Battle of Hastings, The (22 page)

Harold seems to have sacrificed his archers, whom he had
certainly had at Stamford Bridge, in his rapid march south. If he had any, it is likely that the king would
position them on his flanks where they would have the best chance of aiming at the charging enemy without wounding their own comrades, but this is guesswork only. In the absence of any documentary
evidence, it must be assumed that they can have contributed little to their side of the battle. Under normal conditions, the Normans would have expected to reprovision themselves with the arrows
shot by the enemy, but judging by William of Poitiers’ emphasis on the hail of arrows in the later stages of the battle, they must have been adequately supplied by their own reserves.

Many writers have been convinced that Harold must have contemplated an attack at some stage, that he could never have intended a purely defensive action. It seems to me perfectly possible that
he did just that. William was the aggressor, he was the defender. He must have been well aware that more men would join him as time went on; he certainly expected that the northern earls, his
brothers-in-law, would be arriving with whatever forces they had remaining from Gate Fulford and Stamford Bridge (indeed, we know that they had got as far as London by the time the battle was
fought); numerically, his position could only improve. William, on the other hand, as far as he knew, could not expect any reinforcements and if the English fleet could get around to Hastings to
cut off his retreat, could be attacked from the rear as well. The duke was trapped in a small promontory of land, which he had already devastated with his customary thoroughness, and would soon
have been desperate for provisions. The only exits open to him were either to retreat to his ships and move further up or down the coast (a very risky manoeuvre, under his enemy’s eye, and
unlikely to succeed), or to advance by the London road, which was blocked by Harold. General Fuller believes that
he would have been able to re-embark his men under cover of
archery fire. We do not know how many archers William had, he seems to have had a lot, but, with all due respect to so senior and experienced an officer, it seems unlikely that archers, unsupported
and, according to the Tapestry, mostly without body armour, could have withstood alone an attack by the full English army.

The corollary, of course, was that, like any animal at bay, he would attack at once. None the less, it may have seemed to Harold a perfectly feasible strategy to hold him in check and block his
exit while his own position strengthened. The various chroniclers indicate that if he could have held his troops together and maintained his impregnable position, this would have been a reasonable
tactic. If the situation had become dangerous, he could have withdrawn into the forest behind him to regroup and attack again on a more propitious occasion (allowing, it is true, that retreat along
the narrow ridge behind him could have been a risky and slow manoeuvre). As has been pointed out, he did not need an outright victory at this point, he had everything to gain by luring William
forward. In the meantime, by keeping him penned in where he was, he was at least preventing any further ravaging of the country. And if he could hold his ground until sunset, he would in effect
have won. If William had had to withdraw to his bridgehead at Hastings at the end of the day without victory, with heavy losses, without provisions and with Harold still in possession of Caldbec
Hill and the London road, he would have been in a very difficult situation. The only thing that prevented this from happening was Harold’s death.

The insistence of so many historians on William’s consummate generalship in this campaign has always seemed unaccountable. In the first place, he could have had no reason to expect so easy
a landing in England, yet there is no evidence of any plan or
preparation made by him for the contingency of his landing being strongly opposed other than his reported and
prudent determination not to land in the dark. Even if he had known of Hardrada’s and Tostig’s invasion, he could have had no certainty when he sailed that the king would go north to
oppose them, leaving the south shore undefended. There was no more than a 50:50 chance that he would do so. Again, even if he had known that Harold had gone, he does not appear to have had any plan
of campaign for after his landing. He does not seem to have had any intention of securing strong points like Dover, Canterbury or even London while Harold was in the north. He established his
bridgeheads at Pevensey and Hastings and waited. He might have waited in vain, and, as has already been pointed out, he could not have waited indefinitely. If Harold had been content to wait until
hunger and low morale among the Norman troops had forced him to move inland, he would almost certainly have been defeated. He seems, in short, to have been in the position of a general who had
managed to establish a bridgehead but had no plan of operation beyond it. Nothing but the incredible luck that attended him throughout the campaign saved him.

The one point on which there seems to be unanimity among the Norman chroniclers is the admission that, if the English had maintained their position on the ridge and had resisted the temptation
to pursue the fleeing (or supposedly fleeing) enemy, it would have been virtually impossible to dislodge them. William of Poitiers speaks of ‘one side attacking in different ways and the
other standing firmly as if fixed to the ground’. Likewise the
Carmen
also speaks of the serried ranks of English standing as if rooted to the ground, and adds ‘nor would the
attackers have been able to penetrate the dense forest of the English had not invention reinforced their strength’. Baudri de Bourgeuil describes the
English as massed
in a single dense formation, adding that they would have been impregnable if they had held together. Henry of Huntingdon writes that Harold had ‘placed all his people very closely in a single
line, constructing a sort of castle with them, so that they were impregnable to the Normans’. Wace condemns the English for having been lured by the feigned retreats into abandoning a
position in which they could hardly have been defeated. Add to this the oral tradition that Harold had exhorted his troops before the battle not to be lured from their defensive position, and it
will be seen that his tactics were not as foolish or short-sighted as has been suggested. They should have worked.

