Battle of Hastings, The (20 page)

The first of these, according to William of Poitiers, was the arrival of a messenger from Robert FitzWymark, a man of Norman or Breton parentage long settled in England, and related to both the
duke and the former king – the Robert FitzWymark who less than a year previously had been present at the deathbed of Edward the Confessor. The message he sent to the duke was that

William’s reply was that he would fight Harold as soon as possible and had confidence in the ability of his men to destroy him ‘even if I had only 10,000 men of the
quality of the 60,000 I have brought with me’. He spoke with bravado; it is unlikely that he had more than the 10,000 he referred to so disparagingly. Whether because of FitzWymark’s
warning or native prudence, he did, however, stay within his fortifications, maintaining close contact with his ships, while he awaited Harold’s arrival.

The situation in the north is much vaguer, since there was no chronicler to leave an account and no direct evidence of the sequence of events survives. It has been calculated that the earliest
the king could have had news of the Norman landing was 1 October, which presupposes the arrangement of a relay network of mounted messengers between London and York. (Robert FitzWymark’s
warning to William illustrates well the efficiency of the intelligence the duke could rely on; for FitzWymark to get this information to him so fast, ahead of the king’s arrival in London
after an exceptionally rapid march, he must have set up his own system of relay messengers to bring the news.) In the days between the battle on the 25
^th
and the arrival of the news from
the south, there would have been more than enough to do in the north, with the despatch of the surviving Norwegians, the burial of the more distinguished English dead (Orderic Vitalis speaks
decades later of the mountain of dead men’s bones that still bore
witness to the terrible slaughter on both sides), the tending of the wounded and the restoration of
order in York itself.

The Chronicle does not say whether the news of the Norman landing reached the king in York or whether he had already started south and met it on the way. The balance of probability, supported by
Florence of Worcester, is that he was still in York and set out for London immediately. If he left on the 2
^nd
and maintained the same impressive speed he achieved on the journey north,
he would have arrived in London on 6 or 7 October. On the other hand, he may have been slowed by wounds inflicted at Stamford Bridge on many of his crack troops; he may indeed have been wounded
himself. He may have collected contingents of men on the way south who had not been in time to meet him on his march to York. Few things testify more convincingly to the efficiency of the English
military organization (and, indeed, to Harold’s general acceptance as king) than his ability to raise so many effective armies in so short a time between May and October. None the less it
would have been the housecarls who bore the brunt of the Norwegian assault at Stamford Bridge, and even their legendary fighting capacity must have been weakened by it. According to some accounts,
he diverted his march to offer prayers at Waltham Abbey, his own foundation, but this cannot greatly have delayed his arrival in London, where his first preoccupations would be to rest his men,
send his fleet to cut off the Norman retreat and coordinate the levies that were coming in.

At this point, William of Poitiers takes up the story again. According to him, Harold sent an emissary to William, restating the right by which he held the throne and bidding William leave his
kingdom with all his men. William replied at much greater
length, setting out the basis of his own claim and offering to submit his case to either English or Norman law or to
trial by personal combat. According to the chronicler, ‘we wish to bring the tenor of the duke’s own words (which we have diligently sought out) rather than our own composition to the
notice of many’ as proof of the justice of the Norman cause.
^xcii
The wisdom and justice that he endeavoured to illustrate by the lengthy speech
reported are not, in fact, very clearly demonstrated. By English law William had no case, there was no reason why the English succession should be determined by Norman law any more than by the
Pope, and trial by combat had at this time no status in the English legal system and did not have until William at a later date altered that system to accommodate it. And, in parenthesis, if
William’s invasion had indeed been blessed by the Pope, it would have been most improper for him to have devalued that blessing by offering any of these alternatives. It is likely that the
speech reported here by William of Poitiers, like the speech attributed to the duke at the beginning of the battle, was his own composition. On the other hand, such an exchange of embassies would
have been a perfectly normal proceeding in such a situation. The main point of interest about this one is that, if it did take place, it makes nonsense of the claim made by both William of Poitiers
and the
Carmen
that Harold’s objective was to take William by surprise, as he had done with Hardrada. If you plan to take your enemy by surprise after a forced march of exceptional
speed, you do not first of all send a formal embassy to him letting him know exactly where you are.

The question of what Harold’s plans actually were now becomes important. William’s situation was straightforward. The success of his venture depended entirely upon how soon he could
gain an outright and crushing victory over his opponent. It has
been suggested that the savage pillage and harrying of Harold’s lands in Sussex had been designed in
part at least to provoke Harold into confronting him as soon as possible. It is true that the obligations of mediaeval kingship dictated that Harold should avenge the slaughter of his people, more
especially when they were the people of Sussex among whom he had grown up; but pillage and rapine on this scale was, as we have seen, a fairly routine act of war. It seems unlikely that a commander
as experienced as Harold would allow himself to be provoked into precipitate action by it. He had, after all, done a good deal of harrying himself in the past. His situation was, in a way, as
straightforward as William’s. William needed a quick and decisive victory as soon as possible, preferably without moving so far from his base that his lines of communication with his ships
could be cut; Harold presumably also desired a quick and decisive victory but he did not need it as urgently as William did. He had the luxury of a choice that William did not have. William had to
win; Harold could afford a draw. He could retreat from the battlefield in order to regroup and reattack, as Alfred and Edmund Ironside had done on several such occasions.

