William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

It was clearly necessary to do something to relieve the prevailing tension, and the expedient chosen was characteristic of the time; the relics of the patron saint of the town were brought with great solemnity out of the church, and the casket which contained them was exhibited to receive the prayers and offerings of the duke and his army. The result was a convincing proof of the virtue of the bones of St. Valery; without further delay the south wind blew.[^[123]]

The same day saw the embarkation of the Norman army, the work being carried through as quickly as possible in evident fear that the wind might slip round again to its former quarter. Night was falling before all was ready, and before the duke, after a final visit to the church of St. Valery, had given his last orders on the Norman shore. It was important that the fleet should be prevented from scattering in the darkness, so each vessel was ordered to carry a light, a lantern of special power adorning the masthead of the duke’s own ship. With the same object it was directed that the fleet should anchor as soon as it was clear of the estuary of the Somme, and await further orders. Through the dead of night the fleet hung outside the harbour, and it was still dark when the expedition ventured out at last into the open waters of the Channel. The great body of the ships, each of which carried a heavy load of horses in addition to its freight of men-at-arms, was inevitably outstripped by the unimpeded galley which bore William to his destiny; and when the dawn began to break, the duke found himself out of sight of the rest of the fleet, and not yet within view of the English shore. In these circumstances William cast anchor and breakfasted “as it had been in his own hall,” says one of his companions; and, under the influence of the wine with which the Mora was well supplied, his spirits rose, the prospects of his enterprise seemed golden in the morning light, and he spoke words of encouragement to his companions. And at last the sailors reported that the rest of the fleet began to come in sight; the four ships which first appeared together upon the horizon grew more and more until the man on the look-out could be made by our imaginative informant to remark that the masts of the fleet showed like a forest upon the sea.[^[124]] Then the duke weighed anchor for the last time, and the south wind still holding carried him and his fleet into Pevensey bay at nine in the morning; the day being St. Michael’s Eve—by an appropriate chance, for the archangel was highly honoured in the Norman land.

William’s landing was entirely undisputed; the good luck which, as we have noticed, waited on his expedition in its diplomatic antecedents, attended its military details also. During the summer months, Harold, making what use he could of the antiquated military system of England, had called out the fyrd, and lined the south coast with troops, which, however helpless they might be in a pitched battle with the Norman chivalry, might have brought considerable inconvenience to William, if they had been in evidence at the moment of his landing. From May to September the Sussex coast in general, Hastings and Pevensey in particular, were guarded by the rural forces of the shire.[^[125]] At last, about the time when William was moving from the Dive to St. Valery, the patience and provisions of the fyrd gave out together; the rustics had been kept away from their homes for four times the customary period of service without anything happening, and they refused to stay on guard any longer. They probably would not have made any difference to the ultimate result in any case, nor need we blame Harold for being unable to keep them together; but the fact is another illustration of the hopeless inefficiency of the old English state. And then, one week before William’s landing, Harold had gathered the whole of such professional soldiers as England contained, and had spent them in the life-and-death struggle at Stamfordbridge. Harold Hardrada had fallen, but his overthrow had gone far to exhaust the military resources of England, and it was a shattered, if victorious, army which was resting with Harold Godwinson, at York, when a fugitive from Sussex arrived to tell that William of Normandy had landed, and that the south lay at his mercy.

William’s first movements in England were very deliberate. His immediate care was to fortify his position at Pevensey and so protect his fleet against surprise. At Pevensey, as afterwards at Lincoln, a line of Roman walling could be turned to account in the construction of a castle,[^[126]] which was run up in the course of the day; and having thus, like his Scandinavian ancestors, secured for himself a base of operations if events turned out ill, William marched to Hastings, which was to be his base of operations for the rest of the campaign.[^[127]] At Hastings, therefore, another castle was thrown up, the building, like nearly all the castles built during the twenty years which followed the Conquest, consisting merely of a mound, with wooden defences on the top and a ditch and one or more outer works below. Hastings is a point of departure for many roads; a fact which no doubt very largely accounts for William’s choice of the town as his headquarters; for it could easily be provisioned by supplies from the neighbouring country, and it lay very conveniently as a base for an attack on London.

