Battle of Hastings, The Page 9
It is an iceberg.
And there is that unforgettable, extraordinarily powerful and fully achieved masterpiece, The Dream of the Rood, in which Christ’s cross speaks of its experience of the crucifixion with a passion and imaginative originality that were not to be recaptured in English poetry for three centuries after the conquest:
As a rood was I raised up; I bore aloft the mighty King, the Lord of Heaven; I durst not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails; the wounds are still plain to view in me, gaping gashes of malice; I durst not do hurt to any of them. They bemocked us together. I was all bedewed with blood, shed from the Man’s side, after He had sent forth His Spirit. I have endured many stern trials on the hill; I saw the God of hosts violently stretched out; darkness with its clouds had covered the Lord’s corpse, the fair radiance; a shadow went forth, dark beneath the clouds. All creation wept, lamented the King’s death; Christ was on the cross.l
When poetry was written in English again, it had a different character, the difference not always easy to define but probably due in part to the fact that, while before the conquest much of the most impressive work had been written for an aristocratic audience or readership, by the time of its revival it was being written for a more popular and provincial public. It was not until the fourteenth century that it regained its old authority.
Anglo-Saxon poetry has been accused of a gloomy overemphasis on the darker side of human existence. It is true that it tends to dwell on the transitoriness of life and of pleasure; happiness in any Dark Age society probably was transitory. But it reflects the circumstances of the life in which it was written. Just as the Anglo-Saxons’ love of gold was derived in part from the way its radiance lighted the darkness and cold of their churches and houses, so their poetry mirrors the harshness of their daily existence. The reader is always conscious of the gloom and wildness of the northern landscape that produced it: the cold, the hard life extracting a living from the soil, the seaspray in the face, the loneliness of a life deprived of the support of a lord, contrasted with the warmth and joy of feasting in the hall and the company of comrades. It calls to mind Bede’s famous story of the Northumbrian ealdorman’s comparison of the life of man to the sparrow flying through the warm lighted hall, passing from the cold darkness outside to another unknown darkness on the other side. There is none of the joy of the merry month of May in Anglo-Saxon poetry. But there is a noble melancholy and an elegiac lyricism, combined with a stoic acceptance of fate, and a courage ‘perfect, because without hope’,li exquisitely summed up in the words of Byrhtwold, the old retainer, at the battle of Maldon:
Mind shall be the braver, heart be the fiercer,
Courage be the greater, as our strength lessens.
Here lies our lord, hacked and cut down,
A brave man in the dust; ever will he mourn
Who thinks from this war-play to return home.
England was unique in Europe in 1066 in having a fully developed vernacular prose. Its most remarkable manifestation is, of course, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which recorded in English events from the seventh century onwards at a time when chronicles would normally have been written in Latin. It was, in fact, not one chronicle but several, different versions being maintained at different ecclesiastical centres around the country. Its establishment has been credited to Alfred, as part of his campaign to promote writing in English that could be read in their own tongue by all of his people who were literate. There is no written evidence to support the claim, but the coincidence of the appearance of a chronicle in English at the time when Alfred was campaigning for essential books to be available in English is, to say the least, suggestive, especially since it would have taken a certain amount of central authority to get the project going in the first place. Whatever the origin of the Chronicle, it does, in itself, provide an overview of the development of written English, from the earliest entries, such as the rather incoherent but vivid account of the blood feud in 755 between Cynewulf and Cyneheard (the first ever substantial piece of historical writing in Europe in any vernacular) to the bitter irony of the late tenth- and early eleventh-century entries on the Danish raids in the reign of Æthelred and the fluency and power of the account of Count Eustace’s affray at Dover and the outlawing of the Godwin family in 1051. The Cynewulf and Cyneheard episode gives a fair sample of Alfredian prose in its early stages, though it may be a reworking of an earlier account of the episode that had been handed down: after telling us that Cynewulf had held the kingdom of the West Saxons for thirty-one winters, it continues:
He wished to drive out a prince named Cyneheard. . . and when [Cyneheard] heard that the king was lying with a woman at Merton, he rode there and surrounded the bower before the king’s men were aware of him. And when the king perceived that, he went to the door and there valiantly defended himself until he saw the prince and then rushed at him and severely wounded him. And then they were all fighting with the king until they had slain him. And when the king’s men heard the din from the woman’s bower they rushed there, whoever was readiest and swiftest; and the prince offered all of them life and goods but none would accept. And they fought together until all were slain but one Welsh hostage, and he was badly wounded. And in the morning when the king’s thegns that had been left behind heard that the king was dead they rode thither with his ealdorman Osric and his thegn Wiferth and the men who had been left behind, and found the prince where the king lay slain and the gates had been locked against them, and there they were fighting. And he offered them lands and goods at their own choice if they would grant him the kingdom, and told them that kinsmen of theirs were within who would not go from him. And they answered that no kinsmen were dearer to them than their lord, and they would never follow his slayer. And they offered that their kinsmen should go safely hence; and they said that the same had been offered to their companions who had been with the king. They said that they cared for this ‘no more than your companions who were slain with the king’. And they were fighting around the gates until they got inside and slew the prince and all who were with him, all but one who was the ealdorman’s godson, and his life was spared though he was much wounded.
