Harold could have played a patriotic card, positing himself as a king of England protecting his people from these invaders. His army would have ended up with all the disadvantages of a being an invader living off the land. It would have been much better for Harold to wait. Harold was not only a crowned king but a popular one too, which meant he could afford a draw. As a 17th-century quote from the Earl of Manchester, about the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists, says:.
If Harold was defeated by William but managed to survive, he could have headed west and then regrouped to fight another day. That exact thing had happened 50 years earlier with the Anglo-Saxons versus the Vikings. Edmund Ironside and Cnut went at it about four or five times until Cnut eventually won. This illustration depicts Edmund Ironside left and Cnut right , fighting one another. All Harold had to do was not die, whereas William was gambling everything.
For him, it was the biggest roll of the dice of his career. The outcome was a decisive victory for King Harold II. The Norwegians were caught off guard and all those camped at Stamford Bridge were killed. The Norwegian reinforcements were also defeated and only a small force escaped. They tried to form a shield wall on a small hillock below the main battle-line, but as the Tapestry makes clear these warriors wore no hauberks, almost certainly meaning that they were select fyrd and not trained carles.
The Norman cavalrymen used their height advantage to slash down onto Saxon heads, and with no support from the rest of the army, the shield-ring was cut to pieces within minutes, and the fyrdmen were butchered to the last man.
The effect on English morale can only be imagined. Barely moments ago it had seemed as if they were on the brink of victory with the Normans in headlong retreat, and now they had been forced to stand and watch as a large number of their own had been slaughtered just a few hundred yards away.
The battle was now at stalemate. Having been fighting for the best part of two hours most battles of the age would have been over by now the men on both sides were exhausted and bloody. The first Norman assault had been repulsed, but so had the English counter-attack, if that was indeed what it was.
Both sides had already suffered hundreds of casualties, the Tapestry depicting headless corpses and hacked off limbs, and so it is likely that the armies took pause to catch their breath — then, yet again, it was William and not Harold who seized the initiative. Remembering the key to the battle lay with the housecarles in the first few English ranks, he ordered all three divisions to launch repeated attacks, cavalry followed by infantry, followed by cavalry, followed by infantry and so on, and all the time the Norman archers were ordered to pepper the English war-hedge with arrows.
This was no grand, cinematic charge up the hill by Norman cavalry but rather, relatively small groups of knights attacking different sections of the English shield wall in continuous relays for the next few hours.
The Normans would gallop forward as fast as the slope would let them, throw their javelins, and then wheel away to be succeeded by a volley of arrows and then a second wave of heavy infantry, fighting the housecarles chest to chest.
The same process was then repeated again and again, hour after hour, all along the line. The front rank of carles had stayed solid during the first Franco-Norman assault. Their kite shields reached almost to the ground, the men hunching down behind them so only their eyes and the tops of their helmeted heads presented any sort of target.
Their right hands were drawn back holding heavy war-spears, ready to thrust them forward. They were still confident. Norman arrows fell out of the sky, forcing them to raise their shields, as the Norman infantry closed in again.
Bringing their shields back down a few arrows found their mark, slicing into shoulders and legs, as men fell a second ranker would step forward to take his place and the wall was whole again. As the two lines of infantry clashed, men stabbing at each other, snarling like animals, cohorts of cavalry would come forward at pace, the horsemen riding to within yards of the battling ranks and, picking their moment they would let fly a javelin to bury itself in the neck of a carle thrusting forward with his own spear.
Gurgling his own lifeblood away the carle would fall backwards, and again another man would step forward to take his place in the line, keeping the Normans at bay. Soon the lines had to move, almost imperceptibly, as the piles of dead made fighting ever harder, and corpses were dragged back to give the front lines room to carry on the struggle. The stink was terrible, blood mixing with sweat, urine and faeces on the now-slippery slopes of Battle Hill.
