THE NORMAN INVASION AND THE CAMPAIGN OF HASTINGS.[1055]
§ 1. _The Building of the Fleet._
[Sidenote: Success of all William’s negotiations.]
We left the Duke of the Normans successful in every negotiation which concerned his enterprise, both with his own subjects and with strangers. We saw his cause, after some hesitation, zealously taken up by his own people, while volunteers flocked eagerly to his muster from the territories of all the neighbouring princes. We have seen his undertaking receive the highest of religious sanctions in the blessing of the Roman Pontiff. Had the enterprise been one against Anjou or France, warfare would have begun long before the period of the year which we have now reached. But William’s present warfare was aimed at a realm whose insular position shielded it at least for a season. England could be reached only by sea, and the Normandy of those days had ceased to be a naval power. The army destined to undertake the conquest of England had to be carried across the Channel. A vast fleet was therefore needed, and a fleet had to be created for the [Sidenote: Formation of the Norman fleet. Summer, 1066.] purpose. The creation of that fleet was the work of the summer of the great year, while King Harold of England was so carefully guarding his southern coasts.[1056] As soon as the undertaking was finally determined on, the woods of Normandy began to be felled,[1057] and the havens of Normandy resounded with the axes and hammers of carpenters and ship-builders.[1058] A large proportion of the ships were the [Sidenote: Contributions of ships.] offerings of the great Barons and Prelates of the land.[1059] William Fitz-Osbern, who had been the first man in Normandy to pledge himself to the enterprise, now redeemed his pledge by the gift of sixty ships. The same large number was contributed by Roger of Montgomery and by Roger of Beaumont, and also by Hugh of Avranches, the future Earl of Chester. Fifty ships, with sixty knights, formed the contingent of Hugh of Montfort. Two less famous men, Fulk the Lame and Gerald the Seneschal,[1060] contributed forty each. The gift of Walter Giffard was thirty ships with a hundred knights. The same number of ships, with their crews, were supplied by Vulgrin, the pious and peaceful Bishop of Le Mans. He, we are told, was specially zealous in the Duke’s cause,[1061] looking on him doubtless as the champion of Rome and of Christendom. But greater even than these great contingents were the gifts of the Duke’s own kinsfolk, of the members of the ducal house no less than of those sons of his mother whom his bounty had so lavishly enriched. A hundred and twenty ships, the largest offering in the whole list, were the contribution of the Count of Mortain. A gift second only to that of his brother, a gift of a hundred ships,[1062] was the contribution of the Bishop of Bayeux. William of Evreux gave eighty, Robert of Eu sixty. The monk Nicolas, the son of Duke Richard the Third, now Abbot of the great house of Saint Ouen, gave twenty ships with a hundred knights. Others of less degree gave one ship or more, according to their means.[1063] And among these was another monk, of less lofty birth, but of higher personal renown, than the princely Abbot of Saint Ouen’s. [Sidenote: Remigius of Fécamp, first Bishop of Lincoln. 1067–1092.] A single ship with twenty knights was the offering of Remigius, then almoner of the house of Fécamp,[1064] but who was in aftertimes to be the last Prelate of the ancient see of Dorchester, the first who placed his throne on the lordly steep of more famous Lincoln. But one gift, though the gift of a single ship only, had a value beyond all others in the eyes of the Duke. The ship which was destined for his own use, the ship which was to bear William and his fortune,[1065] was the offering of the conjugal love of the [Sidenote: William’s ship the “Mora,” the gift of Matilda.] Duchess Matilda. This chosen vessel bore the name of the Mora, a name not very easy to explain. Either at its prow or at its stern it bore the likeness of a boy wrought in gold blowing an ivory horn pointing towards England.[1066]
[Sidenote: Number of the ships variously stated.]
The whole number of the fleet thus collected is variously stated. The lowest reckoning gives the exact number as six hundred and ninety-six; the largest of those accounts which are at all credible raises it to an indefinite number above three thousand.[1067] Exaggeration is always to be looked for in such accounts; but so great a difference can hardly be accounted for wholly by exaggeration. It is evident that our different accounts follow different ways of reckoning; that some, for instance, counted only the ships strictly so called, while others reckoned also the small craft of [Sidenote: Character of the ships.] every kind. The ships, after all, were only large open boats with a single mast and sail, and with a smaller boat attached. It is plain that they were designed almost wholly for transport, and they do not seem to have in any way equalled those mighty horses of the sea[1068] which had borne Swend and Cnut to the conquest of England.
[Sidenote: William’s attention to ecclesiastical affairs.]
But while William was thus busily pressing his warlike preparations, he was, no less characteristically, largely occupied with ecclesiastical affairs. Indeed the chosen champion of the saints and of their honour, the armed missionary who was setting forth to convert the stiff-necked islanders from the error of their ways, was bound, more than ever, to show himself a faithful nursing-father [Sidenote: Council at Bonneville, June 15.] to the Church at home. In a court or council which the Duke held at Bonneville in the month of June two important ecclesiastical appointments were made. Two great Abbeys needed chiefs. The chair of Saint Evroul was void by the death of Abbot Osbern, and the new monastery of Saint Stephen was now far enough advanced towards perfection for the brotherhood to be regularly [Sidenote: Appointment of Mainer at Saint Evroul,] organized under an Abbot. The monks of Saint Evroul petitioned the Duke for the appointment of a new head of their body. William, after consulting with the Diocesan Hugh of Lisieux, placed the pastoral staff in the hand of the Prior Mainer, who presently received the abbatial benediction from the Bishop.[1069] But a greater than Mainer was on this same day advanced from the second to the [Sidenote: and of Lanfranc at Saint Stephen’s.] highest rank in monastic dignity. It was at this court at Bonneville that the renowned Prior of Bec, the future Primate of Canterbury, the man whose acute and busy spirit made him well nigh the soul of his master’s enterprise, became the first chief of his master’s great foundation. The scruples of the great scholar and diplomatist had at last been overcome, and in the same hour in which Mainer received the staff of Saint Evroul, Lanfranc also received the staff [Sidenote: Motives to special devotion at this time.] of the still more famous house of Saint Stephen.[1070] The policy of pushing on the two great expiatory foundations at this particular moment is obvious. The champions of the Church must, as far as might be, wipe out all memory of their former sin. William must set out on his holy enterprise with perfectly clean hands, and Matilda must be able to lift up hands no less clean as she prayed for his safety and victory before the altars which she had reared. Indeed, even without this overwhelming motive, the eve of so great and hazardous an undertaking was a moment which specially called for works of devotion of every kind, and we have seen that it was so felt by others in Normandy besides the Duke and Duchess.[1071] At this time therefore, [Sidenote: Consecration of the Holy Trinity at Caen. June 18.] besides the organization of William’s foundation under its first and greatest Abbot, the material fabric of Matilda’s foundation was so eagerly pressed on that the unfinished minster was hallowed three days after the appointment of [Sidenote: Dedication of the Duke’s daughter Cecily.] the two Abbots.[1072] As part of that great ceremony, the ducal pair offered on the altar of God an offering more costly than lands or buildings or jewelled ornaments. In a milder sense than that in which the words were used by the ancient prophet, they gave their first-born for their transgression, the fruit of their bodies for the sin of their souls. The Duke’s eldest daughter Cecily, now a child, but in after days to become a renowned Abbess of her mother’s foundation, was dedicated by her parents as a virgin set apart for God’s service.[1073] It was not however till nine years later that her lips pronounced the irrevocable vows.[1074]
These ecclesiastical ceremonies are the last Norman events of a peaceful kind which I have to record during this year of wonders. They answer to the ecclesiastical events which happened in England at a time a little earlier. The establishment of Lanfranc at Saint Stephen’s, the consecration of the minster of the Trinity, answer to King Harold’s renewed gifts to Waltham, to his labours for ecclesiastical reformation at Ely.[1075] On each side of the Channel the rival princes and their subjects were striving to win the favour of Heaven by acts of special devotion. We have now to turn away from ecclesiastical, and from all other peaceful affairs, to that great struggle between the two contending chiefs, on the last act of which we are now fairly entered.
[Illustration: THE VOYAGE AND CAMPAIGN OF WILLIAM.]
§ 2. _The Embarcation and Voyage of William. August–September, 1066._
[Sidenote: The fleet at the mouth of the Dive. August 12?]
At last, in the course of the month of August,[1076] the Norman fleet was ready to set sail on its great enterprise. William was now to be occupied with war, and with war alone. He entrusted the government of the Duchy to Matilda, with the help of a council of wise men, at whose head stood the famous Roger of Beaumont. The age of Roger made him fitter for counsel than for action; so he tarried at home, while his son went to the war.[1077] The Duke himself hastened to the spot which had been chosen for the embarcation. This spot lay close to the scene of one of the most memorable of William’s exploits. The mouth of the Dive, where the fleet of Normandy was now gathered for the unprovoked invasion of England, lies only a few miles below that ford of Varaville where the Norman Duke had once, in a more righteous cause, dealt so heavy a blow against the French [Sidenote: Description of the place.] invaders of his Duchy. The river there pours itself into the sea, under the shelter of heights which are a close continuation of the hills from which King Henry had looked down to see the massacre of his rear-guard.[1078] The course of the stream has no doubt greatly changed; the harbour, largely blocked up by sand, has lost much of its importance as a harbour, though it is now awaking to a kind of renewed life in the form of a modern watering-place. A large and singular church, retaining its massive central arches of Norman work, is the only piece of antiquity which remains in the original small town of Dive. A modern column and inscription on the height above shows that the historical interest of the spot is not forgotten, and the name of the great Duke is still attached to the humble hostelry. In this harbour then the ships were gathered; the host lay encamped on the hills, waiting for the south wind which was to bear them across to the land of promise. The view from those hills is a noble one. To the west the eye ranges over the whole low country and over the gentler heights which bound it in the extreme distance. At the foot of the heights the Dive rolls along its winding course, then no doubt pouring itself into the sea with a wider and more open flood than it can now boast of. Beyond it glistens the Orne, the stream which flowed by the rising minsters of Caen, the stream whose flood, like Kishon of old,[1079] had wrought such help for William’s cause on the day when he won his spurs at Val-ès-dunes.[1080] To the north-east stand forth the rocks which guard the entrance to a yet greater stream, the rocks by which William’s Wiking forefathers had so often sailed to threaten the great cities on the Seine, and which now, under Norman guardianship, served as it were to keep the Lord of Paris imprisoned within the narrow limits of his inland realm.
The south wind for which William so eagerly waited was as slow in coming as the east wind which was so eagerly looked for, when a later William was waiting to set forth for the shores of England on a widely different [Sidenote: Delay at the Dive.] errand.[1081] The fleet was detained for a whole month at the mouth of the Dive,[1082] and the panegyrist of William [Sidenote: Good order maintained in William’s army.] grows eloquent on the wonderful good order and peaceable demeanour of the host which was, no doubt most unwillingly, subjected to this untoward delay. The excellence of the Duke’s commissariat is set forth in such glowing colours that we cannot help longing to know the details of his arrangements. The whole army, we are told, received regular pay and regular provisions during the month which was thus condemned to inactivity.[1083] All plunder was forbidden, and we are told that William’s orders to this effect were carried out with a degree of success which seems incredible. The inhabitants of the surrounding country learned to pass without fear among the motley host, a host made up not only of their own countrymen but of adventurers from every province of Gaul.[1084] The flocks and herds fed undisturbed in their pastures; the ripening corn remained alike uncut and untrampled by the dangerous visitors.[1085] In all this there is doubtless much of the exaggeration of a professed panegyrist. But we can well believe that the strong will of the Great William was really able to preserve a degree of good order among the mixed multitude which he commanded which a lesser man might have found it hopeless to preserve even among an army of his own subjects.
[Sidenote: Numbers of William’s army.]
The numbers of the host which William had now assembled are as variously stated as the number of the ships which were to carry them. The sum total is commonly given at sixty thousand, or even more; but there are authorities which bring it as low as fourteen thousand.[1086] Here, as in the case of the ships, while we must allow for error and exaggeration, we must also allow for different systems of reckoning. The higher amount may be meant to take in all the armed men of every class, while the lower may give only the number of knights—what in the military language of a later age would have been called the number of _lances_. In the history of all ages nothing is so little trustworthy as the figures which profess to set before us the numbers of armies. And I fear that the exact number, or even any near approximation to the exact number, either of the Norman invaders or of the English defenders, is one of the things which the historian must, however unwillingly, leave uncertain.
[Sidenote: Spies sent by Harold.]
It was while the Norman fleet was still at the mouth of the Dive, while the whole southern coast of England was so strongly guarded by the watchful care of Harold,[1087] that an incident is said to have happened, which, though it has been mixed up with events not belonging to it in date, is most likely not without some foundation in fact. The King of the English, among his precautions for the defence of the country,[1088] did not forget to get what knowledge he could as to the condition and numbers of the enemy. He sent spies across to the mouth of the Dive. [Sidenote: One is brought before William, who sends him back with a threatening message to Harold.] One of them was seized and led before the Duke. We are not told whether William followed the magnanimous or ostentatious example of Xerxes[1089] in showing the Englishman the whole strength and numbers of the Norman host; but he at least sent him home unhurt, though charged with a threatening message to his sovereign. When the spy strove to hide his errand under some of the usual subterfuges,[1090] William showed him at once that no disguises could avail with him. Harold might forbear to waste his gold and silver in paying spies to search out William’s resources; sooner than Harold looked for, he would himself come as his own messenger, and would teach him on his own soil what the power of Normandy was.[1091] [Sidenote: William’s comparison between himself and Harold.] And it was now, we are told, that the Duke made that most singular comparison between himself and his rival of which I have already spoken. He had promised away all the goods of Harold beforehand, while Harold had not the strength of mind to promise anything of his.[1092] He goes on to say that Harold would fight only to retain what he had wrongfully seized, while he would fight to obtain possession of the gift of his departed friend which he had earned by his services towards him.[1093] Success was certain; the fleet was of such a number as to be fully enough for any purpose that was needed, while he was not cumbered with any useless multitude of ships. And, as for the army, the fate of campaigns was decided, not by the number of armies, but by their valour.[1094]
[Sidenote: William resolves to change his position.]
A month was thus lost at the Dive,[1095] and yet the south wind came not. The Duke at last resolved to change his position and his place of embarcation. He had many good reasons for doing so. Had he stayed much longer in his first quarters, his supplies would probably have failed him, and he would no longer have been able to keep back his troops, especially the foreign mercenaries, from plunder. Meanwhile the same failure of provisions which William merely dreaded had actually defeated all the schemes of the [Sidenote: Influence of the disbanding of Harold’s fleet and army. September 8.] English King. While William lay at the mouth of the Dive, Harold’s great fleet and army, which had so long guarded the English coast, was finally disbanded, and the mass of the ships went back to London.[1096] It had in fact been a sort of involuntary struggle between the two rivals, which could keep an army for a longer time on foot in a state of inaction. In this struggle William had succeeded. The host with which Harold had lined the whole West-Saxon coast was doubtless far larger than the host which William had gathered at a single haven of Normandy. But William’s host, gathered from all parts of Gaul, consisted far more largely of professional soldiers than Harold’s, and in a far smaller degree of the general levies of the country, eager to return to their homes and harvests. It is no wonder that the endurance of William’s army outlasted the endurance of the army of Harold. But William had doubtless by this time exhausted the supplies afforded by the lands near the Dive, and he found it expedient to remove to quarters whose resources were still untouched. And the disbanding of Harold’s fleet and army supplied another motive equally strong. Now that the shores of England were left comparatively defenceless, now that the English fleet no longer rode triumphantly in the Channel, it became a matter of importance with William to be nearer to the English shores, ready to sweep down on any unguarded spot at any favourable moment. William therefore took advantage of a west wind[1097] to hasten from the Dive to a point which far more [Sidenote: William sails to Saint Valery. September 12.] closely threatened the southern shores of England. He passed by the mouth of the Seine and by the whole coast of Upper Normandy, and took up his position at a spot beyond the limits of his own immediate dominion, within the territories of his now faithful vassal Guy of Ponthieu.[1098] [Sidenote: History of the Abbey of Saint Walaric or Valery.] Near the mouth of the broad estuary of the Somme, on a low height overhanging the water,[1099] stood a minster, commemorating the good deeds of Walaric, a saint of Merovingian times, who had done much to evangelize the still heathen lands of Northern Gaul.[1100] Like so many other foundations originally secular, it had seen its canons give way to monks, and the monastery now ranked high among foundations of its own class. Near its gate a small town had arisen, bearing, like the abbey itself, the name of its ancient patron, but in a form which French pronunciation had moulded into a likeness to the great Valerian house of Rome. The Abbey of Saint Valery, like many other monasteries, had suffered through its own renown; the relics of its founder had been carried off by the pious cupidity of a Count of Flanders, and had been restored by the pious intercession of a Duke of the French.[1101] Like many other monasteries, the duty of its defence had given [Sidenote: The Advocates of Saint Valery.] a title to a line of temporal nobles. The Advocates of Saint Valery were powerful lords; one of them, as we have seen, had married a daughter of Normandy, and a younger branch of his race filled a high and honourable place among [Sidenote: Description of the place.] the great houses of the Norman land.[1102] Of this famous abbey the vast encircling wall still remains, but the remains of the church are small, and of a date somewhat later than the days with which we are concerned. But the ancient town, rising, with its parish church, above the modern port which has arisen rather higher up the river, still retains its walls and gateways and general mediæval look in singular perfection. Below, immediately on the coast, stands a ruined tower of rude work, to which an inaccurate or misunderstood legend has attached the name of Harold of England.[1103] The spot, even apart from its historical associations, is in every way striking. The broad estuary, the wooded heights above it, the ancient and the modern town, unite to form a singularly varied [Sidenote: Gathering of the fleet; its losses.] landscape. It was here, on the wide expanse of water into which the mouth of the great Picard river spreads itself, that the fleet of William rode, still waiting for the long-expected south wind which should at once transport him and his host to the shores of Sussex. Its numbers seem to have been somewhat lessened from the numbers, whatever those numbers were, of the fleet which had been gathered at the mouth of the Dive. We hear of losses from shipwreck, and of losses from desertion;[1104] and, as we have seen, it is not impossible that we ought to add losses from at least partial actions with English ships.[1105] At any rate, from what cause soever, a good many men were missing from William’s muster; and we are told that he imitated the well-known stratagem of Xerxes,[1106] by causing the recovered bodies of the drowned men to be buried as secretly as might be, lest the knowledge of their losses [Sidenote: Further delay at Saint Valery. September 12–27.] might serve to dishearten his followers.[1107] Still the wind was not favourable; the west wind had brought the fleet to Saint Valery, but the south wind was not yet willing to bring it to any English haven. All the time then that Harold was engaged in his great Northern march and in his victory at Stamfordbridge, William was still lying inactive in his second naval quarters at the mouth of the Somme.
[Sidenote: The army inspirited by exhortations and religious ceremonies.]
But with William time was never idle; he had ever at his command the resources of both worlds to occupy any season of constrained inaction. It was even more incumbent upon him to respect the property of his allies and vassals than to respect that of his own subjects. He occupied himself as diligently in care for his commissariat at Saint Valery as he had done at the Dive.[1108] By constant exhortations he kept up the spirits of those of his men who were already beginning to shrink from the enterprise.[1109] And the champion of the Church, the pious leader of the great expedition for the second conversion of the erring English, was not likely to be sparing at such a moment in those means of spiritual excitement of which he so well knew the efficacy. Prayers and sacred rites of every kind were resorted to, in order to move Heaven to send the looked-for wind which should waft its servants to do its bidding beyond the sea. The Duke himself was unwearied in his devotions within the minster of Saint Valery, nor did he pay less regard to the outside of the temple than to the inside. His eyes were ever watching the weathercock on the minster tower; when he saw it pointing to the south, his heart was downcast and his eyes were filled with tears, but the least turn in the opposite direction again kindled his hopes. Still the wind came not; the sky was cloudy; the weather was cold and rainy; for fifteen days all the powers of the air seemed steadily bent against the enterprise.[1110] [Sidenote: Procession of the body of Saint Valery.] At last recourse was had to a ceremony of special solemnity, one which, it was thought, could not fail to wring the long-wished-for boon from the saints and from their Creator. At the request of the Duke and his army, the Abbot and monks of Saint Valery came forth from their church in solemn procession, bearing the shrine which contained the wonder-working body of their glorified patron. A carpet was spread on the ground, and the shrine was exposed to the gaze of the army, awaiting their devotions and their offerings. The Duke and all his host knelt in prayer for the withdrawal of the adverse breeze and the sending of one more favourable. Nor was their bounty less than their faith; the shrine of Saint Valery was hidden by the pieces of money showered down as offerings by his worshippers.[1111]
[Sidenote: The south wind blows. Wednesday, Sept. 27.]