The confusion of personal pronouns, the abrupt unexplained switch from the third to the second person, all mark it out as early experimental prose; but nothing conceals the vitality and immediacy of the account given, even though it must have been written well over a hundred years after the events described. The contrast in fluency and control with the much later Chronicle extracts already quoted is striking but this early piece was written by a clerk who already had an instinctive feeling for the rhythms and potentialities of English prose.
Outside the Chronicle, it is equally possible to track the development of the language in flexibility and sophistication from the slightly elementary individuality and sincerity of Alfred’s first efforts to the fiery eloquence of Archbishop Wulfstan’s Sermon of the Wolf and the classic elegance of Ælfric. It is impossible not to wonder what would have resulted if the language had been allowed to continue along its well-established trajectory; but the development of the prose, like that of the poetry, was stamped out brutally overnight on 14 October 1066. When in the 1070s the English language ceased to be used for political and administrative purposes, there was no longer any central authority to establish and propagate a standard ‘received’ English and it broke down into a confusion of regional dialects. Indeed, it is likely that the written Old English that has descended to us, the Wessex form of the language, must always have been something of a literary and bureaucratic mandarin, probably different from its spoken form even in Wessex, certainly different from what was spoken in Mercia or Northumbria. With the loss of its dominance, the regional variants had their way. Thus, when English prose began to be used again for literary purposes, three centuries later, it was, in effect, a new English, and had returned to the tentative experimentalism that Old English had shown in Alfred’s day. Not until Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, roughly four hundr
ed years after the conquest, did it show itself again as a fully developed literary medium.
THE ARMIES
The predominating ethos of Dark Age societies was martial; the king functioned first and foremost as a war-leader and as the defender of his people, and the more effective he was in this capacity, the higher his standing with his own people and his enemies. It was King Alfred who, in his translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, first defined what he called the tools of his kingship by separating them into what would be the traditional three classes, the praying men, the fighting men and the working men; but there was never any doubt about which of them formed the aristocracy. In England, as in Normandy, the ability to fight was the most important qualification for life, and the reputation of a renowned warrior the most eagerly sought.
It may seem rather contradictory, therefore, to make the point that major pitched battles, like Hastings, were on the whole avoided whenever possible, and the most successful rulers of the day were generally those who were most efficient in avoiding them. It has been pointed out that the only major battlefield on which William had appeared before Hastings was that of Val-ès-Dunes, when he was only nineteen and where the commander-in-chief was his overlord, the King of France. Over the next twenty years until Hastings, he contrived with considerable adroitness to achieve his objectives by more indirect methods such as siege-work, in which in his early years at least he appears to have been masterly. The battle of Mortemer, in which the Normans defeated the French under the French king and the Count of Anjou, was captained on the Norman side by William’s cousin, Robert of Eu, and the battle of Varaville against the same opponents, where William managed to catch the French army divided in two on either side of a ford, indicates patience and clever tactics but can hardly be compared with a battle of the scale of Hastings. Harold, in his warfare against the Welsh king Gruffydd ap Llewellyn in 1062, showed something of the same tendency. He pursued an extremely effective campaign of harassment against him, but the hands that eventually killed Gruffydd were Welsh, not English. On the whole he appears to have preferred negotiation to battle and to have resorted to force only when diplomacy failed. Edward, on the other hand, despite his saintly reputation, seems to have favoured warfare rather than diplomacy on the occasions for which we have evidence (for example, the exiling of the Godwin family in 1051 and the Northumbrian rebellion in 1065): a not uncommon example of the civilian who knew little at first hand of war contrasted with the soldier who knew all too much about it.
The reason is not difficult to find. Far too much must be hazarded on the outcome of a single pitched battle, and, unless the odds on one side were overwhelming (in which case the lesser side would if it could find a way to avoid battle, such as retreating), the eventual outcome was far too uncertain for the hazard to be worthwhile. The principle was summed up succinctly by Vegetius in his De Re Militari, the military bible of the Middle Ages, probably written about AD 390: battle should be the last resort, everything else should be tried first. ‘The main and principal point in war,’ he went on, ‘is to secure plenty of provisions for oneself and to destroy the enemy by famine. Famine is more terrible than the sword.’lii The tactic of harrying and devastating the enemy’s territory (as Harold did in Wales and as William did when he landed in England) had the double advantage of damaging the enemy’s prestige and economy, and maintaining the invading army at no cost to the invader. As has been pointed out, one man’s foraging is another man’s ravaging. It was also a procedure much more popular with the individual soldier. In ravaging (or foraging), he not only looked after his own commissariat, he also had the chance of plunder. In battle, he was much more likely to be killed. It has been suggested that the harrying of Harold’s lands in Wessex was the most effective stratagem used by William to provoke Harold into confronting him at the earliest possible opportunity. And it was, of course, what the Viking raiders did in the ninth and tenth centuries. Apart from the five pitched battles of Edmund Ironside against Cnut and, of course, the battle of Maldon, there had been few major battles against the Vikings since Alfred’s conclusive victory at Edington. It follows that over the century before Hastings, the English defence capability had been geared more to combat guerrilla Viking invasions than to battles on the Stamford Bridge or Hastings scale, the one notable exception being Athelstan’s great victory in 937 at the battle of Brunanburh over the combined forces of the kings of Scotland and Ireland.