Gradually, more poorly-equipped select fyrd men were forced to step forward into a front rank that was beginning to visibly shorten along the ridgeline. The fyrdmen were brave and relatively well trained, but they were not housecarles, and William knew it. Their padded leather jerkins were no substitute for the thousands of interwoven mail links of a hauberk, and Norman arrows and throwing spears punched home, killing them by the dozen and forcing more of their brethren into the wavering line.
It was now that the superbly drilled Norman cavalry came into their own, each officer, the so-called magister militum master of knights calling out commands by voice, trumpet call or flag — the gonfanons. Seeing that sections of the shield wall were now manned by fyrdmen and not carles, the cavalry used their tactic of the feigned flight, pretending to fall away in disarray.
Each time, considerable numbers of fyrdmen, freed from the horror of absorbing the punishment of the shield wall, sallied out, hoping to smash their opponents once and for all, only to see their fleeing quarry suddenly wheel around, cut them off from their comrades on the summit and surround them with a wall of horseflesh and chain-mail armour. By now the English had just about run out of anything to throw at the Normans, every arrow, spear, javelin, hand axe and rock having been sent flying into their ranks.
More importantly, the corps of housecarles was dying. Many had arrived at Hastings carrying wounds and injuries from Stamford Bridge, their armour saving their lives but unable to protect them from the broken bones and heavy bruising wrought by sword blows. They had not wavered, nor sallied out like their select fyrd comrades, but they were too few and they knew it.
Most of them were lying where they had fallen, in the front rank, surrounded by the corpses of their foes. The main body of the English army was still intact. True, the housecarles were nearly a spent force, but there were still numbers of professional lithsmen and the bravery of the several thousand select fyrdmen was undiminished.
By now it was late afternoon, well after 3pm and it would be dark in less than two hours. Practised eyes looked around the battlefield, counting the numbers, grimly assessing the odds, and the truth was that only time could now save the English army, and both the remaining carles and William recognised it. If Harold could hold until nightfall, he would win. Cloaked by night, he would be able to take his men north, back to their horses on Caldbec Hill and the safety of the Andredsweald.
As for William, his men would have no choice but to retreat back to their encampment of the previous night knowing the dawn would bring them no such relief. There were no fresh men or mounts on their way to the Normans. The battle had now lasted an unbelievable six hours, and it still hung in the balance. For the fourth and last time that day, it was William, not Harold, who acted decisively.
Forsaking the rolling attacks of the last few hours, he ordered an all-out assault. The cavalry and infantry were to crash into the shield wall, all the while the archers were told to loose endless volleys into the hard-pressed English.
The Norman horsemen tried to force their way through into the English line, that same line responding with equal ferocity.
Almost all the front line were now select fyrd and lithsmen. Instinct prompted most of the surviving carles to inch backwards to gather together around their lords and their banners, even now looking to protect them from what was to come, and leaving yet more lithsmen and fyrdmen to take their places in the shield wall.
The dead were piled up in heaps, men standing among their own slaughtered comrades, no-one was pulling the corpses away now, and all eyes were on the advancing Normans. Now, for the first time, lack of numbers forced the English line to retreat from the far western and eastern edges of the ridge, and the attacking Normans could see the shield wall perceptibly shrinking before them, its ranks getting thinner and thinner as the last of the carles in the frontlines were bludgeoned to death.
There was no longer a dam of mail-shirts and huge battleaxes. Norman cavalry and infantry seized a foothold on the western end of the summit of Battle Hill, and could now attack straight into the English flank, forcing the shield wall to curve round to try and protect itself. It was the beginning of the end. The Normans could sense victory at long last. The site is now operated by English Heritage, and also includes a gatehouse exhibition as well as wooden sculptures of Norman and Saxon troops scattered across the landscape.
Residents of Hampstead might not be too pleased to learn that their exclusive London village once housed more pigs than people, but this is just one of the fascinating insights to be gained from reading the Domesday Book….
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