The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  This bloody business, with the Normans trying but failing to break through the English line, must have continued intermittently for hours: we know that the Battle of Hastings went on all day. At some stage, however, presumably several hours into the conflict, there came a crucial turning point, though the Carmen and William of Poitiers offer different versions of how it happened. According to Poitiers, it began with a near disaster. Because of the ferocity of the English resistance, he says, some troops on the left wing of the French army turned tail and started to flee. At the same time, a rumour ran through the entire army that William himself had been killed, which in turn led to ‘almost the whole of the duke’s battle line giving way’. The situation was only retrieved by an act of personal heroism by William, who rushed towards the fugitives, shouting ‘Look at me! I am alive, and with God’s help I will conquer! What madness is persuading you to flee? What way is open to escape?’ At these words, says Poitiers, the Normans recovered their courage. Following the duke’s lead, they turned to face the English who had been pursuing them, and killed them all in a moment.

  The Carmen tells it somewhat differently. In this version, the episode begins with the French pretending to run away – it is a plan, intended to lure the English out from their impenetrable shield-wall. And at first it is successful: the English take the bait and run down the hill in pursuit of what they take to be a retreating enemy, only to have the French turn around and start attacking them. But soon thereafter, the plan goes awry, when the English fight back with unexpected vigour, compelling their attackers to run away for real. ‘Thus’, says the Carmen, ‘a flight which had started as a sham became one dictated by the enemy’s strength.’ It is at this point that William rides to the rescue, rallies the deserting troops and leads them in a successful counter-attack.32

  Clearly, something like this must have happened. The two stories are quite similar in places, particularly in the crucial role they attribute to William. In the Carmen, just as in Poitiers’ version, the duke removes his helmet to dispel the rumour of his death, and this same scene is also depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. (Although, as ever with the Tapestry, the true hero appears to be Bishop Odo, who rides in brandishing his baculum ‘to encourage the lads’.) The essential difference is that, in the Carmen, what begins as a ruse almost results in disaster, whereas in Poitiers’ account it begins as a disaster which in turn gives rise to a ruse. For, as Poitiers has it, the Normans soon realized their moment of crisis had given them a rare opportunity to kill Englishmen. ‘They remembered how, a little while before, their flight had brought about the result they desired.’ And so they fled again, only this time as a trick. The English, as before, rushed after them in pursuit, only to have the Normans wheel around their horses and cut them down.33

  There is not much to help us choose between the two accounts. Our first instinct might be to believe Poitiers, the man with military experience. Yet there are strong hints in his text that the old soldier was here writing more in his capacity as ducal propagandist, trying to improve on the version of events related by the Carmen. In the latter account, for instance, it is unclear exactly who was responsible for the flight that nearly caused the disaster, but we are clearly told ‘the Normans turn tail; their shields protect their backs’. Poitiers, by contrast, blames the initial flight on ‘the Breton knights and other auxiliaries on the left wing’. If the Normans did run away, he says, it was only because they believed their leader was dead, so there was no shame in that; even the army of the Roman Empire, he continues, fled occasionally in such circumstances. This all smacks of protesting rather too much, and we might therefore prefer to believe the Carmen when it speaks of a deliberate stratagem that went badly wrong. Certainly it is hard to credit Poitiers when he claims that a subsequent fake flight was inspired by the original retreat, as if the Normans had discovered this trick during the course of the battle. Despite the doubts expressed by many armchair generals over the decades, feigned flight was a ruse that French cavalry forces had been employing for centuries. The Normans themselves are described as having used it to good effect against invading French forces in 1053, in the course of the struggle for Arques.34

