The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (14 page)

William of Normandy had perfected a new method of warfare which would make the conquest of England surprisingly easy to achieve. His Normans fought on horseback and at short intervals threw up primitive castles made out of earthworks to hold the surrounding countryside. His great reputation meant that the expedition, for which he began building boats in the summer of 1066, attracted landless Norman knights of Viking origin in large numbers. Under the sacred papal banner at the ancient town of Lillebonne, with its old Roman amphitheatre, William assembled his force of 5,000 of the most daring men in western Europe. From Brittany, Flanders, Sicily, central France and Normandy itself they flocked to a man who promised them English land and English wives in exchange for their help in conquering England–for he had no gold to offer them. They loved to fight and saw a real prospect of gain for themselves across the Channel in England.

But so did many others. In May 1066 Harold’s brother Tostig–at the head of a menacing Norwegian fleet sent by Harold Hardrada of Norway–appeared off the Isle of Wight. From there he moved northwards up the east coast burning ports until he was seen off by Earl Edwin and Earl Morcar and fled north to sanctuary in Scotland.

To make matters worse, by midsummer Harold’s spies had confirmed that there would soon be an attack from Normandy. Harold frantically started rebuilding the neglected English navy, and kept the kingdom’s militia on standby, for across the sea the duke of Normandy was building more ships than had ever been seen together, perhaps a thousand in all. Though they were not much bigger than fishing smacks they would be more than adequate for their task. We can see them in the Bayeux Tapestry, which was commissioned by William’s half-brother the bishop of Bayeux to commemorate the occasion, and which shows them being dragged to the sea by ropes and loaded with horses and armour. In order to bind his men more tightly to him, the duke increased their pay and promised more. By August 1066 the dusty fields of Picardy were full of soldiers waiting for a propitious wind to carry them across the Channel from the port of St Valéry. For a month they lay in their tents as the great harvest moon waxed and waned and the black night sky filled with smoke from their campfires. But still no signal came.

Towards the end of September the soldiers began to mutter nervously that the lack of wind was a sign that God opposed the expedition. At this the brutal Duke William caused the body of St Valéry to be exhumed and paraded round the town while the soldiers watched. At last, a few days later, on 27 September, William got the wind he had asked for. As the soldiers knelt in thankful prayer William was already at anchor midway across the Channel waiting in his crimson-sailed ship for the other vessels to join him. Soon the invasion force was blown lightly across to England, where they landed at Pevensey (the Anglo-Saxon name for the former Roman port of Anderida). The remains of a Roman fort stood there, and William in the Norman fashion immediately made of it a rough defensive castle of ditch and earthwork to protect his troops. In fact the superstitious Norman knights might already have been disheartened, for William had tripped when he landed and sprawled his full length. But as they inveighed against the ill omen the duke leaped up with earth clutched in his fists, and exclaimed that he had only wanted to grasp his new kingdom more closely.

But what of King Harold? Why was he not there to repel the warriors clattering unopposed down the wooden gangplanks? Why was there no one to stop the whole host moving off east down the coast to Hastings, where William’s scouts had told him that the land was hillier and would be easier to hold? Indeed why had there been no ships in the Channel to stop the Norman fleet? By the most unfortunate of coincidences, the same wind conditions which had prevented the Normans from sailing had allowed Tostig and his ally the king of Norway, Harold Hardrada, to invade the north of England. On 25 September, two days before William and his troops arrived at Pevensey, Harold had defeated Tostig and Harold Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York. It would take Harold at least ten days to reach the south coast and meet Duke William. But his men were exhausted from a battle in which so many of them had been wounded.

Worse still, after 8 September the English fleet had had to be disbanded because its sailors and the militia had been guarding the Channel ports since early summer and it was feared that they might mutiny if they continued to be left to their own devices. The militia was allowed to be called out for only forty days, and that period had elapsed. So the Channel had been left quite empty, with the English navy withdrawn up the Thames to London.

