Battle of Hastings, The Read online

  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.

  It has been suggested by Lt Colonel C. H. Lemmon that the pursuit of the Bretons by his right wing was part of a planned counter-attack by Harold, and that this would most naturally have been led by his brothers, Earl Gyrth and Earl Leofwine.c Their deaths are shown on the Tapestry at just about this stage of the battle; if they had indeed been leading a counter-attack, their fall would certainly have thrown it into disarray, but their deaths might not have been seen by the men on the far right who would have continued to advance as planned, only to find themselves isolated and cut off. On the other hand, the bodies of Gyrth and Leofwine were found close beside their brother at the end of the battle, which is not consistent with them falling at the head of an attack unless there had been an opportunity to retrieve them during a lull in the fighting. It is more likely that the men on the right wing were simply unable to resist the temptation to break ranks and pursue the fleeing Bretons, who were rallied by the duke and rounded on them with the Norman centre, cutting them down. Alfred’s army at Wilton had done precisely the same thing, and the Danes had turned on them with equally disastrous results.

  At this stage, there seems to have been something of a hiatus in the battle. As Colonel Lemmon points out, troops cannot engage in hand-to-hand fighting for eight hours on end, and both sides would have needed to regroup and rearm. So far, the battle had not gone at all as the duke had expected, since none of his troops, not even the cavalry, had succeeded in making any impact on the English defences; in William of Poitiers’ words:

  When the Normans and the troops allied to them saw that they could not conquer such a solidly massed enemy force without heavy loss, they wheeled round and deliberately feigned flight. They remembered how, a little while before, their flight had brought about the result they desired [i.e., in drawing the English away from their defensive position]. . . As before, some thousands of them dared to rush, almost as if they were winged, in pursuit of those they believed to be fleeing. The Normans, suddenly wheeling round their horses, checked and encircled them, and slaughtered them to the last man.

  Having used this trick twice with the same result, they attacked the remainder with greater determination: up to now the enemy line had been bristling with weapons and most difficult to encircle. So a combat of an unusual kind began, with one side attacking in different ways and the other standing firmly as if fixed to the ground.

  Nothing in the story of the battle has provoked more argument than this question of the feigned flights. Historians have divided between those who maintain that a feigned flight on the spur of the moment was much too complicated a manoeuvre for troops to carry out at that stage of the history of warfare, and those who point to the occasions on which it had been successfully executed in the past. Experienced soldiers, like Colonel Lemmon, point with justice to the problems associated with the manoeuvre, even in more favourable situations than obtained at Hastings:

  A ‘feigned retreat’ would demand that every man taking part in it had to know when to retreat, how far to retreat and when to turn round and fight back; and, moreover, that these movements had to be carefully synchronized, or disaster would result. To arrange this in the heat of battle with men fighting hand-to-hand for their lives was clearly impossible. Could the operation have been a carefully rehearsed act, set off, perhaps, by a trumpet call? Similar acts, performed at military tournaments and tattoos with the well-drilled and disciplined soldiers of today need much rehearsal and, even with the small numbers employed, are difficult enough to stage. Is it possible that a feudal force at the beginning of this millennium could have performed such an act at all? Finally, there is the military maxim, evolved after long years of experience in warfare, that ‘troops committed to the attack cannot be made to change direction’. If the situation created by the real flight of some troops was restored by an immediate charge of fresh troops, the result would be much the same as if a ‘feigned retreat’ had been possible and had taken place, as far as the progress of the battle was concerned. A ‘feigned retreat’, therefore, the chroniclers made it, in order to save the face of the troops who ran away.ci

  The Lemmon line is supported by Colonel A. H. Burne in his Battlefields of Britain, who writes, ‘I simply cannot bring myself to believe that a feigned retreat could have been mounted, as an afterthought, in the midst of the battle’, and suggests robustly that the first retreat could be accepted by Norman chroniclers as genuine, since it was the fault of the Bretons, but that the subsequent retreats, which were by Norman troops, had to be presented as something else.

  Other historians, however, such as R. Allen Brown, point to the equally convincing reasons for supposing that feigned retreats were possible:

  The feigned flight, so the argument runs, cannot have happened because it could not have happened; and it could not have happened because it would have required to a high degree discipline and training which feudal armies, and most especially the exhibitionist knights who formed them, notoriously did not possess. The truth is, of course, that our Frankish knights and Norman knights were as professional as the age could make them, born and bred to war and trained from early youth, in the household which is the contingent of a lord, in the art and science of horsemanship and arms. Not only do we have entirely acceptable, one might almost say overwhelming, evidence for the tactic of the feigned flight employed at Hastings, but we also have further evidence of its practice on other occasions by other knights of this generation – by the Normans at St Aubin-le-Cauf near Arques in 1052–53 and near Messina in 1060, and by Robert le Frison of Flanders at Cassel in 1071. If this is not enough, then we can find much earlier references to the manoeuvre, which was thus evidently a well-known ruse de guerre, in e.g. Nithard under the year 842, over two hundred years before Hastings, and in Dudo of St Quentin writing in the first decades of the eleventh century. Clearly of all the arguments which surround the Norman Conquest and Hastings, this one at least must stop.cii

  It certainly seems perfectly probable that small groups of knights, accustomed from long training to fighting together as a conroi or squadron, could have practised and carried out such a manoeuvre, though there would still be the risk of their action being interpreted by the rest of the army (many of whom were foreign mercenaries) as a genuine flight and panic spreading as a result. Bernard S. Bachrach, in his article on the feigned retreats at Hastings,ciii shows that the feigned retreat was a common tactic used by the horsemen of the steppes, and points to its use among the Huns, Visigoths and, especially, the Byzantines, who are said by Gregory of Tours to have used it successfully against a body of Franks positioned very much as Harold’s forces were at Hastings and with very similar results. Clearly, it must be accepted that feigned retreats were perfectly possible by 1066; with the slight reservation
that in this case, all the evidence for them comes to us at second hand, from the winning side, and with the proviso, as pointed out by Colonel Lemmon, that in enemy communiqués, a retreat according to plan was usually interpreted as meaning that the troops had run away.

