Read Battle of Hastings, The Online
Authors: Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood
It has been suggested by Lt Colonel C. H. Lemmon that the pursuit of the Bretons by his right wing was part of a planned counter-attack by Harold, and that this would most naturally have been
led by his brothers, Earl Gyrth and Earl Leofwine.
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Their deaths are shown on the Tapestry at just about this stage of the battle; if they had indeed been
leading a counter-attack, their fall
would certainly have thrown it into disarray, but their deaths might not have been seen by the men on the far right who would have
continued to advance as planned, only to find themselves isolated and cut off. On the other hand, the bodies of Gyrth and Leofwine were found close beside their brother at the end of the battle,
which is not consistent with them falling at the head of an attack unless there had been an opportunity to retrieve them during a lull in the fighting. It is more likely that the men on the right
wing were simply unable to resist the temptation to break ranks and pursue the fleeing Bretons, who were rallied by the duke and rounded on them with the Norman centre, cutting them down.
Alfred’s army at Wilton had done precisely the same thing, and the Danes had turned on them with equally disastrous results.
At this stage, there seems to have been something of a hiatus in the battle. As Colonel Lemmon points out, troops cannot engage in hand-to-hand fighting for eight hours on end, and both sides
would have needed to regroup and rearm. So far, the battle had not gone at all as the duke had expected, since none of his troops, not even the cavalry, had succeeded in making any impact on the
English defences; in William of Poitiers’ words:
When the Normans and the troops allied to them saw that they could not conquer such a solidly massed enemy force without heavy loss, they wheeled round and deliberately
feigned flight. They remembered how, a little while before, their flight had brought about the result they desired [i.e., in drawing the English away from their defensive position]. . . As
before, some thousands of them dared to rush, almost as if they were winged, in pursuit of those they believed to be fleeing. The Normans, suddenly wheeling round their horses,
checked and encircled them, and slaughtered them to the last man.
Having used this trick twice with the same result, they attacked the remainder with greater determination: up to now the enemy line had been bristling with weapons and most difficult to
encircle. So a combat of an unusual kind began, with one side attacking in different ways and the other standing firmly as if fixed to the ground.
Nothing in the story of the battle has provoked more argument than this question of the feigned flights. Historians have divided between those who maintain that a feigned flight
on the spur of the moment was much too complicated a manoeuvre for troops to carry out at that stage of the history of warfare, and those who point to the occasions on which it had been
successfully executed in the past. Experienced soldiers, like Colonel Lemmon, point with justice to the problems associated with the manoeuvre, even in more favourable situations than obtained at
Hastings:
A ‘feigned retreat’ would demand that every man taking part in it had to know when to retreat, how far to retreat and when to turn round and fight back; and,
moreover, that these movements had to be carefully synchronized, or disaster would result. To arrange this in the heat of battle with men fighting hand-to-hand for their lives was clearly
impossible. Could the operation have been a carefully rehearsed act, set off, perhaps, by a trumpet call? Similar acts, performed at military tournaments and tattoos with the well-drilled and
disciplined soldiers of today need much rehearsal and, even with the small
numbers employed, are difficult enough to stage. Is it possible that a feudal force at the
beginning of this millennium could have performed such an act at all? Finally, there is the military maxim, evolved after long years of experience in warfare, that ‘troops committed to
the attack cannot be made to change direction’. If the situation created by the real flight of some troops was restored by an immediate charge of fresh troops, the result would be much
the same as if a ‘feigned retreat’ had been possible and had taken place, as far as the progress of the battle was concerned. A ‘feigned retreat’, therefore, the
chroniclers made it, in order to save the face of the troops who ran away.
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The Lemmon line is supported by Colonel A. H. Burne in his
Battlefields of Britain,
who writes, ‘I simply cannot bring myself to believe that a feigned retreat could have been
mounted, as an afterthought, in the midst of the battle’, and suggests robustly that the first retreat could be accepted by Norman chroniclers as genuine, since it was the fault of the
Bretons, but that the subsequent retreats, which were by Norman troops, had to be presented as something else.
Other historians, however, such as R. Allen Brown, point to the equally convincing reasons for supposing that feigned retreats were possible:
The feigned flight, so the argument runs, cannot have happened because it could not have happened; and it could not have happened because it would have required to a high
degree discipline and training which feudal armies, and most especially the exhibitionist knights who
formed them, notoriously did not possess. The truth is, of course,
that our Frankish knights and Norman knights were as professional as the age could make them, born and bred to war and trained from early youth, in the household which is the contingent of a
lord, in the art and science of horsemanship and arms. Not only do we have entirely acceptable, one might almost say overwhelming, evidence for the tactic of the feigned flight employed at
Hastings, but we also have further evidence of its practice on other occasions by other knights of this generation – by the Normans at St Aubin-le-Cauf near Arques in 1052–53 and
near Messina in 1060, and by Robert le Frison of Flanders at Cassel in 1071. If this is not enough, then we can find much earlier references to the manoeuvre, which was thus evidently a
well-known
ruse de guerre,
in e.g. Nithard under the year 842, over two hundred years before Hastings, and in Dudo of St Quentin writing in the first decades of the eleventh century.
Clearly of all the arguments which surround the Norman Conquest and Hastings, this one at least must stop.
