he had passed oversea in Normandy, before he was called upon to rule
over Saxon England, had set their seal upon him, and his favourite
courtiers were of Norman-French nationality. He had, certainly, married
Editha, daughter of the great Saxon Earl Godwin, and sister of Harold;
but his quarrels with her family go largely toward making up the story
of his reign. The head and front of his offending is undoubtedly the
alleged bequest, at a comparatively early period, of his crown to
William, Duke of Normandy. Apart from the fact that the succession was
not his to give, and would in any case have been the business of the
Witan, this devising of crown and country to an alien whose ways were
not those of the Saxons, and between whose people and Edward’s people
the keenest jealousy and animosity already existed, was unpatriotic
to the last degree; and had the “Confessor” been made to suffer the
terrible fate that befell the second Edward, himself the patron
of alien courtiers, that fate had been better deserved. Nay, were
justice done the memory of that traitor to his country, his shrine in
Westminster Abbey would be torn down and demolished.
But clearer and wiser views at last prevailed with the cloistered King,
and in that clarified and enlarged vision, he, drawing towards his
end, designated the Saxon Harold, his brother-in-law, his successor.
Wisdom, however, was vouchsafed him too late: the mischief was done.
The fates were working in those years against England and for Duke
William of Normandy, whom history knows, _ad nauseam_, as “William
the Conqueror.” That historic personage was a great captain, strong
in battle and in strategy, but he had also the mind of an attorney,
which could quirk you and quibble you, and chouse you as efficiently as
the sharpest practitioner that ever misused the law. It was no matter
to that acute and ambitious brain that the sanctimonious “Confessor”
had revoked his bequest in favour of Harold; to him, at least, it
held good. And events marvellously aided him. Somewhere about 1064,
Earl Harold, already king-designate, was voyaging down channel, when
his ships were driven ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, in territory
tributary to William. Those were times when to be cast ashore was to
suffer, not only the discomforts incidental to shipwreck, but to be
seized and held to ransom by the scarce more than robber-lords of that
age. Such an one was Count Guy of Ponthieu, who speedily seized Harold
and imprisoned him in his castle of Beaurain, and would have held him
there, over against the arrival of that ransom, had it not been for
the Duke, who, hearing of this odd freak of fate, and with a keen eye
to how the incident could be used to his own advantage, demanded his
release. But Harold’s enlargement from an acknowledged and undisguised
prison was merely an exchange for a gilded captivity. Nominally, he
was now become the guest of the Duke, in his palace at Rouen, but
in reality he was his prisoner, only to be released on terms. Those
terms were soon disclosed, and the English Earl, already marked as the
successor of Edward, was made to swear, at Bayeux, as the price of his
liberty, to become the guardian of William’s supposed interests in
England, and to receive him, on Edward’s death, as King. These oaths
he took, with others, upon a chest which William had secretly filled
with the choicest saintly relics that Normandy contained. It does not
become us, with our later knowledge of the very unsaintly character
of the old bones usually palmed off in those times as the relics of
saints, to scoff at Harold turning pale when the tremendous character
of the contents of that chest was revealed to him. The credulity of
that age did not permit him the assumption that the alleged relics were
probably no more than the mere ordinary unsanctified plebeian bones and
teeth and fragments of skin we may readily presume them to have been,
with the same relation to the genuine articles as that of a Bank of
Engraving note to one issued by the Bank of England. Harold accepted
them, as he could not choose but do, at their face value, so to speak,
and trembled.
Such is the story handed down to us. The oath taken, Harold was free
to return; and, as his own conscience later told him, and as ours must
needs tell us, was free to disregard an oath, however solemn, taken
under circumstances of compulsion.