  Whether the retreats were feigned or genuine makes no difference to the outcome. William of Poitiers says that ‘some thousands’ of the English had rushed out to pursue the retreats and were all killed. Exaggeration of the numbers of the defeated enemy was standard procedure, to make the eventual victory more glorious, just as the English records imply that Harold was seriously outnumbered. It cannot possibly have been as many as ‘some thousands’ but it was probably enough to cause serious damage to the English defence and to make it necessary for Harold to draw in his wings and shorten his front. This must have made it easier for the Normans to gain access to the ridge and attack him on his flanks, and according to the Carmen, they did so. It is irritating that at this point William of Poitiers’ chronicle stops reporting the various stages of the battle in favour of a panegyric on the courage and ferocity of the duke. He takes up a more sober account only towards the end of the day when, he says:

  the English army realized that there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer. They knew that they had been weakened by the loss of many troops; that the king himself and his brothers and not a few of the nobles of the kingdom had perished; that all who remained were almost at the end of their strength, and that they could hope for no relief.civ

  In fact there must have been some considerable interval between the two Norman ‘feigned’ retreats and the collapse that he reports here. William of Poitiers’ failure to report the closing stages of the battle in as much detail as the earlier part probably arose from the general fatigue and confusion of those taking part, and their inability to give him the detailed information he needed. We can imagine the growing exhaustion on both sides, the determination of the English to hold their position till after sunset, the desperate efforts of the Normans to assail the English flanks and break through their line to reach the king. Battles lasting as long as Hastings (between eight and nine hours) and indeed Stamford Bridge (probably about seven hours) were extremely rare in the Middle Ages, and it was part of the bad luck of the English that they should have had to fight two of them so close together.

  The crucial factor, which William of Poitiers skates over, is the death of Harold. The highly coloured version in the Carmen, according to which four knights, one of them the duke himself, burst through the English line and hacked the king down under his standards, is not credible. It is the part reputedly played in this version by the duke that is unbelievable. If it had been true, William of Poitiers would certainly have known of it and equally certainly would have reported it. It would have been a story to rank with the death of Roland at Roncesvalles. It is much more likely that no one on the Norman side knew, in the confusion of the battle, precisely when he was struck, especially if his death or initial disablement was indeed caused by an arrow, and that no one survived on the English side who could have given the facts. There is a tradition, unsupported by surviving evidence, that in the later stages of the battle the duke gave orders to his archers to aim high, so that the arrows dropped on the English from above. This would have overcome the difficulties they would have been caused by the rising ground in their opening volleys, though it would have considerably reduced the penetrative power of the arrows. It would also have enabled the Norman cavalry to charge simultaneously under the archers’ cover. If Harold’s death was in fact caused by one of the Norman arrows falling from the sky, the arrows were penetrating adequately and William’s tactics paid off.

  R. Allen Brown, in his account of the battle, said that the only really undisputed fact about Hastings was that the Normans won. One other thing is indisputable, which is that the side whose leader fell first would lose. William had the luck with him throughout his campaign for the throne, but nowhere was that luck more striking than his survival on the battlefield, where he must have been as much if not more at risk as Harold. If he did indeed have three horses killed under him in the course of the battle (and there is no reason to doubt it), then on three occasions at least he was particularly vulnerable not just to the enemy but to being accidentally ridden down by his own knights. It is clear from the first, genuine, flight of the Bretons how quickly the Norman army would have faltered and retreated if he had been killed or incapacitated.

  The manner of Harold’s death has been almost as much disputed as the retreats, feigned or otherwise. The confusion has been caused partly by the Tapestry, which, in plate 71, shows an armed figure apparently trying to pull an arrow out of his eye and next to him, another armed figure with a battle-axe who is being cut down by a Norman knight. Across the two figures the text reads Hic Harold Rex interfectus est, ‘Here King Harold is killed’. The word ‘Harold’ is directly above the figure with the arrow in his eye, the words ‘interfectus est’ above the figure with the battle-axe. In general, the designer of the Tapestry has taken care to put the name of a character above the person named. The question that has exercised historians is whether both figures depict the dying king or only one of them. Although William of Poitiers could tell us nothing about Harold’s death, and little in detail about the later stages of the battle, he does make it clear that the duke had kept up an unceasing barrage of arrows, so the likelihood that the king was struck in the eye by one of them is strong. It is even stronger that, once he was thus disabled, and with his brothers having already fallen, Norman knights would find it easier to burst through the line and hack him down. This section of the tapestry has been subjected to repairs, and efforts have been made to prove, by examining original and newer stitch marks on the reverse, that what now appears to be an arrow in the eye was originally intended to be a javelin that was being thrown by the figure clutching it – not the king but one of his men. It is certainly true that the Tapestry’s present state does not necessarily represent the designer’s original intention (this is one of the most intensively restored sections), and a very small adjustment of stitches could, quite unintentionally, make a considerable difference to the final effect. Furthermore, blinding was, by Biblical warrant, widely regarded in the Middle Ages as the appropriate punishment for perjury and might therefore be regarded by the Tapestry’s designer as particularly appropriate to Harold.

  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.cv 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.’cvi 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’.