The Battlefield: Hastings 1066

By Lisa J. Yarde

On a morning nine hundred and forty-eight years ago, a pivotal battle took place to decide the future of England, whether it would remain in the Anglo-Danish sphere of medieval politics or become aligned with the doctrines of the Catholic Church embraced by its continental neighbors. Two opposing armies met during the Battle of Hastings as those who survived the victor’s lifetime called it, one set of forces under the direction of the Anglo-Danish ruler Harold Godwinson and the other led by the invader, Duke William of Normandy. Each man believed so strongly in his right to rule England that he knew nothing short of the annihilation of his enemy would determine the country’s fate.

Resolve would not have been the only commonality between the proud commanders. Both men had Scandinavian origins, Harold being the great-nephew of King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark through his mother Gytha and William descended from Scandinavian raiders who had carved out the Norman duchy from northernmost France two centuries before the conflict at Hastings. Harold succeeded to the throne in January 1066 upon the death of his predecessor King Edward called the Confessor. He had commended his queen, Edith who was sister to Harold, and the country to his brother in-law. The rudimentary parliament of England, the witan confirmed Harold as king. William was a bastard, born of the Norman duke Robert and his mistress Herleva. William had survived against all odds, including assassination attempts, to rule Normandy from 1035. He believed in a spurious claim over England based on the promise of Edward the Confessor, with whom he shared blood ties through Edward’s mother Emma of Normandy.

Before I started writing On Falcon’s Wings years ago, the tale of Saxon and Norman lovers torn apart by the ambitions of Harold and William, I knew the significance the Battle of Hastings would have held in the development of the characters. Until I delved into research of the period, I never imagined how dramatic the events of that morning of October 14, 1066 would have been. Some scholars still debate the exact location of the battle, a good distance from the town of Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle referred to it as the battle at the ‘hoary (gray) apple tree’, the site where Harold’s army convened. A century later, the victors called the place Senlac, a form of the Old English Sandlacu, which referred to ‘sandy water’. In Norman French, Senlac meant ‘lake of blood’, an appropriate term for the aftermath of William and Harold’s warfare. How did it begin?

The root of the conflict between the English defenders and their Norman invaders arose from a claim William made, calling Harold an oath breaker. During Edward the Confessor’s rule, Normans held influence at his court; even the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert de Jumieges hailed from Normandy. As a result, there had been bad blood between Harold’s father Godwin and Edward the Confessor up to 15 years before the battle. Later, Godwin and his family went into exile. When they returned to court, reconciliation with the monarch meant the swift departure of Robert de Jumieges. He took with him Harold’s brother Wulfnoth, never fated to live as a free man in the place of his birth again, along with Harold’s nephew Haakon. Two years before the battle, Harold left England and ended up in Normandy. His motives remain unknown; I theorized in On Falcon’s Wings that he sought the freedom of Wulfnoth. Once handed over to William’s custody, Harold remained a guest of the Norman ducal court.

Was he a willing guest? No one will ever know, but William’s chroniclers claimed Edward had sent Harold to confirm William’s right to rule England. According to them, Harold swore an oath on holy relics and having later broken his oath by accepting kingship of England, William had no choice but to fight Harold for the crown. It is a lie in my opinion that also demonstrated sincere ignorance of the role of the witan in confirming England’s kings and dismissed other likely claimants. If Harold swore an oath, he made it under duress while trapped in Normandy. He would have effectively been giving claim to a foreigner in preference over another relevant claimant, Edgar the Aetheling, who although a six-year old child at the time, remained Edward’s closest living male relative. It seems an unlikely choice for Harold, who had proved himself in wars against the Welsh as a devoted patriot of his birth country.  

For a battle-hardened commander like William, the insult to his pride was enough to spur him into battle, but he also sought the blessing of Pope Alexander II, who provided the papal banner that William’s men carried. Warriors such as Roger de Beaumont, Robert de Mortain, Hugh de Montfort, and William de Warenne, even the duke’s half-brother Bishop Odo de Bayeux, received promises of great wealth and planned the invasion of England with William. The Normans sailed from St. Valery on the coast on September 27, 1066 across the English Channel and landed in Sussex at the market town of Pevensey a day later. They proceeded to steal and kill, ravaging the people of villages that would later be referred to in the annals as ‘laid waste’.

