However this may be, on the morning of Saturday, October 14, Harold’s army was drawn up in line on the ridge now crowned by the abbey and town of Battle, and William’s army, having marched forth that morning from Hastings, confronted them on the hill which now bears the name of Telham. As for the battlefield itself, the chronicler, as we have seen, calls it “the Hoar Apple Tree”; one Norman historian, Orderic, calls it Senlac or Epiton, but it will probably always be best known by the name which is, of course, only approximately correct, the battlefield of Hastings. There is no evidence that there was even a village there when the battle was fought. The position of Harold’s army was on a hill of moderate height, 260 feet above the sea level, so surrounded by narrow valleys, which might almost be called ravines, as to make it singularly difficult of approach by cavalry. In order to render it yet more secure against such an attack, Harold had, according to one writer,[251] strengthened it by a fence or palisade as well as by a fosse drawn, perhaps somewhat lower down, right across the field.
As to the numbers engaged on each side we have no information that is worth anything, only absurd and exaggerated estimates, especially on the part of the Norman writers concerning the size of the English army. As a mere conjecture, founded on the dimensions of the battlefield, there is something plausible in the suggestion[252] of 10,000 to 15,000 as the number of William’s soldiers, and the same or a little less for those of Harold. There cannot be much doubt that the quality of the invading troops was superior to that of the defenders. William’s men were Normans, trained and seasoned by twenty years of fighting, supplemented by brave adventurers, with whom war was probably a regular profession, drawn from all parts of France. The backbone of Harold’s army was doubtless his bodyguard of house-carls, terribly thinned by the fierce fight at Stamford Bridge, and these were reinforced by the peasants of the fyrd, brave men but little used to arms and hastily summoned from the neighbouring counties. Still they had the advantage, such as it was, of standing on the defensive in a position which had evidently been chosen with considerable military skill.
The chief weapon of the Normans was the sword, of the English the great two-handed battle-axe, the use of which was borrowed from their Danish antagonists. Both sides seem to have been armed with lances, and the best troops in both armies were clothed in long coats of mail, which were wanting, however, to the peasants of the English fyrd. The long kite-shaped shield, covering the greater part of the person, was carried by both nations, but the English were perhaps superior in the defensive tactics of the shield-wall, formed by men standing close together, shoulder to shoulder, and locking their shields into what the classically educated Norman writers called a testudo. On the other hand, William was evidently much the stronger in archers and in cavalry, and it was this superiority which eventually won for him the victory. The Normans fought of course under the standard blessed by the Pope, the Saxons under the well-known Dragon-banner of Wessex, and another which was perhaps of Harold’s own devising and which bore the likeness of a full-armed fighting man. On the English side we hear of no leaders besides Harold and his two brothers, Gyrth, Earl of East Anglia, and Leofwine, Earl of Essex and Kent, both of whom seem to have fallen early in the battle. The lack of a strong lieutenant, who could have taken the direction of the defence when the king fell, had probably something to do with the issue of the fight. On the Norman side, as we might expect, the names of many leaders are given us, but we need only notice here William’s half-brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (son of the tanner’s daughter), who salved his episcopal conscience by fighting with a heavy mace instead of with a sword, thus hoping to avoid the actual shedding of blood; Count Eustace of Boulogne, the hero of the flight from Dover; and William Fitz-Osbern, the faithful friend of the Norman duke as his father had been before him.
We may pass over the account of the messages which are said to have been exchanged between the two rival chiefs, including a proposition by Duke William that, to save the effusion of Christian blood, they should settle their differences by single combat; and we may also pass over the story of the diverse ways in which the two armies spent the night before the battle, the English in song and revelry, crying “Wassail” and “Drink to me”; the Normans in confessing their sins and receiving absolution from the numerous priests who accompanied the army. Thus we come to the morning of Saturday, October 14, at nine A.M., when, as before said, the two armies stood fronting one another in battle array. As to the positions of the various divisions of the English army, we have no sufficient indication, except that we are told that the men of Kent claimed the right to march in the van, and strike the first blow in the battle, and that the Londoners made a similar claim to guard the person of the king, being grouped round his standard which was planted in the centre of the ridge. As to William’s army, we are told that he put in his first line his archers (apparently light armed), in his second his mail-clad infantry, and in a third, behind them all, he ranged his cavalry. Moreover, there was in each of these lines another threefold division according to nationalities: the Normans in the centre, the Bretons on the left, and the Frenchmen (the men from the central regions of France) on the right.
The prelude to the battle was a romantic incident which showed that the day of chivalry had dawned. A minstrel—or as one narrator calls him, an actor—named Taillefer craved of Duke William the boon of striking the first blow. He had sung on the march some staves of the great Song of Roland, describing the death of that hero and of Olivier in the gorge of Roncesvalles, and now he pranced forth before the duke—
On the rough edge of battle ere it joined.