More important than this, he had the option of not fighting a pitched battle at all. William could not have stayed bottled up on the Hastings peninsula for ever. By 14 October, he must have
pretty well exhausted the provisions that could be provided by the surrounding country, and would have been unable to feed his men without moving further away from his base. By far the most
sensible strategy for Harold would have been to draw William away from his ships into the interior of the country, over territory unknown to him that had preferably been stripped in advance of
anything that could have offered sustenance to the Norman army. Famine, as Vegetius had said, is more terrible than the sword, and
in this case could easily have been
arranged. William’s stragglers and foragers could have been cut off and destroyed, and the main part of his army could have been engaged and defeated with minimal loss to the English at
whatever time seemed to offer the best advantage, when they had recovered from the stress of Stamford Bridge and two long forced marches, and had been supplemented by further levies. This was the
kind of strategy that Harold had employed in the past against Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, and it is unbelievable that he did not resort to it again in 1066. The really interesting question is why.

Various explanations have been offered for Harold’s tactics (or apparent lack of them) at this time. There were rumours after Hastings that he had been ill before Stamford Bridge, that he
had had some sort of infection in his leg that made it impossible for him to ride. There are always such rumours after the event, impossible to verify later, but if this one is true, it makes his
victory at Stamford Bridge even more remarkable. He may have been wounded at Stamford Bridge and he must, at the very least, have been exhausted by the time he reached Hastings, as must most of his
army, a situation that contrasted cruelly with the well-rested and well-fed condition of the Normans who had spent a fortnight living comfortably off the fat of Harold’s lands. By 1066 he was
probably about forty-four, by the standards of the day no longer a young man. A paper written by a psychiatrist, Dr Max Sugar, endeavours to ascribe what he terms the king’s loss of
initiative and nerve before Hastings to a clinical depression brought on by his excommunication by the Pope and consequent conviction of the damnation of his soul. The idea that Harold had been
excommunicated has been adopted by several writers and has muddied the historical waters. Setting aside the fact that there is at least a modicum of doubt whether the Pope was involved at
all in William’s invasion before it took place, there is absolutely no evidence that Harold was formally excommunicated (any more than William himself had been when he defied
the Pope’s prohibition on his marriage with Matilda of Flanders). If William was proclaiming his invasion a holy war (which he was), Harold would have known of it from his spies and would
presumably have been extremely annoyed. But that would be a long way from excommunication.

The arguments in this paper, relying, as they too often do, on late or unreliable authorities, cannot be taken very seriously. None the less there are questions that have to be asked and are
very difficult to answer. The Harold whom we see during the days between Stamford Bridge and Hastings seems not to be the Harold who is portrayed by the author of the
Vita Ædwardi
as
‘passing with watchful mockery through all ambushes, as was his way.’
^xciii
Why did he afford William the early battle that was so
crucial to him and might be so disastrous to Harold himself? Why, when he was having heavy losses during the battle, did he not withdraw his forces into the forest behind him? Orderic, unsupported
by William of Poitiers or indeed any other earlier source, says that Harold’s younger brother, Gyrth, attempted to persuade him to allow him to lead the English army so that in case of
disaster Harold would still be alive to lead the resistance against William. Gyrth’s main argument was that he had sworn no oaths to William and could therefore defend his country with a
clear conscience. This would have been a sensible proposal, but hardly practicable in the circumstances in which it was made. The first duty of any king at this time was to protect his kingdom and
people. The main reason for Harold’s unanimous election as king was his ability to defend the country. His reputation as a warrior was second to none in England, his opposition to a Norman
takeover (or indeed a Norwegian one) was well known
and of long standing. At Stamford Bridge he had triumphantly vindicated the trust put in him, and in the minds of most
Englishmen at that time, Hardrada, because of his fearsome reputation, represented a much greater threat than the then comparatively unknown Norman duke; for Harold not to lead his forces in person
against William, not to have revenged the outrages committed against his people, would have severely compromised his credibility as king and his ability to govern in future. Indeed, it is doubtful
if such a stratagem would have worked. The army raised by Edmund Ironside against Cnut before his father’s death in 1016 refused (apparently legally) to fight because his father, the king,
was not with them. The fact that Æthelred must at this stage have been a dying man clearly made no difference. The custom presumably originated for the protection of a king against ambitious
heirs and nobles. In 1016 it worked against the national interest. We shall never know how it would have worked in 1066. If, on the other hand, Gyrth also advised him to adopt delaying tactics and
draw William away from the coast, as he is also reported to have done, he would have been on much surer ground.

The frequently offered explanation, that Harold hoped, in a fit of rashness and overconfidence, to repeat the strategy that had worked so well against Hardrada, is not really convincing. In the
first place, if indeed emissaries were exchanged before the battle, he was obviously not counting on the element of surprise that had been crucial to his previous victory; and in the second, he
must have known that the situation was totally different. The surprise attack that he was able to make so triumphantly on Hardrada depended on a number of fortuitous circumstances (the assignation
at Stamford Bridge to receive hostages, the weather, the division of Hardrada’s army) that he could not have known about until he reached Tadcaster and heard what had happened
and how he could turn it to the English advantage. The one thing he must have been certain about was that he would not catch William in the same way. He had campaigned with him in
Brittany, he must have been aware that he would not catch William off guard and certainly not with his army split in two. The notion that Harold’s strategy was dictated by his determination
to surprise William as he had surprised Hardrada has become one of the accepted myths of Hastings; but it is important to remember that it originated solely in the brains of two Normans, William of
Jumièges and William of Poitiers, neither of whom could possibly have known what the king was actually thinking or planning. There is no hint of any such design in the English sources.
Haste, yes; surprise, no.