Battle of Hastings, The Read online

  The question of what Harold’s plans actually were now becomes important. William’s situation was straightforward. The success of his venture depended entirely upon how soon he could gain an outright and crushing victory over his opponent. It has been suggested that the savage pillage and harrying of Harold’s lands in Sussex had been designed in part at least to provoke Harold into confronting him as soon as possible. It is true that the obligations of mediaeval kingship dictated that Harold should avenge the slaughter of his people, more especially when they were the people of Sussex among whom he had grown up; but pillage and rapine on this scale was, as we have seen, a fairly routine act of war. It seems unlikely that a commander as experienced as Harold would allow himself to be provoked into precipitate action by it. He had, after all, done a good deal of harrying himself in the past. His situation was, in a way, as straightforward as William’s. William needed a quick and decisive victory as soon as possible, preferably without moving so far from his base that his lines of communication with his ships could be cut; Harold presumably also desired a quick and decisive victory but he did not need it as urgently as William did. He had the luxury of a choice that William did not have. William had to win; Harold could afford a draw. He could retreat from the battlefield in order to regroup and reattack, as Alfred and Edmund Ironside had done on several such occasions.

  More important than this, he had the option of not fighting a pitched battle at all. William could not have stayed bottled up on the Hastings peninsula for ever. By 14 October, he must have pretty well exhausted the provisions that could be provided by the surrounding country, and would have been unable to feed his men without moving further away from his base. By far the most sensible strategy for Harold would have been to draw William away from his ships into the interior of the country, over territory unknown to him that had preferably been stripped in advance of anything that could have offered sustenance to the Norman army. Famine, as Vegetius had said, is more terrible than the sword, and in this case could easily have been arranged. William’s stragglers and foragers could have been cut off and destroyed, and the main part of his army could have been engaged and defeated with minimal loss to the English at whatever time seemed to offer the best advantage, when they had recovered from the stress of Stamford Bridge and two long forced marches, and had been supplemented by further levies. This was the kind of strategy that Harold had employed in the past against Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, and it is unbelievable that he did not resort to it again in 1066. The really interesting question is why.

  Various explanations have been offered for Harold’s tactics (or apparent lack of them) at this time. There were rumours after Hastings that he had been ill before Stamford Bridge, that he had had some sort of infection in his leg that made it impossible for him to ride. There are always such rumours after the event, impossible to verify later, but if this one is true, it makes his victory at Stamford Bridge even more remarkable. He may have been wounded at Stamford Bridge and he must, at the very least, have been exhausted by the time he reached Hastings, as must most of his army, a situation that contrasted cruelly with the well-rested and well-fed condition of the Normans who had spent a fortnight living comfortably off the fat of Harold’s lands. By 1066 he was probably about forty-four, by the standards of the day no longer a young man. A paper written by a psychiatrist, Dr Max Sugar, endeavours to ascribe what he terms the king’s loss of initiative and nerve before Hastings to a clinical depression brought on by his excommunication by the Pope and consequent conviction of the damnation of his soul. The idea that Harold had been excommunicated has been adopted by several writers and has muddied the historical waters. Setting aside the fact that there is at least a modicum of doubt whether the Pope was involved at all in William’s invasion before it took place, there is absolutely no evidence that Harold was formally excommunicated (any more than William himself had been when he defied the Pope’s prohibition on his marriage with Matilda of Flanders). If William was proclaiming his invasion a holy war (which he was), Harold would have known of it from his spies and would presumably have been extremely annoyed. But that would be a long way from excommunication.

  The arguments in this paper, relying, as they too often do, on late or unreliable authorities, cannot be taken very seriously. None the less there are questions that have to be asked and are very difficult to answer. The Harold whom we see during the days between Stamford Bridge and Hastings seems not to be the Harold who is portrayed by the author of the Vita Ædwardi as ‘passing with watchful mockery through all ambushes, as was his way.’xciii Why did he afford William the early battle that was so crucial to him and might be so disastrous to Harold himself? Why, when he was having heavy losses during the battle, did he not withdraw his forces into the forest behind him? Orderic, unsupported by William of Poitiers or indeed any other earlier source, says that Harold’s younger brother, Gyrth, attempted to persuade him to allow him to lead the English army so that in case of disaster Harold would still be alive to lead the resistance against William. Gyrth’s main argument was that he had sworn no oaths to William and could therefore defend his country with a clear conscience. This would have been a sensible proposal, but hardly practicable in the circumstances in which it was made. The first duty of any king at this time was to protect his kingdom and people. The main reason for Harold’s unanimous election as king was his ability to defend the country. His reputation as a warrior was second to none in England, his opposition to a Norman takeover (or indeed a Norwegian one) was well known and of long standing. At Stamford Bridge he had triumphantly vindicated the trust put in him, and in the minds of most Englishmen at that time, Hardrada, because of his fearsome reputation, represented a much greater threat than the then comparatively unknown Norman duke; for Harold not to lead his forces in person against William, not to have revenged the outrages committed against his people, would have severely compromised his credibility as king and his ability to govern in future. Indeed, it is doubtful if such a stratagem would have worked. The army raised by Edmund Ironside against Cnut before his father’s death in 1016 refused (apparently legally) to fight because his father, the king, was not with them. The fact that Æthelred must at this stage have been a dying man clearly made no difference. The custom presumably originated for the protection of a king against ambitious heirs and nobles. In 1016 it worked against the national interest. We shall never know how it would have worked in 1066. If, on the other hand, Gyrth also advised him to adopt delaying tactics and draw William away from the coast, as he is also reported to have done, he would have been on much surer ground.