  One flight or two, real or ruse, the outcome was the same: substantial numbers of English soldiers were slaughtered, and the integrity of the English shield-wall was compromised. ‘Up to now’, says William of Poitiers, ‘the enemy line had been bristling with weapons and most difficult to encircle’, the obvious implication being that this was now no longer the case. The English grew weaker, he tells us, as the Normans ‘shot arrows, smote and pierced’. Arrows may well have become the crucial factor: at this point on the Bayeux Tapestry, the lower margin fills with archers. ‘The dead, by falling, seemed to move more than the living’, says Poitiers. ‘It was not possible for the lightly wounded to escape, for they were crushed to death by the serried ranks of their companions. So fortune turned for William, hastening his triumph.’35

  What ultimately decided the battle, everyone agrees, was the death of King Harold. Day was already turning to night, says the Carmen, when the report ‘Harold is dead’ flew throughout the battlefield, causing the English to lose heart. Poitiers concurs: knowing that their king was dead, ‘the English army realized there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer’. William of Jumièges, in his brief account of the battle, tells us that ‘when the English learned that their king had met his death, they greatly feared for their own lives, and turned at nightfall to seek refuge in flight’. The Bayeux Tapestry puts it in typically telegraphic terms: ‘Here Harold was killed, and the English turned in flight.’36

  But how did Harold die? The established story, as everyone knows, is that the king was felled by an arrow that hit him in the eye. The Tapestry famously shows him gripping a shaft that has lodged in his face, and this depiction is seemingly backed up by several chroniclers. ‘A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom’, wrote Baudri of Bourgeuil; ‘his brain was pierced by an arrow’, says William of Malmesbury. ‘The whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold’, says Henry of Huntingdon, ‘and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye.’37

  But there are problems. The Tapestry, as is well known, is debatable, principally for two reasons. First, there is debate over which figure is actually Harold. Is he the upright figure grasping the arrow (whose head, after all, interrupts the word ‘Harold’ in the caption); or is he the falling figure immediately to the right, being hacked down by a horseman, under the words ‘interfectus est’ (‘was killed’)? Some critics solve the riddle by saying that Harold is represented by both these figures, and that the Bayeux Tapestry artist does this kind of thing on numerous other occasions; others have demurred that, if this is really the case, Harold manages the neat trick of losing his shield and acquiring an axe in the act of dying.

  Even if, however, we accept that the first figure represents Harold, there is controversy over the arrow itself. The Tapestry was heavily restored in the mid-nineteenth century, and the death of Harold is one of the areas where the restorers may have taken considerable liberties. Some experts contend, from an analysis of the embroidery and an examination of the earliest drawings of the Tapestry in its (apparently) unrestored state, that the first figure is actually holding not an arrow but a spear, ready to hurl at his attackers.38

  Even if the Tapestry artist did intend to depict an arrow, can we be sure that he was depicting what really happened? On many occasions we can see that the Tapestry includes images which are not truly original, but which have been copied and adapted from other illustrated manuscripts that the artist had to hand, and it looks very much like this process was at work in Harold’s death scene. Immediately before the king dies, we see a Norman soldier about to decapitate an unarmed Englishman. This otherwise inexplicable image seems to have been lifted more or less unaltered from an illustrated version of an Old Testament story, namely the fate of King Zedekiah and his sons, one of whom is shown being beheaded in exactly this ma
nner. This artist may have lighted on this particular image because of the resonance of the story – Zedekiah and his family were punished because he had broken his oath of fealty to his overlord, and Zedekiah’s own punishment was blinding. It could well be, therefore, that the arrow in Harold’s eye is simply a piece of artistic licence based on nothing more than an allusion to this particular Bible story, and that blinding was felt to be a fitting end for a king who was similarly foresworn.39

  Lastly, we have to consider the fact that the Tapestry is our only contemporary source to suggest that Harold was hit in the face by an arrow. True, a similar report is carried by an Italian chronicler, Amatus of Montecassino, writing about 1080, but his account is compromised by the fact that the Latin original is lost – it survives only in a fourteenth-century French translation, heavily interpolated in places, and hence of negligible worth.40 These two questionable sources apart, the story that Harold was felled by an arrow occurs in later works (Baudri of Bourgeuil, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon are all twelfth-century). Contemporary accounts, by contrast – the Carmen, William of Poitiers, William of Jumièges and the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – make no mention of it. In the case of the last two, this omission is not very remarkable, given the brevity of their accounts; in the case of William of Poitiers and the Carmen it is altogether more striking. Poitiers offers us the longest and most detailed account of the battle, yet makes no mention of the manner in which Harold died. Possibly this was because he did not know. Alternatively, it may have been because he knew full well, having read the Carmen’s version, and did not care to endorse it.

