In the early part of 1066, but most probably after the termination of William’s cause at Rome, a council of the Norman baronage met at Lillebonne[[105]] to discuss the proposed invasion of England. It is plain that what most exercised the minds of William and his barons was the difficulty of building, equipping and manning a number of ships sufficient for the transport of the army within a reasonable time. In fact it seems probable that one special purpose of the council was to ascertain the number of ships which each baron was prepared to contribute towards the fleet—a matter which lay altogether outside the general question of military service and could only be solved by amicable agreement between the duke and his vassals taken individually. William stipulated that the ships should be ready within the year; a demand which to some at least appeared impossible of fulfilment; and, indeed, the creation of an entire fleet of transport vessels within six months is a wonderful illustration of the energy with which the Norman nobility adopted the cause of the duke. Transport vessels the ships were, and nothing else, as is evident from the representation of them in the Bayeux tapestry, and we are bound to conclude that it was well for William that his passage of the Channel met with no serious opposition on the part of Harold. As might be expected, the number of ships actually provided is very variously given by different writers. Curiously enough the most probable, because the lowest, estimate is made by a very late authority, the Norman poet Wace, who says that when he was a boy his father told him that six hundred and ninety-six ships assembled at St. Valery. There have also come down to us several statements of the contribution which the greater barons of Normandy made to the fleet, which are probably true in substance although the lists differ among themselves and the totals which they imply exceed the modest figures presented by Wace.[[106]] It would appear that William’s two half-brothers headed the list; Robert of Mortain giving a hundred and twenty ships, Odo of Bayeux a hundred. The counts of Evreux and Eu, both members of the ducal family, furnished eighty and sixty ships respectively. William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Beaumont, Roger de Montgomery, and Hugh d’Avranches gave sixty ships each; Hugh de Montfort, fifty. Two men who do not appear in the subsequent history, a certain Fulk the Lame and one Gerald, who, although styled the seneschal, is difficult to identify at William’s court, gave forty ships each. Thirty ships were given by Walter Giffard and by Vulgrin, bishop of Le Mans; and Nicholas, abbot of St. Ouen, and the son of Duke Richard III. contributed twenty. An interesting figure in the list is Remi, the future bishop of Lincoln, who in 1066 was only almoner of Fécamp abbey, but nevertheless provided a ship and manned it with twenty knights. The Duchess Matilda herself supplied the ship, named the Mora, which was to carry her husband. One fact stands out clearly enough on the surface of this list—the great bulk of the fleet was supplied by William’s kinsmen and by men whom we know to have enjoyed his immediate confidence, and it is significant that we can recognise in this brief account just those men who received the greatest spoils of the conquered land. Among these few names the future earldoms of Kent, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Chester, Buckingham, Warwick, and Leicester are represented. Doubtless the rest of the Norman nobility in one way or another contributed in proportion to its wealth, but we have just accounted for nearly eight hundred vessels, and it is clear that in the all-important matter of the fleet William found his fullest support among his relatives and personal friends.
How far this statement would hold good in relation to the army of the Conquest is a question which we have no detailed means of answering. Doubtless the lords of Montfort, Longueville, Montgomery, and their fellows brought the full complement of their vassals to the duke’s muster, but the essential fact in the composition of William’s army lies in the width of the area from which it was recruited. From every quarter of the French kingdom, and from not a few places beyond its borders, volunteers crowded in to swell the Norman host. Brittany supplied the largest number of such volunteers, and next to Brittany came Flanders, but the fame of William’s expedition had spread beyond the Alps, and the Norman states in South Italy and Sicily sent their representatives.[[107]] And this composite character of the army which fought at Hastings had deep and abiding results. A hundred years after the Conquest, Henry II. will still be sending out writs addressed to his barons and lieges “French and English,” and the terminology here expresses a fact of real importance. The line of racial distinction which was all-important in later eleventh-century England was not between Englishmen and Normans, but between Englishmen and Frenchmen. England fell, not before any province, however powerful, of the French kingdom, but, in effect, before the whole of French-speaking Europe, and, by her fall, she herself became part of that whole. For nearly a hundred years England had been oscillating between the French and the Scandinavian world; the events of 1066 carried her finally within the influence of Southern ideas in religion, politics, and culture.