In two years from that time, January 5th, 1066, the Confessor died,
with his latest breath naming Harold his successor—a choice later
ratified by the council of the English realm. Harold was elected and
proclaimed King, and the warrior-lawyer over in Normandy was left out
in the cold. William, however, could not have been surprised at this,
and set to work upon the next step in his scheme, which was to obtain
the support of the Pope against “the perjurer,” as he was pleased to
style Harold. All these things had been thought out long in advance by
that wily brain. William, as claimant to the English throne, could be
effectively aided by William as champion of the Church’s might; and
William had ever been concerned, from motives of policy, to figure as
one of the Church’s most devout sons. If you consider it, religion
has ever, from the earliest times, been made the stalking-horse of
scoundrels: a fact so patent that your playwright or your novelist
is commonly concerned to furnish forth his villain with a text or a
psalm, and thus moral sentiments on the stage are the stigmata of the
wrong-doer.
XXXIX
The Pope, Alexander the Second, placing his ghostly terrors at the
disposal of William, declared Harold an usurper, and William the lawful
heir. Thus early had Englishmen to remember Rome for a disservice. It
then remained only for William to collect his forces for an invasion
of England. He set about the work with business-like promptitude and a
settled determination which, by comparison, make the great Napoleon’s
projected invasion of over seven hundred years later seem like the
wayward fancy of an infant. The forests of Normandy were felled
and converted into timber, and all the summer of 1066 thousands of
shipwrights were busily employed in Norman havens building the vast
fleet designed to invade our shores. When we form a mind’s-eye picture
of a fleet, we necessarily visualise nowadays something very different
from the flotilla prepared by the Duke of Normandy for the invasion
of England; but we must go far back, beyond even the small ships with
which Edward the First waged war in foreign parts, if we would see what
William’s navy, made of the green timber that had been growing six
months before, was like. His “ships” numbered, according to the lowest
computation, six hundred and ninety-six: according to the highest,
there were over three thousand; but if we turn to the indisputable
evidence of the famous Bayeux Tapestry it will be seen that they were
craft more in the nature of galleys—open boats with one mast.
The same want of exact figures meets the inquirer who seeks to learn
the number of that invading army. Contemporary chroniclers are at great
variance, the numbers, by their accounts, ranging from 14,000 up to
60,000. From February onwards to September those craft were building
and that army collecting. Meanwhile King Harold was not idle. He had
long been skilled in warfare, and was as able a general as William
himself, and by sea and land he was gathering a force together that in
all human probability would have annihilated the Norman host had it not
been for the happening that at this juncture divided his attention.
That happening was the invasion of northern England by the Norwegian
king, Harald Hardrada, in conjunction with Harold’s own brother, the
banished rebel Tostig, in September, at the very time when the Duke
of Normandy’s expedition was lying ready to sail, only waiting upon a
southern wind. The Norwegian host landed in the Ouse and the Humber,
and the English had been defeated at Fulford and Hardrada received in
York as a conqueror before the English Harold could march from London
to the scene. But when he arrived victory attended him, and in the
Battle of Stamford Bridge, September 25th, he not only defeated the
invaders, and killed Hardrada and his brother, Tostig, but almost
annihilated the foreigners. It was the supreme victory of a great
military career, and the last ever gained by the Saxon English. In the
midst of the rejoicings and the absolutely necessary rest at York,
Harold received the tidings of the Norman landing at Pevensey, near
Hastings.
Fate had indeed dealt hardly with that brave heart. He had marched full
two hundred miles to meet one foe, and he was now to march back to face
another, already established on the coast he had been so concerned
to guard. For the south wind that had been denied William for near a
month of waiting at the Dive and at St. Valery had, in this hour of his
need, played Harold false and had wafted the Norman sails across the
Channel. William landed unopposed on the deserted coast at Pevensey,
twelve miles to the west of Hastings, in the early morning of September
28th, and the next day marched to Hastings, which he made the base
of his operations. From that place he ravaged and laid waste all the
surrounding country, with the intention of drawing Harold down to the
sea-coast, to attack him in defence of his plundered and ill-treated
subjects. He reasoned, as an invader even in these times must needs
reason, that the chances were more in his favour if he could meet the
English by the shore. Were he obliged to march inland to the attack,
grave considerations of provisioning his army must be contended with,
and in the event of defeat his difficulties would have increased with
every mile he had advanced into the interior. He thus lay at Hastings,
within reach of his ships, while Harold was marching southwards, and
organising his army in London. There were not wanting those who at
this time warned William earnestly against what they considered the
folly of his enterprise. The might of the Saxons was no mere tale, and
messengers, coming southward with news of how Harold had defeated the
Norwegian invaders, and was now marching to repeat his victory upon the
Norman host, might well have made even so tried and fearless a soldier
as William retrace his steps. But he had come to victory or to death,
and had staked all upon this one throw for that magnificent prize, the
crown of England. Had he recrossed the Channel, it is certain that
never again would the opportunity of landing on an unguarded coast be
afforded him; and on all counts, now or never was his time. He had
taken a high moral ground for his invasion, and was come, by his own
claim, not as Conqueror, but as one claiming his legal rights, secured
on the most sacred of oaths and hallowed by the blessing of the Church.
