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I have dwelt at some length upon these matters of internal organization, not only because they are fundamental to an understanding of many institutions of the Norman empire, but because they also serve to explain how there came to be a Norman empire. The conquest of England has been so uniformly approached from the English point of view that it is often made to appear as more or less of an accident arising from a casual invasion of freebooters. Viewed in its proper perspective, which I venture to think is the Norman perspective, it appears as a natural outgrowth of Norman discipline and of Norman expansion. Only because the duke was strong at home could he hope to be strong abroad, only because he was master of an extraordinarily vigorous, coherent, and well-organized state in Normandy could he attempt the at first sight impossible task of conquering a kingdom and the still greater task of organizing it under a firm government. We must take account, not only of the weakness of England, but also of the strength of Normandy, stronger than any of its continental neighbors, stronger even than royalty itself.
That the expansion of Normandy should be directed toward England was the result, not only of the special conditions of the year 1066, but of a steady rapprochement between the two countries, in which the active effort was exerted from the Norman side. By geographical position, by the Scandinavian settlement of both countries, and by the commercial enterprise of the merchants of Rouen, the history of Normandy and England had in various ways been brought together in the tenth century, till in 1002 the marriage of the English king Ethelred with Emma, sister of Duke Richard the Good, created dynastic connections of far-reaching importance. Their son Edward the Confessor was brought up at the Norman court, so that his habits and sympathies became Norman rather than English, and his accession to the English throne in 1042 opened the way to a rapid development of Norman influence both in church and in state, which Freeman, with his strong anti-foreign feelings, considered the real beginning of the Norman Conquest. As Edward’s childless reign drew near its end, there were two principal claimants for the succession, Harold, son of Godwin, the most powerful earl of England, and Duke William. Harold could make no hereditary claim to the throne, nor until the eve of Edward’s death does he seem to have had the king’s support, but he was a man of strength and force and was clearly the leading man of the kingdom. William, as the great-nephew of Ethelred and Emma, was cousin (first cousin once removed) of Edward, a claim which he strengthened by an early expression of Edward in his favor and by an oath which he had exacted from Harold to support his candidacy. The exact facts are not known regarding Harold’s oath, made during an involuntary visit to Normandy two or three years before, but it enabled William to pose as the defender of a broken obligation and gave him the great moral advantage of the support of Pope Alexander II, to whom he had the question submitted. At Edward’s death Harold had himself chosen by the witan, or national council, and crowned, so that he had on his side whatever could come from such legal forms and from the support which lay behind them. We must not, however, commit the anachronism of thinking that he was a national hero or even the candidate of a national party. There was in the eleventh century no such thing as a nation in the sense that the term is understood in the modern world, and the word could least of all be applied to England, broken, divided, and harried by Danish invasions and by internal disunion. Even the notion of the foreigner was still dim and inchoate, and the reign of Canute, to cite no others, had shown England that she had nothing to fear from a king of foreign birth. The contest between Harold, who was half-Danish in blood, and William, big as it was in national consequences, cannot be elevated to the rank of a national struggle.
From the death of Edward the Confessor and the coronation of Harold, in January, 1066, until the crossing of the Channel in September, William was busy with preparations for the invasion of England. Such an expedition transcended the obligation of military service which could be demanded from his feudal vassals, and William was obliged to make a strong appeal to the Norman love of adventure and feats of arms and to promise wide lands and rich booty from his future conquests. He also found it necessary to enlist knights from other parts of France—Brittany, Flanders, Poitou, even adventurers from distant Spain and Sicily. And then there was the question of transport, for Normandy had no fleet and it was no small matter to create in six months the seven hundred boats which William’s kinsmen and vassals obligated themselves to provide. All were ready by the end of August at the mouth of the Dives,—as the quaint Hôtel Guillaume-le-Conquérant reminds the American visitor,—but mediæval sailors could not tack against the wind, and six weeks were passed in waiting for a favoring breeze. Finally it was decided to take advantage of a west wind as far as the mouth of the Somme, and here at Saint-Valéry the fleet assembled for the final crossing. Late in September the Normans landed on the beach at Pevensey and marched to Hastings, where, October 15, they met the troops of Harold, fresh from their great victory over the men of Norway at Stamfordbridge.
Few battles of the Middle Ages were of importance equal to that of Hastings, and few are better known. Besides the prose accounts of the Latin chroniclers, we have the contemporary elegiacs of Guy of Amiens and Baudri of Bourgueil, the spirited verse of the Roman de Rou of Master Wace, the most detailed narrative but written, unfortunately, a century after the event, and the unique and vivid portrayal of the Bayeux Tapestry. This remarkable monument, which is accessible to all in a variety of editions, consists of a roll of cloth two hundred and thirty feet long and twenty inches in breadth, embroidered in colors with a series of seventy-nine scenes which narrate the history of the Conquest from the departure of Harold on the ill-fated journey which led him to William’s court down to the final discomfiture of the English army on the field of Hastings. The episodes, which are designated by brief titles, are well chosen and are executed with a realism of detail which is of the greatest importance for the life and culture of the age. Preserved in the cathedral and later in the municipal Museum of Bayeux—save for a notable interval in 1804, when Napoleon had it exhibited in Paris to arouse enthusiasm for a new French conquest of England,—the tapestry appears from internal evidence to have been originally executed as an ornament for this cathedral by English workmen at the command of Bishop Odo, half-brother of the Conqueror. There is no basis for the common belief that it was the work of Queen Matilda or her ladies, but efforts to place it one or even two centuries later have proved unavailing against the evidence of armor and costume, and the general opinion of scholars now regards it as belonging to the eleventh century and thus substantially contemporary with the events which it depicts.
