A short history of the Norman Conquest of England

by Edward A. Freeman

2. The March of the Normans.—The Norman writers tell us that Duke William’s army spent the night before the battle, the night of Friday, October 13th, in prayer and shrift, while the English spent it in drinking and singing. And certainly, if our men sang some of the old battle-songs, we shall not think the worse of them. But this is the kind of thing which we often find the writers of the victorious side saying of a defeated army. Anyhow both armies were quite ready for their work early on Saturday morning. The Normans marched from Hastings to the height of Telham, opposite Senlac. There they made ready for the fight; the knights mounted their war-horses and put on their harness. The Duke’s hauberk was by some chance turned the wrong way; but his ready wit turned this into a good omen, he said that a Duke was going to be turned into a King. Then he mounted his horse; he looked out at the place where his spies told him that the English King was posted, and he vowed that, where Harold’s standard stood, he would, if he won that day’s fight, build a minster to Saint Martin of Tours. Then the host set out in three divisions. On the left Count Alan of Britanny commanded the Bretons, Poitevins, and Mansels. Among them was one English traitor, Ralph of Wader or of Norfolk. He was seemingly banished by Edward or Harold, and, as he was of Breton descent by his mother, he now came back among his mother’s people. On the right Roger of Montgomery, one of the most famous lords of Normandy, commanded the French and the mercenaries from all parts. In the midst were the Normans themselves, and in the midst of them was the banner which had come from Rome, borne by a knight of Caux named Toustain (that is, Thurstan) the White. Close by it rode the Duke and his two half-brothers, Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Count Robert of Mortain. The Duke carried round his neck the relics on which Harold had sworn. In each of these three divisions were three sets of soldiers. First went the archers and other light-armed foot, who were to try to put the English into disorder with their arrows and other missiles. Then came the heavy-armed foot, who were to try and break down the palisade, and lastly the horsemen. The archers had no defensive armour; the horsemen and heavy-armed foot had coats of mail and helmets with nose-pieces. The knights had their kite-shaped shields, their long lances carried overhand, and their swords for near fight. The Duke and the Bishop alone carried maces instead of swords. The mace was a most terrible and crushing weapon; Odo, it was said, carried it rather than a sword or lance, because the canons of the Church forbade a priest to shed blood. In this array they had to cross the rolling and marshy ground between the hills of Telham and Senlac.

3. The Array of the English.—Meanwhile King Harold marshalled his army on the hill, to defend their strong post against the attack of the Normans. All were on foot; those who had horses made use of them only to carry them to the field, and got down when the time came for actual fighting. So we see in the Tapestry King Harold riding round his host to marshal them and exhort them; then he gets down and takes his place in the battle on foot. The army was made up of soldiers of two very different kinds. There was the King’s personal following, his housecarls, his own thanes, and the picked troops generally, among them the men of London who claimed to be the King’s special guards, and the men of Kent who claimed to strike the first blow in the battle. They had armour much the same as that of the Normans, with javelins to hurl first of all, and for the close fight either the sword, the older English weapon, or more commonly the great Danish axe which had been brought in by Cnut. This was wielded with both hands, and was the most fearful of all weapons, if the blow reached its mark; but it left its bearer specially exposed while dealing the blow. The men were ranged as closely together as the space needed for wielding their arms would let them; and, besides the palisade, the front ranks made a kind of inner defence with their shields, called the shield-wall. The Norman writers were specially struck with the close array of the English, and they speak of them as standing like trees in a wood. Besides these choice troops, there were also the general levies of the neighbouring lands, who came armed anyhow, with such weapons as they could get, the bow being the rarest of all. These inferior troops were placed to the right, on the least exposed part of the hill, while the King with his choice troops stood ready to meet Duke William himself. The King stood between his two ensigns, the national badge, the dragon of Wessex, and his own Standard, a great flag with the figure of a fighting man wrought on it in gold. Close by the King stood his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, and his other kinsfolk—among them doubtless his uncle Ælfwig, the Abbot of the New Minster at Winchester, who came to the fight with twelve of his monks. Leofric, Abbot of Peterborough, was also there; but we do not hear of any of the bishops. Whether Earl Waltheof was there is not certain; it is certain that Edwin and Morkere were not.

