It is an interesting, but not very profitable, speculation how far Harold was justified in staking his all upon the result of a single battle with the invader. With our knowledge of what happened it is natural to condemn him; he was condemned by the general opinion of the historians of the next generation, and very possibly their sentence is right. On the other hand we cannot but feel that we know very little of the real facts of the case; even the essential question of the relative numbers of the English and Norman armies cannot be answered with any degree of accuracy. It may be argued with much plausibility that the wisest course for Harold would have been to let William work his will upon the unfortunate inhabitants of Sussex, trusting to time and the national feeling likely to be aroused by the ravages of an invader to bring an overwhelming superiority in numbers over to his side. This, we may be sure, would have been the course taken by William himself in such a case, but Harold was probably by nature incapable of playing a waiting game of this kind. His ability, so far as we can tell, lay in sudden assaults and surprises; the more deliberate processes of generalship were foreign to his temperament. And then there remains the fact that the loyalty of Mercia and Northumbria was at least doubtful; delay on Harold’s part might only mean that Edwin and Morcar with their forces would have time to come over effectively to William’s side, while another great victory so soon after Stamfordbridge would have placed Harold in a position from which, for the time being, he could defy all rivals. At any rate he took the step, and paid the penalty of failure.
But, whatever we may think of the general wisdom of Harold’s strategy, it is impossible to deny that he showed a general’s appreciation of the tactical possibilities of the ground on which he chose to put the fate of England to the test. After a forced march through the thick woods which at that time covered the Sussex downs, the king halted his army on a barren ridge of ground seven miles north-east of the town of Hastings. It is plain from all the narratives of the forthcoming encounter that the ridge in question was quite unoccupied at the time of the battle; and when the English chroniclers wish to describe its site they can only tell us that Harold and William came together “by the hoar apple-tree.”[[135]] The strength of the position was determined, not so much by the general elevation of the ground, which at no point reaches a greater height than 300 feet above sea level, as by the fact that it was surrounded by country very hilly and much broken by streams, and that its physical features lent natural support to the disposition of an army which relied for success on its capacity for stolid resistance. The position was undoubtedly chosen by Harold with the object of forcing his enemy to an immediate battle; for William could not move either east or west from Hastings without exposing his base to an English attack; and Harold, who knew that the main strength of a Norman army lay in its troops of mailed horsemen, had been careful to offer battle on a site in which the cavalry arm would be placed by the ground at a natural disadvantage.[[136]]
From the nature of the case it has come about that we possess very little information either as to the numbers of the English army or as to the details of its formation on the day of battle. The Norman writers, on whom we are compelled to rely, have naturally exaggerated the former, nor did any survivor from the English army describe the order of its battle array to the chroniclers of Worcester or Peterborough. In recent studies of the great battle there is manifested a strong unwillingness to allow to either the English or the Norman host more than a small proportion of the numbers which used to be assigned to it thirty years ago.[[137]] It is very improbable that William led more than 6000 men into action on October 15, 1066, and there is good reason for doubting whether the knightly portion of his army can have exceeded 5000. Small as this last number may appear, every man included in it was an efficient combatant; but the English force was largely composed of rustics impressed from the shires through which Harold had rushed on his great march from York to London after the battle of Stamfordbridge, and even so, it is far from certain that the native force was materially stronger than the army of invasion. With regard to its distribution, we know that the English line of battle seemed convex to the Normans on their approach from the south-east,[[138]] and it is probable that it ran for some 800 yards along the hill of battle, the flanks being thrown well back so as to rest upon the steep bank which bounds the ridge towards the north. It is certain that the English troops were drawn up in extremely close order, and it is a natural assumption that Harold would place the kernel of his army, the huscarles who had survived Stamfordbridge, in the front rank; stationing his inferior troops in the rear so as to support the huscarles in resisting the impact of the Norman cavalry.[[139]] On the highest point of the whole line, a spot now marked by the high altar of the Abbey church of Battle, Harold planted his standard; and it was round the standard that the fight was most stoutly contested, and that, after seven hours of struggle, the king at last fell.