The devotion and the pious liberality of the Norman host did not pass unrewarded. The prayers and the gifts of William and his followers did their work. The costly offerings at Caen, the crowning act of devotion at Saint Valery, at last availed to release the new Agamemnôn from his unwilling sojourn at another Aulis.[1112] In the milder belief of William’s age the virginity of Cecily was an offering more acceptable to Heaven than the bloody sacrifice of Iphigeneia. And at last so many prayers were heard. On Wednesday the twenty-seventh of September, two days after Harold’s victory at Stamfordbridge, the south wind blew.[1113]
[Sidenote: The embarcation.]
The camp was in a tumult of joy and thankfulness. The wished-for hour was at last come. England and its spoils seemed to lie before them, ready to be grasped by the hands of the champions of the Church and of the Norman saints. Men were seen everywhere lifting up their hands to heaven, exhorting and rejoicing with one another that the hours of weariness were over, that the moment of action at last had come.[1114] In the midst of the general joy came the Duke’s orders for immediate embarcation. William, as eager by temper as he was cautions by reflexion, was foremost in urging his followers to hasten on board their vessels, and to lose no time in making for the promised land.[1115] But his troops needed little urging; the dread of the unknown sea and of the unknown land, the dread of the wealth of England and of the might of her defenders,[1116] had all passed away. The Norman warriors were so clearly the favourites of Heaven, the sign which they had just received so clearly showed that their cause was the cause of righteousness, that doubt and fear no longer lingered in the mind of any man. Men rushed to the shore;[1117] one man exhorted his followers, another his comrades; each was eager to be first on board, to be foremost in the holy work. The captain outstripped his soldiers; the soldier outstripped his companions; men left behind them their goods and their necessary stores, having one fear only before their eyes, lest by any mishap they should themselves be left behind.[1118] Some bore on their shoulders the swords, the spears, the coats of mail, which would be needed on the other side of the water. Some yoked themselves to waggons loaded with spears, and loaded also with casks of wine. This last was the only kind of provision of which any great quantity seems to have been thought needful; conquered England was to find the rest.[1119] Some were busy in setting up the masts, some in unfurling the sails;[1120] the especial work of the horsemen was the difficult task of bringing their horses on board the vessels.[1121] The ships resounded with music; the pipe, the zittern, the drum, the cymbals, all were heard, and the voice of the trumpet sounded proudly over all.[1122] Meanwhile the Duke once more made his way to the minster of Saint Valery, and offered his last prayers and gifts on Gaulish ground before he went forth to the conquest of the island realm.[1123] Before he reached his ship, evening had set in. The moon was hidden and the heavens were clouded over. The Duke therefore ordered every ship to bear a light,[1124] while on the top of the mast of his own Mora a huge lantern blazed to be the guiding star of the [Sidenote: William sets sail.] whole navy. William now went on board; the trumpet sounded, and the voice of the herald announced the Duke’s last orders before setting sail. The ships were to keep as near together as might be, and to follow closely after the beacon-light of his own ship. When they were well out to sea, they were to rest a while in the dead hour of the night, till the signals speaking alike to the eye and the ear had again issued the ducal commands from the ducal vessel.[1125] The fleet set sail; the vessels halted and rested as the Duke had ordered. But before day-break the trumpet again sounded from the Mora, and the lantern [Sidenote: Details of his voyage.] again blazed at her mast. The ships again set sail; but the ship which carried William and his fortunes far outstripped all her followers.[1126] We are told that the speed of the vessel, like that of the divine barks of Scheria,[1127] adapted itself to the eagerness of her master;[1128] but it is plain that one reason for the special fleetness attained by William’s ship was that she was one of the few vessels in the fleet which were unencumbered by horses.[1129] The day was now dawning, and the ducal ship was alone. At the Duke’s bidding a sailor climbed the mast to see whether any of the other vessels were in sight. But the morning light as yet showed him nothing on all sides but the sea and the sky.[1130] The Duke ordered a halt; the anchor was cast, and William, as if in his own house, ordered a plentiful breakfast to be served up. The rich contents of one of the casks of wine were not forgotten; and William in cheerful mood bade his men be of good heart and assured them that their comrades would soon overtake them; God, in whose cause they were setting forth, would watch over the safety of all the host.[1131] The sailor was again sent to the mast-head, and he now announced that four ships were in sight. Presently he saw such a multitude that their masts looked like a forest upon the waves.[1132] The heart of William was lifted up in thankfulness.[1133] The south wind still blew; in the morning light the lantern was no longer needed; the chequered colours of the sails of the Mora were now the beacon on which every eye in the whole [Sidenote: William lands at Pevensey. Thursday, September 28.] fleet was fixed.[1134] England was soon in sight, and by nine in the morning of Thursday the twenty-eighth of September, the Norman claimant of her Crown had already set foot upon her shores.[1135]
He landed at a spot so memorable in the earliest English history that, to one who muses there, the landing even of William himself seems but of secondary interest.[1136] William came, as it might seem, to pour a new Latin and Celtic infusion into Teutonic England. He brought his Romanized Northmen and the Welsh of the Lesser Britain to bear rule over Saxons, Angles, and Danes who [Sidenote: Description and historical associations of the place.] had never fallen away from their Teutonic heritage. He came to begin his work on a spot where the Saxon of old had dealt one of the heaviest of all his blows against the Roman and the Briton. He came to subdue England on one of the spots which had seen most done to turn Britain into England. A north-west course from Saint Valery had brought the invading fleet to a point in that eastern part of the South-Saxon coast which, trending to the north-east, is cut off in a marked way by the promontory of Beechy Head from that long and nearly straight line of coast which reaches westward to Selsey Bill. At Beechy Head to the west, and again near Hastings to the east, the high ground comes down to the sea. Between these points lies a long flat shore, where the waves now break on a vast mass of shingle, which, at some points, stretches a long way inland, forming a wilderness of pebbles, slightly relieved by small patches of gorse and thin herbage. Between the coast and the hills—the hills which form a part of the great _Andredes-weald_—there lies a wide level, but here and there slight and low projections, feeble offshoots from the high ground, [Sidenote: Pevensey the ancient Anderida.] straggle down towards the coast. One such post, commanding alike the sea and the inland country, had been chosen as the site of a Roman city, and Anderida, the _Andredes-ceaster_ of our forefathers, became, in the later days of Roman occupation, one of the chief of the fortresses which guarded the Saxon Shore.[1137] In those days, and in the days of William also, Anderida was a haven of the sea. The vast expanse of shingle is owing to the later siltings which have choked up so many harbours along this coast; in the fifth and in the eleventh century the sea still washed the foot of the slight eminence occupied by the city, and ships could ride at anchor beneath the Roman [Sidenote: Remains of the Roman city.] walls.[1138] Of those walls and of their massive towers large portions still remain; but not a single human dwelling-place survives within their circuit. In the south-eastern corner of the Roman city, the mediæval castle of Pevensey, a foundation of William’s brother Robert,[1139] has arisen and has fallen into decay. And just without the ancient walls, the villages of Pevensey and West Ham, each with its Old-English name and its mediæval church, seem to show by their position that the first Teutonic settlers in Britain avoided, from whatever reason, the occupation of the old Roman sites. Few groups are more striking in themselves than this assemblage of antiquities of various dates and kinds, Roman and mediæval, ecclesiastical and military. But the true attraction of the spot comes from the memory that there was dealt one of the most awful of those awful blows which made our race dominant in this our island. [Sidenote: Landing of Ælle in Chichester harbour. 477.] Second among the Teutonic settlements, first among the strictly Saxon settlements, the followers of Ælle and Cissa had for fourteen years been fighting their way onwards from their first landing-place on British soil. The foundations of the South-Saxon Kingdom had been laid at Cymenes-óra, in the haven which in after days was to be called after the city to which the younger conqueror gave his name.[1140] Since that day, the Saxons had been gradually spreading eastward towards the frontiers of their [Sidenote: Taking of Anderida. 491.] Jutish kinsfolk in Kent. At last, as we read in our Chronicles, “Ælle and Cissa beset Andredes-ceaster, and slew all that were therein, nor was there a Briton left there any more.”[1141] So it was that our fathers did their work; but so it was that England became England. The fall of Anderida put the finishing stroke to the Teutonic conquest of south-eastern Britain. The long extent of coast, once part of the Saxon Shore in the elder sense, now became far more truly a Saxon shore under the rule of our first Bretwalda.[1142] The walls which were stormed by Ælle and Cissa have, from that day to this, remained as the mighty monument of a fallen power, the sepulchre of the races which our fathers swept away. In the days of William, as now, those walls had already long ceased to surround the dwelling-places of men.[1143] The forsaken city could at most have served as an occasional place of shelter for the people of the two English settlements which had arisen at either end of it. Beneath those awful ruins, among the memorials of ancient English victory, the Norman Duke now landed. He came, as it might seem to a superficial eye, to undo the work of Ælle and Cissa, to subject the sons of the destroyers of the Briton and the Roman to men speaking the tongue of Rome, and in the veins of many of whom still flowed the blood of the British exiles of Armorica. In truth the errand on which he came was the exact opposite. He came, a chief of Danes and Saxons who had fallen from their first love, who had cast away the laws and the speech of their forefathers, but who now came to the Teutonic island to be won back into the Teutonic fold, to be washed clean from the traces of their sojourn in Roman lands, and to win for themselves, among the brethren whom they were to meet as momentary enemies, a right to an equal share in the name, the laws, and the glories of Teutonic England.
[Sidenote: Defenceless state of the coast at the time of William’s landing.]
Pevensey then, the English name which had supplanted the ancient Anderida, was the place of William’s landing. The town is mentioned among those ports on the southern coast which Harold had taken special care to supply with garrisons.[1144] But at the moment of William’s landing the post was either wholly undefended, or defended by a force which found it hopeless to offer resistance. It will be remembered that the Housecarls had gone northward with the King, and that the irregular levies which had guarded the coast only three weeks before were now scattered every man to his own home.[1145] Any force then which occupied Pevensey, or any other point of the South-Saxon coast, is likely to have been intended as a mere outpost to watch and to give the alarm, rather than to have been placed there with any hope of seriously withstanding the invaders. Harold had doubtless hoped that the winds which had delayed William so long would still work in the cause of England. He trusted that the enemy’s passage would be delayed till he could himself return to the southern coast at the head of the victors of Stamfordbridge. [Sidenote: Lucky moment of William’s voyage.] But the fortune of William bore him to the English shore at the very moment which suited his purpose. A little earlier or a little later, he would have met with a vigorous and, in all probability, a successful resistance. On that St. Michael’s Eve he met with no resistance whatever. There were neither ships to hinder him from drawing near to the shore,[1146] nor soldiers to withstand him in the act of [Sidenote: He lands without resistance.] landing. The whole Norman fleet disembarked without a blow being struck against them.[1147] But the array in which they disembarked seems plainly to show that they had at [Sidenote: Details of the landing; close order of the ships.] least reckoned on meeting with armed resistance. The fleet was not allowed to be scattered; the ships all steered for the same point, and cast anchor as near together as might be in the one haven of Pevensey.[1148] The wide expanse of shore at this point would render such a course especially easy. As soon as the anchors were cast, the ships were run ashore, the masts were lowered, the shields and saddles were unladen, the horses were released from their unfamiliar prisons.[1149] The fighting men then landed as nearly as might be in battle array. The first armed man who set [Sidenote: William slips; his ready use of the omen.] foot on English ground was Duke William himself. As he descended from his ship, his foot slipped and he fell with both his hands upon the ground. A loud cry of grief was raised at the evil omen. But the ready wit of William failed him not. “By the splendour of God,” he cried, “I have taken seizin of my Kingdom, the earth of England is in my two hands.”[1150] It is added that a soldier, of kindred spirit with his leader, ran forward, and plucking a handful of thatch from a cottage, placed it in the Duke’s hand as seizin, not only of England, but of all that England held within it.[1151] “I accept it,” answered the Duke; “and may God be with us.”
[Sidenote: Order of the landing.]
The whole army now landed in order. First came the archers, ready for action, with bended bows and quivers slung at their sides. They scoured the whole of the neighbouring shore, but they nowhere found an armed enemy to resist them.[1152] Next came the knights, all in their helmets and harness. They at once mounted their horses, and formed in the plain as if to call forth the hidden defenders of England to battle.[1153] But not a blow was struck; Pevensey was occupied as the first-fruits of the invasion; a garrison was left to secure William’s first possession on English ground, and the words of one of our informants might almost imply that some portion of the Roman ruins was once more turned, in the rough and hurried way which was all that the time allowed, to purposes of defence. One object of this fortification and garrison was to guard the ships, which had been drawn on shore and which were now to be left behind.[1154] For the stay of the Norman host at Pevensey was not a long one. No great amount of provisions had been brought with them, nor could the town of Pevensey and its neighbourhood supply food for so great a multitude.[1155] It was needful to move to some wealthier and more convenient post, which would afford better head-quarters for the army, and which might serve as a central point for a systematic [Sidenote: The army marches to Hastings. Friday, Sept. 29.] harrying of the country. Only one day therefore was spent at Pevensey; on the next day, the feast of the Archangel so deeply reverenced by Norman devotion, the army marched on eastward, probably along the line of a Roman road, and came to the town which William chose as his base of operations for this memorable campaign. That campaign can be called by no name so fitting as the Campaign of Hastings; for Hastings was the head-quarters of William, the centre of the whole operations of the campaign. But in speaking of the great battle itself, the name of Hastings simply leads to geographical confusions. I speak therefore of the Campaign of Hastings, while to the battle itself I restore its true ancient name of Senlac.[1156]
[Sidenote: Description and early history of Hastings.]
The town and port of Hastings[1157] is one which has been more than once mentioned in the earlier stages of our history.[1158] Its name has been made memorable by the zeal and energy displayed by its seamen in their pursuit [Sidenote: 1049.] of the pirate-ships of Swegen after the murder of Beorn.[1159] Like Pevensey, it had been garrisoned by Harold.[1160] And yet the town seems to have surrendered to William without striking a blow. Hastings, like most other English towns, had most likely no fortifications which could resist Norman arts of attack, and the prowess of the seamen, whose force would at any time have been weak against the vast fleet of William, was utterly useless now that the invaders had actually landed. The town is placed on a part of the coast where the hills come close down upon the sea, forming a striking contrast to the wide open flats which the Normans had just left behind them at Pevensey. Two gorges between hills open immediately upon the water; the eastern opening is occupied by the elder, the western by the more modern, town of Hastings. The hill which divides the two is crowned by the ruins of the castle which probably marks the site of William’s [Sidenote: Importance of the position.] head-quarters. The position was an important one; it commanded the great roads east and west, and also the north road leading directly between London and the coast. [Sidenote: William makes an entrenched camp on the hill.] William therefore chose Hastings as a permanent camp.[1161] After consultation with his brothers, Bishop Odo and Count Robert, he gave orders for the construction of one of those wooden fortresses which were so constantly run up for sudden emergencies in Norman warfare, and which often proved the forerunners of more lasting buildings of stone. The time at William’s command allowed only of the digging of a trench, the casting up of a mound, and the fortification of its summit with a castle of wood.[1162] But it was doubtless this temporary structure which formed the germ of the stately castle which in after days crowned the height of Hastings, and within whose walls arose a church and college, whose chief stall, less than a hundred years after this time, formed one of the countless preferments of the worldly Archdeacon who was so soon to be transformed into the champion and martyr of the Church.[1163]
It is not clear whether it was at Pevensey or at [Sidenote: Slight loss of the fleet on the voyage.] Hastings that the Duke reviewed his troops, and found, so we are told in one account, that two only of his ships had been lost on the passage.[1164] But one rather remarkable [Sidenote: Fate of the soothsayer.] life had been lost with them. A clerk, who pretended to the power of soothsaying, had assured the Duke, not only that his voyage would be prosperous, but that he should win England without a blow. Harold would of his own accord again bow to him and become his man. Half the prophecy was already fulfilled; it remained to see what would be the fate of the other half. But the prophet himself came not to the muster. He had embarked in one of the missing ships and was returned as drowned.[1165] “A poor diviner must he have been,” said William, “who could not divine the way and time of his own death. Foolish would he be who should put faith in the words of such a [Sidenote: Was this the time of the affair of Romney?] soothsayer as this.”[1166] One hardly knows whether these dark allusions to lost ships and lost men are to be taken in connexion with the fact that, at some stage of the campaign before the great battle, certain stragglers from the Norman fleet or army had made their way eastward as far as Romney, and had there fallen in a skirmish with the townsmen.[1167] The words of our accounts leave it uncertain whether a portion of the fleet lost its way on the passage, or whether a detachment of the army wandered thither from Hastings. In any case, this and some other indications which we have already seen[1168] all tend to show that the fight on Senlac was not absolutely the first time that Normans and Englishmen met with arms in their hands during this memorable year.
[Sidenote: William systematically ravages the country.]
William, it will be remembered, while encamped in his own territory and in that of his vassal of Ponthieu, had carefully maintained his troops at his own cost, and had at least done his best to hinder all plunder of the surrounding country. But England, though a realm which William claimed as his own by inheritance, was not to be dealt with so tenderly.[1169] A poet in the Norman interest tells us that whatever damage the English suffered was only the fitting punishment for their stubbornness in not at once admitting the manifest rights of their lawful [Sidenote: Object of these ravages; to tempt Harold to fight.] King.[1170] However this may be, there can be little doubt that William’s ravages were not only done systematically, but were done with a fixed and politic purpose. It was William’s object to fight a battle as soon as might be. But it was not his object to advance for this purpose far into the country, to seek for Harold wherever he might be found. So to do would have been to cut himself off from his own powerful base of operations and from his only hope of retreat in case of defeat. It was William’s object to bring Harold down to the sea-coast, to tempt him to an attack on the Norman camp, or to a battle on the level ground. In either of these cases the Norman tactics would have a distinct advantage over the English. It is impossible to doubt that the systematic harrying of the whole country round Hastings was done with the deliberate purpose of provoking the English King, and of [Sidenote: Lasting effects of William’s harrying.] bringing him in all haste to defend his subjects. The work was done with a completeness which shows that it was something more than the mere passing damage wrought by an army in need of food. The traces of the ravages done at this time are recorded in the great Survey twenty years later. The Tapestry not only vividly sets before us the way in which provisions of all sorts were brought in for the use of the camp;[1171] it also represents an incident which at once goes to the heart. A house is being set on fire; the inmates, a woman and a child, are coming forth from their burning dwelling.[1172] This is doubtless one instance among thousands of the cruel destruction which was fast spread over the country, as far as William’s plunderers could reach. Men fled everywhere with such of their goods and cattle as they could save, and sought for shelter in the churches and churchyards.[1173] It would doubtless be the policy of the pious Duke to keep his followers back, as far as might be, from all damage towards those who thus put themselves under the direct protection of religion. Elsewhere all was havock. It was to save his people from the horrors of war in their most barbarous form that King Harold jeoparded his life and Kingdom.[1174]
[Sidenote: Result of the Northern campaign doubtful at the time of William’s landing.]
At the moment of William’s landing, and even at the moment of his occupation of Hastings, he must have been quite uncertain as to the fortunes of his rival in the North. It was perfectly possible that he might never have to contend with Harold of England at all. The result of the Northumbrian campaign could hardly have been known in Sussex two days after the fight of Stamfordbridge, and it was one of the possible chances of war that William might have to fight for the Crown of England against the victorious host of Tostig and Harold Hardrada. But the two great rivals were not long kept in ignorance of [Sidenote: Robert the son of Wymarc brings news. His position and estimate of his conduct.] each other’s movements and purposes. The news was brought to William by a message from an English landowner of Norman birth, in whom it is easy to recognize the Staller Robert the son of Wymarc, him who had stood at the bed’s head of the dying Eadward.[1175] We know not whether he had retained his Stallership, or any other office, under Harold. But it is plain that he had become the man of the new King, for he was living in England under the King’s peace and in full possession of his lands.[1176] There is nothing in his present conduct which sets him before us as a traitor to his new allegiance. It is scarcely ground enough for such a charge to say that he could hardly have been with Harold at Stamfordbridge.[1177] His conduct in fact seems to have been that which was really right and honourable under the circumstances in which he stood. He had to reconcile his good will and his duty towards his adopted country with his earlier good will and earlier duty towards his natural sovereign. He sent a messenger to Hastings,[1178] with a message designed to persuade the Duke, in the interest of all parties, to give up his enterprise, and to [Sidenote: He counsels William to go home.] go quietly back to his own dominions. He, Robert, counselled him as a friend and kinsman;[1179] he would be deeply sorry if any harm befel him or his army, and, if he remained in England, he and his army would meet with certain destruction. It was hopeless for William to think of contending with the forces of England. King Harold had just defeated the Norwegian invader with a slaughter of twenty thousand men;[1180] Tostig and Harold Hardrada were slain; the King of the English was coming southwards with a countless host, a host, men said, of an hundred thousand.[1181] Against the English King and the English army, flushed with their victory over the greatest warrior in the whole world,[1182] it would be madness to risk a battle. Neither in number nor in strength were the Normans fit to do battle against King Harold and the English. Against them, in short, William’s army would count for no more than so many barking curs.[1183] The Duke was a prudent man, and had hitherto always acted prudently.[1184] Let him act prudently now; let him go home; let him at all events keep within his entrenchments and not risk a battle.[1185] If he did go forth to fight, his rashness would certainly bring about his utter overthrow.
Such counsel as this, addressed to William the Conqueror, speaks muck more highly for the good intentions of Robert than for his knowledge of mankind, above all for his knowledge of the man with whom he was dealing.[1186] William had not crossed the sea for nothing; he was not like the King in the Gospel, who had to stop on his march to consider whether he were able with his ten thousand to meet him who came against him with twenty thousand.[1187] [Sidenote: William’s answer; He will fight in any case.] It was perhaps not without a reference to that parable that William answered that, had he only ten thousand men, such as those of whom he had sixty thousand, he would not draw back; he would not cross the sea again without avenging himself of his enemy. He would not even keep himself within his entrenchments; whatever were the numbers on either side, he would go forth and meet Harold face to face.[1188] He condescended to thank Robert for the kindly interest which he took in his welfare, though he hinted that the words in which he had contrasted Norman and English prowess would better have been spared.[1189] The Duke had no need of such counsels as those which were pressed upon him by his cousin’s favourite. He had come into England to win his Crown, and his Crown he would win at all hazards.
§ 3. _The Southern March of Harold. October 1–13, 1066._
[Sidenote: The news brought to Harold at York. October 1?]
I have already told how the news of William’s landing was brought to King Harold at the feast of victory at York.[1190] That feast must have been saddened by the thought of the many brave men who had fallen at a moment when England needed the help of all her sons, by the thought that England had been saved only by the death of a brother of her King, by the thought that, while King and people were rejoicing at the victory which had just been gained over one enemy, another enemy, certainly not less terrible, was daily threatening the defenceless southern coast. And in the very moment of triumph the news came that the blow had actually fallen. Men now heard that, while Harold was letting the remnants of the Norwegian army depart in peace, the Duke of the Normans had actually landed, that he was ravaging English ground far and wide, that a portion of English ground was already entrenched and palisaded, and changed into a Norman [Sidenote: The news brought by a South-Saxon Thegn who saw the landing.] fortress.[1191] The Norman poet gives us a graphic description of the way in which the news was brought to the English King. A Thegn of the country heard the cries of grief and dismay with which the South-Saxon churls beheld the approach of the Norman fleet.[1192] He went forth; he hid himself in a convenient lurking-place, and beheld in safety the whole process of the landing of the Norman army.[1193] He saw first the archers and then the knights disembark. He saw the shields and armour brought out of the ships; he saw the carpenters come out with their axes; he saw the fosse dug, and the palisade thrown up.[1194] The [Sidenote: He hastens to York.] sight was enough; the heart of the English Thegn was troubled; he took his weapons, his sword and his javelin;[1195] he mounted his horse, and rode straight to bear the news to his Lord King Harold. He hastened on with all speed night and day; he rested late and rose early,[1196] till he found the victor of Stamfordbridge in the banquetting-hall at York. Here he at once told his errand. The countless host from all Gaul, the host of horsemen and archers and slingers who had gathered under the banner of Duke William,[1197] had landed at Pevensey. They had already built a fort and had fenced it with a palisade.[1198] Presently another messenger, a churl, came from Hastings itself.[1199] He had more news to tell, more details of the cruel harrying of the South-Saxon land. The host of Normans, Frenchmen, and Bretons, a host that no man could number, a host like the stars of heaven or the fishes of the sea, was ravaging far and wide.[1200] Men were being slain, their widows, their sons, their daughters, their flocks and their herds, were becoming the prey of the stranger.[1201] Each message enforced the same truth; the King must march at once to the defence of his southern coasts, or the whole land [Sidenote: Answer of Harold.] would be wrested from him. Harold is reported by the Norman poet to have said that it would have been better to have given Tostig all that he asked,[1202] so that he might have been himself in the south to hinder the landing of the French invaders. Such a speech cannot have been uttered by Harold, as it misconceives all the relations between him and his brother. The situation is better conceived when the King is made to say that, had he been on the South-Saxon shore, the strangers would never have made good their landing. Either they would have been driven back into the sea, or they would have escaped its dangers only to perish on English ground. “But,” he added, “the mischance was the will of the King of Heaven, and I could not be everywhere at the same moment.”[1203]
[Sidenote: Position of Harold between the two invaders.]
And so of a truth it was. The event of this great campaign, the overthrow of Harold and of England, turned wholly, setting aside the mere accidents of battle, on the inability of Harold himself to contend against two invasions, or to be at the two ends of his Kingdom at the same time. Of the two invasions, the Norwegian and the Norman, each rendered the other possible. Or even had the south wind blown sooner at the mouth of the Dive, the southern coast of England would have been found guarded against any attack, and Harold would probably have gone to meet his namesake of Norway flushed with victory over William and his host. As it was, the fate of England, as ever in that age, rested on one man, and that one man could not be at once in Sussex and in Northumberland. Harold, too late to hinder the landing of the Normans, had now before him the far harder task of dislodging them when they were already in the land. It was a hard lot to have to hasten at once on such an errand, after hardly a moment’s rest from the toils and the glories of Stamfordbridge. One terrible campaign was hardly over, when another yet more terrible had to be begun. But the heart of Harold failed him not, and the heart of England beat in unison with the [Sidenote: Harold begins his march to London.] heart of her King. As soon as the news came, King Harold held a Council of the leaders of Stamfordbridge,[1204] perhaps rather an armed Gemót, such as we have already heard of more than once.[1205] He told them of the landing of the enemy; he set before them the horrors which would come upon the land if the invader succeeded in his enterprise.[1206] A loud shout of unanimous assent rose from the Assembly. Every man pledged his faith rather to die in arms than to acknowledge any King but Harold.[1207] The King thanked his loyal followers, and at once ordered an immediate march to the south, an immediate muster of the forces of his Kingdom. London again was the trysting-place.[1208] With speed and energy equal to that which had carried him to his northern capital, he now set out on the return march. He himself pressed on at once, at the head of such of his Housecarls and other immediate following as had survived the fight of Stamfordbridge. Eadwine and Morkere were bidden to follow with the whole force of [Sidenote: Merlswegen in command of the North.] their Earldoms. Meanwhile the command of the North was committed to the Sheriff Merlswegen.[1209] We shall hear of him again among the patriots of a time a few years later, and we cannot doubt that this great command was put into his hands because he was known to be one more worthy of the trust than the King’s own brothers-in-law. And so it [Sidenote: Eadwine and Morkere keep back from the war.] proved. Even the great salvation of Stamfordbridge, the deliverance of Northumberland from the very jaws of her enemy, could not bind the sons of Ælfgar to gratitude or fidelity to the West-Saxon King. In their eyes, no doubt, the landing of William only offered another chance of bringing about their darling scheme of a divided Kingdom. William had a quarrel with Harold; he had none with Eadwine or Morkere. They had not forsworn themselves to their lord or done despite to any holy relics. The invader might well be content with the immediate territories of his enemy and his house. William might rule over Wessex and East-Anglia, and might leave Mercia and Northumberland to the House of Leofric. It was probably with some such designs as these that the Northern Earls held themselves and their forces back from the struggle. But, whatever were their motives, the fact that they did hold themselves back is certain.[1210] The main forces of Northumberland and north-western Mercia came not to King Harold’s muster.[1211]
[Sidenote: General zeal of the nation.]
But elsewhere another spirit reigned.[1212] Men well knew what was at stake. They went forth, as loyal subjects, as true men to their lord, to fight for the King whom they had chosen. But they went forth also on a higher errand still, to save the land of their birth from the grasp of the invader, an invader of wholly alien speech and feeling, an invader who could never be as Cnut or even as Harold of Norway. The presence of the Frenchmen in the land awoke a spirit in every English heart which has never [Sidenote: Charge of parsimony against Harold.] died out to this day. We hear indeed vague stories how Harold lost favour with the victors of Stamfordbridge by refusing to divide among them the rich plunder of the Norwegian host.[1213] We hear how he left the plunder untouched under the care of Archbishop Ealdred,[1214] instead of scattering it with a bounteous hand among the men whose toils and whose blood had won it. These stories rest on but poor authority; still they may have some groundwork of truth.[1215] The time was not a time for waste of treasure; the armaments of the year must have been costly in the extreme; Harold needed wealth to oppose to the wealth of William, and, considering the doubtful fidelity of the Northern Earls, he could not afford to throw away the sinews of civil war. A prudent economy on the part of Harold may have called forth a certain measure of discontent; but it is certain that such discontent had no serious effect on the campaign. The discontented in such a case must have been mainly the King’s own Housecarls, and those who bring this charge against Harold tell us also that it was the King’s own Housecarls who formed the strength of the host that fought at Senlac.[1216] It is far more certain that, as King Harold set forth on his southern march, fresh from the triumph of Stamfordbridge and with the fate of England resting once more upon him, the men of the greater part of England flocked eagerly to the Standard of their glorious [Sidenote: The shires which sent men. Wessex, East Anglia, Eastern Mercia.] King. They gathered round him from all the shires through which the Dragon and the Fighting Man passed once more on their southern journey. They gathered round him from all the shires under his own immediate rule, and under the rule of his faithful brothers.[1217] North-western [Sidenote: The North and Northwest kept away by their Earls.] Mercia stood aloof under Eadwine. Northumberland, under the rule of Morkere, sent none but such as joined the King’s own Standard on his march. Not so the lands which were still under the House of Siward. Whether the young [Sidenote: Loyalty of the Earldom of Waltheof.] Waltheof came himself we know not; but there is no doubt that the men of Northampton and Huntingdon came loyally to King Harold’s muster. And from all the east and south, from the lands which had passed from the rule of Godwine to the rule of Harold, from the lands where Gyrth still kept up the memory of Harold’s earlier government, from all the lands between the Tamar and the German Ocean, men came to fight for Harold and for [Sidenote: The men of Kent and London.] England. And, foremost and honoured among all, ranking, it would seem, every man among the King’s personal following, came the men of Kent, whose right it was to deal the first blow in the battle, and the men of the great city itself, whose high privilege it was to guard the King himself and his Standard.[1218] At the head of the men of London stood the Sheriff of the Middle-Saxons, the Staller Esegar,[1219] the son of Æthelstan, the son of Tofig, none the [Sidenote: Esegar commands the Londoners.] less loyal to his King because the minster of the Holy Rood had risen on soil which had once been the dwelling-place of his fathers.[1220] Of his fellow-Staller Eadnoth we hear nothing; Bondig would almost seem to have tarried in the North, or, from whatever cause or accident, not to [Sidenote: Few names of Englishmen preserved.] have appeared at the muster.[1221] We see then that England, as a whole, failed not of her duty; but few indeed, compared with the long roll-call of the invaders, are the men whom we know by name as having joined in the great march and fought in the great battle. Still there are a few names which have come down to us, names to be cherished wherever the tongue of England is spoken, names which should sound like the call of the trumpet in the [Sidenote: Entries in Domesday.] ears of every man of English birth. In the dry entries of the Norman Survey a few records still live of the men who fought and died for England. Two nameless freemen of Hampshire, owners of a small allodial holding, come first [Sidenote: Ælfric of Huntingdonshire.] on the patriotic bead-roll. One degree clearer in personality stands forth Ælfric of Gelling, a Thegn of Huntingdonshire, and tenant of the Church of Ramsey, who came from Waltheof’s Earldom, whether in the following of his Earl or at the bidding of his own loyalty to his King. [Sidenote: Breme of East-Anglia.] From East-Anglia we find recorded a nameless tenant of the House of Saint Eadmund, and Breme a freeman of King Eadward’s, who came no doubt in the following of Earl Gyrth. With a clearer consciousness of their personal being, we can honour the names of two noble tenants of the Church of Abingdon, men high in rank in the old West-Saxon Earldom, who fought and fell by the side of Harold. Their names set them before us as representatives of the two great Teutonic races of the land, each alike armed to defend their common blood and speech [Sidenote: Godric and Thurkill of Berkshire.] against the Southern invader. Thither came Godric the Sheriff, Lord of Fifhide, whose name witnesses to his English descent, and thither too came the Danish Thurkill, Lord of the neighbouring lordship of Kingston. He had, at Earl Harold’s counsel, commended himself and his lands to Saint Mary of Abingdon, and he came no doubt with as fervent a trust in the Black Cross of that ancient house as the King himself reposed in the more famous relic of his own newly hallowed minster. And it was not only the tenants of religious houses who went forth to battle for the excommunicated King against the invader who boasted himself as the special champion of the Church and of religion. Two English Prelates at least, and several churchmen of lower rank, personally braved the curse of Rome in the [Sidenote: Ælfwig Abbot of New Minster.] cause of England. The New Minster of Winchester, King Ælfred’s great bequest to his royal city, was still ruled by Ælfwig, the brother of the great Earl Godwine, the uncle of King Harold himself.[1222] Like Ealhstan and like Eadnoth in earlier times, he and twelve of his monks marched to the field, not merely to pray for England, but to wield their weapons among the foremost of her champions. With their coats of mail over their monastic garb, they took their place in the ranks, and fought and died alongside of Thurkill and Godric and the other valiant men whose names no chronicler has recorded.[1223] Ælfwig came to the fight at the bidding of kindred no less than at the bidding [Sidenote: Leofric Abbot of Peterborough. His death, Nov. 1.] of loyalty. Another Prelate, of equal ecclesiastical rank, and of greater personal fame, Leofric, the renowned Abbot of Peterborough,[1224] preferred the cause of his country to the cause of his own house. Eadwine and Morkere kept aloof from the great struggle; their worthier cousin, the Abbot of five monasteries, followed Harold to the fight, and, unlike his brother of Winchester, returned to his home sick and wounded.[1225] And one lowlier churchman must not [Sidenote: Eadric the Deacon.] be passed by. The Norman record itself seems to assume a kind of pathos, as we read how Eadric the Deacon, a freeman of Harold’s, followed his lord from the East-Anglian land of his earlier government, and died with him in the battle.[1226] Volunteers like these doubtless took their places among the King’s personal following. But we cannot doubt that the main strength of the army consisted of Harold’s own picked troops, his veteran Housecarls, the conquerors of Gruffydd, the victors of Stamfordbridge. Still it is clear that the levies of all southern and eastern England answered readily to Harold’s summons. They flocked to his muster in London in as great numbers, and with as great speed, as the swift march of events at this fearful crisis allowed them.
[Sidenote: Harold reaches London. October 5?]
The march of Harold from York to London was as memorable an instance of the indomitable energy of his character as his march, so short a time before, from London to York. He seems to have reached London about ten days after the fight at Stamfordbridge, about a week after William’s landing at Pevensey.[1227] He came at the head of his own following, and of such of the general levies of the central shires as had joined him on the road. In the great city, which had been appointed as the general trysting-place, he waited, impatiently as it would seem, while men flocked in from his own Wessex and from the lands of the three faithful Earls. He waited also for the further succours which were never to arrive, for the forces which the Earls of the North were keeping back from [Sidenote: He goes to pray at Waltham.] the muster. At such a moment of suspense the heart of Harold, no less than the heart of William, looked for help and guidance from on high. His home was now in the royal hall of Westminster, beneath the shadow of the minster of the Apostle, the minster where prayers and masses were daily going up for the soul of his revered predecessor.[1228] It was the minster too where he himself had gone through the most solemn act of his life, where he had received his royal unction and his Imperial Crown. But it was not before the tomb of Eadward, or before the altar of Saint Peter, that Harold sought for heavenly strength and counsel in the great crisis of his life. His heart went back to the home of his earlier days, to the lowlier church of his own rearing, to the relic which had ever been the especial object of his devotion, the Holy Cross which gave England her war-cry. One at least of the few days of the King’s short stay in London was devoted to a last pilgrimage to his own Waltham.[1229] [Sidenote: His last gifts to the minster.] Early in the morning of one of those October days King Harold made his way to the minster of the Holy Cross, bearing with him the last gifts that he was to offer there. Those gifts were a further supply of relics, the treasures of his own chapel,[1230] gathered together no doubt by the lavish piety of Eadward, but which now formed Harold’s last oblation upon the high altar of his own minster. Before [Sidenote: Harold’s vow.] that altar the King and Founder knelt in prayer. He vowed that, if God gave him victory in the strife to which he was then marching forth, he would yet further endow the church of the Holy Rood with gifts and lands, and would yet further increase the number of those who served God within its walls. Nay more, he would look upon himself as God’s ransomed servant, and would devote himself to his special service for ever.[1231] We need not take these striking words to mean that Harold dreamed, like Ceadwalla or Ine, of laying aside his Crown and of becoming God’s special servant as monk or priest. We hear in them simply the voice of deep penitence for the few sins and errors which stained that noble life, the voice of earnest prayer for deliverance from the meshes in which the craft of his adversary had entangled him. We hear in them the voice of high and humble resolution to live from henceforth, as man and as King, a life such as became a faithful servant of God, such as became a King sitting on the throne of the righteous Ælfred, and whose first days of government had been passed in the old realm of the martyred Eadmund. When his offerings had been made and his prayers had been uttered, the King turned him to depart. The Canons and all the members of the Church of Waltham formed in procession before their sovereign and Founder. They swept westward along that stately nave, between the two rows of its massive columns, till they reached the great western portal, over which was placed the wonder-working relic, the Holy Rood of Montacute and Waltham.[1232] Before the great object of his life’s reverence, King Harold bowed himself low, and lay for a while flat on his face [Sidenote: Miracle of the Holy Rood.] on the consecrated pavement. Then, as men said at Waltham in after days, the holy image, whose head had hitherto stood erect, bowed itself towards the King who lay prostrate beneath it. One eye alone, that of the sacrist Thurkill, was privileged to behold the actual working of the divine wonder. But many there were who had seen the image in former days, and who bare witness how its head had been from that day bowed towards the ground, as if to say “It is finished,” as if to say that all was over with the hopes and the career of him who had so devoutly honoured it.[1233]
[Sidenote: Messages between William and Harold.]
It was perhaps on his return from Waltham, it was certainly during his short sojourn in London, that Harold received another message from his rival. Here again we come to one of those stages of our narrative where all is confusion and contradiction. The English writers, in their short accounts of events which they loved not to dwell upon, are silent as to any attempts at peaceful negotiations taking place, at the last moment, between the two armed princes. The witness of the Norman writers is full indeed, but their witness does not agree together.[1234] The different versions agree in no circumstance of time, place, or order of events. Yet we cannot doubt that some messages passed between Harold and William, and we can almost as little doubt that it was William who sent the first messenger to Harold, and not Harold who sent the first messenger to William. It was perfectly in character that an invader who assumed the character of a legal claimant, nay more, an invader who professed to come as an armed missionary of the Roman See, should play out his part by offering the perjurer and usurper one more chance of repentance. Harold, on the other hand, a national King, simply defending his own Crown and the freedom of his people, had no need thus ostentatiously to put himself in [Sidenote: Mission of Hugh Margot to Harold;] the right. We may then believe that the first message which passed between the Norman Duke and the English King, after William landed on English ground, was when Hugh Margot, a monk of Fécamp, came to King Harold in London. He found him seated, as we may imagine him, on his throne in his Palace of Westminster, [Sidenote: he calls on him to give up the Crown.] and called on him, in the name of the Duke of the Normans, to come down from his throne, and to lay aside his crown and sceptre. The messenger once more set forth the rights of William, his claim on the Crown by the bequest of Eadward, his personal claim on Harold as his sworn man. The Duke was ready to have his claims fairly discussed, according to the law either of England or of Normandy. If either Norman or English judges held that Harold’s right was good, William would let him enjoy that right in peace. Otherwise let him quietly yield up what he had usurped, and spare the bloodshed and misery on either side of which he would be guilty if he attempted to retain it.
[Sidenote: Indignation of Harold restrained by Gyrth.]
A message like this might have provoked the meekest of men. It is not wonderful that we read in one account[1235] that Harold’s wrath was highly kindled, nay that he was with some difficulty kept back from a breach of the rights of ambassadors in the person of the insolent monk. The influence which thus restrained the King from violence is said to have been that of Earl Gyrth, who, in the Norman [Sidenote: Harold’s counter-message to William; his clear statement of his rights.] accounts, appears throughout as the good genius of his royal brother. However this may be, we elsewhere find[1236] a message addressed by Harold to William, which is evidently an answer to the monk of Fécamp, and which contains a calm and clear statement of Harold’s right. He does not deny the fact of his oath to William, but he maintains that it was an extorted oath and therefore of no force. He does not deny the fact of Eadward’s earlier promise to William, but he maintains that that promise has been cancelled by a later bequest. Ever since the blessed Augustine first preached the Gospel to Englishmen, it had always been the law of England that a testament was of no strength at all while the testator lived. Up to the moment of his death, a man might revoke any earlier disposition of his goods, which could not take effect till the breath was out of his body. Eadward had indeed once made a promise of the succession in favour of William, but that promise had become void and of none effect by his later and dying nomination of the reigning King. How far the words of any message of Harold’s have been truly reported to us by our Norman informants it is impossible to say, but it is clear that the answer thus put into Harold’s mouth, though far from exhaustive, is thoroughly to the purpose as far as it goes. Harold’s best claim to his Crown, his election by the English people, is not insisted on. But the answer to the two points insisted [Sidenote: Harold challenges William to fight on Saturday.] on by William seems hardly to admit of a rejoinder. We are told in other accounts that Harold offered William his friendship and rich gifts if he would depart quietly out of the land, but added that if he were bent on warfare, he would meet him in battle on the coming Saturday.[1237] The Duke, we are told, accepted the challenge; he dismissed the messenger with the honourable gifts of a horse and arms; and Harold, it is added, when he saw him thus return, repented him that he had done despite to the messenger whom Duke William had sent to him.
[Sidenote: Harold as well as William eager for battle.]
The challenge had now passed. There can be no doubt that the irritating message of William, and the reports which must have reached London of the cruel harrying of the South-Saxon lands, had wrought the effect which they were doubtless meant to work on the mind of Harold. It was, as we have seen, the policy of William to draw Harold down to a battle, in which William should have the vantage-ground of his intrenched camp at Hastings. And Harold was now as eager for battle as William himself could be. He was eager to avenge his own wrongs and the wrongs of his people. He was eager to strike the decisive blow before the French host could be strengthened by reinforcements from beyond sea.[1238] His personal wrath was kindled against the man who had insulted and mocked him by a challenge the most galling that had ever been addressed to a crowned King upon his throne. And a higher feeling of duty would bid him to go forth and put a stop as soon as might be to the pitiless ravages which were laying waste his land and bringing his people to beggary.[1239] The purpose of the King was to go forth at once and to meet the invader face to face, according to the challenge which he had himself given for the coming [Sidenote: Proposal of Gyrth.] Saturday. But the tale goes on to tell how Gyrth, the special hero of the Norman writers, again strove to turn his brother from his purpose.[1240] His counsel was that the King should remain, seemingly as the defender of London, while he himself should go forth to battle with the Norman. The King was wearied with his labours in the Northumbrian campaign; the troops which had as yet come together in London were not numerous enough to justify the King in attempting to strike a decisive blow [Sidenote: Gyrth’s scruples about the oath.] at their head. Moreover, whether the oath was binding or not, Harold could not deny that he had sworn an oath to William as his lord, and it was not well that a man should go forth to fight face to face against the lord to whom he had done homage.[1241] But he, Gyrth, was under no such restraint; he need feel no such scruples. He had never sworn ought to Duke William; he could go forth with a clear conscience and fight against him face [Sidenote: Gyrth proposes that he should march against William, while Harold remains and harries the country.] to face for his native land.[1242] Let the King too think on the risk to himself and to his Kingdom if he jeoparded his own life and all that depended on his own life, the noble heritage of English freedom,[1243] on the chances of a single battle. Let Gyrth fight against William. If Gyrth overcame the invader, the gain to England would be as great as if Harold himself overcame him. But if William overcame Gyrth, the loss to England would be far less than if William overcame Harold. If Gyrth were slain or in bonds, Harold could still gather another army, and could strike another blow to rescue or to avenge his brother.[1244] Let then the Earl of the East-Angles go forth with the troops which were already assembled in London, and let the King himself wait till a greater force had answered to his summons. Let him meanwhile harry the whole land between London and the coast, even as the Normans themselves were harrying it. Let him burn houses, cut down trees, lay waste corn-fields. Let him in short put a wilderness between himself and his enemy. William then, whether successful or unsuccessful in the battle with Gyrth, would presently be starved into favourable terms. He would soon find it impossible to maintain his host in the wasted land, and he would be driven to withdraw peacefully to his own dominions.[1245]
[Sidenote: Estimate of Gyrth’s advice.]
A hero was speaking to a hero; we may add, a general was speaking to a general. Our hearts are moved at the generous self-devotion of the brave Earl, who recked so little of himself as compared with the safety of his brother and his country. And in the wise, though cruel, policy which he enforced upon his brother, we can discern a subtlety of intellect fitted to grapple with that of William himself. Gyrth, as painted by hostile historians, stands forth as one who, had he outlived that one fatal day, would never have allowed England to fall without striking another blow. But how were the counsels of that lofty spirit received by the no less lofty spirit to whom they were addressed? [Sidenote: Norman calumnies.] We may cast aside the mere inventions of Norman calumny. They represent Harold as thrusting away his brother with insult, as even spurning his aged mother from his feet, when, still sad at the fate of Tostig,[1246] she implored him not to jeopard the lives of all the sons who were left to her.[1247] Such tales as these come from the same mint of falsehood as the tales which describe William as striking his wife with his spur or as beating her to [Sidenote: Answer of Harold; he refuses to ravage his land or do harm to his people.] death with his bridle.[1248] Another Norman writer, who at least better understood the characters of the two noble brothers, puts into the mouth of Harold words which, after eight hundred years, still send a thrill to the hearts of Englishmen. All who heard the counsel of Gyrth cried out that it was good, and prayed the King to follow it.[1249] But Harold answered that he would never play the coward’s part, that he would never let his friends go forth to face danger on his behalf, while he himself, from whatever cause, drew back from facing it.[1250] And he added words which show how the wise and experienced ruler, the chosen and anointed King, had cast aside whatever needed to be cast aside in the fiery exile who had once harried the coast at Porlock.[1251] “Never,” said Harold, “will I burn an English village or an English house; never will I harm the lands or the goods of any Englishman. How can I do hurt to the folk who are put under me to govern? How can I plunder and harass those whom I would fain see thrive under my rule?”[1252] Truly, when we read words like these, we feel that it is something to be of the blood and of the speech of the men who chose Harold for their King and who died around his Standard.
[Sidenote: Harold marches from London. Thursday, October 12.]
Six days had now been passed in the trysting-place of London.[1253] Daring the whole of that time men had been flocking in, but the forces of the North under the sons of Ælfgar had not yet appeared. Harold now determined to delay no longer. He set out from London, seemingly on Thursday, exactly one week after his arrival in the great city, in order to redeem his challenge of giving battle to the invaders on Saturday. He marched forth at the head of his own following and of such troops as had come in to the London muster. These would no doubt be largely reinforced by the levies of Kent and Sussex pressing to his Standard on the march. At [Sidenote: Numbers of his army; exaggeration on both sides.] the numbers of the army which he thus collected it is impossible to do more than guess. The Norman and the English writers both indulge in manifest exaggerations in opposite directions. The Normans employ every rhetorical art to set before us the prodigious numbers of the English. They were a host that no man could number, a host like the host of Xerxes, which drank up the rivers as it passed. Nothing but the special favour of God could have given his servants a victory over their [Sidenote: Harold unjustly censured.] enemies which was truly miraculous. On the other hand, the English writers yielded from the very beginning to the obvious temptation of laying the blame of the national overthrow on the rashness of the King. Harold refused to wait till a sufficient force had come together; he ventured a battle with numbers altogether inadequate, and he paid the penalty of his own over-daring. Such are the comments even of the writers who are warmest in their admiration of Harold, and who pour forth the most bitter regrets over his fall.[1254] Yet we must remember that nothing is easier than to blame a defeated commander, nothing easier than to throw on his shoulders either the faults of others or the mere caprices of fortune. And we should remember too that, deeply as we reverence our national writers, implicitly as we accept their statements of facts, warmly as we sympathize with their patriotic feelings, their criticisms on such a point as this are simply the criticisms of monks on the conduct of a consummate general. We may fairly assume that whatever captains like William and Harold did was the right thing to do in the circumstances under which they found themselves. The consummate generalship [Sidenote: His generalship; he fights on ground of his own choice.] of Harold is nowhere more conspicuously shown than in this memorable campaign. He formed his plan, and he carried it out. He determined to give battle, but he determined to give battle on his own ground and after his [Sidenote: No attack on the Norman camp intended.] own fashion. All probability goes against the belief that Harold designed anything so foolhardy as an attack, by night or by day, on the Norman camp. No doubt the expectation of such an attack was prevalent in the Norman camp.[1255] But our evidence proves only the existence of such an expectation among the Normans; it in no way proves the existence of any such design on the part of the English King. The nature of the post which he chose distinctly shows the contrary; it distinctly shows what Harold’s real plan was. It was to occupy a post where the Normans would have to attack him at a great disadvantage, and where he could defend himself at a great advantage. This he effectually did, and it was no small effort of true generalship to [Sidenote: Harold probably judged rightly as to numbers.] do so. And for the post which he chose, and for the mode warfare which he contemplated, overwhelming numbers were in no way desirable. A moderate force, if thoroughly compact and thoroughly trustworthy, would really do the work better. If then Harold marched against the invader at the head of a force which, to critics of his own day, seemed inadequate for his purpose, the chances are that Harold knew well what he was doing and that his critics did not understand his plans. Harold was defeated; he has therefore paid the usual penalty of defeat in ignorant censure of his actions. But it is quite certain that his defeat was not owing to mere lack of numbers, and we may fairly conclude that the force with which he set out was one which he judged to be sufficient for carrying out the plan which he had formed.
[Sidenote: Military importance of the campaign; skill of both generals.]
The great campaign of Hastings was thus in truth a trial of skill between the two greatest of living captains. Each of them, it may fairly be said, to some extent compassed his purpose against the other. William constrained Harold to fight; but Harold, in his turn, constrained William to fight on ground of Harold’s own choosing. He constrained him to fight on ground than which none could be better suited for the purposes of the English defence, none worse suited for the purposes of the Norman attack. This march of Harold from London into Sussex was a march as speedy and as well executed as his march from London to York so short a time before. But it was a march conceived with somewhat different objects. Both marches were made to meet an invader, to deliver the land from the desolation caused by the presence of an invader. But the march into Northumberland was strictly a march to surprize an invader, while the march into Sussex was a march to meet an invader against whom altogether different [Sidenote: Harold’s tactics defensive.] tactics had to be employed. It was Harold’s policy to make the enemy the assailant in the actual battle as well as in the general campaign. One cannot doubt that the whole march was designed with reference to this special object. From the moment when Harold fixed a day for the battle, he no doubt also fixed a place. He must have known Sussex well, and he had clearly, from the very beginning, chosen in his own mind the spot on which he would give battle. His march was strictly a march to the [Sidenote: He marches through Kent and Sussex,] actual spot on which the battle was to be fought. His course lay along the line of the great road from London to the south coast. He halted on a spot which commanded that road, and which also commanded the great road eastward from William’s present position. He hastened on through those Kentish and South-Saxon lands which had been the cradle of his house, and which contained so large [Sidenote: and encamps on SENLAC. Friday, October 13.] a portion of his own vast estates. He halted at a point distant about seven miles from the head-quarters of the invaders, and pitched his camp upon the ever-memorable heights of Senlac.[1256]
[Sidenote: Nature of the site.]
The spot on which the destinies of England were fixed was indeed one chosen with the eye of a great general. Harold has, in this respect, had somewhat scanty justice done to him by those of his own countrymen who seem inclined to throw on him the blame of the national defeat. But it is in the Norman accounts, which alone supply details, that the history of the great battle must be studied; and it cannot be denied that, in every military respect, they do full justice both to the English King and to the English army. Their conventional rhetoric of abuse never fails them; but what Harold and his followers really were we see from the facts as stated by the Normans themselves, and from the expressions of unwilling, of half-unconscious, admiration which those facts wring from them.[1257] Harold might be a perjurer and an usurper, but the language of his enemies at least shows that they found him [Sidenote: The post perfectly suited to Harold’s object.] an equal and terrible adversary in the day of battle. And nowhere is Harold’s military greatness so distinctly felt as when, with the Norman narratives in our hand, we tread the battle-field of his own choice, and see how thoroughly the post was suited for the purposes of him who chose it. It was the policy of Harold not to attack. The mode of fighting of an English army in that age made it absolutely invincible as long as it could hold its ground. [Sidenote: His arrangements purely defensive.] But neither the close array of the battle-axe men, nor the swarms of darters and other half-armed irregular levies, were suited to take the offensive against the horsemen who formed the strength of the Norman army. It needed only a developement of the usual tactics of the shield-wall to turn the battle as far as possible into the likeness of a siege. This was what Harold now did. He occupied, and fortified as thoroughly as the time and the means at his command would allow, a post of great natural strength, which he made into what is distinctly spoken of as a castle.[1258] It was a post which it was quite impossible that William could pass by without attacking. But it was also a post which it in no way suited William’s purposes to occupy with his own forces. By so doing he might have forced Harold to decline fighting; he could not have compelled him to fight on other ground. Harold was therefore enabled to occupy the post of his own choice, the natural bulwark of London and of the [Sidenote: Description of the hill of Senlac or Battle.] inland parts of England generally. The hill of Senlac,[1259] now occupied by the Abbey and town of Battle, commemorates in its later name the great event of which it was the scene. It is the last spur of the downs covered by the great Andredes-weald, and it completely commands the broken ground, alternating with hill and marsh, which lies between itself and the sea. It stands in fact right in the teeth of an enemy marching northwards from Hastings. The hill itself is of a peninsular shape, stretching from the east to the south-west, and it is united by a narrow isthmus to the great mass of the high ground to the north.[1260] The height is low, compared with the mountains and lofty hills of the western parts of our island, but its slopes, greatly varying in their degrees of steepness, would, even where the ascent is most gentle, afford a formidable obstacle to an enemy who relied mainly on his cavalry. The spot was then quite unoccupied and untilled; nothing in any of the narratives implies the existence of any village or settlement; our own Chronicles only describe the site as by “the hoar apple-tree,”[1261] some relic, we may well believe, of the days when streams and trees were still under the guardianship of their protecting, perhaps indwelling deities. At present the eastern part of the hill is covered by the buildings of the Abbey, and by part of the town which has gathered round it, including the parish church. The town also stretches to the north-west, away from the main battle-ground, along what I have spoken of as the isthmus. But the hill reaches to a considerable distance south-west of the isthmus, westward from the buildings of the Abbey, and this part of the ground, we shall see, really played the most decisive part in the great event of the place. A sort of ravine, watered by two small streams which join together at the base of the hill, cuts off the south-western end of the battle-ground from the isthmus and the ground connected with it. The steepness of the ground here is considerable. At the extreme south-east end, the present approach to the town from Hastings, the ascent is gentler. Turning the eastern end of the hill, which here takes a slightly forked shape, the ground on the north side, near the present parish church, is exceedingly steep, almost precipitous. Along the south front of the hill, that most directly in the teeth of the invaders, the degree of height and steepness varies a good deal. The highest and steepest is the central point occupied by the buildings of the Abbey. Some way westward from the Abbey is the point where the slope is gentlest of all, where the access to the natural citadel is [Sidenote: The detached hill.] least difficult. But here a low, detached, broken hill, a sort of small island in advance of the larger peninsula, stands out as an outpost in front of the main mass of high ground, and, as we shall see, it played a most important part in the battle.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF SENLAC
14th October 1066.
_The position at the commencement of the Norman attack about 9 a.m._]
[Sidenote: Advantage of the site.]
Such a post as this, strong by nature and standing directly in the face of the enemy, exactly suited Harold’s objects. And the approach to it was equally unsuited to the objects of William. Seven miles of hill and dale form the present road from Hastings to Battle. But the Norman army, in its advance from Hastings, would have to spread itself over the whole country, a country where marsh and wood doubtless alternated, except so far as their own ravages had done something to clear their path. The ground immediately around Senlac is specially broken and rolling, and the lower land close at the foot of the hill, which must in many parts have been utterly trackless, was doubtless, in an October of those days, a mere quagmire. It is only where the present road enters the town of Battle that a sort of low isthmus of somewhat higher and firmer ground forms a slight connexion between Senlac and the opposite hills to the south. Through all this difficult country the Normans had to make their way to the foot of the English position. And there they would find, not only a post of great natural strength, but something which was not without reason called a fortress. Harold entrenched himself [Sidenote: Harold fortifies the hill. Defences of the English camp.] behind defences, not indeed equal to those of Arques[1262] or Old Sarum, but perhaps nearly equal to those of William’s own camp at Hastings. He occupied the hill; he surrounded it on all its accessible sides by a threefold palisade, with a triple gate of entrance, and defended it to the south by an artificial ditch.[1263] The name of the Watch-Oak is still borne by a tree on the isthmus. In that quarter no attack was to be feared, and the defences were there probably less diligently cared for. The royal Standard was planted just where the ground begins to slope to the south-east, the point most directly in the teeth of the advancing enemy. Within the fortress thus formed, the King of the English and his army awaited the approach of the invaders.
Of the numbers of the host gathered within this narrow compass we have, as we have seen, no certain account. While the English writers naturally diminish, the Norman [Sidenote: Stories of desertions; their probable origin.] writers as naturally magnify their numbers.[1264] The English writers further tell us that, on account of the straitness of the post, many of the English deserted.[1265] It may be so; but it should be again remembered that, with the tactics which Harold had chosen, overwhelming numbers were not desirable. Enough of good troops to hold the hill against the enemy were better than a vast host of tumultuary levies. We can well believe that the population of the neighbouring country flocked to the Standard in far greater numbers than at all suited the King’s purpose. The services of some volunteers may have been rejected; some may have turned away when they saw the peculiar nature of the service required of them, a kind of service which we can well conceive to have been neither attractive nor intelligible to raw levies. But it is certain that, whatever was the number of the troops who remained or who were retained, little could be said against their quality. We shall see that the Housecarls, the main core of the army, retained their old reputation to the last, and the fault even of the irregular levies was certainly not that of a lack of mere courage.[1266]
[Sidenote: Stories of further messages, spies, &c.]
It does not appear that any long time passed between Harold’s occupation of his hill fortress and the battle itself. The spot was not one in which a large body of men could remain for any length of time; on the other hand the invaders could not remain altogether inactive, neither could they pass by the English position without attacking it. And that position, after all, was not a regular castle to be reduced by a regular siege. Immediate battle was absolutely inevitable on both sides. Everything in our narratives leads us to believe that the battle followed almost immediately on the arrival of Harold at Senlac. The hill seems to have been occupied on the Friday, and [Sidenote: Report of the English spy, who takes the shaven Normans for priests.] the fight we know began the next morning. Spies were sent out on both sides,[1267] and there is nothing impossible in the well-known tale that the English spy, struck by the unusual aspect of the closely-shaven Normans, reported to his sovereign that the French host contained more priests than soldiers. Harold, we are told, answered with a laugh that the French priests would be found to be valiant warriors [Sidenote: Tale of a dispute between Harold and Gyrth.] indeed.[1268] But much less faith is due to the legend that Harold and Gyrth themselves rode forth to spy out the invading army, that Harold proposed to fall back on London, that Gyrth dissuaded him from such a course, that the two brothers quarrelled and nearly fought, but that they came back to the camp without letting any sign of their dispute appear to any one else.[1269] Nothing can be less trustworthy than these Norman reports of things which are said to have taken place within the English camp. No power short of divination could have revealed to any Norman witness a private conversation and a private [Sidenote: William’s last message.] quarrel between the English King and his brother. A somewhat greater degree of attention is due to the story that William, even at the last moment, after the English camp was actually pitched on Senlac, still made one last attempt at negotiation.[1270] If such an attempt was made, it was of course made with no hope and no thought on William’s part of its leading to any peaceful arrangement between himself and his rival. William’s object must have been to keep up to the last the character of one making a legal and righteous claim, a claim which nothing but a necessity beyond his control drove him into asserting by force. And, by the peculiar form of message which is said to have been sent, he might well have hoped to spread fear and disunion through the English army. He is said to have first invited Harold to a personal interview at some point between Hastings and Senlac, with a few followers only on either side. Gyrth is said to have answered for his brother, refusing any personal conference, and bidding William send to the camp whatever message he thought good. [Sidenote: Three choices offered to Harold.] The message came. It offered a choice of three things. Let Harold resign the Kingdom according to his oath. Let Harold and his house hold the Kingdom under William, Harold as Under-king of the Northumbrians, Gyrth as [Sidenote: Challenge to single combat.] Earl of the West-Saxons.[1271] Failing either of these offers, let Harold come forth and meet William in single combat. The Crown of England should be the prize of the victor, and the followers of both combatants should depart unhurt. [Sidenote: William’s object in the message.] [Sidenote: The policy of all these proposals is manifest. Their object] was to make the strife appear a mere personal quarrel between Harold and William, instead of an attack made by the Duke of the Normans on the land and people of England. And the proposal that the two princes should spare the blood of their armies, and decide their difference in their own persons, had a specious look of humanity. [Sidenote: Harold refuses the challenge; his grounds of refusal.] But Harold and Gyrth had seen far too much of the world to be taken in in this way. Harold could not separate himself from his people. His cause was theirs and their cause was his. When the Duke of the Normans attacked the King whom the English nation had chosen, he attacked the nation itself. The Crown was Harold’s by their gift; but it was not Harold’s in any such sense that he could stake it on the result of a single combat, any more than he could stake it on a throw of the dice. A single combat between Harold and William would of course involve the death of one or other of the combatants. Neither King nor Duke was a man likely to cry craven. What then if William slew Harold? His right to the English Crown would be no better than it was before. Englishmen, with arms in their hands, were not likely to submit to the judgement of such an ordeal. William would still have had to fight;—he would no doubt have been able to fight at a great advantage, but he would still have had to fight—against Gyrth, Eadgar, Eadwine, Waltheof, any one whom the English people chose to place at their head. If, on the other hand, Harold slew William, it was, if possible, even less likely that the mingled host which came from all the lands beyond the sea for spiritual and temporal gains would at once quietly go back to the various homes from which they had come. The challenge was simply a blind, and Harold did only his duty in refusing to be bound by such a false issue, and in saying that God alone must judge between him and his foe.
[Sidenote: Further doubtful details of the messages.]
Our accounts of these messages are so confused and contradictory that it is impossible to feel thorough confidence whether any messages were really sent at this stage of the story or not. We are told that, either now or at some earlier time, William offered Harold the option of a legal judgement on the points at issue between them. Let their quarrel be decided either by the laws of Normandy or by the laws of England, or by the Pope and his clergy at Rome.[1272] Here again we see the same sort of fallacy at work as in the challenge to single combat. The Crown of England could not be adjudged according to any rules of Norman Law or by the award of any Norman tribunal. As for English Law, the Assembly which alone had power to deal with the question, had dealt with it nine months before. Those who had then given their votes for Harold were now there present to enforce those votes axe in hand. The appeal to the Roman See was a still more transparent fallacy. William and his host knew well, and Harold and his host no doubt also knew well, that the sentence of Rome had already gone forth against England, and that the consecrated banner of the Apostle was at that moment in the Norman camp. In another version we hear, not of a proposed appeal to the Apostolic throne, but of a solemn warning that Harold and all his followers were already excommunicated by the Apostolic sentence. Dismay, we are told, was spread through the English host, and men began to shrink from the coming battle. Gyrth once more steps forth as the good genius of his brother and of his country. His voice and his arguments again bring back the courage and the hopes of the English army.[1273] We may give to these tales such amount of belief as we may think good. But we may be sure that the day before the battle was spent on both sides in diligent preparation for the work that was to come on the morrow.
§ 4. _The Battle. October 14, 1066._
[Sidenote: The night before the battle. Friday, October 13.]
And now the night came on, the night of Friday the thirteenth of October, the night which was to usher in the ever-memorable morn of Saint Calixtus. Very different, according to our Norman informants, was the way in which that night was spent by the two armies. The English spent the night in drinking and singing,[1274] the Normans in [Sidenote: Devotion of the Normans.] prayer and confession of their sins.[1275] Among the crowds of clergy in William’s host were two Prelates of all but the highest rank in the Norman Church.[1276] One was Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, who in his temporal character was soon to have so large a share of the spoils of England.[1277] The other was the Duke’s own half-brother, the famous Odo, who, to his Bishop’s seat at Bayeux, was soon to add the temporal cares of the Kentish Earldom.[1278] Under the pious care of the two Bishops and of the other clergy, the Norman host seems to have been wrought up to a sort of paroxysm of devotion. Odo extracted from every man a special vow, that those who survived the struggle of the coming Saturday would never again eat flesh on any Saturday that was to come.[1279] Tales like these are the standing accusations which the victors always [Sidenote: The night said to be spent by the English in drinking and singing.] bring against the vanquished. The reproach which is cast on the English host on the night before the fight of Senlac is also cast on the French host on the night before the fight of Azincourt.[1280] And yet there may well be some groundwork of truth in these stories. The English were not, like the Normans, fighting under the influence of that strange spiritual excitement which had persuaded men that an unprovoked aggression on an unoffending nation was in truth a war of religion, a Crusade for the good of the souls of Normans and English alike. It may therefore well be that there was more of ceremonial devotion in the camp of William than in the camp of Harold. And yet even a Norman legend gives us a picture of the English King bending before the Body of his Lord,[1281] and Englishmen may deem that the prayers and blessings of Ælfwig and Leofric were at least as holy and as acceptable as the prayers and blessings of Geoffrey and Odo. And we must not forget that the devotions of William and his followers are recorded by William’s own chaplain and flatterer, while no narrative of that night’s doings survives from the pen of any canon of Waltham or any monk of the New Minster. And we shall hardly deem the worse of our countrymen, if that evening’s supper by the camp-fires was enlivened by the spirit-stirring strains of old Teutonic minstrelsy. Never again were those ancient songs to be uttered by the mouth of English warriors in the air of a free and pure Teutonic England. They sang, we well may deem, the song of Brunanburh and the song of Maldon; they sang how Æthelstan conquered and how Brihtnoth fell; and they sang, it well may be, in still louder notes, the new song which the last English gleeman had put into their mouths,
“How the wise King Made fast his realm To a high-born man, Harold himself, The noble Earl.”[1282]
And thoughts and words like these may have been as good a preparation for the day of battle as all the pious oratory with which the warlike Prelate of Bayeux could hound on the spoilers on their prey.
[Sidenote: BATTLE OF SENLAC. Saturday, October 14.]
The morning of the decisive day at last had come. The Duke of the Normans heard mass, and received the communion in both kinds,[1283] and drew forth his troops for their [Sidenote: William’s speech to his army.] march against the English post. As usual, an exhortation from the general went before any military action. The topics for a speech made by William to his army were obvious.[1284] He came to maintain his just right to the English Crown; he came to punish the perjury of Harold and the older crime of Godwine against his kinsman Ælfred. The safety of his soldiers and the honour of their country were in their own hands; defeated, they had no hope and no retreat; conquerors, the glory of victory and the spoils of England lay before them. But of victory there could be no doubt; God would fight for those who fought for the righteous cause, and what people could ever withstand the Normans in war? They were the descendants of the men who had won Neustria from the Frank, and who had reduced Frankish Kings to submit to the most humiliating of treaties.[1285] He, their Duke, and they his subjects, had themselves conquered at Mortemer and at Varaville.[1286] Were they to yield to the felon[1287] English, never renowned in war, whose country had been over and over again harried and subdued by the invading Dane? Let them lift up their banners and march on; let them spare no man in the hostile ranks; they were marching on to certain victory, and the fame of their exploits would resound from one end of heaven to the other.[1288]
The faithful William Fitz-Osbern now rode up to the mound on which his sovereign stood,[1289] and warned him that [Sidenote: The army marches to Telham.] there was no time to tarry.[1290] Kindled by the exhortations of their leader, the host marched on. They made their way, perhaps in no very certain order, till, from the hill of Telham or Heathland, they first came in sight of the [Sidenote: The knights arm.] English encamped on the opposite height of Senlac.[1291] The knights, who had ridden from Hastings in a lighter garb, and probably on lighter horses, now put on their full armour, and mounted their war-steeds. The Duke now [Sidenote: Incident of the reversed hauberk.] called for his harness. His coat of mail was brought forth; but in putting it on, by some accident, the fore part was turned hindmost. Many a man would have been embarrassed at the evil omen, and in truth the hearts of many of William’s followers sank.[1292] But his own ready wit never failed him; he was as able to turn the accident to his advantage as when he first took seizin of the soil of Sussex.[1293] The omen, he said, was in truth a good one; as the hauberk had been turned about, so he who bore [Sidenote: William in full harness.] it would be turned from a Duke into a King.[1294] Now fully armed, he called for his war-horse. His noble Spanish steed, the gift of his ally King Alfonso,[1295] was brought forth. The horse was led by the aged Walter Giffard, the Lord of Longueville, the hero of Arques and of Mortemer. He had made the pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James of Compostella, and he had brought the gallant beast as a worthy offering for a prince who was the mirror of knighthood.[1296] William now sprang on his horse’s back, and, now ready for battle, he paused for a moment at the head of his host. His gallant equipment and bearing called forth the admiration of all around him, and a spokesman for their thoughts was found in Hamon, the Viscount of the distant Thouars.[1297] He spoke no doubt the words of all, when he said that never had such a knight been seen under heaven, and that the noble Count would become a nobler King.[1298]
And now the Duke, fully armed, looked forth upon the [Sidenote: Vital brings the news of the English army.] English encampment. At that moment Vital, a follower of his brother the Bishop, one whose name is written in Domesday, rode up to his sovereign. He had been one of those who were sent forth to spy out the English host; and William now asked him what he had seen and where the English usurper was to be found. Vital told him that Harold stood among the thick ranks which crowned the summit of the hill, for there, so he deemed, he had seen the [Sidenote: William vows to build a monastery on Senlac, if victorious.] royal Standard.[1299] Then the Duke vowed his vow, that if God would give him victory over his perjured foe, he would, on the spot where that Standard stood, raise a mighty minster to his honour.[1300] Among those who heard him [Sidenote: William Faber prays that it may be in honour of Saint Martin.] was a monk, William by name, who had come from the house of Marmoutiers, nestled far away beneath its cliffs by the banks of the rushing Loire. Men called him _Faber_, the wright or smith, because in other days, before he had put the cowl upon him, he had shown his skill in forging arrows for the service of the craft of the woods.[1301] He now stepped forward, and craved that the holy house which the Duke would ere long raise on yonder height should be raised in honour of the renowned Saint Martin, the great Apostle of the Gauls.[1302] The Prince of the Cenomannians owed spiritual allegiance to the metropolitan throne of Tours; he said that it should be as his monastic namesake craved, and in after days the height of Senlac was crowned with the Abbey of Saint Martin of the Place of Battle.
[Sidenote: Threefold division of the army.]
The vow was spoken, and William and his host now marched on in full battle array. The army was ranged in three divisions, corresponding, whether by accident or by design, with the geographical position of each contingent in its own land.[1303] To the left were the Bretons, the Poitevins, the men of Maine, under the command of Alan of [Sidenote: The left, Bretons, &c., under Alan.] Britanny.[1304] He and his might deem that, in following the banner of their own Norman conquerors, they were avenging a far earlier wrong, that they were coming to wreak on the Teutonic occupants of the greater Britain a tardy vengeance for the conquest which had driven their own forefathers to the shores of the lesser. Yet Alan might have paused to remember how his own ancestor and namesake had found in an English King his truest champion against the Norman enemy,[1305] and he might have hesitated before striking a blow to bring both Britains into one common bondage. And with Alan rode a man of mingled birth, whose name will again meet us in our history, but as one branded with the twofold infamy of a man false alike [Sidenote: Ralph of Norfolk.] to his native country and to its foreign King. There, the only English traitor in that motley host, rode Ralph of Norfolk, Ralph of Wader, son of an English father and a Breton mother, who now came among the forces of his maternal country to win back the lands which some unrecorded [Sidenote: The right wing; the French and other mercenaries under Roger of Montgomery.] treason had lost him.[1306] Far to the right rode a more honourable foe. There was the post of Roger of Montgomery, whose name has already so often met us in our Norman story, who now came to be the founder of a mighty house in the conquered island, to be honoured with English Earldoms, and to leave the name of his Lexovian hill and manor as the name of a borough and a shire among the twice conquered Cymry.[1307] Under him marched the mercenary French, the men of Boulogne and Poix, and all who, from that region, followed Duke William for hire or for hope of plunder.[1308] With Roger was joined in command one who bore a name soon to be as renowned in England and in Flanders as it already was in Normandy, but a name which, after all its bearer’s exploits, has utterly passed away, while that of his colleague [Sidenote: William Fitz-Osbern.] has been so marvellously abiding. For with Roger rode William Fitz-Osbern, the Duke’s earliest and dearest friend, the son of the man who had saved his life in childhood,[1309] the man who had himself been the first to cheer on his master to his great enterprise, and to exhort the nobles of Normandy to follow their lord beyond the [Sidenote: Eustace of Boulogne.] sea.[1310] And there too, among the mingled bands on the right wing, rode one whom England might well curse more bitterly than any other man in the invading host. There rode one who had been honoured with the hand of a daughter of England, who had been enriched with the wealth of England in the days of his royal kinsman, and who now came to seek for a richer and more lasting share of her plunder in the wake of her open enemy. Eustace of Boulogne, the man whose crime had led to the banishment of England’s noblest sons, the man who had murdered unarmed Englishmen on their own hearthstones,[1311] now came to feel what was the might of Englishmen harnessed for the battle, and to show himself the one man in either [Sidenote: The Normans in the centre.] host whose heart was accessible to craven fear. And in the centre, between Breton and Picard, just as Normandy lies between Britanny and Picardy, marched the flower of [Sidenote: The men of Coutances] the host, the native Normans.[1312] Furthest to the left, next in order to their Breton neighbours, marched the only band who had an ancestral grudge against England, the only men in William’s host who came to revenge the devastation of their own land by English hands. The valiant men of the Constantine peninsula, the descendants of the Danes of Harold Blaatand, were there under the command of Neal of Saint Saviour.[1313] The rebel of Val-ès-Dunes now followed his lord in his great enterprise; the namesake and descendant of him who had beaten off the host of Æthelred now came to wreak a tardy vengeance on Englishmen in [Sidenote: and Bayeux.] their own land. Next to the forces of the Côtentin came a band whom the men of Wessex and East-Anglia might well nigh claim as countrymen, the Saxons and Danes of the land of Bayeux, among whom, even then, some relics of Teutonic speech and even of heathen worship may perchance have lingered. They came ready and eager to deal hand-strokes [Sidenote: The archers of Evreux.] with the bravest of the English, while the men of Louviers and Evreux came with their unerring bows, and their arrows destined to pierce many an English eye.[1314] The [Sidenote: Armour and weapons of the Normans.] archers were all but universally on foot; the Parthian horse-bowman was not absolutely unknown to Norman tactics, but such an union of characters did not extend to any considerable portion of the army.[1315] For the most part the archers were without defensive harness; they were clad in mere jerkins, with caps on their heads, but a few wore the defences common to the horse and foot of both armies. These were the close-fitting coat of mail reaching to the knees and elbows, and the conical helmet without crest or other ornament, and with no protection for the face except the nose-piece. The horses had, unlike the practice of after times, no artificial defence of any kind.[1316] Their riders, in helmets and coats of mail, bore the kite-shaped shield, and were armed with long lances, not laid in the rest as in the equipment of the later chivalry, but lifted high in air over the bearer’s shoulder. For close combat they had the heavy straight sword; the battle-axe is not shown on the Norman side, and two men only in the host are represented as wielding the terrible mace. Those two men formed the [Sidenote: The Papal banner and the group round it.] innermost centre of the advancing host. There, in the midst of all, the guiding star of the whole army, floated the consecrated banner, the gift of Rome and of Hildebrand, the ensign by whose presence wrong was to be hallowed into right. And close beneath its folds rode the two master-spirits of the whole enterprise, kindred alike in [Sidenote: The Duke himself.] blood, in valour, and in crime. There rode the chief of all, the immediate leader of that choicest and central division, the mighty Duke himself. And we may be sure that it was not only by the voice of flattery, but in the words of truth and soberness, that there, amid the choicest chivalry of Europe, the Bastard of Falaise was hailed as bearing the stoutest heart and the strongest arm among them all. Mounted on his stately horse, the gift of the Spanish King, he rode beneath the banner of the Apostle, the leader and the moving spirit of the whole host. No man could bend his bow,[1317] but on that day he bore [Sidenote: His mace.] a weapon fitted only for the closest and most deadly conflict;
οὕνεκ’ ἄρ’ οὐ τόξοισι μαχέσκετο δουρί τε μακρῷ, ἀλλὰ σιδηρείῃ κορύνῃ ῥήγνυσκε φάλαγγας.[1318]
The most authentic record of that day’s fight arms him neither with sword nor spear, but sets before us the iron mace of the Bastard as the one weapon fit to meet, man to man, and prince to prince, with the two-handed axe of Harold.[1319] Round his neck, we are told, were hung, as a hallowed talisman, the choicest of the relics on which the King of the English was said to have sworn his fatal oath.[1320] [Sidenote: Bishop Odo.] Close at his side, and armed with the same fearful weapon, rode one whose name was soon to be joined with his own in the mouths of Englishmen, and who was to win a far deeper share of English hatred than the mighty Conqueror himself. Odo, the warrior-Prelate of Bayeux, rode in full armour by the side of his brother and sovereign, as eager and ready as William himself to plunge wherever in the fight danger should press most nearly. To shed blood by sword or spear was a sin against the Church’s canons, but to crush head-piece and head with the war-club was, in Odo’s eyes, no breach of the duties of a minister of peace. The two mighty brethren, Duke and Bishop, formed the [Sidenote: Robert of Mortain.] central figures of the group. And hard by them[1321] rode a third brother of less renown, a third son of the Tanner’s daughter, Robert of Mortain, the lord of the castle by the waterfalls,[1322] he who was soon to have a larger share than any other man of the spoils of England,[1323] and to add to his Earldom by the Breton march the more famous [Sidenote: The Standard borne by Toustain of Bec.] Earldom of the kindred land of Cornwall. Fast by the three brethren the consecrated banner was borne by Toustain the White, the son of Rou, a knight of the less [Sidenote: Refusal of Ralph of Toesny and Walter Giffard to carry it.] famous Bec in the land of Caux.[1324] Two men of higher rank and of greater age had already declined that honourable office. Ralph of Conches or of Toesny, the heir of the proud line of Malahulc,[1325] the man who had perhaps borne to King Henry the news of the night of Mortemer,[1326] held, among his other dignities, the hereditary right to bear the banner of his lord in the day of battle.[1327] But on that day that honour was something from which men shrank as keeping them back from the more active duties of the fight. Ralph of Toesny would not encumber his hands with anything, not even with the banner of the Apostle, if it were to stay his sword from smiting the foe without mercy.[1328] So too spake the famous Walter Giffard of Longueville.[1329] Even in the days of Arques and Mortemer he was an aged man, and now he was old indeed; his hair was white, his arm was failing.[1330] He would deal blows on that day with such strength as his years had left him, but the long labour of carrying the standard could be borne [Sidenote: The Norman chivalry.] only by a younger man. Thick around Toustain and the chiefs beside whom he rode, were gathered the chivalry of Normandy, the future nobility of England, the men who made their way into our land by wrong and robbery, but whose children our land won to her own heart, and changed the descendants of the foemen of Pevensey and Senlac into the men who won the Great Charter and dictated the Provisions of Oxford. Time would fail to tell of all; but a few [Sidenote: William Patry.] names must not be passed by.[1331] There was William Patry of La Lande, who in old time had received Earl Harold as a guest, and who now rode by William’s side, swearing that he would meet his lord’s rival face to face, and would deal to him the reward of his perjury.[1332] And there too rode [Sidenote: Roger the Bigod.] men of nobler and of more lasting name. There rode Roger the Bigod, son of the poor serving-knight of William of Mortain, whose presence in the hostile ranks we can well forgive, as we hail in him the forefather of that great house whose noblest son defied the greatest of England’s later Kings in the cause of the liberties of England.[1333] [Sidenote: William Malet.] And one there was in that host, well nigh the only Norman on whom Englishmen can look with personal sympathy and honour, William Malet,[1334] a man perchance born of an English mother, one connected at all events by some tie of spiritual or temporal kindred with England and with Harold, and one who on that day knew how to reconcile his duty as a Norman subject with respect and honour towards the prince and towards the land to which that duty made him a foe.[1335] The names and the rewards of these men and of countless others are written in the great record of Domesday. The heroes who fought against them for hearth and home are nameless.
[Sidenote: Three kinds of troops in each division;]
The invading army was thus arranged in a threefold division according to the place of origin of each contingent. Each division again was ranged in a threefold order according to the nature of the troops which each contingent contained. [Sidenote: archers; heavy-armed foot; horsemen.] First in each division marched the archers, slingers, and cross-bow men, then the more heavily armed infantry, lastly the horsemen.[1336] The reason of this arrangement is obvious. [Sidenote: The order of the attack.] The light-armed were to do what they could with their missiles to annoy the English, and, if possible, to disorder their close array. On them followed the heavy infantry; they were to strive to break down the palisades of the English camp, and so to prepare the way for the charge of the horse. For William’s knights to charge up the slope of Senlac was in any case a hard task, but to charge up the slope, right in the teeth of Harold’s axes, with the shield-wall and the triple palisade still unbroken, would have been absolute madness. Because therefore William exposed his infantry to the first and most terrible danger, we are not justified in charging him with that brutal carelessness as to soldiers beneath the degree of knighthood or gentry, which was so often displayed by French commanders of later times. The two great captains who were that day matched together both knew their trade. The foresight of Harold had rendered William’s choicest troops absolutely useless, until after a struggle which could not fail to be attended with a frightful slaughter of his warriors of lower degree.
[Sidenote: The two armies in sight.]
The English host now looked down from the height of Senlac upon the advancing enemy. Like the Normans, they had risen early; they were now fully armed, and they stood ready and eager for battle.[1337] The King rode round his lines, and addressed to his men the speech expected from a [Sidenote: Harold’s speech.] general before action.[1338] The topics of Harold’s exhortation were as obvious as those of William’s. The English had simply to stand firm, and they were invincible; if they broke their ranks, they were lost. They fought for their country, their warfare was purely defensive, while Duke William had come from a foreign land to seek to conquer them. It was therefore for William to attack, for Harold simply to defend; he had therefore chosen a post where the whole work to be done was to defend it. The Normans were good and valiant horsemen; let them once pierce the English barrier, and it would be hard to drive them out again. But if the English kept their ranks, the Normans never could pierce the barrier. Their long lances would be of little avail in a combat on such ground as he had chosen for the fight. The English javelins would disorder their ranks as they advanced, and the axes would cleave them to the earth if they ventured on a hand to hand fight at the barricades.[1339] And now, as Vital had brought his news to [Sidenote: The English spy brings news.] William, so also an English spy brought to Harold the latest tidings of the array and the approach of the enemy. The King was still on his horse, his javelin in his hand, when the news was brought to him beneath the shadow of a tree—perhaps the hoar apple-tree which marked the place [Sidenote: He dismounts at the royal post.] of battle.[1340] When he had heard the tidings of his messenger, when he had surveyed and exhorted his whole army, the King rode to the royal post; he there dismounted, he took his place on foot, and prayed to God for help.[1341]
Thus far we have a natural and credible picture of the preparations of Harold and his host for the work of that awful day. But such a day was not likely to pass without [Sidenote: Tales of Harold and Gyrth.] its full accompaniment of legend and romance.[1342] Norman writers, strangely in the confidence of the English King, now tell us of dialogues between Harold and Gyrth; how, when the first division appeared on the crest of the hill, the King’s heart was lifted up as he looked at his own vast numbers, and how he despised the seemingly small band that came against him.[1343] But Gyrth, ever wise, bids him think of the valour and good array, the horses and the harness of the enemy, and to remember how large a part of his own army are but unarmed churls. Presently, as division after division appears on Telham and passes down into the lower ground, the King’s heart begins to quake. The Earl, an easy prophet after the fact, reproaches him with not having followed his counsel, with having refused to remain in London, and with having rashly staked everything on a single battle. Harold answers that it is Saturday, his lucky day, the day on which he was born, and the day which he had therefore chosen for his challenge.[1344] The calm intellect of Gyrth, like that of William, mocks at luck, and he reminds his brother that, if Saturday was the day of his birth, Saturday may also prove to be the day of his death. At last the whole ground between the heights is filled with the invading host; the banner of Saint Peter is seen floating over the central division. Then the King’s heart utterly fails him; he can hardly speak for fear and surprise; he can only mutter charges against Baldwin of Flanders for deceiving him by false statements, of which no mention is found elsewhere, as to the force which William would be likely to muster.[1345]
The credibility of a story of this kind is of the very lowest. Harold and Gyrth both died in the battle; they would at any rate keep their fears to themselves, and it is hard to see how their private talk could have come to the knowledge of the Norman poet. Besides this, Harold must, by this time at least, have known perfectly well the nature and number of the force that was coming against him. The very account in which we find all these stories tells us how well both sides had been served by spies and messengers.[1346] Each prince must have been thoroughly aware with what sort of an enemy he had to deal. There was enough indeed to make the stoutest heart in either army anxious; but of any feeling unworthy of a King or a soldier Harold and William were alike incapable. The proud horsemen and archers of Normandy might indeed, like the Medes of old, wonder at the tactics which opposed them without the help [Sidenote: The English on Senlac.] of bow or steed;[1347] but they could hardly, like their forerunners, impute madness to the immoveable wedge of men which, as if fixed to the ground by nature, covered every [Sidenote: Their defences and close array.] inch of the opposite hill. The whole height was alive with warriors; the slopes, strong in themselves, were still further strengthened by the firm barricades of ash and other timber, wattled in so close together that not a crevice could be seen. Up the slopes, through the barricades, the enemy had to make their way in the teeth of ranks of men, ranged so closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall, that while they simply kept their ground, the success of an assailant was hopeless.[1348] Every man, from the King [Sidenote: The whole army on foot.] downwards, was on foot. Those who rode to the field put their horses aside when the moment for actual fighting came.[1349] An English King was bound to expose his subjects to no danger from which he himself shrank, and, where the King fought, no man might dream of flight.[1350] This ancient national custom, adopted in earlier fights from choice and habit, was, in the post which Harold had chosen, a matter of absolute necessity. The work of that day was to defend a fortress, to stand firm, and to strike down at once any man who strove to make his way within [Sidenote: The light-armed to the left.] its wooden walls. To the south-west of the hill, beyond the isthmus, seem to have been placed the less trustworthy portions of the army, the sudden levies of the southern shires. These, like the Norman archers, had, for the most part, no [Sidenote: English armour and weapons.] defensive armour. Their weapons were of various kinds; the bow was the rarest of all;[1351] a few only were armed with swords or axes. Most of them had javelins or clubs, some had only such rustic weapons as forks and sharp stakes. Others seem to have retained some of the rudest arms of primitive days, and to have gone to battle with the stone hatchets or stone hammers which we commonly look on as belonging only to earlier and lower races than our own.[1352] But even such rude weapons as these would be of use in thrusting back the less efficient portion of the invaders, as they strove to climb the height or to break down the barricade. But it was not in troops or arms like these that Harold placed his main trust. The flower of the English army consisted of the King’s personal following, his picked men, who had been his comrades in all his wars, together with the chosen warriors of Kent, Essex, and London. These wore helmets and coats of mail hardly differing from those of the enemy. Their shields too were mostly of the same kite-shaped form, but a few of them vary from this type; some especially are round, with a boldly projecting boss, more like the shields of classical warfare. They carried, like the Romans, javelins to hurl at the beginning of the action, and heavier weapons for close combat. Some still retained the ancient broadsword, the weapon of Brunanburh, of Maldon, and of Assandun, but most of [Sidenote: The English axes.] them bore a weapon more terrible still, the long-handled axe wielded with both hands. The introduction of this arm was an innovation of the last fifty years. Its introduction was doubtless due to Cnut, but the axe was probably brought into more general use, and made more distinctly the national weapon, by Harold himself. The Norman writers seem almost to shudder at the remembrance of this fearful weapon, which, wielded by the arm of Harold, struck down horse and man at a single blow.[1353] It was in truth the perfection of a weapon of mere strength; no blow could be so crushing if the blow reached its aim; but swung in the air, as it was, with both hands, it left its wielder singularly exposed to missile weapons while in the act of striking the [Sidenote: The two ensigns;] blow.[1354] On the very crown of the hill, on the point where the ground begins to slope to the south-east, the point directly in the teeth of the advancing army, on the spot marked to after ages by the high altar of the abbey church of Battle, were planted the two-fold ensigns of England.[1355] [Sidenote: the Dragon;] There, high above the host, flashed the Dragon of Wessex, the sign which had led Englishmen to victory at Ethandun and at Brunanburh, at Penselwood and at Brentford, and which had sunk without dishonour in the last fight beneath the heights of Assandun.[1356] And now it came all glorious from the overthrow of the mightiest warrior of the North, to try the fortune of England against the subtler [Sidenote: the Standard of the Fighting Man.] arts of Gaul and Rome. There too was pitched the Standard, the personal ensign of the King, a glorious gonfanon, blazing with gems, and displaying, wrought in the purest gold, the old device of Eteoklos,[1357] the [Sidenote: The group round the Standard.] armed warrior advancing to the battle.[1358] Around this special post of honour and of danger were ranged the choicest warriors of England, the personal following of Harold and his house, their Thegns and their Housecarls, the men who had stormed the mountain-holds of Gruffydd and whose axes had cloven the shield-wall of Hardrada.[1359] And there, between the Dragon and the Standard, stood [Sidenote: The King and his kinsfolk.] the rising hopes of England’s newly-chosen dynasty. There, as the inner circle of the host, were ranged the fated warriors of the house of Godwine. Three generations of that great line were gathered beneath the Standard of its chief. There stood the aged Ælfwig, with his monk’s cowl beneath his helmet. There stood young Hakon the son of Swegen, atoning for his father’s crimes. And, closer still than all, the innermost centre of that glorious ring, stood the kingly three, brothers in life and death. There, in their stainless truth, stood Gyrth the counsellor and Leofwine the fellow-exile.[1360] And there, with his foot firm on his native earth, sharing the toils and dangers of his meanest soldier, with the kingly helm upon his brow and the two-handed axe upon his shoulder,[1361] stood Harold, King of the English.
The French army was now crossing the lower, but not level, ground which lies between Telham and Senlac. It is not strictly a plain, but rather a rolling country, with the ground rising and falling. Swampy as it still is in many places, to cross it, and that in the full harness of battle, must have added somewhat to the toils and difficulties of a march which had already led them from Hastings to Telham. Still all three divisions pressed vigorously on to [Sidenote: Points of attack of the three divisions.] the foot of the heights. Alan and his Bretons on the left, the division of William’s army which was most likely the least esteemed, had to make their attack on the least trustworthy portion of the English army. They had to make their way up the ground lying to the west of the present buildings of the abbey. There the ascent is easiest in itself, but it is defended by the small detached hill already spoken of,[1362] which was doubtless occupied as an English outpost. On the other hand, at the extreme right, Roger of Montgomery with his Frenchmen had to attack at the eastern and north-eastern points of the hill, perhaps over the ground ranging from the present road from Hastings nearly to the parish church of Battle. William himself and his native Normans took on them the heaviest task of [Sidenote: William himself against the Standard.] all. They were the centre, and their duty was to cut their way up the hill right to the Standard, in the teeth of King Harold himself and the picked men of the English host.
[Sidenote: Beginning of the battle.]
And now the fight began. It was one of the sacred hours of the Church, it was at the hour of prime, three [Sidenote: 9 A.M.] hours before noon-day,[1363] that the first blows were exchanged between the invaders and the defenders of England. The Normans had crossed the English fosse,[1364] and were now at the foot of the hill, with the palisades and the axes right before them. The trumpet sounded, and a flight of arrows from the archers in all the three divisions[1365] of William’s army was the prelude to the onslaught of the heavy-armed foot. [Sidenote: Exploits of Taillefer.] But, before the two armies met hand to hand, a juggler or minstrel, known as _Taillefer_, the Cleaver of Iron,[1366] rode forth from the Norman ranks as if to defy the whole force of England in his single person. He craved and obtained the Duke’s leave to strike the first blow; he rode forth, singing songs of Roland and of Charlemagne[1367]—so soon had the name and exploits of the great German become the spoil of the enemy. He threw his sword into the air and caught it again;[1368] but he presently showed that he could use warlike weapons for other purposes than for jugglers’ tricks of this kind; he pierced one Englishman with his lance, he struck down another with his sword, and then himself fell beneath the blows of their comrades. A bravado of this kind might serve as an omen, it might stir up the spirits of men on either side; but it could in no other way affect the fate of the battle. William was too wary a general to trust much to such [Sidenote: First attack.] knight-errantry as this. After the first discharge of arrows, the heavier foot followed to the attack, and the real struggle now began. The French infantry had to toil up the hill, and to break down the palisade, while a shower of stones and javelins disordered their approach,[1369] and while club, sword, and axe greeted all who came within the reach of hand-strokes. The native Normans had to do this in the face of the fiercest resistance, in the teeth of the heaviest axes, wielded by the hands of men with whom to fight had ever been to vanquish, the kinsmen and Thegns and Housecarls of King Harold. Their own missiles, hurled from below, could do comparatively little damage. Both sides fought with unyielding valour; [Sidenote: The war-cries.] the war-cries rose loud on either side;[1370] the Normans shouted “God help us;” the English, from behind their barricades, mocked with cries of “Out, out” every foe who entered or strove to enter.[1371] But our fathers also mingled piety with valour; they too called on holy names to help them in that day’s struggle.[1372] They raised their national war-cry of “God Almighty,”[1373] and in remembrance of the relic which their King so well loved to [Sidenote: The “Holy Cross” of Waltham.] honour, they called on the “Holy Cross,” the Holy Cross of Waltham, little knowing perhaps of the awful warning which that venerated rood had given to their King and to his people.[1374] The Norman infantry had now done its [Sidenote: Attack of the Norman horsemen.] best, but that best had been in vain. The choicest chivalry of Europe now pressed on to the attack.[1375] The knights of Normandy, and of all the lands from which men had flocked to William’s standard, now pressed on, striving to make what impression they could with the whole strength of themselves and their horses on the impenetrable fortress of timber, shields, and living warriors. But the advantage of ground enjoyed by the English, their greater physical strength and stature,[1376] the terrible weapons which they wielded, all joined to baffle every effort of Breton, Picard, Norman, and of the mighty Duke himself. Javelin and arrow had been tried in vain; every Norman missile had found an English missile to answer it.[1377] The lifted lances had been found wanting; the broad sword had clashed in vain against the two-handed axe;[1378] the maces of the Duke and of the Bishop had done their best. But few who came within the unerring sweep of [Sidenote: Success of Harold’s tactics; the attack beaten back.] an English axe ever lived to strike another blow. Rank after rank of the best chivalry of France and Normandy pressed on to the unavailing task. All was in vain; the old Teutonic tactics, carried on that day to perfection by the master-skill of Harold, proved too strong for the arts and the valour of Gaul and Roman. Not a man had swerved; not an inch of ground was lost; the shield-wall was still unbroken, and the Dragon of Wessex still soared unconquered over the hill of Senlac.
The English had thus far stood their ground well and wisely. The tactics of Harold had thus far completely answered. Not only had every attack failed, but the great [Sidenote: Flight of the Bretons on the left; the light-armed English pursue.] mass of the French army altogether lost heart. The Bretons and the other auxiliaries on the left were the first to give way. Horse and foot alike, they turned and fled. A body of English troops was now rash enough, in direct defiance of the King’s orders, to leave its post and pursue. These were of course some of the defenders of the English right. They may have been, as is perhaps suggested by a later turn of the battle, the detachment which guarded the small outlying hill. Or they may have been the men posted at the point just behind the outlying hill, where the slope is easiest, and where the main Breton attack would most likely be made. They had succeeded in beating back their assailants, and the temptation to chase the flying enemy must have been almost irresistible. And it may even be that old differences of race added keenness to the encounter, and that Englishmen felt a special delight in cutting down _Bret-wealas_ even from [Sidenote: Panic of all William’s army.] beyond sea. At any rate, the whole of William’s left wing was thrown into utter confusion. The central division could hardly have seen the cause of that confusion; the press of the fugitives disordered their ranks, and soon the whole of the assailing host was falling back; even the Normans themselves, as their historian is driven unwillingly to confess, were at last carried away by the contagion.[1379] For the moment the day seemed lost; men might well deem that the Bastard had no hope of being changed into the Conqueror, the Duke of the Normans [Sidenote: William and Odo recall the fugitives.] into the King of the English. But the strong heart of William failed him not, and by his single prowess and presence of mind he recalled his flying troops. Like Brihtnoth at Maldon,[1380] like Eadmund at Sherstone,[1381] he was himself deemed to have fallen or to have fled.[1382] He tore his helmet from his head,[1383] and with his look and his voice[1384] he called back his men to the attack. “Madmen,” he cried, “behold me. Why flee ye? Death is behind you, victory is before you. I live, and by God’s grace I will conquer.”[1385] With a spear, snatched, it may be, from some comrade, he met or pursued the fugitives, driving them back by main force to the work.[1386] Yet one version tells us that at this very moment a counsellor of flight was at his side. One Norman poet has sung how Eustace of Boulogne bade William turn his rein, and not rush on upon certain death.[1387] If such counsels were ever given, they were cast aside with scorn; the bold words and gestures of the Duke restored the spirits of his men, and his knights once more pressed on, sword in hand,[1388] round him. His brother the Bishop meanwhile rode, mace in hand, to another quarter, and called back to their duty another party of fugitives.[1389] [Sidenote: The Bretons turn on their pursuers.] Encouraged by this turn in the fight, the Breton infantry themselves, chased as they were across the field by the over-daring English, now turned and cut their pursuers in pieces.[1390] Order was soon again established throughout the whole line of the assailants, and William and Odo, with all their host, pressed on to a second and more terrible attack.
[Sidenote: Second great attack; personal exploits of William.]
A new act in the awful drama of that day has now begun. The Duke himself, at the head of his own Normans, again pressed towards the Standard. Now came what was perhaps the fiercest exchange of handstrokes in the whole battle. As in the old Roman legend,[1391] the main stress of the fight fell on three valiant brethren on either side. William, Odo, and Robert pressed on to the attack, while Harold, Gyrth, and Leofwine stood ready to [Sidenote: William seeks out Harold;] defend. The Duke himself, his relics round his neck, spurred on right in the teeth of the English King. A few moments more, and the mighty rivals might have met face to face, and the war-club of the Bastard might have clashed against the lifted axe of the Emperor of Britain. That Harold shrank from such an encounter we [Sidenote: but is unhorsed by the spear of Gyrth.] may not deem for a moment. But a heart, if it might be, even loftier than his own beat high to save him from such a risk. In the same heroic spirit in which he had already offered to lead the host on what seemed a desperate enterprise,[1392] the Earl of the East-Angles pressed forward to give, if need be, his own life for his King and brother. Before William could come to handstrokes with Harold, perhaps before he could even reach the barricade, a spear, hurled by the hand of Gyrth, checked his progress. The weapon so far missed its aim that the Duke was himself unhurt. But his noble Spanish horse, the first of three that died under him that day, fell to the ground.[1393] But Duke William could fight on foot as well as on horseback.[1394] Indeed on foot he had a certain advantage. He could press closer to the barricade, and could deal a nearer and surer [Sidenote: Hand to hand fight at the barricades; William kills Gyrth with his own hand.] blow. And a near and sure blow he did deal. William rose to his feet; he pressed straight to seek the man who had so nearly slain him. Duke and Earl met face to face, and the English hero fell crushed beneath the stroke of the Duke’s mace.[1395] The day might seem to be turning against England, when a son of Godwine had fallen; nor did the blow come singly. Gyrth had fallen by a fate worthy of such a spirit, a fate than which none could be more glorious; he had died in the noblest of causes and by the hand of the mightiest of enemies. Nor did he fall alone; close at his side, and almost at the same moment, [Sidenote: Death of Leofwine.] Leofwine, fighting sword in hand, was smitten to the earth by an unnamed assailant, perhaps by the mace of the Prelate of Bayeux or by the lance of the Count of Mortain.[1396] A dark cloud indeed seemed to have gathered over the destinies of the great West-Saxon house. Of the valiant band of sons who had surrounded Godwine on the great day of his return, Harold now stood alone. By a fate of special bitterness, he had seen with his own eyes the fall of those nearest and dearest to him. The deed of Metaurus had been, as it were, wrought beneath the eyes of Hannibal;[1397] Achilleus had looked on and seen the doom of his Patroklos and his Antilochos. The fate of England now rested on the single heart and the single arm of her King.
But the fortune of the day was still far from being determined. The two Earls had fallen, but the fight at the barricades went on as fiercely as before. The men of the Earldoms of the two fallen chiefs relaxed not because of the loss of their captains. The warriors of Kent and Essex [Sidenote: William takes a horse from a knight of Maine.] fought manfully to avenge their leader.[1398] As for the Duke, we left him on foot, an enemy as dangerous on foot as when mounted on his destrier. But Norman and horse could not long be severed. William called to a knight of Maine to give up his charger to his sovereign. Was it cowardice, was it disloyalty to the usurper of the rights of the old Cenomannian house, which made the knight of Maine refuse to dismount at William’s bidding?[1399] But a blow from the Duke’s hand brought the disobedient rider to the ground,[1400] and William, again mounted, was soon again dealing wounds and death among the defenders of England.[1401] But the deed and the fate of Gyrth were soon repeated. The spear of another Englishman brought William’s second horse to the ground, and he too, like the East-Anglian Earl, paid the penalty of his exploit by death at the Duke’s own hand.[1402] Count Eustace had by this time better learned how to win the favour of his great ally. His horse was freely offered to the Duke; a knight of his own following did him the same good service, and Duke and Count pressed vigorously on against the English lines.[1403] The struggle was hard; but the advantage [Sidenote: Partial success of the Frenchmen on the right;] still remained with the English. The second attack had indeed to some extent prevailed. Not only had the English suffered a personal loss than which one loss only could have been greater, but the barricade was now in some places broken down.[1404] The French on the right had been specially active and successful in this work. And specially distinguished among them was a party under the command of a youthful Norman warrior, Robert the son of the old Roger of Beaumont.[1405] They had perhaps met with a less vigorous resistance, while the main hopes and fears of every Englishman must have gathered round the great personal struggle which was going on beneath the Standard. Still those who were most successful had as yet triumphed only over timber, and not over men. The shield-wall still stood behind the palisade, and every Frenchman who had pressed within the English enclosure had paid [Sidenote: but the general attack repulsed.] for his daring with his life.[1406] The English lines were as unyielding as ever; and though the second attack had been less completely unsuccessful than the first, it was still plain that to scale the hill by any direct attack of the Norman horsemen was a hopeless undertaking.
[Sidenote: William’s stratagem of the feigned flight.]
But the generalship of William, his ready eye, his quick thought, his dauntless courage, never failed him. In the Norman character the fox and the lion were mingled in nearly equal proportions;[1407] strength and daring had failed, but the object might perhaps still be gained by stratagem.[1408] William had marked with pleasure that the late flight of his troops had beguiled a portion of the English to forsake their firm array and their strong position.[1409] He had marked with equal pleasure that some impression had at last been made on the English defences. If by any means any large portion of the English army could be drawn down from the heights, an entrance might be made at the points where the barricade was already weakened. He therefore ventured on a daring stratagem. If his army, or a portion of it, pretended flight, the English would be tempted to pursue; the pretended fugitives would turn upon their pursuers, and meanwhile another division might reach the summit through the gap thus left open. He gave his orders accordingly, and they were faithfully and skilfully obeyed. A portion of the army, seemingly the left wing[1410] which had so lately fled in earnest, now again [Sidenote: The English on the right come down and pursue.] turned in apparent flight.[1411] Undismayed by the fate of their comrades who had before broken their lines, the English on the right wing, mainly, as we have seen, the irregular levies, rushed down and pursued them with shouts of delight.[1412] But the men of Britanny, Poitou, and Maine [Sidenote: The Bretons turn.] had now better learned their lesson. They turned on the pursuing English; the parts of the combatants were at once reversed, and the pursuers now themselves fled in earnest.[1413] Yet, undisciplined and foolhardy as their conduct had been, they must have had some wary leaders among them, for they found the means to take a special revenge for the fraud which had been played off upon them. [Sidenote: Stand of the English at the detached hill.] The importance of the small outlying hill now came into full play. Either its defenders had never left it, or a party of the fugitives contrived to rally and occupy it. At all events it was occupied and gallantly defended by a body of light-armed English.[1414] With a shower of darts and stones they overwhelmed a body of French who attacked [Sidenote: Great slaughter of the French in the western ravine.] them; not a man of the party was left. Another party of English, evidently consisting of the levies of the neighbourhood, had the skill to use their knowledge of the country to the best advantage. They made their way to the difficult ground to the west of the hill, to the steep and thickly-wooded banks of the small ravine. Here the light-armed English turned and made a stand; the French horsemen, recklessly pursuing, came tumbling head over heels into the chasm, where they were slaughtered in such numbers that the ground is said to have been made level by their corpses.[1415]
[Sidenote: Fatal error of the pursuit.]
The men who had committed the great error of pursuing the apparent fugitives had thus, as far as they themselves were concerned, retrieved their error skilfully and manfully. But the error was none the less fatal to England. The Duke’s great object was now gained; the main end of Harold’s skilful tactics had been frustrated by the inconsiderate ardour of the least valuable portion of his troops. Through the rash descent of the light-armed on the right, the whole English army lost its vantage-ground. The pursuing English had left the most easily accessible portion of the hill open to the approach of the enemy.[1416] While French and English were scattered over the lower ground, fighting in no certain order and with varied [Sidenote: The Normans ride up the hill to the west. 3 P.M.?] success, the main body of the Normans made their way on to the hill, no doubt by the gentle slope at the point west of the present buildings.[1417] The great advantage of the ground was now lost; the Normans were at last on the hill. Instead of having to cut their way up the slope and through the palisades, they could now charge to the east, with a slight inclination of the ground in their favour, directly against the defenders of the Standard. Still the [Sidenote: The battle now on the hill.] battle was far from being over. The site had still some advantages for the English. The hill, narrow and in some places with steep sides, was by no means suited for the evolutions of cavalry, and, though the English palisade was gone, the English shield-wall was still a formidable hindrance in the way of the assailants. In short the position which the keen eye of Harold had chosen stood him in good stead to the last. Our Norman informants still speak with admiration of the firm stand made by the [Sidenote: Close combat of the Normans against the English shield-wall.] English. It was still the hardest of tasks to surround their bristling lines. It was a strange warfare, where the one side dealt in assaults and movements, while the other, as if fixed in the ground, withstood them. The array of the English was so close that they moved only when they were dead, they stirred not at all while they were alive. The slightly wounded could not escape, but were crushed to death by the thick ranks of their comrades.[1418] That is to say, the array of the shield-wall was still kept, though now without the help of the barricades or the full advantage of the ground. The day had now turned decidedly in favour of the invaders; but the fight was still far from being over. It was by no means clear that some new chance of warfare might not again turn the balance in favour of England.[1419]
[Sidenote: The English array relaxed.]
It is hard to tell the exact point of time at which the Normans gained this great advantage. But it was probably about three in the afternoon, the hour of vespers.[1420] If so, the fight had already been raging for six hours, and as yet its result was far from certain. But the last stage of the battle was now drawing near. The English, though no longer entrenched, had still the fortress of shields to trust to, but gradually the line became less firmly kept, and the battle seems almost to have changed [Sidenote: Personal exploits.] into a series of single combats. It is probably at this stage that we should place most of the many personal exploits recorded of various warriors on both sides.[1421] The names of the Normans are preserved, while the English, though full justice is done to their valour, remain nameless. [Sidenote: Valour and conduct of Harold.] Of Harold himself, strange to say, we hear nothing personally, beyond the highest general eulogies of his courage and conduct. His axe was the weightiest; his blows were the most terrible of all. The horse and his rider gave way before him, cloven to the ground by a single stroke.[1422] He played the part alike of a general and of a private soldier. This is a praise which must have been common to every commander of those times; still it is given in a marked way both to William and to Harold.[1423] [Sidenote: Personal exploits of William;] But the two rivals never actually met. William, we are told, sought earnestly to meet his enemy face to face, but he never succeeded.[1424] He found however adversaries hardly less terrible. Like Gyrth earlier in the fight, another Englishman, whose axe had been dealing death around him, now met the Duke in single combat. William spurred on his horse, and aimed a blow at him with his mace; the Englishman swerved, he avoided the stroke, and lifted his own axe against William. The Duke bent himself; the axe fell, it beat in his helmet and nearly struck him from his horse. But William kept his seat; he aimed another blow at the Englishman, who now took shelter among his comrades. A party of the Normans pressed on, singled him out, and pierced him through and through with their lances.[1425] Another Englishman smote at the Duke with his spear, but William was beforehand with him; before the blow could be dealt, a stroke of the war-club had smitten him to the ground.[1426] Personal encounters of this sort were going on all over the hill. One gigantic Englishman, captain, we are told, of a hundred men,[1427] did special execution among the enemy. Beneath his blows, as beneath those of the King, horse and rider fell to the ground; the Normans stood aghast before him, till a [Sidenote: of Roger of Montgomery.] thrust from the lance of Roger of Montgomery left him stretched on the earth. Two other Englishmen, sworn brothers in arms, fought side by side, and many horses and men had fallen beneath their axes. A French knight met them face to face; for a moment his heart failed him and he thought of flight; but his courage returned; he raised his shield to save his head from the axes; he pierced one Englishman through with his lance; as the Englishman fell, the lance broke in his body; the Frenchman then seized a mace which hung at his saddle-bow, and smote down the comrade of the slain man, crushing head-piece [Sidenote: Death of Robert Fitz-Erneis.] and head with a single blow.[1428] One gallant Norman, Robert Fitz-Erneis, a near kinsman of Ralph of Tesson, died in a more daring exploit than all. He galloped, sword in hand, right towards the Standard itself. He sought for the honour of beating down the proud ensign beneath which the King of the English still kept his post. More than one Englishman died beneath his sword, but he was soon surrounded, and he fell beneath the axes of their comrades. On the morrow his body was found stretched in death at the foot of the Standard.[1429]
Other tales of the same sort, characteristic at least, whether verbally true or not, abound in the pages of the Norman poet. All bear witness to the enduring valour displayed on both sides, and to the fearful execution which was [Sidenote: The English resistance slackens.] wrought by the national English weapon. But at last the effects of this sort of warfare began to tell on the English ranks. There could have been no greater trial than thus to bear up, hour after hour, in a struggle which was purely defensive. The strain, and the consequent weariness, must have been incomparably greater on their side than on that of their assailants. It may well have been in sheer relief from physical exhaustion that we read, now that there was no artificial defence between them and their enemies, of Englishmen rushing forward from their ranks, bounding like a stag, and thus finding opportunity for the personal encounters which I have been describing.[1430] Gradually, after so many brave warriors had fallen, resistance grew fainter;[1431] but still even now the fate of the battle seemed doubtful. Many of the best and bravest of England had died, but not a man had fled; the Standard still waved as proudly [Sidenote: The battle undecided while Harold lived.] as ever; the King still fought beneath it.[1432] While Harold lived, while the horse and his rider still fell beneath his axe, the heart of England failed not, the hope of England had not wholly passed away. Around the two-fold ensigns the war was still fiercely raging, and to that point every eye and every arm in the Norman host was directed. The battle had raged ever since nine in the morning, and evening-was now drawing in.[1433] New efforts, new devices, were needed to overcome the resistance of the English, diminished as were their numbers, and wearied as they were [Sidenote: The archers shoot in the air.] with the livelong toil of that awful day. The Duke ordered his archers to shoot up in the air, that their arrows might, as it were, fall straight from heaven.[1434] The effect was immediate and fearful. No other device of the wily Duke that day did such frightful execution. Helmets were pierced; eyes were put out; men strove to guard their heads with their shields,[1435] and, in so doing, they were of course less able to wield their axes. And now the supreme moment drew near. There was one point of the hill at which the Norman bowmen were bidden specially to aim with their truest skill. As twilight was coming on, a mighty shower of arrows[1436] was launched on its deadly errand against the defenders of the Standard. There Harold still fought;[1437] his shield bristled with Norman shafts; but he was still unwounded and unwearied. At last another arrow, more charged with destiny than its fellows, went still [Sidenote: Harold wounded in the eye and disabled. 6 P.M.] more truly to its mark. Falling like a bolt from heaven, it pierced the King’s right eye; he clutched convulsively at the weapon, he broke off the shaft, his axe dropped from his hand, and he sank in agony at the foot of the Standard.[1438] The King was thus disabled, and the fate [Sidenote: Fight round the Standard.] of the day was no longer doubtful. Twenty knights now bound themselves to lower or to bear off the ensigns which still rose as proudly as ever while Harold lay dying beneath them. But his comrades still fought; most of the twenty paid for their venture with their lives, but [Sidenote: The Dragon borne off and the Standard beaten down.] the survivors succeeded in their attempt. Harold’s own Standard of the Fighting Man was beaten to the earth; the golden Dragon, the ensign of Cuthred and Ælfred, was carried off in triumph.[1439] But Harold, though disabled, still breathed; four knights rushed upon him and [Sidenote: Harold despatched by Eustace and three others.] despatched him with various wounds.[1440] The Latin poet of the battle describes this inglorious exploit with great glee. One of the four was Eustace; in such a cowardly deed of butchery he might deem that he was repeating his old exploit at Dover. Nor are we amazed to find the son of Guy of Ponthieu foremost in doing despite to the man who had once been his father’s prisoner. But one blushes to see men bearing the lofty names of Giffard and Montfort, names soon to be as familiar to English as to Norman ears, taking a share in such low-minded vengeance on a fallen foe.[1441] The deeds of the four are enumerated, but we know not how to apportion them among the actors. One thrust pierced through the shield of the dying King and stabbed him in the breast; another assailant finished the work by striking off his head with his sword. But even [Sidenote: Insults offered to his dead body.] this vengeance was not enough. A third pierced the dead body and scattered about the entrails;[1442] the fourth, coming, it would seem, too late for any more efficient share in the deed, cut off the King’s leg as he lay dead.[1443] Such was the measure which the boasted chivalry of Normandy meted out to a prince who had never dealt harshly or cruelly by either a domestic or a foreign foe. But we must add, in justice to the Conqueror, that he pronounced the last and most brutal insult to be a base and cowardly act, and he expelled the perpetrator from his army.[1444]
[Sidenote: The Thegns and Housecarls still resist.]
The blow had gone truly to its mark; but still all was not over. Harold had fallen, as his valiant brothers had fallen before him. The event too truly showed that England had fallen with the sons of Godwine; that, as ever in this age, everything turned on the life of one man, and that the one man who could have guarded and saved England was taken from her. The men who fought upon the hill of Senlac may have been too deeply occupied with the duty of the moment to look forward to the future chances of their country. But they knew at least that with their King’s death that day’s battle was lost. Yet even when Harold had fallen, resistance did not at once cease. As long as there was a ray of light in the heaven, as long as an English arm had strength to lift axe or javelin, the personal following of King Harold continued the unequal [Sidenote: Utter slaughter of the King’s personal following.] strife.[1445] Worn out by the strain of a long resistance, while the Normans, as assailants, seemed to draw fresh vigour from the conflict,[1446] they, the highest nobility, the most valiant soldiery of England, were slaughtered to a man.[1447] Quarter was neither given nor asked;[1448] not a man of the _comitatus_ fled; not a man was taken captive. There, around the fallen Standard, we may call up before our eyes the valiant deaths of those few warriors of Senlac whose names we know. There fell Thurkill and Godric beside their friend and former Earl. There Ælfwig died by his royal nephew, leaving an inheritance of sorrow to the house over which he ruled. And there the East-Anglian deacon lay in death by the side of the lord whom, from his early days, he [Sidenote: Leofric and Esegar escape wounded.] had served so faithfully.[1449] Those alone escaped, who, smitten down by wounds, were on the morrow thrown aside as dead,[1450] but who still breathed, and who in time recovered strength to seek their homes and still to serve their [Sidenote: Leofric dies. November 1.] country. Abbot Leofric, sick and weary, made his way home to die in his own Golden Borough;[1451] and Esegar, the valiant Staller, was borne back to London, his body disabled by honourable wounds, but his heart still stout and his wit still keen to keep up resistance to the last.[1452]
Few however could those have been who escaped by accidents like these. As a rule, no man of Harold’s following who marched to Senlac found his way back from that fatal hill. The nobility, the warlike flower, of southern and eastern England were utterly cut off. But we cannot blame men of meaner birth and fame for not showing the same desperate valour. Night was now [Sidenote: Flight of the light-armed.] coming on, and, under cover of the darkness,[1453] the light-armed took to flight.[1454] Some fled on foot, some, like the two traitors at Maldon,[1455] on the horses which had carried [Sidenote: Pursuit of the Normans; great slaughter of the pursuers in Malfosse.] the fallen leaders to the battle.[1456] The Normans pursued, and, as in an earlier stage of the day, the fleeing English found means to take their revenge upon their conquerors. On the north side of the hill the descent is steep, almost precipitous, the ground is irregular and marshy. No place could be less suited for horsemen, unaccustomed to the country, to pursue, even by daylight, light-armed foot, to many of whom every step of ground was familiar. In the darkness or imperfect light of the evening, their case was still more hopeless than in the similar case earlier in the day. In the ardour of pursuit horse and man fell headforemost over the steep, where they were crushed by the fall, smothered in the morass, or slain outright by the swords and clubs of the English. [Sidenote: Eustace bids William retreat.] For the fugitives, seeing the plight of their pursuers, once more turned and slaughtered them without mercy. Count Eustace, deeming that a new English force had come to the rescue, turned with fifty knights, and counselled William to sound a retreat. He whispered in the ear of the Duke that, if he pressed on, it would be to certain death. The words were hardly out of his mouth, when a blow, dealt in the darkness, struck the Count between the shoulder-blades, and he was borne off with blood flowing from his mouth and nostrils.[1457] But William pressed on; his good fortune preserved him from the bad luck of his less fortunate soldiers, and he did not return to [Sidenote: End of the battle.] the hill till all danger was over. This was the last scene of the battle, and no scene impressed itself more deeply on the minds of the descendants of the victors. The name of _Malfosse_, borne for some ages by the spot where the flying English turned and took their last revenge, showed how severe was the reverse which the victors there met with even in the very hour of their triumph.[1458]
[Sidenote: Effect of the death of Harold.]
I have thus described, as well as I could reconcile various and conflicting narratives, the chief vicissitudes and incidents of this memorable and hard-fought battle. On its historic importance I need not dwell; it is the very subject of my history. England was not yet conquered. The invader, as it was, had hard struggles to go through before he gained full possession of the length and breadth of the land. Had Harold lived, had another like Harold been ready to take his place, we may well doubt whether, even after the overthrow of Senlac, England would have been conquered at all. As it was, though England was not yet conquered, yet, from this moment, her complete conquest was only a matter of time. The Norman had to face much local resistance against the establishment of his power; he had to quell many local revolts after the establishment of his power; but he never again met Englishmen in a pitched battle; he never again had to fight for his Crown against a rival King at the head of a national army. Such being the case, it is from the memorable day of Saint Calixtus that we may fairly date the overthrow, what we know to have been only the imperfect and temporary overthrow, of our ancient and free Teutonic England. In the eyes of men of the next generation that day was the fatal day of England, the day of the sad overthrow of our dear country, the day of her handing over to foreign lords.[1459] From that day forward the Normans began to work the will of God upon the folk of England, till there were left in England no chiefs of the land of English blood, till all were brought down to bondage and to sorrow, till it was a shame to be called an Englishman,[1460] and the men of England were no more a people.[1461]
[Sidenote: Military character of the battle.]
Looking also at the fight of Senlac simply as a battle, it is one of the most memorable in all military history. Two utterly opposite systems of warfare came into conflict under two commanders, each worthily matched against the [Sidenote: Skill and valour shown on both sides.] other both in conduct and in personal prowess. We read with equal admiration of the consummate skill with which Harold chose his position and his general scheme of action, and of the wonderful readiness with which William formed and varied his plans as occasion served, how he seized on every opportunity, and made even discomfiture serve his final purpose. And each chief was thoroughly and worthily served by at least a portion of his army. As a mere question of soldierly qualities, one hardly knows which side to admire most. Each nation displayed, in this the first important battle in which they met as enemies, qualities which to this day remain eminently characteristic of the two nations respectively. The French—for the praise must not be confined to the native Normans only—displayed a gallantry at once impetuous and steady, and a quickness and intelligence in obeying difficult orders which is above all praise. They came again and again to the charge, undismayed by repeated reverses, and they knew how to carry out successfully the elaborate stratagem of the feigned flight. This last task must have been all the harder, because it seems not to have been a deliberate scheme planned from the beginning, but to have been suggested to William’s ready wit by the exigencies of the moment. Yet almost more admirable, and far more touching, is the long, stubborn endurance of the English, keeping their post through nine hours of constant defence, never yielding till death or utter weariness relieved them from their toil. Had the whole English host been like Harold’s own following, the defeat of Senlac would undoubtedly have been changed into a victory. Even writers in the Norman interest allow that so great was the slaughter, so general at one time was the flight of the Norman host, that nothing but the visible interposition of God on behalf of his righteous cause could have given William the victory.[1462] [Sidenote: The battle lost through the rashness of the light-armed.] The battle was lost through the error of those light-armed troops, who, in disobedience to the King’s orders, broke their line to pursue. Their error was a grievous and a fatal one, but it was the natural error of high-spirited and untried men, eager for combat and for distinction, and chafing no doubt at the somewhat irksome restraints involved in Harold’s plan of defence. And some credit is due to them and to their immediate leaders for the skill and presence of mind with which they did their best to retrieve their error. Indeed, as far as they themselves were concerned, they did retrieve it amply. Never was a battle more stoutly contested between abler generals supported by more valiant soldiers. Like the whole English history of this age, it shows how little the English people had really degenerated in any essential patriotic or military qualities. But again it shows how wholly everything depended on the presence of some one competent man to seize the post of command at the right moment. As long as an Eadmund or a Harold is forthcoming, defeat may alternate with victory, but even defeat never is disgrace. How the same people fared under an incompetent King we have seen throughout the long wretchedness of the reign of Æthelred. How they fared under selfish and vacillating chiefs we shall see in the interregnum which followed the death of Harold. But we must first cast one more look upon Senlac hill, upon the victors and upon the vanquished. We have to behold William the Conqueror in his hour of triumph, and we have the hero of England to follow to his grave.
§ 5. _The Burial of Harold. October–December, 1066._
[Sidenote: William returns to the hill. His midnight feast.]
The fight was now over; night had closed in, and those among the English host who had not fallen around their King had left the field under cover of the darkness. William now returned to the hill, where all resistance had long ceased. He looked around, we are told, on the dead and dying thousands, not without a feeling of pity that so many men had fallen, even as a sacrifice to his own fancied right.[1463] But the victory was truly his own; in the old phrase of our Chroniclers, the Frenchmen had possession of the place of slaughter.[1464] A place of slaughter indeed it was, where, from morn till twilight, the axe and javelin of England, the lance and bow of Normandy, had done their deadly work at the bidding of the two mightiest captains upon earth. Dead and dying men were heaped around, and nowhere were they heaped so thickly as around the fallen Standard of England. There, where the flower of England’s nobility and soldiery lay stretched in death,[1465] there, where the banner of the Fighting Man now lay beaten to the ground, the Conqueror knelt, he gave his thanks to God, and bade his own banner be planted as the sign of the victory which he had won. He bade the dead be swept aside; the ducal tent was pitched in this, as it were, the innermost sanctuary of the Conquest, and meat and drink were brought for his repast in the midst of the ghastly trophies of his prowess. In vain did Walter Giffard warn him of the rashness of such an act. Many of the English who lay around were not dead; many were only slightly wounded; they would rise and escape in the night, or they would seek to have their revenge, well pleased to sell their lives at the price of the life of a Norman.[1466] But the strong heart of William feared not; God had guarded him thus far, and he trusted in God to guard him still. Then he took off his armour; his shield and helmet were seen to be dinted with many heavy blows, but the person of the Conqueror was unhurt.[1467] He was hailed by the loud applause of his troops, likening him to Roland and Oliver and all the heroes of old. Again he returned thanks to God, again he thanked his faithful followers, and sat down to eat and drink among the dead.[1468]
[Sidenote: The burial of the dead. Sunday, October 15.]
The Normans watched upon the hill all night.[1469] On the morrow of that fearful Sabbath, the morning light of the day of Christian worship first showed the full horrors of the scene. The first duty was the burial of the dead. The Duke went over the ground in person, superintending the funeral rites of the slain of his own army.[1470] Nor was he, either by temper or by policy, disposed to treat the vanquished or their kinsfolk with needless cruelty or insult. The women of the surrounding country came to the camp, praying for the bodies of their husbands, sons, and brothers, and, by William’s express order, they were allowed to remove them for burial to the neighbouring towns and minsters.[1471] The bodies of Ælfwig and his monks were among [Sidenote: Ælfwig and his monks.] the first to be recognized by the monastic garb beneath their harness. We hear nothing of the disposal of their bodies, but we know that their presence in the fight was not forgotten by the Conqueror.[1472] We hear nothing of the place of burial of Godric or Thurkill or even of that of Gyrth and Leofwine. We may suppose that the bodies of the two Earls were borne away to some church on one of the many estates held by their house within the South-Saxon land.[1473] [Sidenote: Harold’s body not forthcoming.] But there was still one corpse which was not forthcoming, one corpse for which, when found, the stern policy of the victor decreed a harsher fate. Wives and sisters had borne away the bodies of Thegns and churls,[1474] but there was neither wife nor sister to claim the mangled corpse of the Emperor of Britain. One widowed Lady sat in her palace at Winchester, weeping for the fate of Tostig, perhaps waiting for the coming of William.[1475] And where was the other, the daughter of Ælfgar, the wife of Harold, the bride who, as William deemed, had usurped the place which was designed for his own child? Are we to deem that she had chosen to cast in her lot rather with her recreant brothers than with her dauntless husband?[1476] Or was it rather that she bore within her a future hope of England, one to whom men might fondly look as an Ætheling born of a crowned King and his Lady, a son of Harold and Ealdgyth, a grandson alike of Ælfgar and of Godwine?[1477] All that we know is that, at that moment, the wife of Harold was far away, perhaps already on her journey, under the care of Eadwine and Morkere, to seek safety within the distant walls of Chester.[1478] But there were still those who loved the fallen hero; there were those who clave to him in life, and who in death would not forsake him. There was the widowed mother, bereaved of so many valiant sons; there were the bedesmen who had tasted of his bounty, and the woman who had loved him with a true, if an unlawful love. It was from the holy house of Waltham that men [Sidenote: Osgod and Æthelric come from Waltham.] came to do the last duty to the dead of Senlac. Two of the Canons of Harold’s minster, Osgod and Æthelric the Childmaster, had followed the march of the English host. They came, either through the mere instinct of affection or, as was told in the legends of their house, made fearful of coming evil through the mysterious warning which the Holy Hood had given to the King.[1479] They followed their Founder to the hill of slaughter; but they themselves joined not in the fight; they stood afar off that they might see the end.[1480] With them, it may be, had come the now aged Danish princess, Gytha, the widow of Godwine, the mother of the three heroes who had died [Sidenote: Gytha asks for Harold’s body.] beneath the fallen Standard. She came to the Duke and craved the body of her royal son. Three sons of hers had fallen by his hand or the hand of his followers; let the Conqueror grant one at least of the three to be honoured with solemn and royal rites. Harold’s weight in gold should be the price of his burial within the walls of his own minster.[1481] But in the case of his great rival the Conqueror was inexorable. His soul was indeed too lofty to be moved by petty spite towards an enemy who could [Sidenote: William commands that he shall be buried on the seashore.] no longer harm him. But his policy bade him to brand the perjurer, the usurper, the excommunicate of the Church, the despiser of the holy relics, with the solemn judgement of a minister of righteous vengeance. The proffered bribe had as little weight with him as it had with the Homeric Achilleus.[1482] He whose insatiable ambition had caused the slaughter of so many men should not himself receive the honours of solemn burial. He was not indeed to be left to dogs and vultures; but he who had guarded the shore while living should guard it still in death.[1483] A cairn on the South-Saxon shore, raised high upon the rocks of Hastings, should be the only memorial of the usurper.[1484] [Sidenote: The body found by Eadgyth Swanneshals.] But the royal corpse was still unrecognized; it had been thrown aside among the other bodies which lay around the Standard, when the ground was cleared for William’s midnight meal. Who could undertake to find one single body in such an Aceldama? Who could undertake to recognize a form mangled and mutilated by the base malignity of unworthy foes? Ealdgyth was far away; Gytha could not be asked to take upon her such an office. The two faithful priests did their best, and failed in the attempt.[1485] There was one alone who could be trusted for the mournful duty; one who knew him, alas, too well; one who had loved the man and not the King, and whose love, it may be, had been sacrificed to the duty or the policy of the ruler. The proud daughter of Ealdormen, the widow of two Kings, had left him to his fate; it was one of humbler rank, whose love had brought him not crowns or earldoms, but who had been the well-beloved of his less exalted days, who was called on to do the last bidding of affection upon earth. His former mistress, Eadgyth of the Swan’s Neck, was brought to the spot by Osgod and Æthelric, and was bidden to search for Harold amid the slain.[1486] Her eye at last recognized the disfigured corpse, not by its mangled features, but by marks which his faithful priests, perhaps even his mother, knew not.[1487] The body thus found awaited the bidding of the Conqueror. [Sidenote: Honours shown to the body.] William had no mind for simple insult beyond what the stern bidding of his policy dictated. Christian burial was refused; yet William could show to the corpse of Harold honours not less marked than Kleomenês had [Sidenote: It is buried on the shore by William Malet.] shown to the corpse of Lydiadas.[1488] The mangled limbs were wrapped in a purple robe, and the body was borne to William’s camp by the sea-shore.[1489] The charge of this unhallowed yet honourable burial was entrusted by the Duke to the willing hands of one of his own chiefs, who was at least not the personal foe of Harold or of England. By the care of William Malet, a name again to appear in our history, the body of Harold the son of Godwine was buried beneath a heap of stones upon the rocks of Sussex.[1490]
[Sidenote: Other accounts.]
Thus far we have the certain guidance of contemporary writers. Harold died on Senlac and was buried on the heights of Hastings. But there are two other tales, the evidence for which I shall discuss elsewhere,[1491] but whose substance I cannot here pass by. One indeed, with some doubt as to the details, I do not hesitate to accept, as resting on amply sufficient, though not on strictly contemporary, evidence. The other is a mere romance, food for the comparative mythologist rather than for the historian, and valuable only as illustrating a certain ever-recurring [Sidenote: Legend of Harold’s escape.] tendency of the human mind. This is the well-known tale, according to which Harold did not die in the great battle. He escaped, we are told, and lived for a longer or a shorter time, according to different accounts, devoting his latter days, according to the most celebrated version, to a life of penance.[1492] The King, so the story runs, was found half dead by some of the women who came to tend the wounded. He was then carried to Winchester by two men of middling rank, Thegns of the lowest class or churls of the highest.[1493] There he was nursed for two years, not by his royal sister, but by a Saracen woman skilled in [Sidenote: His later adventures.] surgery. He then went into the kindred lands of Saxony and Denmark,[1494] to ask help for England from her continental brethren. No such help however was forthcoming, and after a long series of adventures, Harold [Sidenote: His seclusion and death at Chester.] forsook the world and became a recluse in a cell attached to Saint John’s minster at Chester, the minster which had once witnessed the homage done to Eadgar the Peaceful by all the Under-kings of Britain.[1495] There he died at a great age, having only in his last moments revealed to those around him that the lowly anchorite was no other than the native King of conquered England.
[Sidenote: The tale a mere legend; its explanation.]
That this tale is a mere legend I have not the slightest doubt. But that such a tale should arise is by no means wonderful. It was indeed almost a matter of course. Whatever might be the feeling among Earls and Prelates who had other objects, popular English feeling would be for a while unwilling to believe in the death of the true national hero. Harold was expected to return, just as Baldwin of Constantinople, as Sebastian of Portugal, as many other princes in the like case, were expected to return. The really strange thing is that we do not hear of any false Harolds, as we hear of false Baldwins and false Sebastians.[1496] The cause may be that the later hopes of England gradually drifted away into other directions, towards a restoration of Eadgar or a deliverance by the arms of Swend. Still, as long as resistance to the Norman lasted, rumours that Harold lived, that he would again appear to lead his countrymen, would be rife within the walls of Exeter and within the Camp of Refuge. But Harold came not. Where then, if living, did he hide himself? Why did he not join the patriot bands of Hereward and Waltheof? Why did not the Standard of the Fighting Man once more float over an English host, and the Holy Rood of Waltham again resound as the war-cry of a happier field than Senlac? That Harold lived and yet was not in arms against the invader, could be explained in one way only. He had betaken himself to a life of penitence; by prayer and scourge and fasting he was wiping out the great sin of his life, his fatal oath [Sidenote: The tale appeals to the feelings of the age] to the Norman. In our eyes such a self-consecration on Harold’s part would seem a weak forsaking of an obvious duty. It would not seem so in the eyes of an age which recognized its highest type of holiness in Eadward. The character of a patriot King was indeed honourable, but the character of an ascetic penitent was more honourable [Sidenote: and even to one vein of feeling at Waltham.] still. The tale would appeal to a certain vein of feeling in Englishmen generally. It would even appeal to a certain vein of local piety among Harold’s own bedesmen at Waltham. On the one hand it upset every local tradition, and deprived Waltham of its most cherished treasure. But on the other hand, it magnified in a certain way both the Founder and the foundation, and it went far to raise the church of Harold to a level with the church of Eadward. It was something to be founded by the last native King; it was something to be the last resting-place of his body; but it was something higher still to be founded by one who was no mere King or lawgiver or conqueror, but whose deeds of penance had won him a place in the roll of eremites and saints.
[Sidenote: Harold died on Senlac.]
But of all this history knows nothing. In her pages Harold died, without a shadow of doubt, on the hill of Senlac, on the day of Saint Calixtus. Florence tells the true tale, in words speaking straight from the depths of England’s grief—“Heu, ipsemet cecidit crepusculi tempore.” In that Twilight of the Gods, when right and wrong went forth to battle, and when wrong for a moment had the victory, the brightest light of Teutonic England sank, and sank for ever. The son of Godwine died, as such King and hero should die, helm on head and battle-axe in hand, striking the last blow for his Crown and people, with the Holy Rood of Waltham the last cry rising from his lips and ringing in his ears. Disabled by the Norman arrow, cut down by the Norman sword, he died beneath the Standard of England, side by side with his brothers in blood and valour. His lifeless and mangled relics were all that was left either for the scoffs of enemies or for the reverence of friends. What the first resting-place of those relics was we have already seen, but need we hold that the first resting-place of those relics was also the last?
[Sidenote: His alleged burial at Waltham.]
This brings us to the other story to which I have already alluded, and which, in its main outline, I am prepared to accept. This is that the body of Harold, first buried under the cairn by Hastings, was afterwards translated to his own minster at Waltham. That Waltham always professed to be the burying-place of Harold—that a tomb bearing his name was shown there down to the Dissolution of the Abbey—that fragments of it remained in the middle of the seventeenth century[1497]—are facts beyond dispute. But these local traditions would not, under the circumstances, be of themselves enough to lead us to accept a local claim which at first sight seems to be opposed to the witness of contemporary writers. But a little examination will show that the two stories, the story of the cairn-burial and the story of the burial at Waltham, are not really contradictory. And there is a mass of evidence of all but the highest kind in support of the claim of Waltham to have at last sheltered [Sidenote: His body translated from the shore to Waltham. December, 1066?] the bones of its Founder. I then accept the view that the body of Harold, like the body of Waltheof ten years later, was removed from a lowlier resting-place to a more honourable one, in short from unhallowed to hallowed ground. Waltheof was first buried on the scene of his martyrdom by Winchester, and was afterwards removed for more solemn burial in the Abbey of Crowland.[1498] Such I believe to have been the case with Harold also. This view reconciles the main facts as stated by all our authorities, and it falls in with all the circumstances of the case. With our feelings we might wish that the body of Harold had tarried for ever under its South-Saxon cairn. In William’s own words, no worthier place of burial could be his than the shore which he had guarded. But even modern feelings would be revolted at such a burial of any hero of our own time. And in those days the religious feeling of Harold’s friends and bedesmen would never be satisfied till their King and Founder slept in a spot where all the rites of the Church could be offered around him by the hands of those who were nourished by his bounty. Nor was it at all unlikely that William should relent, and should allow such honours to be paid to the memory of his fallen rival. The first harsh order exactly fell in with the policy of the first moment of victory. But, even before the end of the great year, a time came when William might well be disposed to listen to milder counsels. When the Conqueror had become the chosen and anointed King of the English, he honestly strove for a moment to make his rule as acceptable as might be to his English subjects. In those milder days of his earlier rule, it would quite fall in with William’s policy to yield to any petition, either from Gytha or from the brotherhood at Waltham, praying for the removal of Harold’s body from its unhallowed resting-place. He had then no motive for harshness. The Crown was safe upon his own head; he was the acknowledged successor of Eadward, and he could now afford to be generous to the memory of the intruder of a moment.
[Sidenote: His burial in the minster]
Then it was, as I believe, that the body of Harold was translated from the cairn on the hill of Hastings [Sidenote: and later translation.] to a worthier tomb in his own minster at Waltham. There the King and Founder was buried in the place of honour by the high altar. A later change in the fabric, probably an enlargement of the choir, caused a further translation of his body. On that occasion our local informant, a subject of the Norman Henry, saw and handled [Sidenote: Destruction of his tomb. c. 1540.] the bones of Harold.[1499] For his tomb we now seek in vain, as we seek in vain for the tombs of most of the noblest heroes of our land. The devastation of the sixteenth century, the brutal indifference of the eighteenth, have swept over Hyde and Glastonbury and Waltham and Crowland and Evesham, and in their destroyed or ruined choirs no memory is left of Ælfred and Eadgar and Harold and Waltheof and Simon of Montfort. But what the men of his own time could do they did; the simple and pathetic tale of the local historian shows us how the fallen King was lamented by those who had known and loved him, and how his memory lived among those who shared his bounty without having seen his face. Their affection clave to him in life, their reverence followed him in death; they braved the wrath of the Conqueror on his behalf; they bore him first to his humble and unhallowed tomb, and then translated him to a more fitting resting-place within the walls of the noble fabric which his own bounty had reared.
ὡς οἵγ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.[1500]
Thus was the last native King of the English borne to his last home in his own minster. Once only since [Sidenote: The body of Edward the First at Waltham. 1307.] that day has Waltham seen a royal corpse, but then it was one which was worthy to rest even by the side of Harold. Two hundred and forty years after the fight of Senlac, the body of the great Edward was borne with all royal honours to a temporary resting-place in the church of Waltham.[1501] Harold was translated to Waltham from a nameless tomb by the sea-shore; Edward was translated from Waltham to a still more glorious resting-place beneath the soaring vault of the apse of Westminster. [Sidenote: Comparison of Harold and Edward.] But for a while the two heroes lay side by side—the last and the first of English Kings, between whom none deserved the English name or could claim honour or gratitude from the English nation. The one was the last King who reigned purely by the will of the people, without any claim either of conquest or of hereditary right. The other was the first King who reigned purely as the son of his father, the first who succeeded without competitor or interregnum. But each alike, as none between them did, deserved the love and trust of the people over whom they reigned. With Harold our native kingship ends; the Dragon of Wessex gives place to the Leopards of Normandy; the Crown, the laws, the liberties, the very tongue of Englishmen, seem all fallen never to rise again. In Edward the line of English Kings begins once more. After two hundred years of foreign rule, we have again a King bearing an English name and an English heart—the first to give us back our ancient laws under new shapes, the first, and for so long the last, to see that the Empire of his mighty namesake[1502] was a worthier prize than shadowy dreams of dominion beyond the sea. All between them were Normans or Angevins, careless of England and her people. Another and a brighter æra opens, as the lawgiver of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus seated once more upon the throne of Cerdic and of Æthelstan. The conqueror of Gruffydd might welcome a kindred soul in the conqueror of Llywelyn; the victor of Stamfordbridge might hail his peer in the victor of Falkirk; the King with whom England fell might greet his first true successor in the King with whom she rose again. Such were the men who met in death within the now vanished choir of Waltham. And in the whole course of English history we hardly come across a scene which speaks more deeply to the heart, than when the first founder of our later greatness was laid by the side of the last kingly champion of our earliest freedom—when the body of the great Edward was laid, if only for a short space, by the side of Harold the son of Godwine.