Harold was not idle during these events; he had just emerged three days earlier as the victor in a hard-fought battle at Stamford Bridge where his own brother Tostig supported the ambitions of King Harald Hardrada of Norway to rule England. The exhausted English swiftly went south to deal with the newest threat to their way of life, arriving at nightfall on October 13. Loyal members of Harold’s family remained at his side, including his nephew Haakon, whom he had succeeded in repatriating upon his departure from William’s court. Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine accompanied him, too. His brothers by marriage, the northern earls Edwin and Morcar were absent, claiming great losses against the Norwegians prior to Stamford Bridge at the Battle of Fulford on September 20.    

On the morning of October 14, 1066, the English and Norman forces met. Marshland and ditches, and sloping natural moors covered in thickets of gorse and trees would have surrounded the site. Harold pitched his banner, the dragon of Wessex at the ridge on Caldbec Hill. The English army gathered, largely composed of the fyrd, who gave yearly service to defend their country. The leaders of the fyrd would have been the earls and thegns, local lords who held lands and supported Harold. The elite fighting force would have been the huscarls assigned to Harold, Gyrth, and Leofwine, professional soldiers of Danish origins who had served in England for decades. Thegns and huscarls rode into battle, but like the fyrd, fought on foot. The armaments would have varied; spears, swords, arrows, and round shields for the thegns, but the huscarls like Harold’s man Skalpi, hefted the long Danish axe, known to scythe enemies. Clergy were present to bless the English army, including Abbott Aelfwig of Winchester, Harold’s uncle. The Normans had taken position in the south at Telham Hill in the hours after dawn and formed ranks in three divisions. They defended their bodies with coats of mail, and carried kite-shaped shields, swords, lances, and maces. Lower ranks included archers and even slingers. A conical helmet protected the heads of Norman warriors, with the strength of their forces remaining in the cavalry. Norman knights rode deep-chested, aggressive stallions called destriers into battle. Bishop Odo alongside Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances would have exhorted William’s men to have courage against Harold’s forces, claiming that God had abandoned the English because of Harold’s supposed treachery.

A mile separated William and Harold’s forces. From their natural defensive position, the English streamed out on the battlefield. Huscarls would have occupied the front lines, but also defended their king and his brothers, forming a shield wall. The Norman cavalry attacked, in part led by Roger de Beaumont’s sixteen year-old son Robert, who later received a knighthood for his exploits at Hastings. In a purposeful feint, the Normans tricked the English into pursuit before the Normans counter-attacked with their heavy cavalry. Just before midday, the two armies regrouped and the fighting began to overwhelm the English, who do not recognize the tactics of another feigned flight by cavalry. At some point Harold learned of the deaths of Leofwine and Gyrth. By midafternoon, arrows rained down upon England’s defenders who had lost ground and withdrawn up to Caldbec Hill. There Harold made his last stand with a company of huscarls, where he supposedly suffered an arrow wound to the eye in the shadow of his standard. The Normans gained the ridge and four of them hacked Harold to death alongside the last of his men. After sundown, the battle was over.

My summary can’t really do justice to the tragedy at Hastings or its aftermath. Not only did the last Anglo-Danish king of England die. His brothers, his uncle Aelfwig and many thegns and huscarls including Skalpi joined Harold in death. The Normans continued their devastating path to William’s claim of a conqueror’s crown. He spent the next several years destroying the country he had determined to rule, particularly in the area of York. He ordered the construction of Battle Abbey to commemorate his fight against Harold. Allegedly, William also held some regret upon his death in 1087 for his brutal actions against the English and their king. Cold comfort to those who suffered and died at Hastings.

After the battle, legends persisted of Harold’s survival or escape, as some of his huscarls had done when they left for the shores of Constantinople and service among its Varangian guard. In 2014, the search for Harold’s body at Waltham Abbey has resumed. His birthplace at a Bosham estate also fostered the idea of his burial there, within sight of the English Channel, particularly supported by the discovery in 2003 of a body lacking a head and portions of the limbs. Wherever Harold’s resting place may have been, the catastrophe of his brief reign and his people’s suffering under the Normans remains undeniable.          

Sources

1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth

1066: The Battle of York, Stamford Bridge, and Hastings by Peter Marren

Anglo-Saxon Thegn AD 449-1066 by Mark Harrison

The Godwins by Frank Barlow
Norman Knight AD 950-1204 by Christopher Gravett

Images are licensed from Fotalia.com; include the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings which takes place every year, Battle Abbey, and elements of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by the Middle Ages in Europe. She is the author of two historical novels set in medieval England and Normandy, The Burning Candle, based on the life of one of the first countesses of Leicester and Surrey, Isabel de Vermandois, and On Falcon's Wings, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers before the Battle of Hastings. Lisa has also written four novels in a six-part series set in Moorish Spain, Sultana, Sultana’s Legacy, Sultana: Two Sisters, and Sultana: The Bride Price where rivalries and ambitions threaten the fragile bonds between members of a powerful family. Her short story, The Legend Rises, which chronicles the Welsh princess Gwenllian of Gwynedd’s valiant fight against English invaders, is also available.