In speaking of the generalship displayed by Harold’s rival on this occasion, it is important to beware of the associations aroused by modern military terminology. At least if we speak of him as a strategist or tactician, we should be careful to remember that strategy and tactics themselves had attained to but a rudimentary stage of development in Northern Europe in the eleventh century. Recent studies of the battle of Hastings, the one fight of the period in regard to which we possess a considerable amount of detailed information, have brought out the fact that William’s host was far too stiff and unwieldy a body to perform the complicated evolutions by which it used to be assumed that the day was won.[[140]] We should be committing a grave error if we were to suppose that the Norman army possessed that mobility and capacity for concerted action among its several divisions which belonged to the forces led by Turenne or Marlborough. Feudal battles were determined more by the event of simple collisions of large masses of men than by their manœuvres when in the field: the skill of a great feudal captain lay chiefly in his ability to choose his ground so as to give his side the preliminary advantage in the shock of battle; apart from the example of his personal valour he had but little influence upon the subsequent fortunes of the day. On the present occasion William was compelled to fight on the ground of his opponent’s choice; and this initial disadvantage cost the Norman leader an indefinite number of his best troops, and, even after the issue of the battle had been decided, protracted the English resistance until nightfall had put an end to the struggle. On the other hand, there was one fatal weakness in the English host which must have been recognised by the other side already before the fight had begun. The fact that Harold, for all effective purposes, was totally unprovided with either archers or cavalry exposed his army to a method of attack which he was quite unable to parry, and the arrangement of the Norman line of battle shows that William from the first relied for success on this advantage. The battle of Hastings was won by the combination of archery and cavalry against infantry whose one chance of success lay in the possibility that it might keep its formation unbroken until the strength of the offensive had been exhausted.[[141]]
THE DEATH OF HAROLD
(FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY)]
In the early morning of the 14th of October the Norman army moved out of Hastings and advanced across the seven miles of broken country which lay between the English army and the sea. The march must have been a toilsome business, and the rapidity with which it was accomplished is remarkable.[[142]] At the point marked by the modern village of Telham, the road from Hastings to Battle passes over a hill which rises to some 350 feet above sea-level, and commands a view of the English position. On the far side of this hill it is probable that William halted, waited for his scattered troops to come together, and then drew them out in order of battle. In his first line he placed his light-armed infantry, who probably formed a very inconsiderable portion of his army, and were unprovided with defensive harness. To these inferior troops succeeded infantry of a higher class, protected by armour, but, like the light-armed skirmishers in the front rank, armed only with bows and arrows and slings. The function of the infantry in the coming encounter was to harass the English with their missiles and tempt them to break their ranks. Lastly came the main body of the Norman army, the squadrons of cavalry, on whom it rested to attack the English line after it had been shaken by the missiles of the previous ranks.[[143]] The whole army was further arranged in three great divisions, the native Normans composing the centre, the Bretons, under the command of Alan, son of Count Éon of Penthievre, forming the left wing, and the French volunteers the right.[[144]] In the centre of the whole line of advance, the Norman counterpart of the English standard, there was borne the consecrated banner which William had received from the pope.[[145]]
So quickly had the march from Hastings been made that the actual fighting was opened at about nine in the morning[[146]] by an advance of the Norman foot. Galled by a heavy fire from the archers, which could only be answered very ineffectively by the spears and stones which were almost the sole missile weapons of the English, numbers of the native troops broke away from their line, in defiance of the strict orders issued by Harold to the effect that no man should leave his post. In the meantime, the Norman cavalry had been steadily making its way to the front in order to take immediate advantage of the disorder caused in the English ranks by the fire of the archers. But the knights could only move their horses slowly up the hill; the solidity of the English formation had not been seriously affected as yet, and the cavalry were compelled to attack an unbroken line. The result was disaster. The Breton auxiliaries on the left fell back, the confusion spread rapidly, and the English, seizing their advantage, sallied forth and drove the entire Norman line before them in headlong flight down the hill.[[147]] Fortunately William had not joined in this first attack in person, and when in their panic the Normans believed that their leader had fallen, they were soon recalled to their senses by the sight of the duke with bared head, laying about him with his spear, and shouting words of reproof and encouragement.[[148]] Mounted as they were, the flying knights could have but little difficulty in outstripping their pursuers, but, if we may trust the Bayeux tapestry, a number of English and Normans perished together in the course of the flight, by falling into a deep depression in the ground situated somewhere between the base of the hill and the duke’s post. According to the same authority, the bishop of Bayeux did good service at this moment, restoring order among the baggage-carriers and camp-followers, who were apparently becoming infected with the panic which had seized their masters.[[149]] Between the duke and his brother, the flight was checked, and then the knights, eager to avenge their disgrace, rallied, turned, and cut off their pursuers from their comrades on the hill, making a wholesale slaughter of them.[[150]] Mainly through William’s self-possession the Norman rout had ended after all in a distinct success gained for his side.
As soon as the cavalry had re-formed, the attack on the English position was resumed; this time under the immediate leadership of the duke. The struggle at the foot of the hill had given its defenders time to close their ranks, and the English continued to present an impenetrable front to the Norman cavalry. All along the line a desperate struggle raged for some hours, but of its details no tale can be told, although it is probable that it was at this point in the battle that Gyrth and Leofwine, Harold’s brothers, fell, and there is good reason for believing that the former was struck down by the hand of the duke himself. William, indeed, in all our authorities is represented as the life and soul of the attack, “more often calling to his men to come on than bidding them advance” says William of Poitiers; he had three horses killed under him before the day was over, and he did all that might be done by a feudal captain to keep his troops together and to inspire them by his example. But notwithstanding his exertions it is evident that the English were more than holding their own,[[151]] and a second repulse suffered thus late in the day by the Norman cavalry would almost certainly have passed into a rout of the whole army. At this crisis it occurred to some cunning brain, whether that of the duke or another, that it might be possible by feigning flight to tempt the English troops to break their formation, and then, by turning on suitable ground, to repeat the success which had ended the real flight in the forenoon. The movement was easily carried out; a body of Normans rode away, and a crowd of Englishmen, regardless of everything except the relief from the immediate strain of keeping their ranks, hurled themselves down the hill shouting curses and cries of victory. No discipline could have been kept under the circumstances, and when the galloping knights suddenly spread out their line, wheeled around their horses, and surrounded the disordered mob of their pursuers the latter were ridden down and cut to pieces by scores.[[152]]