  The frequently offered explanation, that Harold hoped, in a fit of rashness and overconfidence, to repeat the strategy that had worked so well against Hardrada, is not really convincing. In the first place, if indeed emissaries were exchanged before the battle, he was obviously not counting on the element of surprise that had been crucial to his previous victory; and in the second, he must have known that the situation was totally different. The surprise attack that he was able to make so triumphantly on Hardrada depended on a number of fortuitous circumstances (the assignation at Stamford Bridge to receive hostages, the weather, the division of Hardrada’s army) that he could not have known about until he reached Tadcaster and heard what had happened and how he could turn it to the English advantage. The one thing he must have been certain about was that he would not catch William in the same way. He had campaigned with him in Brittany, he must have been aware that he would not catch William off guard and certainly not with his army split in two. The notion that Harold’s strategy was dictated by his determination to surprise William as he had surprised Hardrada has become one of the accepted myths of Hastings; but it is important to remember that it originated solely in the brains of two Normans, William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers, neither of whom could possibly have known what the king was actually thinking or planning. There is no hint of any such design in the English sources. Haste, yes; surprise, no.

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bsp; In one sense, Harold’s experience of William’s conduct of war in Brittany in 1064 may have been misleading. John Gillingham suggests that it was.

  Perhaps if Harold had witnessed William’s sudden strike against Alençon in 1051 he might have been more on his guard in 1066. As it was, however, what he saw was a very typical example of William at war – a campaign in which the duke seems to have been prudently content with a small gain. . . In 1064 there was no sign of an aggressive, battle-seeking strategy. On the contrary it was a struggle of attrition in which, more than anything else, questions of supply seemed to dominate the course of events, a campaign very much in the style of all the other campaigns of the last fifteen years – a good guide, Harold might have thought in the summer of 1066, to the kind of war he was facing now.xciv

  If he thought this, he might well have considered that a defensive, bottling-up strategy on his side would be the most effective and the least wasteful of his own men. But he might more prudently have reflected that William’s very act in invading indicated an aggressive, battle-seeking strategy.

  It is helpful at this point to look at the various accounts of the battle in the different sources, and the reasons given or implied for Harold’s defeat, bearing in mind that none is written by an eyewitness and that all date from well after the event and share the benefit of hindsight. William of Jumièges gives no explanation and the briefest of accounts. William of Poitiers and the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, as we have seen, ascribe it to Harold’s overweening pride in thinking that he could take William by surprise, and Orderic Vitalis adopts this version from William of Poitiers. Of the English sources, which are more interesting in this context, the Chronicle (D) says that

  William came against him by surprise before his army was drawn up in battle array. But the king nevertheless fought bravely against him, with the men who would remain with him, and there were heavy casualties on both sides.

  The E text says that Harold fought ‘before all the army had come’. Florence of Worcester is more expansive: he says that although Harold

  well knew that some of the bravest Englishmen had fallen in the two former battles, and that one-half of his army had not yet arrived, he did not hesitate to advance with all speed into Sussex against his enemies. On Saturday. . .before a third of his army was in order for fighting, he joined battle with them. . . But inasmuch as the English were drawn up in a narrow place, many retired from the ranks, and very few remained true to him. Nevertheless from the third hour of the day until dusk he bravely withstood the enemy, and fought so valiantly and stubbornly in his own defence that the enemy’s forces could make hardly any impression.xcv

  The Waltham Chronicle (the authors of which may even have had an eyewitness to help them since there is a legend that two of the canons of Waltham followed the English army to the battlefield) follow the E Chronicle and Florence of Worcester, lamenting that

  the king who was the glory of the realm, the darling of the clergy, the strength of his soldiers, the shield of the defenceless, the support of the distressed, the protector of the weak, the consolation of the desolate, the restorer of the destitute, and the pearl of princes, was slain by his fierce foe. He could not fight an equal contest for, accompanied by only a small force, he faced an army four times as large as his.xcvi