The End of an Era: How the Battle of Hastings Changed England

By Lisa J. Yarde

In the early hours of the morning on Saturday, October 14 in 1066, English warriors and their king Harold Godwinson might not have imagined how the outcome of one battle would affect history. They were fighting for their survival and that of their families. Surely, they intended to deal with their Norman foes under Duke William as decisively as the rout of the Norwegians under Harald Hardrada and King Harold's own traitorous brother Tostig, just 19 days earlier at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. One day at a site now occupied by Battle Abbey changed almost everything. In the aftermath, the English language altered, riddled with French influences instead of just Germanic. The political landscape became more centralized and Norman nobles replaced the aristocracy as landholders. At Hastings, the two opposing sides had similar goals in the eradication of the other, but also held common ties. Harold Godwinson was an Anglo-Danish king, and William’s ancestors were Scandinavia raiders who had invaded northern France and carved out a fiefdom in Normandy.  

For six centuries before the Battle of Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon people had dominated England and imposed their Germanic way of life on the Britons who survived the decline of Roman rule. The people we think of as Anglo-Saxons were an amalgamation of Angles from the Jutland Peninsula, which is part of Germany and Denmark, and the Saxons of modern-day northwest Germany. From the mid-fifth century, their settlements dotted the eastern and southern coastline. They founded various kingdoms, some of which would survive as the English counties of today, including Sussex, Essex, and Wessex. Smaller consolidated regions, such as the union of Bernicia and Deira, emerged stronger as the kingdom of Northumbria. Others rose in prominence and wealth, like Mercia under the reign of Offa in the eighth century. Both Northumbria and Mercia swiftly declined by the ninth century and came under central administration from the surviving kingdom of Wessex.

Anglo-Saxon society emerged with distinct duties and rights. A slave or theow labored for his lord, but had opportunities to earn money and could legally buy his own freedom. In the early years many slaves came from Wales; another term for slave, wealh, evolved into ‘Welsh’ meaning ‘foreigner’ in the Anglo-Saxon language. In the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, the wife of King Hrothgar of the Danes bears the name Wealhtheow. When average citizens, the ceorls, were not working the fields or bound by a trade, they gave service as part of the fyrd, local levies. Some obtained a portion of land from their lords, which the ceorls’ families worked for themselves. Noblemen called gesiths up through the seventh century merged with thegns by the ninth century. Under tenth-century Danish influence, their number included professional warriors or huscarls. The noblemen were the military companions and commanders of the king or their lord. Ealdormen or eorls after the tenth-century gained their appointments from the king, charged by him with the administration of large territories. The regions often derived from the old kingdoms, such as the earldoms of Northumbria and Mercia. Ealdormen had a duty to call up the fyrd in the king’s name for the various wars often embroiling England. Upper class Anglo-Saxon warriors took their horses into battle, but fought on foot.

Each of the classes had an assigned wergild, the value of their lives should any undue harm befall them. Anyone who caused injury or death to a slave or freeman had to pay the wergild, as recompense for having deprived the lord or the victim’s family. A nobleman’s wergild was six times that of a freeman. Payment staved off blood feuds, for no one exacted vengeance quite like Anglo-Saxons left without compensation for their losses. Retribution flowed from public affronts to honor and murder, as generations sought to avenge personal slights. A prime example is the slaughter of Earl Uhtred the Bold of Northumbria and his men in 1016, after which Uthtred’s son Ealdred killed his father’s murderer Thurband. The death of Ealdred occurred at the hands of Thurband’s son Carl. This particular blood feud lasted three generations, almost sixty years until Waltheof, Ealdred’s grandson, killed most of Carl’s sons and grandsons. The concept of loyalty until death was also entrenched in Anglo-Saxon society. A deserter who left his lord became nithing. Anyone could kill him without having to pay wergild.