  For the Carmen – our earliest source for the battle – offers an entirely different account of how Harold met his end. According to the Carmen, the battle was almost won – the French were already seeking spoils of war – when William caught sight of Harold on top of the hill, hacking down his foes. The duke called together a cohort of men, including Count Eustace of Boulogne, Hugh of Ponthieu and a certain ‘Gilfard’ (‘known by his father’s surname’), and set out to kill the king. In this they were successful, and the Carmen gives a graphic description of the injuries each inflicted on Harold, who was pierced with a lance, beheaded with a sword and disembowelled with a spear. His thigh, we are told (possibly a euphemism for his genitalia) was hacked off and carried away some distance.41

  Historians have always had huge problems with this story, and still tend to reject it outright. One of the foremost experts of the last century, Professor R. Allen Brown, found it impossible to believe that William had been personally involved in Harold’s death; not because the duke was uninvolved in the fighting, for everyone accepts that fact. Rather, his objection was that, had William really been involved so directly in Harold’s death, ‘the feat of arms would have been bruited abroad in every court and chanson in Latin Christendom and beyond’.42

  This argument, however, assumes that everyone in Christendom would have regarded the premeditated butchery of a crowned king as acceptable behaviour, which was not necessarily the case. The Carmen insists that Harold’s killers acted ‘in accordance with the rules of war’, a statement which by itself suggests that others may have felt that these rules had been broken. One person who may have thought as much was William of Poitiers. In general he is not afraid to contest points of detail with the Carmen and offer his own version of what happened. When it comes to Harold’s gory end, however, he offers no denial and no alternative scenario: he simply lapses into silence. With most writers, their silence on a particular point would be a poor foundation on which to build an argument. But with a writer as erudite as William of Poitiers, we can reasonably read more into it. Poitiers wanted to present the duke as measured, merciful and just in all his dealings, and in particular in his pursuit of England’s throne. He did not want to show his hero, whose mission had been sanctioned by the pope, hacking his opponent into pieces. The suspicion that Poitiers tried to suppress the Carmen’s version of Harold’s death is reinforced by his similar failure to include the episode involving Taillefer the juggler. Perhaps he thought it unreliable; more likely he considered it shameful – a piece of bloodthirsty barbarism that cast the Normans in a bad light. More pertinent still is the fact we have caught Poitiers at this kind of suppressio veri once before, in his account of the taking of the town of Alençon. His source, William of Jumièges, tells us that the duke mutilated the town’s defenders by lopping off their hands and feet, but Poitiers omits all mention of this from his own account. In the case of Harold’s death, therefore, the silence of William of Poitiers, far from undermining our faith in the Carmen’s version, could instead be considered to strengthen its credibility. That credibility is also enhanced by the fact that the poem’s author, Guy of Amiens, had close connections with the men he tells us were William’s accomplices.43