With characteristic energy but rather too great impetuosity, the minute he heard the Normans had landed Harold began to march south from York. But he lacked the full complement of troops he needed. The men of the earls of Northumbria and Mercia did not accompany him as they were still recovering from Stamford Bridge and so could not provide the great reinforcements which might have held off the Normans. Nor can the enmity between the Godwins and Edwin and Morcar have helped. The army which faced William consisted mainly of Harold’s own bodyguard, the 3,000 housecarles invented by Cnut, men supplied by his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, and Londoners, thanes and churls living near enough to Sussex to join the host immediately.

Harold seems to have decided not to wait for the full English militia to be assembled before he moved on Hastings. It would have taken too long to go through the motions of summoning it out again from more distant shires, many of which were several days’ journey away. Perhaps in the confusion of those September days there was little time to think clearly, with danger facing him from north and south, and Harold was himself exhausted.

The Battle of Hastings was to be a very uneven contest, of highly trained Norman knights against a tired and disorganized English force. Too many of them were peasants in woollen shifts called straight from the fields. They were untrained in warfare but forced by the institution of the fyrd to do service perhaps with just a pitchfork, with a spear if they were lucky. They stood little chance against warriors on horses which were trained to rear and attack. The defeat of the English at the Battle of Hastings hinged on the quality of William’s knights. They could follow military orders in a disciplined manner owing to the Norman practice of educating males in warfare from childhood onwards in the castles of the great lords. It was a way of life which was soon to become commonplace in England.

Hearing from his headquarters, a temporary wooden castle at Hastings, that Harold was fast approaching down what is today the A21, William seized the day. Moving his troops forward the Duke of Normandy made the English king halt at the highest point in the area, then called Senlac, while he positioned his own men on a ridge opposite. Harold had to draw up his forces round the royal standard in an uncomfortably narrow space with little room for manoeuvre. As soon as the sun rose on 14 October 1066, after the Normans had received Holy Communion from a silver chalice, William sent his knights down the hill towards the English while Harold and his men struggled to get into formation after the Saxon fashion, the king’s housecarles positioned in the centre, and all of them on foot–already a disadvantage against the mounted Normans. The Saxons were armed with their great battleaxes which they whirled round their heads. Closely packed next to one another and creating a wall with their long kite-shaped shields, they formed such an impenetrable mass that even horses could not get near them–so long as they did not break ranks. Harold particularly warned his men to resist the temptation to pursue the enemy, for then they would be lost.

In the very middle of the shield wall stood King Harold and his two brothers with the royal standard of England between them, so that no one would dare flee the battle when the king was in the middle of it. Flanking the shield wall on both sides were two wings of the lightly armed local farmers from Sussex and Kent. Among them were monks from Winchester: after the battle, as they lay dead on the field, their brown habits were discovered concealed within their armour.

At first the advantage seemed with the Saxons, because the steepness of the ground made frontal attack by the invaders very difficult. The Normans fought in the style they had brought back from the east–that is to say, making use of the Arab stirrup. This invention freed a rider’s arms to fight while the lower part of his body was secured to the horse. Again and again the Norman cavalry charged up the slopes of the hill where Harold was positioned, but each time it failed to break through the Saxon shield wall.

For six hours the battle was undecided, though victory seemed imminent for the more technically advanced Normans. William now threw his main energy into attacking the more lightly armed Saxon troops on the wings. His archers sent repeated flights of arrows over their heads. This inflicted heavy losses among the ranks of the English peasantry, who were not protected by the chainmail of the housecarles; nevertheless they stood their ground. Then the cunning duke gave his knights a signal. The whole cavalry wheeled round and appeared to flee. This was too much for the Saxons in the shield wall. With shouts and whoops they broke formation and began to pursue the enemy down the hill, heedless of Harold’s shouted orders to stay where they were.

