Battle of Hastings, The (24 page)

None the less, it is probable that the Tapestry in its original condition showed the king being struck in the eye by an arrow.
Drawings of this part of it made in 1733
before much restoration work had been undertaken show what indubitably looks like an arrow, though it is fair to say that it could also be a javelin, in that no flights are visible on it and the
trajectory is pointing a little above the eye. There is also a fairly substantial body of opinion in the century following the battle that the king had been wounded by an arrow. The first to
mention it is Amatus of Montecassino (c.1080), who says that Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. This is corroborated by Baudri de Bourgeuil (c.1100) in the poem he addressed to the
duke’s daughter, the Countess Adela, in which he describes the hanging in her chamber representing her father’s conquest of England. He says that Harold was struck by an arrow, but does
not say where. The next version is that of William of Malmesbury (c.1125) who says that the king was wounded by an arrow in the brain and, while lying wounded, was struck on the thigh by a knight
with his sword, a very fair description of what is shown in the Tapestry. He was followed by Henry of Huntingdon (c.1130) who tells us that the king was struck in the eye by an arrow and was then
killed by wounds. This argues the existence of two different traditions, for neither William nor Henry could have got their version of events from Baudri or Amatus. William’s version exactly
replicates what seems to be the story in the Tapestry, which possibly pre-dates all of them, though there is no evidence that either William or Henry ever saw it.

We cannot attach much conviction to the contention, frequently maintained, that the designer of the Tapestry would not have shown the king by two separate figures so close together. R. Howard
Bloch has drawn attention to the skill of the Tapestry designer in using the techniques of animated cartoons to suggest movement and progression in his portrayal of events; this is most
noticeable in, for example, the scene of Harold’s embarkation from Bosham at the start of the Tapestry, and in the charge of the Norman knights at the opening of the battle,
where a number of figures are depicted in attitudes that, if speeded up, would give the impression of movement.
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This depiction of the slaying of Harold
may well be another example, showing two images of the same character in progression – though if so, it is noticeable that the king had time to change his stockings in between. Whichever
explanation is chosen, it is likely that this scene shows us as much as we are likely ever to know of Harold’s death.

It is clear from what William of Poitiers says that part of the English army, probably the housecarls, fought on grimly after the king’s death, in the old Germanic tradition, but it is
hardly surprising that many of the fyrd melted away into the forest behind them. There is no mention by William of Poitiers of the celebrated Malfosse incident narrated in the
Carmen
and
elsewhere, according to which Norman knights, zealously pursuing the retreating English in the dark, rode unawares into a deep ditch on the north of the battlefield and were crushed to death by
their companions falling on top of them; since it had no effect on the result of the battle, it can be disregarded, although the exact site of the Malfosse has been a fruitful source of controversy
among historians of Hastings. William makes it clear that a considerable number of the English host made a last-ditch stand, supported by what he describes as a ‘broken rampart and a
labyrinth of ditches’ behind the battlefield. For these people, he says, were ‘by nature always ready to take up the sword, being descended from the ancient stock of Saxons, the
fiercest of men. They would never have been driven back except by irresistible force.’
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But without leadership, there was little they could do
except to cause as much damage to the Normans as they could.
They well deserved the tribute of William of Malmesbury: ‘they were few in number and brave in the
extreme’.

In the meantime, William pitched his tent for the night on the place where Harold’s banners had stood, confident that God had judged between him and his enemy. The ruins of Anglo-Saxon
England lay scattered around him on the battlefield.

THE AFTERMATH

L
ate in his life, Napoleon summed up how wars are won and lost. It was, he said, three parts moral. One part physical.
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Throughout his campaign for the English throne, William had relentlessly maintained the moral high ground, from his manipulation of Harold’s oath, through his
dealings with the Vatican, to (according to William of Poitiers) his careful arrangement around his neck on the morning of the battle of the bones of the saints on which he maintained Harold had
sworn. It has frequently been asserted that in the final analysis he had outgeneralled his opponent, but it was on the moral high ground that he most conspicuously did so. It was a considerable
achievement for a man whose conquest lacked any moral or legal justification.

He lost no time in exploiting the propaganda and military victory that he had won, though initially events left him somewhat at a stand. He waited at Hastings, as the D Chronicle records, in the
days following the battle for submissions to his authority to come in. They did not come. Instead, as soon as the news of Harold’s death reached them in London, the remaining chief men of the
kingdom (the two archbishops, Stigand and Ealdred, and Earls Edwin and Morcar among them) elected the young atheling Edgar as king, as clear an indication as could be given of England’s
rejection of
Norman rule. It was, as even William of Poitiers admitted, evidence of ‘their highest wish to have no lord who was not a compatriot’. Perhaps it was
only at this stage that William realized exactly how long a struggle lay ahead of him before he could with any realism call the country conquered. The initial stages of the process, the submission
of Dover, Canterbury, Winchester, the slaughter of the citizens of Romney who had had the impertinence to attack the Norman ships that had accidentally landed there, the gradual encirclement of
London by his army, the devastation of all the territory over which he passed, were soon achieved. London put up more of a fight, but without stronger leadership than a boy of fourteen could
provide, it was soon overcome. The unfortunate Edgar, with Stigand and other dignitaries, came to submit to him at Berkhamstead ‘out of necessity’, says the D Chronicle; and it was
great unwisdom that they did not do so earlier, before so much harm was done, it adds bitterly. The Domesday Book gives proof twenty years later of the devastation of the country through which
William passed, with large areas of this normally rich and fertile country simply entered as ‘waste’. On Christmas Day he was crowned in Westminster Abbey, which thus, in its first year
of existence, saw the burial of one king and the coronation of two more.