The French auxiliaries of William have often been described as adventurers, and adventurers in a sense no doubt they were. But the word should not be pressed so as to imply that they belonged to a social rank inferior either to their Norman associates or to the English thegnhood whom they were to displace,—there should be no talk of “grooms and scullions from beyond the sea”[[108]] in this connection. Socially there was little to distinguish a knight or noble from Brittany or Picardy from Normans like Robert d’Oilly or Henry de Ferrers; nor, rude as their ideas of comfort and refinement must seem to us, have we any warrant for supposing that Wigod of Wallingford or Tochi the son of Outi had been in advance of either in this respect. Like the Normans themselves the Frenchmen varied indefinitely in point of origin. Some of them were the younger sons of great houses, some belonged to the lesser baronage, some to the greater; Count Eustace of Bologne might by courtesy be described as a reigning prince. Some of the most famous names in the succeeding history can be traced to this origin—Walter Tirel was lord of Poix in Ponthieu, Gilbert of Ghent was the ancestor of the medieval earls of Lincoln. But the best way of realising the prevalence of this non-Norman element among the conquerors of England is to work through one of the schedules which the compilers of Domesday Book prefixed to the survey of each county, giving the names of its land-owners, and to note the proportion of “Frenchmen” to pure Normans. In Northamptonshire, for example, among forty-three lay tenants there occur six Flemings, three Bretons, and two Picards, and Northamptonshire in this respect is a typical county.
At or about the time of the council of Lillebonne there is reason to believe that messages were passing between William and Harold concerning the fulfilment of the fateful oath. It is fairly certain that William demanded the surrender of the crown and Harold’s immediate marriage to his daughter, agreeing in return to confirm him in his earldom of Wessex, which last is probably what is meant when our rhetorical informants tell us that William promised to grant half the kingdom to his rival. Such negotiations were bound to fall through; Harold had gone too far to withdraw, even if he had been so minded, and William’s object in making these proposals could only have been to maintain in the eyes of the world the appearance of a lawful claimant deprived of his inheritance. Also we may be quite sure that the building of the fleet was not interrupted during the progress of the negotiations.
The difficulties of Harold’s reign began early. The weakness of his position was revealed at the outset by the refusal of Northumbria to accept him as king, a refusal very possibly prompted by Earl Morcar, who could not be expected to feel much loyalty towards the new dynasty. By making a special journey to York, Harold succeeded in silencing the opposition for the moment, and his marriage with Ealdgyth, the sister of Earls Edwin and Morcar, which may be dated with probability to about this time,[[109]] was very possibly intended to conciliate the great midland house. It would certainly serve as a definite assertion that Harold had no intention of fulfilling that part of his oath to William which pledged him to a marriage with the duke’s daughter, nor can we doubt that Harold realised the expediency of providing an heir to his crown with the least possible delay. At any rate he seems to have been enjoying a few weeks of tranquillity after his visit to York when he received an unmistakable intimation of the coming storm, which was none the less ominous because its immediate results were insignificant.
Tostig, the dispossessed earl of Northumbria, had spent the winter of 1065–6, as we have seen, with Baldwin of Flanders,[[110]] a fact which is suggestive when we remember the relations between Baldwin and William of Normandy. It is evident that Tostig was spending the period of his banishment in forming schemes for his restoration, and the fact that his brother on becoming king dare not or would not recall him made him inevitably a willing tool of William’s policy. Accordingly, early in 1066 Tostig moved from Flanders into Normandy, appeared at the duke’s court, and urged him on to an invasion of England. It is quite possible that he was present at the assembly of Lillebonne; one writer goes so far as to say that the arguments of Tostig contributed largely to persuade the Norman nobility to undertake the enterprise,[[111]] and William may have derived some little advantage from the fact that he could point to one man of high rank among the English nation as an adherent. But it would seem that Tostig was unwilling to await the development of his host’s plans, and in May he set off from the Cotentin on an expedition of his own intended to ravage the English coasts. He landed first in the Isle of Wight, where the inhabitants bought him off with money and provisions, and then sailed, ravaging the coast of Sussex and Kent, until he came to Sandwich. At Sandwich he raised a small force of sailors, but at the same time the news of his expedition was brought to his brother in London, who at once set out for the Kentish coast. Before he could reach Sandwich, however, Tostig had started northward again and finally entered the Humber with sixty ships, harrying the coast of Lindsey. Upon receiving the news Earls Edwin and Morcar, having called out the local fyrd, marched with it to the Humber and compelled Tostig to take refuge in his ships. At this point Tostig was deserted by the men of Sandwich whom he had impressed, and, his fleet being now reduced to twelve ships, he made his way to Scotland and spent the summer, we are told, with King Malcolm.[[112]]
Tostig’s futile raid has an interest of its own in the glimpse which it gives us of the English defences just before the Norman invasion. The evidence of Domesday Book shows that an Anglo-Saxon king had some sort of naval force permanently at his disposal, and we know that Harold built and manned a number of ships to keep the Channel against his Norman rival, but, from whatever cause, the English navy in this critical year proved itself miserably ineffective.[[113]] A mere adventurer, with no foreign aid of any consequence and no local support in England, Tostig could still spread devastation with impunity along half the English coast. The story of Tostig’s expedition reads like a revival of one of the Danish raids of the ninth century—the enemy sacks a town, the fyrd are summoned and hurry to the spot to find that the raiders have just left to plunder the nearest unprotected locality. Clearly the coast defences of England, for all the bitter experience of the Danish wars, had made no real advance since the days of Alfred, and it is not unfair to remark that this fact reflects little credit upon the statesmanship of Harold. He had himself been an exile and had made a bid for power by a piratical descent upon England very similar to the present expedition of Tostig’s. If he really possessed the power, during the last ten years of the Confessor’s reign, with which he is usually credited, it should not have been impossible for him to create a naval force strong enough to counteract such attempts for the future. The events of 1066 are an excellent illustration of the influence of sea power in history; wind and weather permitting, an invader could land an army in England at whatever time and place best suited him. As for Tostig himself, his expedition had been ignominious enough, but before the year was out he was to earn immortality by his association with the last great Scandinavian invasion of England and by the part which he is made to play in the magnificent saga of Stamfordbridge.