Marriage became a contractual arrangement between the bridegroom and the bride’s family, but with some deference to the woman in allowing her to choose or reject a suitor. Prospective husbands offered a bride price to the family, but as part of the marriage settlement, brides also received the morgengifu or morning-gift after the consummation of the union. In the form of land or money, the morning-gift became the personal property of wives until their deaths, reverting to their families if they died without children. In various period, Anglo-Saxon kings offered protections to widows against forced remarriage or veiling in nunneries. Women endured the dominion of their husbands, but held property rights. They existed as separate legal entities from their spouses. Their wergild did not change based on marriage. If a pregnant woman suffered harm, her wergild and that of her unborn child (about half the father’s value) ensured appropriate recompense. Under Alfred the Great of Wessex, the wergild paid to a lord for the rape of a slave was five shillings, a rate that doubled if the victim was a free woman under his dominion. Life for women and men revolved around the hall, a hub of all social activity where slaves and servants toiled at feasts, women brewed and baked, and men feasted while listening to poems about epic battles.   

Perhaps the greatest threat the Anglo-Saxons faced in the six hundred years before Hastings came from the Norwegian and Danish Vikings. On June 8, 793, Norsemen attacked an abbey on the island of Lindisfarne and ushered in the so-called Viking Age. More Scandinavians arrived in the next century, intent on settling England rather than just raiding. Alfred the Great’s wars with Guthrum the Dane drew to a stalemate and led to the creation of the Danelaw, with its capital at York. Scandinavians influenced the culture of England, including the language. In 991 after an English defeat at the Battle of Maldon, King Aethelred the Unready paid Danegeld, tribute intended to halt the raiders. After a temporary respite, Cnut invaded Wessex in 1015, joined by the faithless Ealdorman Eadric Streona of Mercia. After a siege of London, Cnut claimed all the land north of the Thames River by treaty in October 1016, while King Aethelred’s eventual successor Edmund II held the remainder until his death six weeks later.

When Cnut married Edmund’s stepmother Emma in 1017, the act ushered in Norman influence at court, which would affect events leading up to the Battle of Hastings. Emma was the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, Duke William’s great-grandfather. Emma’s children with King Aethelred included Edward the Confessor, who spent years of exile in his mother’s birthplace. In 1043, he returned as England’s monarch, joined by several Norman nobles and clergymen, including Ralph of Mantes, the Earl of Hereford, and Abbot Robert of Jumieges who would become the archbishop of Canterbury. King Edward married Edith, sister of Harold Godwinson, but they had no children. Edward’s indecision regarding a successor endangered England’s future. The Normans based their invasion of England on the idea that King Edward and later Harold Godwinson had promised Duke William the kingdom, while ignoring the claims of Edward’s nephew by the half blood, Edgar, son of Edmund II. Upon Edward’s death, Harold Godwinson took the throne with the agreement of the witan, the king’s council. Harold’s reign lasted only 10 contentious months and ended at the Battle of Hastings. With papal support of his plans, William landed on the southern coast of the country. His mounted knights ravaged the land and its people before they faced off on horseback against Harold and a battle weary force, which had rushed south from Stamford Bridge. The majority of Harold’s nobles and huscarls died with their ruler, often considered as the last Anglo-Saxon king.

Afterward, the Normans swept away aside the institutions of England as they had effectively destroyed its defenders. They replaced at least 90% of the English aristocracy as William dispensed English lands to his loyal followers. Rebellion ensued, for which William’s men meted out terrible punishments including the harrying of the North. An analysis of entries in the Domesday Book reveals many northern villages as “laid waste” to describe the devastation. By this time, Normans held eleven of the fifteen bishoprics in the country. Castles dotted the landscape, physical symbols of Norman authority, and the Normans rebuilt almost every major Anglo-Saxon cathedral or abbey in stone. Huge tracts of territory became royal forests. William and most of his eventual successors were often absent from England, more concerned with their interests in Normandy and France. Norman French replaced the vernacular language at court and in poetic verse, Latin became the official language of government administration and the curia regis took the place of the witan, bound to the king by defined feudal rules where they held tenancies from him. 

Villeins, the lowest class of freemen, became tenants tied to the land who had no redress against their lords. Perhaps the greatest alteration for the average Englishman lay in whether the name and language of his lord as well as the designation of his location had changed. An earlier ancestor in Anglo-Saxon times might have regarded the effects of the conquest as a minimal impact on the drudgery of  daily existence. Anglo-Saxon society was no more egalitarian than the Normans who claimed England in 1066, especially for the poor.   

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by the medieval period. She is the author of historical novels set in medieval England and Normandy, The Burning Candle, based on the life of Isabel de Vermandois, and On Falcon's Wings, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers. Lisa has also written three novels in a six-part series set in Moorish Spain, Sultana,  Sultana’s Legacy and Sultana: Two Sisters, where rivalries and ambitions threaten the fragile bonds between members of a powerful family.