Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter,
about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel
the pleasure of history; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it
were, a great memory of things—like a human memory, but stretched over
a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not
say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and
greatness.
It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How
good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to
look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only
pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the
mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is
not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful
things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury tower, framed
between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey
buildings in your eye of the mind—a great mass of similar stone with
solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster.
All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel
is very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied
to it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more
fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in
such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our
own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid
epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing
the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into
this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the
power to construct and to do—underneath all that is the foundation on
which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that
stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more
vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents.
Recorded history for this island and for Northern France and for the
Rhine Valley is a matter of two thousand years; for the Western
Mediterranean of three; but the things of which I speak are to be
reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie
only nor even chiefly in things that have disappeared. It is indeed a
great pleasure to rummage in the earth and find polished stones wrought
by men who came so many centuries before us, and of whose blood we
certainly are; and it is a great pleasure to find, or to guess that we
find, under Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving
that Canterbury has been there from all time; and that the apparently
defenceless Valley City was once chosen as an impregnable site, when
the water-meadows of the Stour were impassable as marsh, or with
difficulty passable as a shallow lagoon. And it is delightful to stand
on the earthwork a few miles west and to say to oneself (as one can say
with a fair certitude), “Here was the British camp defending the
south-east; here the tenth legion charged.” All these are pleasant, but
more pleasant, I think, to follow the thing where it actually survives.
Consider the track-ways, for instance. How rich is England in these! No
other part of Europe will afford the traveller so permanent and so
fascinating a problem. Elsewhere Rome hardened and straightened every
barbaric trail until the original line and level disappeared; but in
this distant province of Britain she could only afford just so much
energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery; and all over England
you can go, if you choose, foot by foot, along the ancient roads that
were made by the men of your blood before they had heard of brick or of
stone or of iron or of written laws.
I wonder that more men do not set out to follow, let us say, the
Fosse-Way. There it runs right across Western England from the
south-west to the north-east in a line direct yet sinuous, characters
which are the very essence of a savage trail. It is a modern road for
many miles, and you are tramping, let us say, along the Cotswold on a
hard metalled modern English highway, with milestones and notices from
the County Council telling you that the culverts will not bear a
steam-engine, if so be you were to travel on one. Then suddenly this
road comes up against a cross-road and apparently ceases, making what
map draughtsmen call a “T”; but right in the same line you see a gate,
and beyond it a farm lane, and so you follow. You come to a spinney
where a ride has been cut through by the woodreeve, and it is all in
the same line. The Fosse-Way turns into a little path, but you are
still on it; it curves over a marshy brook-valley, picking out the firm
land, and as you go you see old stones put there heaven knows how many
(or how few) generations ago—or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition
remains, and the country-folk strengthen their wet lands as they have
strengthened them all these thousands of years; you climb up out of
that depression, you get you over a stile, and there you are again upon
a lane. You follow that lane, and once more it stops dead. This time
there is a field before you. No right of way, no trace of a path,
nothing but grass rounded into those parallel ridges which mark the
modern decay of the corn lands and pasture—alas!—taking the place of
ploughing. Now your pleasure comes in casting about for the trail; you
look back along the line of the Way; you look forward in the same line
till you find some indication, a boundary between two parishes, perhaps
upon your map, or two or three quarries set together, or some other
sign, and very soon you have picked up the line again.
So you go on mile after mile, and as you tread that line you have in
the horizons that you see, in the very nature and feel of the soil
beneath your feet, in the skies of England above you, the ancient
purpose and soul of this Kingdom. Up this same line went the Clans
marching when they were called Northward to the host; and up this went
slow, creaking wagons with the lead of the Mendips or the tin of
Cornwall or the gold of Wales.
And it is still there; it is still used from place to place as a high
road, it still lives in modern England. There are some of its peers, as
for instance the Ermine Street, far more continuous, and affording
problems more rarely; others like the ridgeway of the Berkshire Downs,
which Rome hardly touched, and of which the last two thousand years
has, therefore, made hardly anything; you may spend a delightful day
piecing out exactly where it crossed the Thames, making your guess at
it, and wondering as you sit there by Streatley Vicarage whether those
islands did not form a natural weir below which lay the ford.