The men of east Sussex were not long before they felt the pressure of the invading army. Most of the villages in the neighbourhood of Hastings are recorded in Domesday to have been “waste” at some period between the death of King Edward and 1066, and the connection between these signs of ravage and William’s camp at Hastings is sufficiently obvious. But it is not probable that William attempted any systematic harrying of this district such as that which three years afterwards he carried out with grim success in the country beyond the Humber; the Sussex villages, as a rule, had quite recovered their former prosperity by the date of the great survey. The passage of foraging parties over the land demanding provisions, which would be none too readily granted, and the other incidents of a medieval war of invasion, are enough to account for depreciation of the kind recorded. Harold himself, as he drew towards Hastings, left traces of his march in similar cases of temporary devastation, and there is no reason to suppose that William undertook a deliberate harrying of Sussex in order to provoke Harold to a general engagement.[^[128]]

THE BUILDING OF HASTINGS CASTLE FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

William, indeed, as yet can hardly have known the result of Stamfordbridge with any degree of certainty. Rumours of the great battle in the north would no doubt gradually filter down into Sussex during the week following the event, but for some days after his arrival at Hastings William cannot have ignored the possibility that it might be a Norwegian host which would ultimately appear upon the edge of the downs. Definite news, however, at some unspecified date, was brought to William by a message from an unexpected quarter.[^[129]] Robert, the son of Wymarc, a Breton knight, who in some unknown way could claim kindred with both William and Edward, had been “staller” or master of the horse to the latter, and had stood together with Harold and Stigand by the king’s deathbed. Whether he had actually been present at the battle of Stamfordbridge is uncertain; but shortly after the fight he sent a messenger to William to advise a speedy withdrawal to Normandy before something worse happened to him. The message ran that Harold had destroyed the huge forces of the king of Norway, himself the bravest man in the world, and that now, inspired by victory, he was turning upon the duke with a great and enthusiastic army. Rather unwisely Robert went on to add that the Normans were no match for the English, either in numbers or bravery, and that William, who had always shown himself discreet hitherto, would do well to retire at once, or at all events to keep within his fortifications and avoid a battle in the open field. To this well-meaning person William replied that his one desire was to come to blows with Harold, that although Robert’s advice might have been better expressed yet he thanked him for it, and that if he had with him but ten thousand instead of sixty thousand men[^[130]] he would never retire without wreaking vengeance on his enemy. It is not unlikely that Robert’s message was really inspired by Harold himself, and from one or two turns of expression in William’s reply we may perhaps gather that he suspected as much; although it might be thought that Harold, who had seen something of his rival in past years, cannot have had much hope of getting rid of him by mere intimidation. However this may be, it is interesting to find Robert, a prominent member of a class which has suffered much abuse because of an assumed lack of patriotism towards its adopted country, playing a part which so admirably saves his duty to his king and his kinsman alike.

We have two poetical accounts of the way in which the news of William’s landing was brought to Harold at York. Wace, the Norman poet of the twelfth century, tells how a Sussex “chevalier” heard the shouting of the “peasants and villeins” as the fleet drew in to the shore, and how, attracted by the noise, he came out, hid behind a hill and lay there until the work of disembarkation was over and the castle at Pevensey thrown up; then riding off with lance and sword, night and day, to York, to tell the king the news of what he had seen.[^[131]] Guy, bishop of Amiens, who wrote within a short time of the event, makes the news of the Norman arrival be borne by a rustic from Hastings, not Pevensey; and the details which are told to Harold relate to the devastation caused by the invaders near Hastings, not to the landing itself.[^[132]] Perhaps these two stories are not quite incompatible with each other; but we need not attempt to reconcile them here, in view of the undoubted fact that Harold was informed of William’s landing within some three days of the event.

At this crisis Harold acted with astonishing energy. Taking with him his faithful huscarles, a body sadly thinned by the battle of a few days before, he hurried southwards by way of Tadcaster, Lincoln, Stamford, and Huntingdon, the same route which in the reverse direction he had followed in the previous week; now as then drawing into his force the fyrd of the shires through which he passed. Edwin and Morcar were directed to raise the levies of their respective earldoms, and in their expected absence the government of the north was entrusted to Marleswegen, the sheriff of Lincolnshire,[^[133]] an Englishman who remains little more than a name in the narrative of the Conquest, but who, if Harold had triumphed at Hastings might probably have played an important part in the history of the following years. How far Harold really believed in the fidelity of the northern earls is uncertain; they had shown no overt signs of disaffection during the last months since he had married their sister. On the other hand, considering the long-standing rivalry between his house and theirs, and their probable share in the Northumbrian difficulties at the beginning of his reign, Harold was perhaps not altogether surprised that Edwin and Morcar, in the words of Florence of Worcester, “withdrew themselves and their men from the conflict.” With the best intentions they would have found it difficult to join him in time for the battle; it would not have been easy for them to raise the fyrd from all the shires between the Humber and the Tweed on the one part and between the fens and the Severn on the other, and to bring the troops to London within the five days which Harold spent there. For on October 11th,[^[134]] a fortnight after the battle of Stamfordbridge, Harold set out from London on his last march towards the Sussex downs.