Legal rights are the great standby of the plunderer and the spoiler,
and the stirrup for William’s vaulting ambition was legality. It was,
as we have seen, the kind of legality we associate rather with the
pettifogging attorney than with justice; but he had wrung the blessing
of Rome on it, and beside his banner floated the standard consecrated
by the Pope.
XL
William “the Conqueror,” as history styles him, never so styled
himself. His astute mind thrust such a warlike thing into the
background. He had only come to claim his own, and was unfortunately
obliged to fight for it against the perjurer! One can almost in
imagination hear the pietistic snuffle of a Pecksniff in this mixture
of legal and religious motives.
[Illustration: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
It was about October 5th that Harold reached London. He lay there six
days, awaiting the promised reinforcements from his northern Earls,
which never came, and in the meanwhile calling in his levies from the
near counties. But before he set out for Sussex he paid a last visit
to his abbey of Waltham, which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross
and had enriched with many gifts—evidences of his piety. For we must
by no means believe that William, the self-constituted champion of
sacred relics and the Church, alone practised, or professed, religion.
Harold’s piety was at least as marked, and it is perhaps not altogether
the Englishman’s sympathy for an Englishman, or his chivalrous regret
for the vanquished, which sees in the ill-fated King’s abasement before
the Holy Rood of Waltham on the eve of that fatal struggle a more
sincere approach to the Most High. He lay prostrate upon the pavement
in supplication, and the dark, wonder-loving legends of that time tell
us that, as he did so, the hitherto raised head of the sacred image
bowed itself upon the Cross, as though enacting again the tragedy of
Calvary: in token, as the belief of that age ran, that the career of
Harold was finished.
The English army set forth from London on Thursday, October 12th,
and marched inevitably, it being the most direct route, by the line
of country through which runs the Hastings Road of our own day. So
speedily did the troops set out to meet their foe, that by Friday night
Harold had pitched his camp on this hill of Senlac, eight miles from
Hastings, on the site of this town of Battle.
A very ancient oak, known as the “Watch Oak,” stands in the private
garden of a house on the bye-road to the right entering Battle. It is
traditionally the spot whence Harold’s scouts watched for the approach
of the invaders.
No one is skilled to tell us whence came this name of Senlac, nor what
it meant. It was the “hill called Senlac.” Around it on three sides
were hollows, marshy with the feeders of little streams. The Normans
gave the name a French twist and called it “Sanglac” or “Sanguelac,”
the Lake of Blood; but although their perversion of the name is
ingenious, it will not serve our turn, since we see that the name of
Senlac existed prior to the battle. Nor will yet another Gallicised
version—that of Saintlache, or Holy Lake, do; and the meaning of the
old name belonging to this place of battle must of necessity be left in
obscurity.