The modern literature of the battle is also commensurate with its importance. The classic account is found in the third volume of Freeman’s majestic History of the Norman Conquest, where the story is told with a rare combination of minute detail and spirited narrative which reminds us, it has been said, of a battle of the Iliad or a Norse saga. Splendid as this narrative is, its enthusiasm often carries it beyond the evidence of the sources, and in several fundamental points it can no longer be accepted as historically sound. The theory of the palisade upon which Freeman’s conception of the English tactics rested has been destroyed by the trenchant criticism of that profound student of Anglo-Norman history, J. Horace Round, and his whole treatment has been vigorously attacked from the point of view of the scientific study of military history by Wilhelm Spatz and his distinguished master, Hans Delbrück, of Berlin. Unfortunately the Berlin critics are influenced too much by certain theories of military organization; they do not call the English soldier of the period a degenerate, but they consider him, and the Norman knight as well, incapable of the disciplined and united action required by all real strategy, incapable even of forming the shield-wall and executing the feigned flight described by the contemporary chroniclers of the battle. While it is true that mediæval fighting was far more individualistic than that of ancient or modern armies and lacked also the flexible conditions which lie at the basis of modern tactics, there is the best of contemporary evidence for a certain amount of strategical movement at Hastings. On one point, however, the modern military critics have compelled us to modify our ideas of the battles of earlier times, namely, with respect to the numbers engaged. Against the constant tendency to magnify the size of the military forces, a tendency accentuated in the Middle Ages by the complete recklessness of chroniclers when dealing with large figures, modern criticism has pointed out the limitations of battle-space, transportation, and commissariat. The five millions with which Xerxes is said to have invaded Greece are a physical impossibility, for Delbrück has shown that, with this number moving under normal conditions, the rear-guard could not have crossed the Tigris when the first Persians reached Thermopylæ. Similarly the fifty or sixty thousand knights attributed to William the Conqueror shrink to one-tenth the number when brought to face with the official lists of English and Norman knights’ fees. If William’s army did not exceed five or six thousand, that of Harold could not have been much greater and may well have been less; though William’s panegyrist places the number of English at 1,200,000, not more than 12,000 could have stood, in the closest formation, on the hill which they occupied at Hastings. Small skirmishes these, to those who have followed the battles of the Marne, the Aisne, the Vistula, and the San, yet none the less important in the world’s history!
In spite of all the controversy, the main lines of the battle seem fairly clear. The troops of Harold occupied a well-defended hill eight miles inland from Hastings on the London road, the professional guard of housecarles in front, protected by the solid wall of their shields and supported by the thegns and other fully armed troops, the levies of the countryside behind or at the sides, armed with javelins, stone clubs, and farmers’ weapons. They had few archers and no cavalry, but the steep hill was well protected from the assaults of the Norman horse and favored the firm defence which the English tactics dictated. The Norman lines consisted first of archers, then of heavy-armed foot-soldiers, and finally of the mailed horsemen, their centre grouped about William and the standard which he had received from the Pope. After a preliminary attack by the archers and foot, the knights came forward, preceded by the minstrel Taillefer, “a jongleur whom a very brave heart ennobled,” qui mult bien chantout, throwing his sword in the air and catching it as he sang—
| De Karlemaigne e de Rollant | Of Roland and of Charlemagne, |
| E d’Oliver e des vassals | Oliver and the vassals all |
| Qui morurent en Rencevals. | Who fell in fight at Roncevals. |
But the horses recoiled from the hill, pursued by many of the English, and only the sight of William, his head bared of its helmet so as to be seen by his men, rallied the knights again. The mass of the English stood firm behind their shield-wall and their line could be broken only by the ruse of a feigned flight, from which the Normans turned to surround and cut to pieces their pursuers. Even then the housecarles were unmoved, until the arrows of the high-shooting Norman bowmen finally opened up the gaps in their ranks into which William’s horsemen pressed against the battle-axes of the king’s guard. And then, as darkness began to fall, Harold was mortally wounded by an arrow, the guard was cut to pieces, and the remnant fled. “Here Harold was killed and the English turned to flight” is the final heading in the Bayeux Tapestry, while in the margin the spoilers strip the coats of mail from the dead and drive off the horses of the slain knights.
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