The myth of an Anglo-Saxon army primarily made up of peasants fighting with sticks and stones was exploded many years ago but dies very hard. Such an army could not have held back the Normans for half an hour, let alone a full day. Another myth, strenuously promoted in some circles in recent years, is that the victory of the Normans was that of a highly disciplined feudal force, composed in large part of well-trained cavalry, over some kind of home guard fighting on foot, enthusiastic but poorly equipped and largely untrained, called together in haste from the shires to meet the threat of invasion but hampered by obsolete organization in the face of the sophisticated opposition. In part, this is due to the retrospective effect of the outcome: the English army was defeated by the Norman army, therefore it must, ipso facto, have been inferior. This argument does not take account of the circumstances in which the battle was fought.
A good deal of research has been done on the composition of the two armies that met at Hastings, but in essentials there are several unknowable facts, the most important of which is our ignorance of the size of the two forces. Many efforts have been made to compute these, on the one side from the numbers of men and horses whose heads are shown above the gunwales in the Norman ships in the Bayeux Tapestry (and the belief that one can extrapolate from this a calculation based on the number of ships believed to have sailed), on the other on the assumed length of the English position and the probable depth of Harold’s deployment along it. Neither hypothesis can provide a reliable result. The depictions on the Tapestry are symbolic, not naturalistic, and we have no detailed knowledge of the types or sizes of the ships William built; and the topography of Harold’s original position has been changed so much by time and building work that it cannot support any reliable calculation. There is also the unreliability of the contemporary evidence. On the English side, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, corroborated by some later chroniclers, states that Harold fought before many of his troops had come up – contradicted by a different assertion, that in fact he had too many men for the position he occupied. On the Norman side, there are wildly unrealistic estimates of the size of the English army, designed in part, probably, to enhance the duke’s prestige in having beaten so colossal a force. As for the Norman army, William announced before the battle that if he had only 10,000 men rather than the 60,000 he had brought he would still fight Harold, but this was undoubtedly a rhetorical figure and 60,000 is not credible. The possibility of armies of 20,000 or more on each side has been suggested, but is unlikely. The best guesses of the best authorities, based on calculations of the size of the battlefield, the number of men it could accommodate and the space between them that would be necessary for them to fight effectively, are that the two armies were fairly evenly matched, at between 6,000 and 8,000 men on each side, and this is borne out by the length of the battle since one would not expect a battle where one side was demonstrably superior to the other to last so long. But they are no more than guesses.
Ironically, of the two forces we know far more about the obsolete English than the professional Norman, and what can be deduced from the written evidence available does not support the idea of an out-of-date amateur force, crushed by a highly trained professional army organized along feudal lines. This is not surprising, given the length of time over which the English system had evolved and the various Viking invasions to which it had been forced to react. There must always, from the earliest days and on both sides of the Channel, have been some arrangements, of varying degrees of formality, linking the defence of a country to the holding of land in that countr
y, so that all free landholders had a responsibility to the king, or to some intermediary lord, to give armed service when required. Vestiges of such a system over the previous centuries can be found in many parts of Europe. England, by coincidence, provides more evidence of its development than Normandy.
Long before the advent of the Vikings, the rulers of the individual kingdoms of the Heptarchy had had occasion to call on their subjects for fighting men. It was as a result of the ninth-century raids that Alfred made the most far-reaching changes yet to the organization of that requirement. It was he who initiated the systematized construction of fortified towns or burhs (or boroughs, as they became) throughout his kingdom, to be permanently maintained in a state of readiness and defence; in theory no one was more than twenty miles away from a place of refuge in the event of Viking attack. The germ of this idea had been found earlier in Mercia, but it was Alfred who saw its relevance to the kind of hit and run raids to which so many parts of England had been subjected, though it was left to his son, Edward the Elder, to complete the scheme. Edward also produced the complicated Burghal Hidage document, which provided for the maintenance and defence of the burhs and has been described as a watershed in the history of Anglo-Saxon governance.liii The lack of castles in England has been seen as a sign of the general backwardness of the English in military matters, in comparison with the achievements of the castle-building Normans, and Orderic Vitalis ascribes the speed with which William was able to subdue the country after Hastings to the absence of English castles. But the virtue of castles lay chiefly in the part they could play in defending border territory (most of the few English castles that existed before 1066 were on the Welsh marches), or in holding down rebellious or conquered territory (the reason why William built so many of them) or in providing a focus for insurrection. In the centuries after the conquest, the many English castles held by rebellious nobles were to prove a mixed blessing to William’s successors. Alfred’s system of fortified burhs whose administration and upkeep were in the hands of their inhabitants, not of individual nobles, and into which country-dwellers could retreat for safety in time of danger represented a much nobler vision and proved an effective deterrent to Viking raiders.