The roads are the most obvious things. There are many more; for
instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with
the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before
the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with
reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. I
remember once being told of a record in a manor, which held of the
Church and which lay upon the southern slope of the Downs, that so much
was entered for “straw from the Lowlands”: then, years afterwards, when
I had to thatch a Bethlehem in an orchard underneath tall elms—a
pleasant place to write in, with the noise of bees in the air—the man
who came to thatch said to me: “We must have straw from the Lowlands;
this upland straw is no good for thatching.” Immediately when I heard
him say this there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know
another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to me
that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to do,
Cross-Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the drift
of the snow, for there was no other guide to one’s direction in such
weather. And I remember another man in a little boat in the North Sea,
as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and
telling me how if one caught the tide all the way up to Long Nose and
then went round it on the end of the flood, one caught a new tide up
London river, and so made two tides in one day. He spoke with the same
pleasure that silly men show when they talk about an accumulation of
money. He felt wealthy and proud from the knowledge, for by this
knowledge he had two tides in one day. Now knowledge of this sort is
older than ten thousand years; and so is the knowledge of how birds
fly, and of how they call, and of how the weather changes with the
moon.
Very many things a man might add to the list that I am making. Dew-pans
are older than the language or the religion; and the finding of water
with a stick; and the catching of that smooth animal, the mole; and the
building of flints into mortar, which if one does it in the old way (as
you may see at Pevensey) the work lasts for ever, but if you do it in
any new way it does not last ten years; then there is the knowledge of
planting during the crescent part of the month, but not before the new
moon shows; and there is the influence of the moon on cider, and to a
less extent upon the brewing of ale; and talking of ale, the knowledge
of how ale should be drawn from the brewing just when a man can see his
face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew. And there is the
knowledge of how to bank rivers, which is called “throwing the rives”
in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name; and how to bank
them so that they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these
things and a thousand others. All are immemorial.
The Battle of Hastings. Related in the Manner of Oxford and Dedicated
to that University
So careless were the French commanders (or more properly the French
commander, for the rest were cowed by the bullying swagger of William)
that the night, which should have been devoted to some sort of
reconnaissance, if not of a preparation of the ground, was devoted to
nothing more practical than the religious exercises peculiar to
foreigners.
Their army, as we have seen, was not drawn from any one land, but it
was in the majority composed of Normans and Bretons; we can therefore
understand the extravagant superstition which must bear the blame for
what followed.
Meanwhile, upon the heights above, the English host calmly prepared for
battle. Fires were lit each in its appointed place, and at these meat
was cooked under the stern but kindly eyes of the sergeant-majors.
These also distributed at an appointed price liquor, of which the
British soldier is never willing to be deprived, and as the hours
advanced towards morning, the songs in which our adventurous race has
ever delighted rose from the heights above the Brede.
The morning was misty, as is often the case over damp and marshy lands
in the month of October, but the inclemency of the weather, or, to
speak more accurately, the superfluous moisture precipitated from an
already saturated atmosphere, was of no effect upon those silent and
tenacious troops of Harold. It was far other with the so-called
“Norman” host, who were full of forebodings—only too amply to be
justified—of the fate that lay before them upon the morrow.
It is curious to contrast the quiet skill and sagacity which marked the
disposition of Harold with the almost childish simplicity of William’s
plan—if plan it may be called.
The Saxon hosts were drawn along the ridge in a position chosen with
masterly skill. It afforded (as may still be seen) no dead ground for
an attacking force and little cover.[1] Their left was arranged _en
potence_, their right was drawn up in echelon. The centre followed the
plan usual at that time, reposing upon the wings to its right and left
and extended. The reserves were, of course, posted behind. Cavalry, as
at Omdurman, played but a slight role in this typically national action
and such mounted troops as were present seem to have been intermixed
with the line in the fashion later known, in the jargon of the service,
as “The Beggar’s Quadrille.” The Brigade of Guards is not mentioned in
any record that I can discover, but was probably set by reversed
companies in a square perpendicular to the main ravine and a little in
front of the salient angle which appears upon the map at the point
marked A.
The terrain can be clearly determined at the present day in spite of
the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It is a
fairly steep slope of hemispherical contour interspersed with low
bushes; the summit (upon which now stands our lovely English village of
Battle and the residence of one of those cultured and leisured men who
form the framework of our commonwealth) was then but a wild heath.
Harold himself could be distinguished in the centre of the line by his
handsome features, restrained deportment, and unfailing gentlemanly
good sense as he spoke to staff officer, orderly, and even groom with
indefatigable skill.
In spite of the determination observable from a great distance upon the
faces of the tall Saxon line, William with characteristic lack of
balance opened the action by ordering a charge uphill with cavalry
alone; it was a piece of tactics absurdly incongruous and one even he
would never have attempted had he understood the foe that was before
him, or the fate to which that foe had doomed him.