  Of course, we cannot say for certain how Harold died. Our sources, as ever, are contradictory, and each of them can be regarded as in some way compromised (because they are based on biblical or classical motifs; because they are inherently biased; because they are better regarded as imaginative works of art rather than sober reportage). We know that at various points in the battle the Normans showered the English with arrows and crossbow bolts, so it is not unlikely that Harold was hit, perhaps fatally, perhaps in the eye. At the same time, we cannot lightly disregard the Carmen (as historians have usually done) when it tells us that Harold died in a very different way, deliberately cut down by his enemies. Apart from anything else, a deliberate killing accords well with William’s assumed war-aim. He had risked everything to get an army to England and to bring Harold to battle. After a long day’s fighting, with the autumn light starting to fade, it would have been quite possible for the English king to withdraw, enabling him to fight another day. William could not take that risk; for him it was imperative that his opponent should die before the day was out. Given this fact, it would not be at all surprising if the duke, in the closing stages of the conflict, decided to risk all and lead just the kind of death squad that the Carmen describes. By the same token, with the deed accomplished, it would be equally unsurprising if the Normans in general, like William of Poitiers in particular, sought to keep these details quiet. An anonymous arrow in the eye accorded better with the idea that, in the final analysis, Harold’s death had been down to the judgement of God.

  12

  The Spoils of Victory

  The night after Hastings was almost as terrible as the day itself. William of Poitiers paints a vivid picture of the English fleeing from the battlefield, ‘some on horses they had seized, some on foot; some along roads, others through untrodden wastes’. These, he makes clear, were the fortunate ones, the lucky unscathed or the lightly wounded. More pitiful is his description of those who wanted to flee but could not: the men lying helpless in their own blood, the maimed who hauled themselves a short distance only to collapse in the woods, where their corpses blocked the escape of others. The Normans pursued them, says Poitiers, slashing at their backs, galloping over their bodies, ‘putting the last touches to the victory’. Yet even the victors died in large numbers that night, their pursuit turning to disaster when they rushed headlong into an unseen obstacle.’ High grass concealed an ancient rampart’, explains Orderic Vitalis, ‘and as the Normans, fully armed on their horses, rode up against it, they fell, one on top of the other, thus crushing each other to death.’ The chronicler of Battle Abbey records that this pit was afterwards known locally as the Malfosse.1

  Thus when the sun came up the next morning it revealed an appalling scene. ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood’, says Poitiers, noting that among them lay Harold’s two brothers, Leofwine and Gyrth, whose bodies were said to have been found close to the king’s own. Beyond this, however, Poitiers gives us a fairly sanitized account. He says little, for instance, of Norman casualties, which must have been considerable. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks of �
��great slaughter on both sides’.) Similarly, we hear nothing about the routine medieval practice whereby the dead were deprived of their valuables, yet we know from other sources that this had been happening even before the end of the battle. (The Bayeux Tapestry, for example, shows in its margins men being stripped of their expensive mail shirts.) Most interestingly, we see Poitiers implicitly contesting a statement made by the author of the Carmen, who says that while William buried his own dead, he left the bodies of the English ‘to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs’. Nothing too surprising there, you might think, considering the labour that burying thousands of Englishmen would entail, but Poitiers was determined to depict his master in the best possible moral light, however much it contradicted military common sense. Leaving the dead unburied, we are told, ‘seemed cruel’ to the Conqueror, who accordingly allowed any who wished to recover their relatives’ remains to do so.2

  But not the remains of Harold. As Poitiers and several other sources make plain, the king’s corpse was in a very bad state, stripped of all its valuables, and so hacked about the face that it could be recognized only by ‘certain marks’. According to the twelfth-century tradition at Waltham Abbey, the task of confirming his identity required the presence of Harold’s sometime partner, Edith Swan-Neck, ‘for she had been admitted to a greater intimacy of his person’.3 In contemporary accounts, by contrast, it is the king’s mother, Gytha, who appears amid the carnage to plead for the return of her son’s body. Despite allegedly offering its weight in gold (a detail provided by the Carmen and kept by Poitiers), her request was refused, William angrily replying that it would be inappropriate for Harold to be interred while countless others lay unburied on his account. This directly contradicts the later tradition that the king was buried at Waltham, and both Poitiers and the Carmen state that his remains were buried on the summit of a nearby cliff, under a mocking inscription which suggested that he could in this way still guard the seashore. It is not impossible that Harold was removed to Waltham at some later date; but had he been granted a Christian burial in 1066, we can be sure that William of Poitiers in particular would have let us know about it.