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It certainly seems perfectly probable that small groups of knights, accustomed from long training to fighting together as a
conroi
or squadron, could have practised and
carried out such a manoeuvre, though there would still be the risk of their action being interpreted by the rest of the army (many of whom were foreign mercenaries) as a genuine flight and panic
spreading as a result. Bernard S. Bachrach, in his article on the feigned retreats at Hastings,
ciii
shows that the feigned retreat was a common tactic
used by the horsemen of the steppes, and points to its use among
the Huns, Visigoths and, especially, the Byzantines, who are said by Gregory of Tours to have used it
successfully against a body of Franks positioned very much as Harold’s forces were at Hastings and with very similar results. Clearly, it must be accepted that feigned retreats were perfectly
possible by 1066; with the slight reservation that in this case, all the evidence for them comes to us at second hand, from the winning side, and with the proviso, as pointed out by Colonel Lemmon,
that in enemy communiqués, a retreat according to plan was usually interpreted as meaning that the troops had run away.
Whether the retreats were feigned or genuine makes no difference to the outcome. William of Poitiers says that ‘some thousands’ of the English had rushed out to pursue the retreats
and were all killed. Exaggeration of the numbers of the defeated enemy was standard procedure, to make the eventual victory more glorious, just as the English records imply that Harold was
seriously outnumbered. It cannot possibly have been as many as ‘some thousands’ but it was probably enough to cause serious damage to the English defence and to make it necessary for
Harold to draw in his wings and shorten his front. This must have made it easier for the Normans to gain access to the ridge and attack him on his flanks, and according to the
Carmen
, they
did so. It is irritating that at this point William of Poitiers’ chronicle stops reporting the various stages of the battle in favour of a panegyric on the courage and ferocity of the duke.
He takes up a more sober account only towards the end of the day when, he says:
the English army realized that there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer. They knew that they had been weakened by the loss of many troops; that the king himself
and his brothers and not a few of the nobles
of the kingdom had perished; that all who remained were almost at the end of their strength, and that they could hope for no
relief.
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In fact there must have been some considerable interval between the two Norman ‘feigned’ retreats and the collapse that he reports here. William of Poitiers’
failure to report the closing stages of the battle in as much detail as the earlier part probably arose from the general fatigue and confusion of those taking part, and their inability to give him
the detailed information he needed. We can imagine the growing exhaustion on both sides, the determination of the English to hold their position till after sunset, the desperate efforts of the
Normans to assail the English flanks and break through their line to reach the king. Battles lasting as long as Hastings (between eight and nine hours) and indeed Stamford Bridge (probably about
seven hours) were extremely rare in the Middle Ages, and it was part of the bad luck of the English that they should have had to fight two of them so close together.
The crucial factor, which William of Poitiers skates over, is the death of Harold. The highly coloured version in the
Carmen
, according to which four knights, one of them the duke
himself, burst through the English line and hacked the king down under his standards, is not credible. It is the part reputedly played in this version by the duke that is unbelievable. If it had
been true, William of Poitiers would certainly have known of it and equally certainly would have reported it. It would have been a story to rank with the death of Roland at Roncesvalles. It is much
more likely that no one on the Norman side knew, in the confusion of the battle, precisely when he was struck, especially if his death or initial disablement was indeed caused by an arrow, and that
no
one survived on the English side who could have given the facts. There is a tradition, unsupported by surviving evidence, that in the later stages of the battle the duke
gave orders to his archers to aim high, so that the arrows dropped on the English from above. This would have overcome the difficulties they would have been caused by the rising ground in their
opening volleys, though it would have considerably reduced the penetrative power of the arrows. It would also have enabled the Norman cavalry to charge simultaneously under the archers’
cover. If Harold’s death was in fact caused by one of the Norman arrows falling from the sky, the arrows were penetrating adequately and William’s tactics paid off.
R. Allen Brown, in his account of the battle, said that the only really undisputed fact about Hastings was that the Normans won. One other thing is indisputable, which is that the side whose
leader fell first would lose. William had the luck with him throughout his campaign for the throne, but nowhere was that luck more striking than his survival on the battlefield, where he must have
been as much if not more at risk as Harold. If he did indeed have three horses killed under him in the course of the battle (and there is no reason to doubt it), then on three occasions at least he
was particularly vulnerable not just to the enemy but to being accidentally ridden down by his own knights. It is clear from the first, genuine, flight of the Bretons how quickly the Norman army
would have faltered and retreated if he had been killed or incapacitated.
The manner of Harold’s death has been almost as much disputed as the retreats, feigned or otherwise. The confusion has been caused partly by the Tapestry, which, in plate 71, shows an
armed figure apparently trying to pull an arrow out of his eye and next to him, another armed figure with a battle-axe who is being
cut down by a Norman knight. Across the
two figures the text reads
Hic Harold Rex interfectus est
, ‘Here King Harold is killed’. The word ‘Harold’ is directly above the figure with the arrow in his eye, the
words ‘interfectus est’ above the figure with the battle-axe. In general, the designer of the Tapestry has taken care to put the name of a character above the person named. The question
that has exercised historians is whether both figures depict the dying king or only one of them. Although William of Poitiers could tell us nothing about Harold’s death, and little in detail
about the later stages of the battle, he does make it clear that the duke had kept up an unceasing barrage of arrows, so the likelihood that the king was struck in the eye by one of them is strong.
It is even stronger that, once he was thus disabled, and with his brothers having already fallen, Norman knights would find it easier to burst through the line and hack him down. This section of
the tapestry has been subjected to repairs, and efforts have been made to prove, by examining original and newer stitch marks on the reverse, that what now appears to be an arrow in the eye was
originally intended to be a javelin that was being thrown by the figure clutching it – not the king but one of his men. It is certainly true that the Tapestry’s present state does not
necessarily represent the designer’s original intention (this is one of the most intensively restored sections), and a very small adjustment of stitches could, quite unintentionally, make a
considerable difference to the final effect. Furthermore, blinding was, by Biblical warrant, widely regarded in the Middle Ages as the appropriate punishment for perjury and might therefore be
regarded by the Tapestry’s designer as particularly appropriate to Harold.