The lesson dealt him was as immediate as it was severe. The foreigners
were thrust headlong down the hill, and a private letter tells us how
the Men of Kent in particular buffeted the Normans about “as though
they were boys.” But even in the heat of this initial success Harold
had the self-command to order the retirement upon the main position:
and with troops such as his the order was equivalent to its execution.
This rude blow would have sufficed for any commander less vain than
William, but he seems to have lost all judgment in a fit of personal
vanity and to have ordered a second charge which could not but prove as
futile as the first, delivered as it was up a perfect glacis
strengthened by epaulements, reverses and countersunk galvon work and
one whose natural strength was heightened by the stockade which the
indomitable energy of Harold’s troops had perfected in the early hours
of the morning. Many of the stakes in this, the reader may note with
pardonable pride, were of English oak—sharpened at the tip.
William’s plan (if plan it may be called) was, as we have seen,
necessarily futile and was foredoomed to failure. But Harold had no
intention to let the action bear no more fruit than a tactical victory
upon this particular field. The brain that had designed the exact
synchrony of Stamford Bridge and the famous march southward from the
Humber was of that sort which is only found once in many centuries of
the history of war and which is (it may be said without boasting)
peculiar to this island.
Another general would have awaited the second charge with its useless
butchery and still more useless contest for the barren name of victory.
Not so Harold. Those commanding, cold grey eyes of his swept the line
in a comprehensive glance, and though no written record of the detail
remains, he must know little of the character of the man who does not
understand that from Harold certainly proceeded the order for what
followed.
The forces at the centre, which he commanded in person, deftly withdrew
before the futile gallop of William’s cavalry, leaving, with that
coolness which has ever distinguished our troops, the laggards to their
fate. At the same moment, and with marvellous precision, the left and
right were withdrawn from the plateau rapidly and as by magic, and the
old-fashioned tactics of mere impact (which William of Normandy seems
seriously to have relied on!) were spent and wasted upon the now
evacuated summit of the hill.
What followed is famous in history.
The cohesion of the Saxon force and the exactitude and coolness with
which its great operation was performed is of good augury for the
future of our country. Though it was now thick night, by no set road
and with no cumbersome machinery of train and rear-guard, the whole of
the vast assembly masked itself behind the woodlands of the Weald.
The Norman horsemen, bewildered and fatigued, gazed on the many that
had fallen in defence of the masking position and wondered whether such
novel happenings were victory or no, but the army whose concentration
upon the Thames it was William’s whole object to prevent, was already
miles northward, each unit proceeding by exactly co-ordinated routes
towards London.
There is perhaps no more difficult task set before soldiers than the
quiet execution of such a manoeuvre after the heat of a heavy action,
and none have performed it more magnificently than the veteran troop of
Harold.
When (luckily) all the orders had been finally distributed a great
tragedy marred the completeness of the day.
Just before the execution of this masterpiece of strategy, and as the
autumn sun was sinking, the inevitable price which war demands of all
its darlings was paid.
Harold himself, the artist of the great victory, fell. But we have no
reason to believe that his loss retarded the retrograding movement in
any degree. Men who create as Harold created have not their creations
spoilt by death.
The shameful history of the close of the campaign is familiar to every
schoolboy, and the military historian must be pardoned if he deals with
a purely civilian blunder in a few brief words.
Parliament interfered—as it always does—with what should have been a
matter for soldiers alone. Intrigues, bribery, or worse (with which the
military historian has no concern) ruined what had been, in the field,
one of the principal achievements of the Saxon arms. And William, who
could not count to hold his own against regular forces and who was
astonished to find himself free to retreat precipitately on Dover, was
still more astonished to find himself accepted a few weeks later after
an aimless march to the west and north by the politicians—or worse—at
Berkhampstead. He and England were equally astounded to find that a
broken and defeated invader could actually be accepted by the
intriguers at Westminster and crowned King of England as the price of a
secret bargain.
Such was the fruit of as great and successful an effort as ever Saxon
soldier made: the Battle of Senlac: for such—as I am now free to
reveal—was the true name of the field of action.
The ineptitude or avarice of politicians had undone the work of
soldiers, and it is no wonder that the last of Harold’s veterans, who
retired in disgust to impregnable fortresses in Ely, Arthur’s Seat, and
Pudsey, are recorded to have gnashed their teeth and shed tears of
indignation at the dispatches from the metropolis. At Crécy they were
to be avenged.