M. K. Lawson suggests that Harold’s position was not confined to the ridge but may well have extended on his right flank to take in the hillock to the south-west of it; E. A. Freeman
implies the same thing in his account of the battle. This hillock may be the mound depicted in plate 66 of the Bayeux Tapestry; the watercourse that the Tapestry shows as running close by it may
have been the little stream that gave the battle its alternative name of ‘Senlac’ (
sand lacu
or sandy stream). He points out that there are serrations protruding from it that
might indicate that it had been staked; if it had been, it would certainly have helped to bring down the horses that are portrayed as having fallen beside it. He supports the idea by reference to
the
Carmen
, which describes the English position as comprising both a
mons,
which could describe the ridge, and a
vallis,
which could describe the declivity between the ridge
and the hillock. It is an interesting theory, but not one that is easy to accept. In the first place, when would the English have had a chance to stake the water, if they only arrived exhausted
late the previous evening (if indeed the serrations shown in the Tapestry are stakes. As Lawson says, they might just as well be reeds or foliage of some kind)? In the second, Harold
would surely have been mad to put light-armed infantry (none of the English shown on the mound is wearing body armour) where they would have been unsupported by the housecarls and
particularly vulnerable to the Norman cavalry. It is more likely that this plate shows the English who broke ranks to pursue the fleeing Bretons before taking refuge on the hillock and being cut
down.

William would have had much less of a choice of ground and the site on which he did fight was particularly disadvantageous for the cavalry that were his greatest advantage over his enemy, since
they would be obliged to charge uphill across what seems to have been very marshy and broken ground. His deployment is described by William of Poitiers, who is the best authority we have on the
battle and who had the advantage of having served as one of William’s knights before he took holy orders:

The
Carmen
supplements this information by saying that William positioned the Breton and other mercenaries on his left, the French and other mixed troops on his right,
with the Normans led by himself in the centre, and this is corroborated to some extent by William of Poitiers who says a little later that the ‘Breton knights and other auxiliaries on the
left wing turned tail’. The
Carmen
opens the actual battle with what is probably the best known if most totally apocryphal story connected with it:

Strangely, the
Carmen
does not give the information that Taillefer rode towards the English singing the song of Roland; this detail is first supplied by Wace, never one
to lose anything that would contribute to a good story. But it is William of Poitiers who gives by far the clearest and most convincing account of the actual fighting, as one would expect from a
former soldier. It started ceremonially at 9 a.m. with the blare of trumpets from both sides, following which, by his account, the Norman archers and foot-soldiers closed to attack the English,
killing and maiming many with their missiles and suffering many casualties in return. The Tapestry glosses this by showing a hail of arrows from William’s archers, most of which are being
caught on the shields of the English. Shooting uphill, most of their shafts would either have been caught on the shields or passed over the heads of the
defenders. The
assaults of the archers and the infantry were unable to make any impression on the tightly packed ranks of English, so the cavalry, who had presumably been waiting for openings in the English lines
to make their charge, were called into action earlier than would have been usual. The English, says William, were greatly helped by the advantage of the higher ground, which they held in serried
ranks without sallying forward, and also by their great numbers and densely packed mass, and moreover by their weapons of war, which easily penetrated shields and other armour. This is presumably
an allusion to the much-feared two-handed axes of the housecarls, which were reputedly capable of cutting down horse and rider together at a single blow. Horses are not stupid, and it is extremely
difficult to ride them straight at a line bristling with offensive weapons, as Napoleon’s cavalry found at Waterloo, when they attempted to charge the unbroken British squares. If, in
addition to the axes of the housecarls, the horses had been confronted with English spears positioned as Snorre Sturlason described, William’s cavalry would have had quite as difficult a job
at Hastings.

It was at this stage, with even the Norman cavalry repelled without any significant advantage gained, that the first noteworthy event of the battle took place. The Bretons in the left wing of
the Norman army broke ranks (William of Poitiers says frankly that they turned tail), and retreated, carrying part at least of the central section of the army with them. Indeed, he says, almost the
whole of the duke’s battle line gave way, a disgrace he excuses by explaining that the Normans believed the duke had been killed. This may have been one of the occasions on which he was
unhorsed, rendering him temporarily invisible. The situation was saved only by his presence of mind. Raising his helmet so that his face could be seen, he halted the retreating men and forced them
back into the fight again with the flat of his sword, leading the counter-attack against the English right wing that had broken formation to pursue the fleeing enemy.

At this point disagreement over the course of the battle starts. That this first Norman retreat was genuine is not seriously contested by anyone, least of all William of Poitiers who is, as we
have seen, refreshingly frank on the subject. What is contentious is the English response. Was the English pursuit the action of ill-disciplined troops who had been instructed to remain within
their lines but were unable to resist the impulse to pursue the enemy when they saw them in flight, or was it part of a deliberate counter-attack that went wrong? Harold has been criticized for not
launching a full-scale attack at this juncture, with the duke’s left wing in disarray and his whole battle line faltering, and if he had done so, he might have been successful. General Fuller
thinks that he would have been, that he would easily have annihilated the Norman archers and infantry and that the cavalry would not have drawn rein until they reached Hastings. But the other view
holds that his chances of success were no more than 50:50, that, once he left the protection of his strongly defended position, he would have been unable to regain it, and that, on a level plain,
his infantry would be very vulnerable to the enemy cavalry, precisely the situation Harold had sought to avoid. He had fought with William in Brittany, he knew the duke would reassert control over
his men.