Again according to William of Poitiers, ‘the bishops and other leading men begged him to take the crown, saying that they were accustomed to obey a king, and wished to have a king as their
lord’.
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According to the D Chronicle, Archbishop Ealdred refused to place the crown on William’s head until he had sworn on the
Gospels to be a true lord, and to rule the people as well as any king who had gone before him, provided they would be loyal to him. It is interesting that much the same oath was administered to
Cnut on his coronation; it may, in fact, have been standard
procedure for all coronations, for English kings as well as for conquerors, but noted only in the case of
conquerors. The proviso of English loyalty was to be important to William, since it gave him the only excuse that could be made for the campaign of oppression that followed. Orderic Vitalis claims
that, by the grace of God, England was subdued within the space of three months; a somewhat optimistic statement, given that he records later that

There were to be continual risings against the invaders all over the kingdom, but particularly in the north where it looked at one point as if a separate kingdom might be set up
under Edgar Atheling, buttressed by his brother-in-law the King of Scotland and King Sweyn Estrithson of Denmark; it was this threat that provoked the infamous harrying of the north by William in
1069–70, a cold-blooded campaign to destroy anything in the area that might support life. Even for chroniclers who normally praised William, this was too much:

Although he may have won the military and propaganda battles, William’s victory may in the long term have had some of the flavour of dust and ashes. His initial return to
Normandy in triumph with eminent English hostages in his train and wagonloads of English gold and treasure was hailed with joy, but England was never to be a place where he felt at home and, as the
years passed, he spent less and less time there. He had never originally intended to be a conqueror; he had expected a peaceful succession, but his instincts were autocratic. The idea that the
English crown was elective, that the English people could thwart his original intentions, was clearly not one that had ever seriously occurred to him or that he could accept.
His initial attempts to learn English were very quickly abandoned; and when the king made no effort to speak the language, it would be hard to blame his underlings for failing to do so. Ironically,
even his campaigns in Normandy, Brittany and Maine were much less successful after 1066 than they had been before it. Orderic Vitalis, a reasonably dispassionate critic of the Conqueror, notes
that, after 1066,

What William really wanted from his conquest was the status of a consecrated king, to assist him in his rivalry with the King of France, and the revenues and loot of England.
His idea of governing according to the laws of Edward the Confessor (which, in fact, were the laws of Cnut) was to ensure that he received every penny to which he was legally entitled. His conquest
was not even to be very durable. Within a century of Hastings, the reign of his own direct Norman line had ended with his daughter’s son, King Stephen (the descendants of his own sons having
died out), and England and Normandy were settling down under the rule of Angevin kings, descendants of the Geoffrey Martel whom William had fought so desperately earlier in his career.

It is impossible not to contrast his victory with that of Cnut half a century before. Cnut had an advantage linguistically in having
a mother-tongue that even at that time
was much closer to English than Norman French was (it is notable that in Snorre’s account of Stamford Bridge, the Northumbrian English and the Norwegian invaders were able to communicate with
each other without much trouble, and a recent study argues convincingly that Old English and Old Norse were mutually intelligible).
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But although
his brand of ruthlessness was no less pronounced than William’s, he chose, after the bloodbath with which he opened his reign, to operate much more diplomatically, and he made conspicuous
efforts to adapt his rule to English custom. The average Englishman would probably have noticed little difference from the rule of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors, apart from the merciful cessation of
Viking raids. Cnut did not replace the native ruling class with an alien one; of the three great earls who flourished during his reign and whom he bequeathed to his successors, only one (Siward of
Northumbria) was Danish, and he had married into the family of his Northumbrian predecessors. Leofric and Godwin were ‘mere English’, and this was very much the pattern for the major
appointments made throughout his reign. Even if he had wished to, he could not have replaced the senior English churchmen with Danes since Denmark had been too recently converted to Christianity to
produce a sufficient number of qualified men. Cnut’s rule hardly interrupted Anglo-Saxon rule.

William had rather more excuse for a wholesale importation of a ruling class from abroad, since the three great battles of 1066 had between them virtually wiped out the entire top layer of
English society. There is some evidence that he started his reign with the intention of honouring his vow to be a good lord to all his subjects: one of his earliest actions as king was to issue a
writ confirming the rights and privileges of the city of London. A
number of major landowners were confirmed in their positions (including Earls Edwin and Morcar); Stigand
continued in office; and a few English names appear on his earliest charters, though these soon disappear as rebellions surfaced throughout the kingdom. William of Poitiers says that he endowed the
boy Atheling with ample lands, but, according to the Domesday Book, Edgar never got possession of any of them. But Edwin and Morcar rebelled in 1068, made their peace with William, then rebelled
again in 1071, when they were involved in the rising of Hereward the Wake. Edwin was eventually killed in the fens by his own men, Morcar was captured and spent the rest of his life in prison. We
have the testimony of the Domesday Book that by 1086 only 8 per cent of English land remained in the hands of those who had owned it in 1066. William of Malmesbury in the following century
confirmed that England had become ‘the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers; at the present time there is no Englishman who is either earl, bishop, or abbot; strangers all,
they prey upon the riches and vitals of England’.
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