Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

The Norman host has been called a horde of mailed robbers and cut-throats, eager only for plunder, and the Saxon army has been almost canonised as a band of heroes, gathered together to die in defence of their native land and their lawful king. Yet, strangely enough, the robbers and cut-throats spent the best part of the night confessing their sins and praying for victory, as well as in making the best dispositions to attain it. The patriots spent the same hours feasting and drinking, and swaggering to each other about the brave deeds they had done in the North and the greater things they were going to do on the morrow.

So the night passes, and the morning dawns grey and chill on the two now silent hosts. Then from the Norman ranks rises the solemn cadence of the Te Deum, and as this dies away the archers move out—forerunners of those stout yeomen whose clothyard shafts were one day to win Creçy and Agincourt. Then come the footmen with their long pikes, and after them the mailed and mounted knights, in front of whom rides Taillefer—Iron-Cutter and Minstrel—tossing his sword into the air and catching it, and singing the while the Song of Roland and Roncesvalles. As the archers and pikemen spread out in skirmishing order he sets spurs to his horse and charges at the Saxon line. He kills two men, and then goes down under the battle-axe of a third.

Then the arrows flew fast and thick, and charge after charge was made upon the palisades of stakes that fenced the Saxon position, high above which floated the Dragon Standard of Wessex and the banner of the Fighting Man.

But the double-bladed Saxon axes were no playthings, and they were swung by strong and strenuous arms, and every time the Norman front came up to the breastwork it was hewn down in swathes by the deep-biting blades. The arrows fell blunted and broken on the big Saxon shields and stout Saxon armour, and so Duke William, with that ever-ready resource of his, bade his archers shoot up into the air, and then down from the grey sky there fell a rain of whirring, steel-pointed shafts, one of which, winged by Fate, struck gallant Harold in the eye—doubtless as he was looking up wondering at this new manœuvre—and, piercing his brain, laid him lifeless in the midst of his champions.

DUKE WILLIAM ROARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE.

Soon after this a cry went up that Duke William too was dead, and he, hearing this, tore off his helmet—a somewhat unsafe thing to do in such a fight—and roared out that he was alive, swearing—as usual by the Splendour of God—that the land of England should yet be his by nightfall.

So they laid on again. William’s horse went down under a pike-thrust. He clove the pike-man to the chin and asked one of his knights to lend him his horse. The knight refused, thinking more of his skin than his loyalty, whereupon William pitched him out of the saddle, swung himself up, and led another charge against the ever-dwindling ring of heroes who were still hammering away with their battle-axes—and this time the stout line wavers and breaks; the mail-clad warriors pour up the slope, shouting that the day is won; axe and sword ring loud and fast on helm and mail, the Saxons reel back, closing round the body of their king and the staff of his banner.

“Dex aide! Dex aide! Ha-Rou! Ha-Rou!” Duke William’s men yell and roar again as they scramble over heaps of mangled corpses filling the trenches and blocking the breaches in the palisades. Another moment or two of brief, bitter, and bloody struggle and the last Saxon ring breaks and melts away, and Hastings and England are won.

What followed is history so familiar that few words more from me will suffice. What Duke William had done in his own land he did after the same methods in the land that had been the Saxons’. Cruel, bloody, and savage they were beyond all doubt, but it is a question whether, even in the doing, they were more disastrous than the ferocious anarchy and the unceasing plunder and outrage and murder that had disgraced the weak and divided rule of the Saxon kings. In their effect they were a thousandfold better. Duke William believed that order was Heaven’s first law, and, by whatever means he had at hand, he was honestly determined to make it earth’s as well. And he succeeded, which after all is not an unsatisfactory test of honest merit. How well he did so let us ask, not one of his own chroniclers or troubadours, but the man who wrote the story of his own conquered people, and this is what he will tell us: