Read The Battle of Hastings Online
Authors: Jim Bradbury
The Battle of Hastings
To my mother, Sarah Helena Joel
1907-2002
and to all the many friends met and made
at Pyke House, Battle
ONTENTS
1
Anglo-Saxon England: Alfred to the Confessor
2
The Reign of Edward the Confessor
6
The Sources
for the Battle
REFACE
W
riting a book on the battle of Hastings for a medieval historian is a bit like reviewing one’s life. Among the souvenirs of the past, our home is decorated with such things as Bayeux Tapestry curtains and a Bayeux Tapestry cover on a dressing table. My wife Ann and I have spent many holidays in Normandy, from Bayeux and Rouen to Caen, Falaise, Fécamp, Alençon … the Conqueror’s footprints tread a wide path.
The project provides an opportunity to thank all those who have contributed to one’s education and interests. These are many and various. They include my father who had an interest in history which probably stirred my earliest curiosity. At secondary school my interest in medieval history was first seriously sparked by Mr R.A. Dare, whom I can see now with his eyes closed and arms waving, carried away by some event from that era. At university I received much help and inspiration from Charles Duggan, who was my tutor, and Gerald Hodgett, who also taught me.
Interest turned to something more on the MA course I took as a mature student, married and with children, in London. The tutors on this course I viewed rather as friends, and their assistance was patient and changed my life. They were Christopher Holdsworth, Julian Brown, and above all Allen Brown, who went on to supervise my unfinished MPhil and PhD research. I recall an essay I wrote for Allen Brown in the early days of that course, on the battle of Hastings. I chose to praise the qualities of Harold rather than those of William as a general, for which temerity I suffered a certain amount of criticism.
Allen’s help is almost impossible to record, it was so varied, from teaching to advice and especially the various social occasions he supervised. I remember in particular the many evenings spent at the pub, the Marquess of Anglesey, where most – I think all – of my supervisions took place. There I gained much from the friendship of other medievalists, including such lifelong friends as Nick Hooper, Matt Bennett, Chris Harper-Bill and Richard Mortimer. No doubt the scene helps to explain the failure to complete the project (on warfare in Stephen’s reign) on which I spent eight years of part-time research, though I think in the end it was not entirely without profit.
Hastings inevitably takes one to Battle. It is impossible in one book to acknowledge all the information, help, discussion, encouragement received there. Battle means Pyke House and the Anglo-Norman Studies conference, and here another debt to Allen Brown, who initiated the conference with help from Gillian Murton and who kept it going through the rest of his life. The friends made and met at Pyke House are myriad. It was the most congenial of all meeting places, thanks to the ministrations of, among others, old Hobby and, more particularly, Peter Birch and his aides, including especially that gourmet’s delight, the catering head for many years, Yvonne Harris.
I have been to Pyke House times beyond counting: for the annual conference, to teach East Sussex County Council weekend courses, and to take student groups during the twenty odd years I taught at Borough Road and West London Institute. At the conferences one met virtually every historian who mattered for the Anglo-Norman period, including friends from Holland, Japan, France, Germany and the States. Outstanding among these was Warren Hollister, whose work on warfare I much admired before I met him, and who became a long-standing friend with his wife and companion at Battle, Edith.
Perhaps the first course I participated in at Pyke House was one on medieval warfare in general, which Allen organised. One of the speakers was the great later medievalist whose life came to a tragic end, Charles Ross. Allen always believed in a good lunch-time session in the pub, and as a result a number of speakers and members of the audience were rather drowsy during the afternoon sessions, not least himself. One afternoon Charles Ross was lecturing and noticed that Allen was gently snoozing in the front row. When it came to question time, a difficult point was put to him and, with malicious glee, he retorted, ‘
ALLEN
! [waking him up] what do you think about that?’
The lectures at the main conferences were most valuable and are of course recorded in the
Anglo-Norman Studies
journal, commencing in 1978 and continuing after Allen’s death under the editorships of Marjorie Chibnall, Chris Harper-Bill, John Gillingham and Chris lewis. But even more valuable, to my mind, have been the social occasions: the sherry parties at the abbey and above all the drinking sessions in The Chequers, the pub next door. Who could forget in that hostelry seeing Allen Brown and Raymonde Foreville replaying the battle of Hastings on the bar billiards table, or Cecily Clark selecting her horses for the day? Numerous interesting day-trips were organised during the conferences, and these too hold many happy memories.
Pyke House was also the venue for various student trips. The attraction, of course, was in the first place its position on ‘the battlefield’ of Hastings, the back garden being the best surviving slope of the hill. Here I spent many enjoyable weekends, often with students from other institutions, sharing the lecturing with friends such as Ann Williams, Chris Harper-Bill and Brian Golding, of what were then North London Poly and Strawberry Hill, and what is still Southampton University. My companion from West London on these trips was often Nick Kingwell, who would generously submerge his fifteenth-century interests to participate in these eleventh-century celebrations.
A memory that slips unbidden into one’s mind is of waking in one of the pleasant bedrooms at Pyke House to open the curtains and watch the sun rising over ‘the battlefield’, of quietly going out to tramp through the dewy grass. I have always been an early riser and liked to walk into Battle to buy a
Guardian
, an
Observer
, or latterly the
Independent
. On many an early morning I would pass others out for their early morning constitutional, most memorably Brian Golding, the fanatical bar billiards player, whose pace at walking was twice that of any other person I have known. I accompanied him on an hour’s walk one morning, but only once. On other occasions one remembers Ann Williams’ or Christine Mahany’s dogs diving into the muddy pools at the foot of the hill.
A lasting memory of Battle and Pyke House is of my friend Ian Peirce. Ian seems to have been at almost all these events: conferences, student weekends, East Sussex weekends. Sometimes indeed I shared with him the teaching of a course on the Norman Conquest. But always, usually without any recompense beyond a drink in The Chequers, Ian would perform for an audience, bringing his collection of medieval weapons, his own constructions of weapons and armour and his expertise on the subject for the benefit of all and sundry. Many, like myself, must have gained from the experience of being dressed as a Norman warrior, and I have embarrassing photos to prove it in many cases, from Simon Keynes and Marjorie Chibnall to Dominica Legge, who had to be rescued as she tottered down the hill under the weight of the armour.
In short, this for me is a book of many memories, nearly all pleasant. I should like also to thank all those involved at Sutton Publishing, at whose suggestion this book was written, in particular Roger Thorp and Jane Crompton, and for their patience and care in seeing it through; and Clare Bishop for all her hard work in editing and assembling in the final stages. For all the many other friends at Battle and elsewhere whose names I have failed to recall or mention, thanks too, and may we raise another glass in The Chequers one day soon.
Jim Bradbury
Selsey 1997
Revised 2009
A
NGLO
-S
AXON
E
NGLAND
: A
LFRED TO THE
C
ONFESSOR
D
EVELOPMENT OF THE
K
INGDOM
I
n April 1066 Halley’s comet crossed the English heavens. It appeared in the north-west and was visible for a week or two. Many commentators noticed it, and it is represented pictorially in the Bayeux Tapestry, with a tail looking somewhat like a garden rake, ‘the long-haired star’ according to one who saw it, wondered at in the Tapestry by a group of pointing men. Recently we have been able to watch a comet (Hale-Bopp) crossing the night sky in a similar manner, and have perhaps experienced something of the wonder felt by men in 1066, though Halley’s comet appears more regularly than Hale-Bopp, about every seventy-five years. Halley’s comet appeared last in 1985–6, but its position in 1066 would have made it a good deal brighter, rather as Hale-Bopp looked in 1997. The slightly blurry object of Hale-Bopp, moving a little in the sky each night and plainly distinct from all the stars, will not appear again in our lifetime. It reminds one of the smallness of man and the shortness of life.
In 1066 most commentators in England felt that the appearance of the comet presaged change and perhaps evil. One chronicler, writing a little later, said that ‘learned astrologers who investigate the secrets of science declared that this meant change in the kingdom’. A poet thought that it ‘announced to the English fated destruction’. William of Poitiers addressed the dead Harold Godwinson: this comet was ‘the presage of your ruin’.
1
Their minds were moulded by a recent history which had seen raids and conquest, changes of dynasty, disorder and instability. No wonder they were resigned to expecting further change, and pessimistic about its nature.
2
By 1066 it is true that England was one of the most developed political units in western Europe, in an age when the West itself was beginning to flex its muscles with regard to the wider world. The boundaries with neighbouring countries were not quite as they are now but, nevertheless, England was a geographical entity which we can recognise. By 1066 the kings of England had begun to establish some domination over the Scots and the Welsh, though it was far from complete or certain to survive. Scotland was itself developing as a kingdom, and the relationship with England was one of acknowledgement of power but nothing close to English conquest and control. Wales seemed more vulnerable, lacking the political unity which was emerging in Scotland. Ireland had escaped any contact as direct as that in Scotland and Wales so far. However, Scandinavian settlements in Ireland, and raids from there against England, were a constant reminder of the dangers of hostile elements in such a nearby island.
Across the Channel the political units also had a face which is familiar, but with a structure unlike that of the later nation states. The French kingdom, formed from the western section of the old Carolingian Empire, was finding its feet. But the Capetian kings were struggling to maintain power within their own demesne lands, mostly around Paris.
Royal power was not unrecognised in the counties and duchies which we consider to be French, but those principalities were not far from being independent, the dukes and counts often having almost royal power. This was true of the duchy of Normandy, geographically bound to have connections with England. It was also true of the county of Flanders. Flanders was less tightly linked to France than was Normandy, though there were connections. Placed as it was on the borders of France and the German Empire, Flanders looked in both directions. In the eleventh century Flanders seemed potentially greater than Normandy, not least because of its rapidly growing towns. Flanders, like Normandy, was geographically near to England, and even more than Normandy had economic links with England through the growth of the Flemish cloth industry, which was already in evidence.