He took his lance by the butt-end as if it had been a truncheon, threw it in the air and caught it by the head. Three times he did this and then he hurled it into the hostile ranks and wounded an Englishman. Then, after repeating this performance with his sword, while the amazed English looked on as at a feat of conjuring, he set spurs to his horse and galloped fiercely towards the ranks of the foe. One Englishman he sorely wounded and one he slew, and then a cloud of darts and javelins was hurled at him and the bold minstrel fell down dead.
For six hours the battle which was now joined raged with nearly equal fortune on both sides. No doubt the first rank of light-armed archers discharged their missiles, and the mailed foot-soldiers pressed forward to take advantage of any impression which they may have made on the hostile ranks; but also (if we may trust the Tapestry) even at this early period of the battle the cavalry were charging (uphill, of course) and dashing themselves against the English shield-wall. So far, on the whole, they dashed themselves in vain, though already thus early in the fight Gyrth and Leofwine seem to have fallen. At length the Norman horsemen, recoiling from a fruitless charge, tumbled into a fosse, ever after known as the Malfosse, which they had scarcely noticed in their advance, and rolled over and over in dire confusion, hundreds of them lying a crushed and helpless mass on the plain. Some of the English who were pursuing shared the same fate; and one of the most spirited pictures in the Tapestry shows how “Here the English and French fell together”. This disaster had very nearly proved the ruin of the invading army, for the large body of varlets or camp followers stationed in the rear to guard the harness, or stores and baggage of the troops, seeing what had befallen their masters, were about to quit the field in headlong flight, and such a movement might well have spread panic through the ranks of the army. But then Bishop Odo of Bayeux, wielding his big mace, and with a coat of mail over his alb, shouted out words of encouragement and reproof, and stayed the panic of the varlets. About the same time apparently, and under the influence of the same panic-fear, a rumour spread through the ranks that William himself was slain. He had indeed three horses killed under him in the long and dreadful struggle, but, as far as we know, he received no wound at any time, and now lifting up the nose-piece of his helmet he showed his full face to his followers whose confidence was at once restored.
As has been said, for six hours the battle hung doubtful. From three o’clock onwards victory began to incline to the Norman side, chiefly owing to two manœuvres, the credit of both of which is assigned to William personally. In the first place, finding himself otherwise unable to break the terrible shield-wall, he took a hint from the disaster of the Malfosse itself, and ordered his followers to feign flight. After men have long stood on the defensive, galled by missiles from afar, the temptation to believe that the victory is won and that they may charge a flying foe is doubtless immense. At any rate Harold’s troops yielded to it, apparently more than once, and each time when pursuers and pursued had reached the plain, the Normans turned and their cavalry encircled and destroyed numbers of the English. The other manœuvre was, we are told, an order given to the archers to shoot high up into the sky, so that their arrows might fall from on high on some unshielded part of their enemies’ persons. Perhaps we have here another illustration of the fact that, for a conflict with missile weapons, it is not all gain to occupy a position on a hill. This is what the Scots learned to their cost in 1402 at Homildon Hill and the English in 1881 at Majuba. At any rate it seems to have been by this change of tactics that the decisive blow was struck. It was by an arrow falling from on high that Harold’s right eye was pierced. The wound was mortal and the king fell to the ground. Whatever life may have been left in him was extinguished by four Norman knights (one of them the hateful Eustace of Boulogne) who not only slew but mutilated their fallen foe.
The English seem still to have fought on for some time after the death of their king, but without purpose or discipline. The Normans were not disposed to give quarter, and apparently the greater number of the mail-clad house-carls fell where they had been fighting. The lighter-armed men of the fyrd fled, and, according to one account, their pursuers followed them into a part of the field where, from the broken nature of the ground and the abundance of ditches, their own ranks—they were evidently mounted warriors—fell into some confusion, and seeing this the fugitives made a rally. Owing probably to the fading light William and his comrades believed this to be a movement of fresh troops brought up against them. They halted, and Eustace of Boulogne counselled retreat, but a blow between the shoulders dealt suddenly from behind caused him to fall to the ground, while William pressed on undaunted and found that the victory was indeed his, and in the old Saxon phrase the Normans “held the place of slaughter”. The Norman duke caused his Pope-blessed standard to be planted on the brow of the hill in the same place where Harold’s banner had floated. After rendering thanks to God for his great victory, he ordered his supper to be prepared on the battlefield in the midst of the thousands of corpses of both armies, whom the survivors all through the following Sunday were busily engaged in burying, or in removing from the field that they might be carried to their homes for burial.