Harold chose his own battle-ground, and chose it with the trained,
unerring eye of one who had been the victor in many hard-fought
campaigns. Electing to take up a defensive position in a spot where
the menace of his presence must needs make William fight, or remain
disastrously inactive on the coast, he ranged his army on the summit
of this long spur of hill that then thrust out boldly from the wooded
surroundings and commanded a view over gorse-covered folds of down,
away to the sea. He had every reason for this plan of awaiting attack,
chief among them the totally different characteristics of the two
armies: the Norman army being strong in cavalry, the Saxons fighting
wholly on foot, from King Harold and his two brothers, Gurth and
Leofwin, down to the merest churl; while on the Norman side there was
a strong force of archers, and on the Saxon none whatever. The Saxons,
or the English, as we perhaps should more properly name them, were
armed with javelins and with the two-handed battle-axe. The battle-axe,
carried over the shoulder and wielded from it with a two-handed grasp
and a swing of the whole body, was a terrible weapon in the hands of
a body of men acting purely on the defensive, but it was ill-adapted
for pursuit. A blow from it was easily capable of cleaving, not only
through the helmet and head of a horseman, but of felling both him and
his horse. Such was the weapon upon which the English chiefly relied in
standing their ground and to withstand the onset of the Norman horse,
which, owing to Harold’s strategy in seizing this commanding eminence,
would be under the necessity of charging uphill.
To render the position additionally secure, opportunity was taken, ere
night fell, to fortify the edge of the plateau with a palisade cut from
the surrounding woodlands, and to wattle it with twigs and boughs so
closely interwoven that it was impossible for a single person to creep
through. Here, then, the English army lay athwart where now runs the
road to the sea, but where at that time, beside a landmark named in
the old English Chronicle “the hoar apple-tree,” there was apparently
no other salient object save the rough track which must even then have
existed, leading down to the port of Hastings.
The night before the battle seems to us, and must even have seemed to
the opposing armies, a tremendously fateful interlude. Political and
other considerations were such that all must have known the fate of
England to depend, not upon a long campaign and a series of marches and
fights, but solely upon the issue of the great contest now impending.
How, then, did they pass the eve of battle? The Normans are our chief,
and almost sole, authorities here, and were concerned, as inevitably
they would be, to picture the Norman army as a host of Christian
soldiers going forth to war with a dissolute, drink-sodden rabble.
According to this partisan view, the Battle of Senlac, or Hastings,
was lost by the English chiefly owing to the effects upon them of an
all-night orgie of wassailing. When morning came, and with it the great
struggle that was to decide the fate of England, the English host were
still muzzy with their potations of the night before, and had not the
clear vision and cool judgment that are as necessary on the battlefield
as elsewhere. What a fine theme for a Temperance Lecturer, hot on the
subject of “the cursed drink”! Such an one might fitly show by this
instance how indulgence in it destroys not only the individual but the
nation itself; but no one seems ever to have fastened upon this very
eloquent illustration.
The Saxons certainly were mighty topers, and it is by no means too much
to say that they were a nation of drunkards. Ancient chroniclers at
all points fully support this sweeping statement; amongst them William
of Malmesbury, who tells us that the Anglo-Saxon rule was bad, and the
monks and nobility corrupt. “Drinking in parties,” he says, “was an
universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights, as
well as days.”
Coming to a description of the night before the battle, he tells
us, in the original Latin in which he wrote: “Angli, ut accepimus,
totam noctem insomnem cantibus potibusque ducentes.” That is to say,
in plain English, they kept awake all night, singing, and drinking
innumerable drinks—which is a very fine, fearless way of preparing to
meet the foe, and one highly expressive of contempt for him; but it is
not a wise way.
He then proceeds to expand his argument by saying: “The vices attendant
on drunkenness which enervate the human mind followed; hence it arose
that, engaging William more with rashness and precipitate fury than
military skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery by
one, and that an easy, victory.”
XLI
The Normans spent the night after a very different fashion—in prayer
and in the confession of their sins—for they knew that many must fall
on that eventful day. The Bishops of Coutances and Bayeux received
their confessions, and recorded their vows on this Friday night that
if they were spared on the morrow they would fast on Saturdays for the
remainder of their lives. William, for his part, registered a solemn
vow that if he gained the victory he would found a great church on the
battlefield, in gratitude for the divine aid. The Normans, in short,
made all due preparation; and as they prayed well, so did they fight,
on that fatal morrow.