4. The Beginning of the Battle.—By nine in the morning, the Normans had reached the hill of Senlac, and the fight began. But before the real attack was made, a juggler or minstrel in the Norman army, known as Taillefer, that is the Cleaver of Iron, asked the Duke’s leave to strike the first blow. So he rode out, singing songs of Charlemagne, as the French call the Emperor Charles the Great, and of Roland his paladin. Then he threw his sword up in the air and caught it again; he cut down two Englishmen and then was cut down himself. After this mere bravado came the real work. First came a flight of arrows from each division of the Norman army. Then the heavy-armed foot pressed on, to make their way up the hill and to break down the palisade. But the English hurled their javelins at them as they came up, and cut them down with their axes when they came near enough for hand-strokes. The Normans shouted “God help us;” the English shouted “God Almighty,” and the King’s own war-cry of “Holy Cross”—the Holy Cross of Waltham. William’s heavy-armed foot pressed on along the whole line, the native Normans having to face King Harold’s chosen troops in the centre. The attack was vain; they were beaten back, and they could not break down the palisade. Then the horsemen themselves, the Duke at their head, pressed on up the hill-side. But all was in vain; the English kept their strong ground; the Normans had to fall back; the Bretons on the left actually turned and fled. Then the worse-armed and less disciplined English troops could not withstand the temptation to come down from the hill and chase them. The whole line of the Norman army began to waver, and in many parts to give way. A tale spread that the Duke was killed. William showed himself to his troops, and with his words, looks, and blows, helped by his brother the Bishop, he brought them back to the fight. The flying Bretons now took heart; they turned, and cut in pieces the English who were chasing them. Thus far the resistance of the English had been thoroughly successful, wherever they had obeyed the King’s orders and kept within their defences. But the fault of those who had gone down to follow the enemy had weakened the line of defence, and had shown the Normans the true way of winning the day.

5. The Second Attack.—Now came the fiercest struggle of the whole day. The Duke and his immediate following tried to break their way into the English enclosure at the very point where the King stood by his standard with his brothers. The two rivals were near coming face to face. At that moment Earl Gyrth hurled his spear, which missed the Duke, but killed his horse and brought his rider to the ground. William then pressed to the barricade on foot, and slew Gyrth in hand to hand fight. At the same time the King’s other brother Earl Leofwine was killed. The Duke mounted another horse, and again pressed on; but the barricade and the shield-wall withstood all attempts. On the right the attack of the French division had been more lucky; the palisade was partly broken down. But the English, with their shields and axes, still kept their ground, and the Normans were unable to gain the top of the hill or to come near the standard.

6. The Feigned Flight.—The battle had now gone on for several hours, and Duke William saw that, unless he quite changed his tactics, he had no hope of overcoming the resistance of the English. They had suffered a great loss in the death of the two earls, and their defences were weakened at some points; but the army, as a whole, held its ground as firmly as ever. William then tried a most dangerous stratagem, his taking to which shows how little hope he now had of gaining the day by any direct attack. He saw that his only way was to bring the English down from the hill, as part of them had already come down. He therefore bade his men feign flight. The Normans obeyed; the whole host seemed to be flying. The irregular levies of the English on the right again broke their line; they ran down the hill, and left the part where its ascent was most easy open to the invaders. The Normans now turned on their pursuers, put most of them to flight, and were able to ride up the part of the hill which was left undefended, seemingly about three o’clock in the afternoon. The English had thus lost the advantage of the ground; they had now, on foot, with only the bulwark of their shields, to withstand the horsemen. This however they still did for some hours longer. But the advantage was now on the Norman side, and the battle changed into a series of single combats. The great object of the Normans was to cut their way to the standard, where King Harold still fought. Many men were killed in the attempt; the resistance of the English grew slacker; yet, when evening was coming on, they still fought on with their King at their head, and a new device of the Duke’s was needed to bring the battle to an end.

7. The End of the Battle.—This new device was to bid his archers shoot in the air, that their arrows might fall, as he said, like bolts from heaven. They were of course bidden specially to aim at those who fought round the standard. Meanwhile twenty knights bound themselves to lower or bear off the standard itself. The archers shot; the knights pressed on; and one arrow had the deadliest effect of all; it pierced the right eye of King Harold. He sank down by the standard; most of the twenty knights were killed, but four reached the King while he still breathed, slew him with many wounds, and carried off the two ensigns. It was now evening; but, though the King was dead, the fight still went on. Of the King’s own chosen troops it would seem that not a man either fled or was taken prisoner. All died at their posts, save a few wounded men who were cast aside as dead, but found strength to get away on the morrow. But the irregular levies fled, some of them on the horses of the slain men. Yet even in this last moment, they knew how to revenge themselves on their conquerors. The Normans, ignorant of the country, pursued in the dark. The English were thus able to draw them to the dangerous place behind the hill, where not a few Normans were slain. But the Duke himself came back to the hill, pitched his tent there, held his midnight feast, and watched there with his host all night.

8. The Burial of Harold.—The next day, Sunday, the Duke went over the field, and saw to the burial of his own men. And the women of the neighbourhood came to beg the bodies of their kinsfolk and friends for burial. They were allowed to take them away to the neighbouring churches. But Duke William declared that, if the body of Harold was found, he, as a perjured man, excommunicated by the Pope, should not have Christian burial. Harold’s mother Gytha offered a vast sum—the weight in gold of the body, it was said—to be allowed to bury him at Waltham. But William refused, and bade one of his knights, William Malet by name, to bury him, without Christian rites, but otherwise with honour, under a cairn on the rocks of Hastings. Yet there was a tomb of King Harold at Waltham, and it was always said there that two of the canons, who had followed Harold to the place, asked for his body, that, when they could not tell it for his wounds, they called in the help of a woman named Edith, whom he had loved before he was King, and that she knew it by a mark. They were then allowed to bury him at Waltham. The truth most likely is that King Harold’s body fared very much as we know that Earl Waltheof’s body fared ten years later. That is, he was first of all buried on the rocks, but afterwards William, now King, relented and allowed him to be buried in his own church. Anyhow there can be no doubt that Harold died in the battle, as all the writers who lived at the time, both Norman and English, say distinctly. But, as often happens in such cases, there afterwards grew up a tale which said that he was not killed, but only badly wounded, that he was carried off alive, and lived for many years, dying at last as a hermit at Chester. The like is told of Harold’s brother Gyrth; but there is no reason to believe either tale.

9. Effects of the Battle.—It must be well understood that this great victory did not make Duke William King nor put him in possession of the whole land. He still held only part of Sussex, and the people of the rest of the kingdom showed as yet no mind to submit to him. If England had had a leader left like Harold or Gyrth, William might have had to fight as many battles as Cnut had, and that with much less chance of winning in the end. For a large part of England fought willingly on Cnut’s side, while William had no friends in England at all, except a few Norman settlers. William did not call himself King till he was regularly crowned more than two months later, and even then he had real possession only of about a third of the kingdom. It was more than three years before he had full possession of all. Still the great fight on Senlac none the less settled the fate of England. For after that fight William never met with any general resistance. He never had to fight another pitched battle against another wearer or claimant of the English crown. He was thus able to conquer the land bit by bit. How this came about we shall see in the next chapter. But it is very important not to make either too much or too little of the Battle of Senlac or Hastings. It did not make William either formally King or practically master of the kingdom. But, as things turned out, the result of the battle made it certain that he would become both sooner or later.

CHAPTER IX.
How Duke William became King.

1. The Election of Edgar.—After the great battle, Duke William is said to have expected that all England would at once bow to him. In this hope he was disappointed. For a full month after the battle, no one submitted to him except in the places where he actually showed himself with his army. The general mind of England was to choose another king and to carry on the war under him. But it was hard to know whom to choose. Harold’s brothers were dead; his sons were young, and it is not clear whether they were born in lawful wedlock. Edwin and Morkere had by this time reached London; but no one in southern England was the least likely to choose either of them. The only thing left to do was to choose young Edgar, the last of the old kingly house. The Wise Men in London therefore chose Edgar as king. He did one or two acts of kingly power; but he was never full king, as not being crowned. He would doubtless have been crowned at Christmas, had things turned out otherwise. When he was chosen, Edwin and Morkere withdrew their forces and went back to their own earldoms, taking their sister Ealdgyth, the widow of Harold, with them to Chester. They most likely thought, either that William would be satisfied with occupying the lands which had been held by Harold and his brothers, or else that they would be able to hold their own earldoms against him. By so doing, they destroyed the last chance of England, which was for the whole land to rally faithfully round Edgar. Southern England alone, weakened by the slaughter on Senlac, was quite unable to withstand William.