  What these accounts boil down to is that a) William took Harold by surprise, before his men were drawn up in battle array, b) Harold fought on a sit too constricted for his numbers, c) Harold fought too precipitately, before most of his men had arrived, and was outnumbered, and d) there were desertions. There are problems with these explanations, some of which are mutually contradictory and all of which, indeed, are the sort of accusations that tend to be levelled at commanders after a defeat. It is unlikely that he was outnumbered, though it must certainly have been true that his strength had been weakened by the events of the previous fortnight; his housecarls, who were reputed each to be as strong as two ordinary soldiers, must have stood the main brunt of the fighting at Stamford Bridge and many must have fallen. In numerical terms, it seems that the two armies were fairly evenly matched, and this is supported by the unusual length of the battle – eight to nine hours – arguing two forces very close in size, neither of which had a clear superiority over the other. We do not know what Florence of Worcester meant by ‘one half of his army’: half the full force that technically he could have called out (which could have been 40,000 men or more); or did he mean half of the levies whom he had actually summoned? Or half the force that he took to Stamford Bridge, many of whom may have been unfit for further service? If he had waited to fight, he could undoubtedly have had more men. On the other hand, if he had waited to fight, he might not have needed them.

  However, the charge that William came on Harold before his men were properly arrayed does not make much sense. Harold is thought to have left London on 11 October on the sixty-mile march to the battlefield, reaching it in the evening of 13 October; if he left on the 12th, it does not affect the timetable much, it merely means that he and his men would have had less rest. He would have bivouacked overnight before the battle at the rendezvous he had appointed, the hoar apple tree, and formed up at daybreak on the 14th on the site he had chosen. According to William of Poitiers, the duke was told of Harold’s approach by his scouts on the 13th (which in itself implies a departure from London on the 11th) and hastily ordered all those in the camp to arm themselves (for, says the chronicler, a great many of his men had been sent out foraging). According to William of Jumièges, the duke was so worried about the possibility of a surprise attack (which may be why William of Poitiers got the idea that Harold intended one) that he kept his men under arms all night just in case. What is not clear from any of the chronicles is whether he started from his camp at Hastings to meet Harold (who would be advancing by the London road) on the morning of the 14th or whether he marched at least part of the way to the battlefield the previous night. If the former, it has been estimated that he would have started his six-mile march from Hastings at approximately 6 a.m. on 14 October, which would have been first light, and that the head of his column would have reached the battlefield at about 8 a.m. If the latter, he could, of course, have been there earlier. Since there is no certain information, this is another occasion when we have to guess. It seems improbable, however, that he would have started his march to meet Harold while large numbers of his men were out foraging. But at this stage, it seems clear that the agenda was being set by Harold. He knew the country and had possibly already decided where to make his stand. It seems unlikely that William, given a free hand, would have chosen ground so unsuitable for cavalry.

  The Battle Abbey Chronicle says that William halted his march at Hedgland (or Hecheland) where his troops put on their armour; this is a very late source, but it would have been a reasonable thing to do. He would not have wanted his men to arrive tired on the field from marching in armour. According to the Chronicle, it was while they were doing this that they got their first sight of the English; the Tapestry shows a scout arriving at that point to tell him of their position. According to the Carmen, William’s forces were close enough to the battlefield, whether at Hedgland or further on, to see the English army emerge from the forest on to the ridge that was to be its fighting position and that blocked the road to London. It would therefore seem that both armies must have appeared virtually simultaneously on the field and deployed in full sight of each other. Harold cannot have been surprised by William’s prompt arrival; he would have had his own scouts out, he knew where he was and would have been well aware how important it would be for William to offer battle as soon as possible. Indeed, if we are to credit William of Poitiers’ version, William must, because of the uneven and marshy ground, have had to array his troops almost within stone’s throw of the English line, since if he had done it earlier, they would have had to reform after they had negotiated the various impediments. This would normally have been considered an extremely hazardous proceeding since it would
render him vulnerable to attack while his men were not in fighting order. He must have thought it safe on this occasion since it was highly unlikely that the English would desert the strong position they already occupied to attack or harass him while he was deploying, though it could have exposed his men to archery fire as they took up position; he could hardly have known at this stage that the king was short of archers. None of this, however, supports the idea that Harold had been caught unprepared, nor does the course of the battle thereafter suggest that the English suffered any disadvantage for such a reason. Indeed, William of Poitiers’ account makes it clear that the English were fully prepared for the opening onslaught of the Norman archers and infantry.