As soon as the Saxons began to follow them, with a great roar the Norman knights turned back and rode them down. Soon the valley between the two hills was filled with the screams of dying men and horses. Bravest of all the Saxons that day was Harold Godwin. It was only when William realized that his troops would never get near the top of the hill, where Harold and his housecarles still kept the shield wall packed in tight formation, that he again ordered his archers to fire their arrows straight into the air over their heads. One of those arrows entered Harold’s brain through the eye and killed him.

The duke of Normandy was no less brave. His was the voice in the thickest of the fray urging his men on. He was always the first to rush forward and attack. Eyewitnesses said he was ‘everywhere raging, everywhere furious’, and, as with Harold, several horses were killed under him that day. He fought until night fell and crowned him with complete victory. As he made his way in the misty twilight across the battlefield he came to where the fighting had evidently been fiercest on the Saxon side, as could be seen by the bodies strewn over the frozen ground. There among them, covered by the now ragged and torn royal standard, lay Harold.

William was so moved by the terrible bloodshed that he decreed that henceforth Senlac would be known as Battle, or Bataille, one of the many Norman words which were to transform the language of England. On the spot where Harold lay William caused the high altar of the new Battle Abbey to be raised as a memorial to the king, which can still be seen today.

Although the Battle of Hastings was a watershed in English history, at the time it was not clear whether the country would rally again either under Edwin and Morcar in the north or under the new party for Edward the Confessor’s great-nephew Edgar the Atheling developing in London. For a month the Conqueror, as he would be known to later generations, bided his time, securing the country round Dover and Canterbury. Then he moved west out of Kent to London, encouraged by the submission of Winchester led by Edith, Harold’s sister and widow of Edward the Confessor.

Though the Conqueror burned Southwark–a constant feature of its history–he could not break through the guard into the walled city at the crossing which is now London Bridge. He therefore decided that the best way of taking London, then as now the key to England, was to ride west. He would lay waste the countryside round it on which the Londoners depended for their food. Great stretches of Surrey, Berkshire and north Hampshire, the fertile country that the people of Reada and Wocca had settled 600 years before, were set alight by descendants of England’s old enemies, the Vikings. When the duke crossed the Thames at Wallingford, apparently intending to return to London again and renew the attack, at the urging of Archbishop Stigand those leading the resistance decided to give in.

Edwin and Morcar had never meanwhile moved their troops south to rally the country. There was no real focus for a national resistance, and William the Conqueror benefited from that. Wealthy London magnates who had earlier declared the youthful Edgar the Atheling king, now accompanied Edwin and Morcar to meet William at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire in the shadow of the Chiltern Hills just west of what today is Hemel Hempstead. There they offered him the crown. Having sworn an oath to be the Conqueror’s men and hostages for peace, they watched as before their eyes William burned every grain of wheat between Berkhamsted and London, a distance of almost thirty miles, to make sure that there was no backsliding when he arrived in London.

On a bitterly cold Christmas Day in 1066 William the Conqueror became King William of England in Westminster Abbey. Although he had taken the crown by military conquest, initially he was very anxious to be considered the legitimate heir and to have the consent of his new subjects. At the moment of coronation he therefore ordered the Englishman Ealdred, archbishop of York and the Norman bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, who were jointly crowning him, to ask the people in the abbey if they accepted him as their king. Although it was unlikely that the English would say no when the abbey was ringed with William’s knights, the shouts of acclamation in English and Norman French alarmed those very knights. In a panic they started setting fire to the buildings surrounding the abbey. As the congregation rushed out, the Conqueror and the priests were left alone at the altar. Despite the confusion without, there was deep silence within. William was anointed king according to the Saxon tradition instituted by St Dunstan, and took the oath of the Anglo-Saxon kings to rule his people justly.

Although the Conqueror’s intention was to live in peace with his new subjects he could not disguise the fact that England was a country held by military garrison. Within three months William had built the White Tower out of earth and timber to overawe the inhabitants of London, which today is part of the complex known as the Tower of London. It was just one of the series of castles thrown up all over England to prevent rebellions.