The summer visit of Tostig to Scotland must have been interrupted by another voyage of greater distance and followed by most momentous consequences. Very possibly he was dissatisfied with the amount of immediate support which his claims had received from William of Normandy; at all events he now made application to a prince of higher rank, more restless spirit, and still more varied experience in the art of war. Although there are chronological difficulties in the story which cannot be discussed here, there can be little real doubt that Tostig in person sailed to Norway, was received by Harold Hardrada, and incited the most warlike king in Europe to an invasion of England. As a matter of fact it is probable that Harold Hardrada, like William of Normandy, would have made his attempt even if Tostig had never come upon the scene; the passage of the English crown to a subject house, coming at a time when there was a temporary lull in the chronic warfare between the three Scandinavian powers, might remind the king of Norway that he could himself, if he chose, put forward a decent pretext for an adventure which would be certain to bring him fame and might rival the exploits of Swegen and Cnut.[[114]] The extent of the preparations which Harold Hardrada had evidently made for his enterprise would of itself suggest that they were independent of the representations of the banished earl of Northumbria, while on the other hand Tostig plays too prominent a part in the Norwegian traditions of the expedition for us to reject his voyage to Norway as mere myth, and his presence may have had some influence in determining the objective of the invaders when once they had touched the shores of England.
After making his appeal to Harold Hardrada, Tostig returned to Scotland and began to raise a force of volunteers there on his own account. Early in September the king of Norway set sail from the Sogne Fiord near Bergen, due west to the subject earldom of the Orkneys and Shetlands, where he was joined by Paul and Erling, the two joint earls, and by a large reinforcement of the islanders.[[115]] From the Orkneys Harold sailed on without recorded incident as far as the Tyne, where he was joined, according to agreement, by Tostig with his Scottish auxiliaries, and then the combined force made for the Yorkshire coast and began offensive operations by a harrying of Cleveland. Passing southward the invaders encountered an ineffectual resistance at Scarborough and along the coast of Holderness, but were able to round Spurn Head without any opposition from the English fleet. The Humber and the inland waters of Yorkshire lay open to Harold, and it would seem that as the Norwegian fleet sailed up the Ouse the English fleet retreated up the Wharfe, for Harold chose to disembark at Riccall, a village some five miles below the confluence of these rivers. Riccall was chosen as the headquarters of the fleet, which could easily block at this point any attempt on the part of the English vessels to break out to the open sea while Harold and his army marched straight on York. At Fulford, two miles from the city, the invaders met the fyrd of Yorkshire under Earls Edwin and Morcar, and the defeat of the local force led to the surrender of York four days afterwards. The city was not put to the sack; hostages[[116]] were exchanged between Harold and the men of York, and it was very possibly to await the delivery of further sureties from the rest of the shire that the king moved out of his new conquest to the otherwise undistinguished village of Stamfordbridge.
On the following day King Harold of England himself arrived at York. News of what was happening in Yorkshire must have been brought to London with extraordinary rapidity, for the battles of Fulford and Stamfordbridge were fought, as men remarked at the time, within five days of each other. Harold possessed the permanent nucleus of an army in the famous body of “huscarles” who resided at his court, and with them he dashed up the great road from London to York, taking along with him so much of the local militia of the counties through which he passed as happened to fall in with his line of march. At Tadcaster, where the north road crosses the Wharfe, he found and inspected the English “fleet,” and on Monday, the 25th of September, one day after Harold Hardrada had entered the capital of Northumbria, it opened its gates to Harold of England. At this time Harold can have done scarcely more than pass through the city for the same day he covered the ten miles which separate York from Stamfordbridge and fell unexpectedly upon the Norwegian army scattered in utter unpreparedness along either bank of the Derwent. The Norwegians on the right, or York, bank of the Derwent were driven into the river by the English attack, and then occurred a strange incident of which the record, curiously enough, is only preserved in the chronicle of the distant monastery of Abingdon. It was essential for the English to get possession of the bridge which spanned the unfordable river before the Norwegians on the left bank should have time to form up in line of battle, and we are told: