrades, he hacked the fallen man’s head from his body and held it aloft in triumph.30
Even if this episode really occurred, the Normans had little else to celebrate. As William of Poitiers explains, ‘the English were greatly helped by the advantage of the higher ground’. The hilltop position that Harold had selected seemed unassailable. Not only was it practically impossible to mount an effective cavalry charge up such a steep slope, the terrain itself was also unfavourable – Poitiers refers at one point to ‘the roughness of the ground’, while the Carmen speaks of ‘land too rough to be tilled’. Unable to mount a mass charge, the Norman horsemen were forced to engage the English at close quarters, riding up to hurl their javelins, or closer still to hack with their swords. These methods (both of which can be seen on the Bayeux Tapestry) naturally exposed the attackers themselves to far greater risk. When Poitiers refers allusively to English weapons ‘which easily penetrated shields and other protections’, he is presumably talking about the great battleaxes which we also see on the Tapestry, being brandished by heavily armed English housecarls. ‘They strongly held or drove back those who dared to attack them with drawn swords’, says Poitiers. ‘They even wounded those who flung javelins at them from a distance.’31