Another, and a highly picturesque, chronicler tells us delightfully
of the alleged actual Saxon debauch on the battlefield, on the night
before the fray. This account is by Wace, the author of several
romances and narrative-poems in Norman-French. Wace wrote his jingling
metrical narrative about 1170, more than a hundred years after the
battle was fought, but probably incorporated the floating traditions of
that great occasion, doubtless still plentiful in his time.
Here is his picture of the Saxon orgies:
Quant la bataille dut joster,
La nuit avant, ço oï conter,
Furent Engleiz forment haitiez,
Mult riant è mult enveisiez;
Tote nuit mangierent è burent
Unkes la nuit et lit ne jurent.
Mult les véissiez demener,
Treper, è saillir è chanter.
The Norman-French in which Wace writes is somewhat puzzling, but the
general sense of it is that “the night before the battle was fought,
as I am told, the English were joyous, laughing much and skylarking.
They ate and drank all night, refusing to take any repose, and skipped
about, dancing and singing.”
Then he gives us the English shouts, as heard by the Normans:
_Bublie_ crient è _weissel_,
E _laticome_ è drincheheil,
_Drinc Hindrewart_ è _Drintome_,
_Drinc Helf_ è _drinc Tome_.
or, as we may put it, “Bubble it up!” they cried, and “Wassail!” and
“Let it come,” and “Drink hail!” “Drink hinderwards and drink to me,
drink health and drink to me!” Modernised, and applied to beer, which
is to our times what mead or metheglin was to the Saxons, “Bubble it
up!” would appear to mean “Froth it up,” or “Put a good head on it”;
while “Let it come” and “Drink hail!” are simply “Pass the bottle” and
“Here’s your health!” But how you drink “hinderwards,” unless it means
“Pass the bottle back again,” I cannot conceive.
At any rate, it is quite evident, by this account, that these English
warriors had each a thoroughly good skinful of booze overnight. They
seem to have almost wallowed in it, and were precisely the men who
would have appreciated the bibulous spirit of that drinking ballad of
modern times, which ran something after this style:
Beer, beer, glorious beer;
Fill yourself right up to ’ere.
Up with the sale of it,
Down with a pail of it,
Glorious, glorious beer.
Up with the trade of it,
Drink till you’re made of it,
and so forth, in a style eminently calculated to win the hearts of my
lords Ardilaun, Iveagh, Hindlip, and Burton.
But the Saxon mead, which may still be discovered in remote parts of
the country as the home-brewed “metheglin,” a sweet and sickly liquor
made from honey, is a heady drink, a great deal more likely to result
in a splitting headache the next morning than the clearer brew of the
barley; and the Norman libellers would have us believe that, because of
that matutinal headache, and an enlarged vision which led the English
to see two, or three, Normans for every one—and to strike at the ones
that were not there—they lost the Battle of Hastings.
The historical facts do not quite fit in with that view. Doubtless
the English and the Norman methods of passing the battle-eve were
different. For one thing, the Norman wolf was posing, until he almost
deceived himself, as the injured party, and one fighting the battle
of religion as well as of personal wrongs; and he acted fully up to
those parts. The English, on the other hand, were elated with their
recent victory in the north, and felt a not unnatural confidence in
their ability to repeat it. Therefore, they went into battle with
less solemnity than the Normans. But we nowhere read that the English
battle-axes were swung with the less terrible effect because of the
revels which may or may not have passed overnight in the English camp,
and nothing seems more certain than that victory only fell to the
Normans because of the mistaken warlike ardour of a portion of the
English army, which broke its ranks in order to pursue a panic-stricken
section of the Norman array, and thus afforded William’s cavalry a
footing on that bitterly contested hill of Senlac.
XLII
The battle began about nine o’clock in the morning, the Norman army
marching from Hastings by the spot where Crowhurst Park is now seen,
to Telham Hill, the “Hetheland” of the chroniclers. Here the Norman
knights put on their armour, and here William made his vow that if
victory were given him he would build a great abbey on the spot where
he saw the emblazoned English banner of the Fighting Man flung proudly
upon the morning breeze. His army then advanced to the attack, the
archers on foot in the front rank, the swordsmen behind them, and in
the rear the cavalry. William himself was armed with an iron mace, the
weapon also carried by his brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.