XL
William “the Conqueror,” as history styles him, never so styled himself. His astute mind thrust such a warlike thing into the background. He had only come to claim his own, and was unfortunately obliged to fight for it against the perjurer! One can almost in imagination hear the pietistic snuffle of a Pecksniff in this mixture of legal and religious motives.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
Bayeux Tapestry.
It was about October 5th that Harold reached London. He lay there six days, awaiting the promised reinforcements from his northern Earls, which never came, and in the meanwhile calling in his levies from the near counties. But before he set out for Sussex he paid a last visit to his abbey of Waltham, which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross and had enriched with many gifts—evidences of his piety. For we must by no means believe that William, the self-constituted champion of sacred relics and the Church, alone practised, or professed, religion. Harold’s piety was at least as marked, and it is perhaps not altogether the Englishman’s sympathy for an Englishman, or his chivalrous regret for the vanquished, which sees in the ill-fated King’s abasement before the Holy Rood of Waltham on the eve of that fatal struggle a more sincere approach to the Most High. He lay prostrate upon the pavement in supplication, and the dark, wonder-loving legends of that time tell us that, as he did so, the hitherto raised head of the sacred image bowed itself upon the Cross, as though enacting again the tragedy of Calvary: in token, as the belief of that age ran, that the career of Harold was finished.
The English army set forth from London on Thursday, October 12th, and marched inevitably, it being the most direct route, by the line of country through which runs the Hastings Road of our own day. So speedily did the troops set out to meet their foe, that by Friday night Harold had pitched his camp on this hill of Senlac, eight miles from Hastings, on the site of this town of Battle.
A very ancient oak, known as the “Watch Oak,” stands in the private garden of a house on the bye-road to the right entering Battle. It is traditionally the spot whence Harold’s scouts watched for the approach of the invaders.
No one is skilled to tell us whence came this name of Senlac, nor what it meant. It was the “hill called Senlac.” Around it on three sides were hollows, marshy with the feeders of little streams. The Normans gave the name a French twist and called it “Sanglac” or “Sanguelac,” the Lake of Blood; but although their perversion of the name is ingenious, it will not serve our turn, since we see that the name of Senlac existed prior to the battle. Nor will yet another Gallicised version—that of Saintlache, or Holy Lake, do; and the meaning of the old name belonging to this place of battle must of necessity be left in obscurity.
Harold chose his own battle-ground, and chose it with the trained, unerring eye of one who had been the victor in many hard-fought campaigns. Electing to take up a defensive position in a spot where the menace of his presence must needs make William fight, or remain disastrously inactive on the coast, he ranged his army on the summit of this long spur of hill that then thrust out boldly from the wooded surroundings and commanded a view over gorse-covered folds of down, away to the sea. He had every reason for this plan of awaiting attack, chief among them the totally different characteristics of the two armies: the Norman army being strong in cavalry, the Saxons fighting wholly on foot, from King Harold and his two brothers, Gurth and Leofwin, down to the merest churl; while on the Norman side there was a strong force of archers, and on the Saxon none whatever. The Saxons, or the English, as we perhaps should more properly name them, were armed with javelins and with the two-handed battle-axe. The battle-axe, carried over the shoulder and wielded from it with a two-handed grasp and a swing of the whole body, was a terrible weapon in the hands of a body of men acting purely on the defensive, but it was ill-adapted for pursuit. A blow from it was easily capable of cleaving, not only through the helmet and head of a horseman, but of felling both him and his horse. Such was the weapon upon which the English chiefly relied in standing their ground and to withstand the onset of the Norman horse, which, owing to Harold’s strategy in seizing this commanding eminence, would be under the necessity of charging uphill.
To render the position additionally secure, opportunity was taken, ere night fell, to fortify the edge of the plateau with a palisade cut from the surrounding woodlands, and to wattle it with twigs and boughs so closely interwoven that it was impossible for a single person to creep through. Here, then, the English army lay athwart where now runs the road to the sea, but where at that time, beside a landmark named in the old English Chronicle “the hoar apple-tree,” there was apparently no other salient object save the rough track which must even then have existed, leading down to the port of Hastings.
The night before the battle seems to us, and must even have seemed to the opposing armies, a tremendously fateful interlude. Political and other considerations were such that all must have known the fate of England to depend, not upon a long campaign and a series of marches and fights, but solely upon the issue of the great contest now impending. How, then, did they pass the eve of battle? The Normans are our chief, and almost sole, authorities here, and were concerned, as inevitably they would be, to picture the Norman army as a host of Christian soldiers going forth to war with a dissolute, drink-sodden rabble. According to this partisan view, the Battle of Senlac, or Hastings, was lost by the English chiefly owing to the effects upon them of an all-night orgie of wassailing. When morning came, and with it the great struggle that was to decide the fate of England, the English host were still muzzy with their potations of the night before, and had not the clear vision and cool judgment that are as necessary on the battlefield as elsewhere. What a fine theme for a Temperance Lecturer, hot on the subject of “the cursed drink”! Such an one might fitly show by this instance how indulgence in it destroys not only the individual but the nation itself; but no one seems ever to have fastened upon this very eloquent illustration.
The Saxons certainly were mighty topers, and it is by no means too much to say that they were a nation of drunkards. Ancient chroniclers at all points fully support this sweeping statement; amongst them William of Malmesbury, who tells us that the Anglo-Saxon rule was bad, and the monks and nobility corrupt. “Drinking in parties,” he says, “was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights, as well as days.”
Coming to a description of the night before the battle, he tells us, in the original Latin in which he wrote: “Angli, ut accepimus, totam noctem insomnem cantibus potibusque ducentes.” That is to say, in plain English, they kept awake all night, singing, and drinking innumerable drinks—which is a very fine, fearless way of preparing to meet the foe, and one highly expressive of contempt for him; but it is not a wise way.
He then proceeds to expand his argument by saying: “The vices attendant on drunkenness which enervate the human mind followed; hence it arose that, engaging William more with rashness and precipitate fury than military skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery by one, and that an easy, victory.”