The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

This, then, is what the fighting seems to have been. Curiously enough, Harold selected the defensive, as did Wellington, as a rule, seven hundred and fifty years after, and fought on foot while fortifying his front with palisades; while the Normans attacked in a series of lines, much as was done by British troops before the introduction of the breech-loader led to the abandonment of “linear” tactics. The last of the Saxon kings had chosen for his stand for crown and kingdom the hill where Battle is now built; but there was one vast difference between the opposing leaders. On the one side the Saxons feasted and made merry, though there is little evidence that Harold made any effort to rouse the enthusiasm of his men as his adversary did. In the Saxon camp there was wine and wassail, and in that of William penitence and prayer. William knew the guiding spirit of the art of war of the time, the infusing into his host that religious fervour which later on made Cromwell defeat Royalists as physically brave as his own Ironsides, and the instilling in their minds confidence in their own powers, which has been at the base of every English victory since then. The Saxons were “slow to find out they were beaten”;[3] but the Norman enthusiasm was raised by the duke’s address on the morning of the fight, in which he recalled to their minds that the Normans “had won their land in Gaul with their own swords; how they had given lands to the kings of the Franks and conquered all their enemies everywhere; while the English had never been famed in war, the Danes having conquered them and taken their land whenever they would.”

All this may be fable, and probably is, but what we know of William tends to show it was likely. Even omens he turned to advantage. He fell on landing, but, rising with his hands full of English soil, he exclaimed, “What is the matter? I have thus taken seisin of this land, and so far as it reaches, by the splendour of God, it is yours and mine.” He put on his mailed shirt back in front, only to laughingly exclaim, as he reversed it, “A good sign and a lucky one: a duke shall this day be turned into a king.”

All this evidences genius for war such as Harold never had. His bravery is undoubted, but mere bravery counts little against bravery plus skill. So it was that, armed with sword and priest-blessed relics, protected by the “consecrated” banner of Pope Alexander, and bearing on his finger a ring set “with one of St. Peter’s hairs,” William went into battle with not merely an army of sixty thousand men, to whom success meant profit, but to whom death meant falling in a holy cause, and to whom the very battle itself was a crusade. Everything was in his favour, when, singing the battle hymn of Roland, he moved his three lines against the hill on which Harold’s royal standard was planted.

The details of the battle are of little interest. It was one of hand-to-hand fighting. “The English axe, in the hand of King Harold, or any other strong man, cut down the horse and his rider by a single blow.”

The personal element entered largely, as it did later, into the contest. The fall of the leader led to the fall of the army. Where Harold was, where his standard flew, there was the “tactical key” of the field of battle. True tactics do not depend on the death of the king, or the capture of so many yards of silk embroidery. But true tactics, rightly understood, were not in these days.

The duke formed his army in two wings and a centre, each of which seems to have advanced covered by archers, supported by heavy infantry, and strengthened by the main arm of battle, then the mailed cavalry. The left wing, composed of men from Ponthieu, Maine, and Brittany, was led by Alan; the right, adventurers from Picardy and France, was directed by Roger de Montgomery; and the centre, comprising the flower of the Norman host, was commanded by William himself.

The bowmen covered the advance by arrow fire, and seemed to have produced little effect; but towards the end of the day they, possibly and apparently from the flanks,[4] poured in a vertical fire, and so covered, without interfering with, the attack of the main bodies, and it was from this, in a sense, long-ranged fire that Harold received the wound that disabled him, caused his death and the ruin of the Saxon cause.

Whether the statement that William, by a feigned retreat, drew the Saxons from their entrenchments in pursuit and then turned on them with success, is true or not, may be open to doubt. Harold’s tactics and his method of entrenchment all point rather to passive than active defence. His best armed and best equipped men were in the centre, round his royal standard, armed with javelin, axe, and sword, and covered close by the large Saxon shield; on his flanks were the less reliable and poorly armed “ceorls,” who could not be trusted to meet the main brunt of battle. It is quite possible, however, that these less disciplined troops may have been decoyed into a pursuit which was counter attacked by the cavalry, and thus the flank was turned, and with it the line of obstacles along the front, whatever they might have been.

Be that as it may, it is most likely that the traditional termination of the battle is in the main correct, and that William, by his “high angle” fire of arrows, was able to “search” the ground behind the stockade, and that the last Saxon king received his death-wound in the eye from one of these missiles. It would have been better strategy on his part to have fought a merely rearguard action at Hastings, and, falling back, have both weakened his adversary by the guards he must have left on the coast, and increased his own power of resistance by the aid of the reinforcements that were coming up. So night went down on the bloody field of Senlac, where Harold lay dead with fifteen thousand Normans and “threescore thousand Englishmen,” though the latter statement is, on the face of it, exaggeration. But the fight had broken the Saxon power, and the Conqueror—as William of Poictiers says—refused his royal brother burial, swearing “that he guarded the coast while he was alive, let him thus continue to guard it after death.” None the less, it is believed he was buried eventually at Waltham, and William the duke passed on to cross the Thames at Wallingford, seized London, and become William the king.

With Senlac perished the militia system of the Saxon rulers of England. The new-comers had brought with them the elements, though not the completion, of the feudal system that was to follow and be the outcome of the Norman Conquest. As a matter of fact, the invading army that William led was only after all a gathering of armed men under leaders of sorts. Its very origin prevented the full organisation which means a real or regular army. Mercenaries, men who had never before the war met the chiefs who were to lead them, in rare cases religious enthusiasts, who believed that the cause of the Pope and the Normans was the cause of God, mere soldiers of fortune, who thought from the fair English land they might obtain fortune even more than fame;—these were the men who were to break up the Saxon kingdom, still existent more or less, and were to weld into one homogeneous whole the English race. Never has the end better justified the means. Never have the means themselves in 1066 been more ignoble. The Norman host as men had scarcely a redeeming feature. To count descent from them, is to count often enough from the meanest social ancestry, though age has made it venerable and respected. Some of the noblest of English families trace, or rather claim, descent from men of the lowest origin, who rose from such a place as that of “Hugo the Dapifer,” to be the rulers of England and replace Saxon jarls whose descent was more distinct, and on whom the Norman parvenu looked down. It cannot be too definitely expressed that to “have come in with the Conquest” is only a confession that those who use the expression are ignoring the fact that many a Saxon thane could show a family title far deeper set in the history of England than any of the men who usurped and trampled on those whose pedigree went back to the days of Æscesdune, before the soldiers of fortune of the Duke of Normandy had emerged from their original obscurity.