followed by the singular interlude provided by Taillefer, the Norman
jongleur, or minstrel, who rode forth from the ranks singing songs of
chivalry, and of the knightly doings of Roland and Charlemagne. He had
begged from William the privilege of striking the first blow, but as
he went out into the space between the confronting armies he assumed
first his character of a juggler, throwing his sword into the air, and
then catching it, to the astonishment of the English, who doubtless
wondered what manner of warrior was this. But, ceasing his tricks, he
suddenly rushed upon the English ranks, and piercing one Englishman
with his lance and striking down another with his sword, was thereupon
himself slain. It was the bravest, or, if you will, the most foolhardy,
act of the battle, for he went forth to certain death. But his action
did this much: it heated the blood of both sides, and those who might
have fought at the beginning without the full fury of enthusiasm, now
fell to it in frenzy, fired by his example. It heartened William’s
second line, the infantry, to their heavy task of advancing, under the
showers of English stones and javelins, up the hill to the attempted
destruction of the palisade; but although they strove, the effort was
too great. All who approached within the reach of English arms and
English axes were struck down, almost cleaved asunder, and although
the rear ranks filled the air with _Dieu aide!_ they wavered from that
first onset, the English shouting “Out, out!” as they thrust back every
one from their defences, varying that cry with the pious invocations,
“Holy Rood,” “Holy Cross,” and “God Almighty!”
Wace tells us of those battle-cries in his quaint renderings of the
English the Normans heard:
_Olicrosse_ sovent crioent,
E _Godemite_ reclamoent;
_Olicrosse_ est en engliez
Ke _Sainte Croix_ est en franceiz,
Et _Godemite_ altretant
Com en franceiz _Dex tot poissant_.
Or, translated:
Holy Cross they often cried,
And shouted God Almighty;
Holy Cross is in English
What _Sainte Croix_ is in French,
And God Almighty is, otherwise,
As they say in French, _Dieu tout puissant_.
If the English really did say “’Oly Cross,” it shows us that the letter
“h” was as slighted in the eleventh century as it is in the twentieth.
The Norman infantry had now recoiled, and the turn of the cavalry
was come. The choicest chivalry of Normandy, however, strove in vain
uphill against the English defences, and many a horse and his mail-clad
rider fell beneath the axes. Harold’s choice of a battle-ground and
his defensive tactics were fully justified, and the Battle of Senlac
would have been his but for the fatal impetuosity of a portion of his
less disciplined troops, who, seeing the panic and headlong flight
of the Norman army, broke their ranks in pursuit. The temptation was
great, for everywhere the Normans were in flight, and the awful cry had
been raised among them that William himself was dead. It was only by
removing his helmet and disclosing his face that his men were assured
of his existence. “Madmen!” he cried. “Why flee ye? Death is behind,
victory before you. I live, and by God’s grace I will conquer,” and so
saying he forced those immediately around him back into the fray.
This incident has been carefully pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry, where
we see “the Duke comforting his young soldiers” by disclosing his face,
while his standard-bearer draws attention to him. The impressiveness
of the scene is perhaps a little marred by the grotesque drawing, and
by the extraordinary likeness of “the Duke” to Mr. Arthur Roberts, and
of one of the “young soldiers” to accepted caricatures of Mr. Austen
Chamberlain.
[Illustration: “DUKE WILLIAM COMFORTS HIS YOUNG SOLDIERS.”
_Central incident of the Battle of Hastings. From the Bayeux Tapestry._]
Meanwhile the flying Norman infantry had in other parts of the field
turned upon their pursuers, and here the sword proved the better
weapon, for the rash English were cut to pieces. Then, somewhere about
three o’clock in the afternoon, began the most terrible attack of that
dreadful day, in the desperate charge made by William, his brothers
Odo and Robert, and their attendant knights, against the sturdy group
around Harold and the English standard. William, on horseback, sought
out the English King, and might have met him face to face, had not
the King’s brother, Gurth, flung a spear at him, which, although it
missed the greater mark, brought down his horse. Unlucky, ill-aimed
blow! It brought Gurth and William face to face, afoot, and presently
the English Earl was lying dead from a blow of the Duke’s mace. Near
by, and almost at the same time, fell Harold’s other brother, Leofwin.
The English fortunes were indeed running low, but the battle was not
yet decided. Still that devoted phalanx of axemen hewed down most of
those who approached, and the day was neither lost nor won. It was then
that the ill-judged pursuit made by the English a little earlier bore
bitter fruit—the sorrow of it! William had noted its effect, and now
that his direct attacks were like to fail, he had recourse to the wily
trick of a feigned flight. Accordingly, to his instructions, a wing of
his army turned tail and fled, as though in panic; and immediately,
learning nothing from that earlier disaster, a portion of the English
came down after them. It was the turning-point of the day, for the
ground the English had left was just the one end of the hill where the
rise was appreciably less steep, and more easily to be charged up by
the Norman cavalry. The fight down in the valley between the pretended
fugitives and their pursuers meanwhile went forward with varying
fortunes. The flying Frenchmen turned, as before, but this time the
English seized on an outlying hill, and although they fell, they fell
in company with their foes. In their turn, they inveigled the French
horsemen into charging upon them into an unsuspected ravine, where they
fell in a mass and were despatched to the last man, so that the old
chroniclers tell us, and the Bayeux Tapestry shows, how the hollow was
filled with the dead.
[Illustration: LAST STAND OF THE ENGLISH.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
William and the pick of his army now beset the hill from its western
slope, thus left open by the descent of the pursuing English, and here,
and along the ridge to the very spot where Harold stood, wielding his
axe with the best of them beneath his standard, the fight stubbornly
continued. The autumn day was now fast drawing to its close, and the
battle might have been still undecided that night, had it not been for
an inspiration that seized William. His archers had hitherto not made
any great impression. He now ordered them to shoot their arrows into
the air, so that they might descend with terrific force upon the heads
of the English; and this done, the execution was dreadful. Many were
struck in the eye by the falling shafts, among them Harold, the English
King himself. An arrow pierced his right eye, and as he agonisedly
strove to withdraw it, the shaft broke. Let us not enlarge upon this
dreadful end of the patriot King, who was presently discovered and
slain by the Norman knights as he lay upon the ground at the foot of
his royal banner.
[Illustration: FLIGHT OF THE ENGLISH CHURLS.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
Thus fell Harold, in his prime, for he was but forty-four years of
age. It happened long, long ago; but although much else has turned
to dry-as-dust in that vast interval, and although many historical
figures and the deeds they wrought are mere vacuities, emptinesses, and
parchment-like bogles, the heroic death of Harold in defence of his
country still calls up bitter sorrow in those of us to whom history is
not merely the printed page, or a glass-covered case in a museum.
When Harold fell England fell with him. All who fought with him that
day knew it must be so, yet the fight, although it was by now a
hopeless cause, went on until the evening deepened into night; and
although those of meaner estate may have fled when the fortunes of the
day were obviously lost, those of higher sort plied their axes to the
death. Few of them escaped, or sought to do so. Yet, even as the last
streaks of waning day faded into night the defeated and fleeing English
turned once more upon their foes, and in the marshy hollow in the rear
of the battle-ground, then eloquently called “Malfosse,” slew in great
numbers the Norman horsemen who incautiously pursued them. It was the
last expiring effort of the day, but so sturdy an one that the Normans
were for awhile stricken again with a temporary panic, thinking that
English reinforcements had arrived. But no fresh troops were come to
save that situation; and not even at this last moment had the northern
Earls, Edwin and Morcar, sent aid to redeem their characters. They live
in history in company with Judas and many another perjured traitor. By
their treachery England was lost.
XLIII
The battle was over, after more than nine hours’ continued fighting;
and now William’s tent was pitched upon the spot where the English
standard had been planted. There he supped, and there, amid the
thousands of dead and dying, he slept. On the morrow the mutilated
body of Harold was found; but neither the bribes nor the entreaties
of his aged mother, Gytha, who had now lost all her sons in battle,
could induce William to yield it to her or any other. The perjurer, the
excommunicate, he swore, should not have religious sepulture. Harold’s
body should rest in unhallowed ground, beneath a cairn of stones on
the rocks of Hastings, and should thus in death guard the Saxon shore
he had guarded in life. And so to the shore at Hastings, wrapped in
a purple robe, his body was borne. And truly, no other burial could
be so fitting for the hero whose life was given for his trust. The
Duke of Normandy was no sentimentalist, and to the minds of that age
unconsecrated interment was a thing to be thought of only with a
shudder; but he was chivalrously poetic here, without a suspicion of it
himself, for no hero was ever laid in more fitting place than Harold,
by the salt selvedge of the coast he had sworn to protect, and did
protect to his last moment: and as for consecration—why, there be those
who dare to think that the laying there of this man’s body, who shed
his life-blood for the land that gave him birth, was itself hallowing
and consecration transcendent for that rocky marge.
But the epic fitness of Harold’s resting-place was not perceived by
that age, or was thought a thing of lesser moment than that he should
be accorded religious burial; and thus it happened that, when the fury
of the Conqueror’s first rage had died down, permission was accorded
for Harold’s body to be translated to Waltham Abbey, the great minster
himself had founded in Essex. The last days of the terrible year of
1066 were drawing in when that re-interment took place, and Sussex lost
the bones of her patriot.
This is pre-eminently the era of national memorials, when heroes of
to-day and of yesterday and other personages whom we are not all agreed
to call heroes are honoured in effigies of bronze. ’Tis but yester-year
since Alfred the Great was duly, and properly, commemorated in this
shape, in his city of Winchester, and a statue of William of Orange—our
William the Third—was erected, not so long since, on the spot where he
landed, at Brixham, in Tor Bay; but Harold yet awaits his turn. For the
why of it, I know not; unless indeed it be that we English are ever a
thought too practical, and honour, not so much endeavour, as success.
Alfred was successful; Harold in the end was crushed, and his England
broken. Yet it was not himself was lacking; it was his rash irregulars,
who, by their headlong zeal, lost him the day. He strove his utmost,
and that utmost was, beyond rivalry, noble.
To say, “He did his best,” is the noblest epitaph we can give any man,
and none should grudge Harold posthumous honour. We “Englishmen,” as
we may still call ourselves, are not yet so indisputably the masters
of the world that we can afford to disregard our national heroes,
and Harold’s statue, of appropriate heroic size, surely should stand
prominently over Hastings, to show newer generations how we can honour
even endeavour that has won to no position, and that we can remember
even our defeated heroes.
The Conqueror, as we must call him, despite his studied avoidance of
that title, inimical to his “legal” claim, fully redeemed his vow to
build a great abbey upon the field of battle. He built the Abbey,
which he dedicated to St. Martin of the Place of Battle, on the place
where so many had been slain to satisfy his ambition, rearing the High
Altar, the holiest spot, on the exact position where Harold had fallen.
William Faber, that _Fabricius_, or smith, turned monk, who was present
at the great battle, and had been at the Duke’s side when he vowed the
Abbey here, would, when it came to the actual building of it, have
chosen another site; for here, he urged, on the hill-top, water was
lacking. Let him and his brethren from the Abbey of Marmoutiers build
in the valley, where the springs were never dry. But this suggestion
outraged the Conqueror’s sense of the dramatic fitness of things,
which, as we have already seen in his selection of Harold’s seashore
resting-place, was a very keen sense indeed. No: he would build upon
the actual field of battle, or not at all; and if the Almighty spared
his life, wine should be more plentiful in that Abbey than water
elsewhere.
Battle Abbey very soon began to rise on that field of blood. The
King of England, as he was now become, spent money freely on it
from his treasury; ship-loads of the fine building-stone of Caen
came continually across Channel from Normandy, until, by one of
those miraculous dreams dreamt at need in those times, a bed of
stone was discovered, and a quarry opened, in the neighbourhood. The
rising Abbey was richly endowed with manors far and near, and was
made the centre of a three miles’ circuit exempted from all other
jurisdictions, ecclesiastical or civil. Its abbots, moreover, were
mitred and seated in the councils of the realm, and beside holding the
privilege of sanctuary, theirs were the rights of free warren, inquest,
and treasure-trove. Were they merciful men and pitiful, then those
dispositions could be humoured to the full, for they were given the
prerogative of pardoning any criminal they met on his way to execution:
a prerogative that meant much in those days, when execution was done
upon criminals for a large variety of offences.
More interesting than all others among William’s gifts to the Abbey
were his sword and his coronation robes, which, stripped of their gold
and silver chains and amulets in the reign of Rufus, for centuries
remained objects of the greatest curiosity. But the Abbey was long
a-building, and twenty-eight years had flown since the battle and
William himself had been seven years in his grave, before it was
completed and finally consecrated.
XLIV
And then it stood in this noble situation for well over four hundred
and fifty years, growing in architectural splendour and worldly wealth,
but decaying in religious life and morals, in common with all other
monasteries. Its income was equal to £10,000 per annum of our money:
the Abbot entertained guests of the noblest, and the brethren’s
indiscriminate charity made Battle a centre for all the “mighty
beggaris, sturdye vagrantes, idle mychers, and foule cozeners” in
Sussex. It was rotten-ripe and full fit to be plucked when Henry the
Eighth ended the monasteries and when his Commissioners appeared before
its doors on May 27th, 1538.
To sentimentalise over the suppression of places like Battle Abbey
would be excusable in the ignorant; in those fully informed it would
be criminal. It cannot be too often repeated that the work undertaken
by Henry the Eighth was no mere capricious act of tyranny, was no
unwarrantable or unprovoked attack upon the religious houses. Wyclif
had long before, at the close of the fourteenth century, declared that
the rotting trunk of the monastic establishments cumbered the ground.
In 1414 over one hundred alien priories were suppressed. In 1489 Pope
Innocent the Eighth issued to the Archbishop of Canterbury a commission
for a general investigation. Parliament itself had petitioned Henry
the Fourth for seizure of the possessions they administered so ill.
Wolsey had from within the Church seen the decadence of the Abbeys and
Priories, and himself suppressed a number of the smaller houses and
devoted their property to the better use of education.
It is a cloud of witness to the general and cumulative disgust of the
times with the enclosed life.
The Commissioners came to Battle, dressed fantastically in the plunder
of other religious houses they had ransacked on their way, “decked in
the spoils of the desecrated chapels, with copes for doublets, tunics
for saddle-cloths, and the silver relic-cases hammered into sheaths
for their daggers.” They, in short, committed on their side almost as
many excesses as the foul-living, blasphemous monastic brethren had on
theirs; but they had this excuse: that if they indeed made a mockery of
religion, it was the monks themselves first showed them the way of it.
The report of Dr. Layton, Chief Commissioner, described the conduct of
Battle as “the worst that ever I see in all other places, whereat I see
specially the blake sort of dyvellyshe monks.” Their doings, however,
had not been so bad as those of establishments subsequently visited,
whose sins will scarce bear mention.
But the monks of Battle had always been prepared to go considerable
lengths for money. In the monastery was hung the famous “Roll of
Battle Abbey,” purporting to be the roll-call of the Norman knights
on the morning of the Battle of Hastings, to which they answered
“Here,” or “Ici,” or “Adsum,” as might be. This historical parchment
is reported to have been removed to Cowdray, where it perished in the
fire of 1793, but it had, centuries before, been so tampered with by
the monks that all its value had been destroyed. It early became a
foible among noble or wealthy families to declare that their ancestors
“came over with the Conqueror,” and Battle Abbey was always ready to
oblige a liberal patron by adding his name to the Roll. In the words
of Dugdale: “Such hath been the subtility of some Monks of old, that,
finding it acceptable unto most to be reputed descendants to those
who were companions with Duke William in that memorable Expedition
whereby he became Conqueror of this Realm, as that, to gratify them
(but not without their own advantage) they inserted their Names into
this antient Catalogue”; and Camden repeats the charge. “Whosoever,” he
says, “considers well shall find them always to be forged, and those
names inserted which were never mentioned in that authenticated record.”
On the surrender of Battle Abbey, it and its lands were granted by the
King to Sir Anthony Browne, in 1538. The knight did not come into his
property with the good will of the neighbourhood, which, pauperised by
and dependent on the monks, with anger saw them thrust forth into the
world, and loved to tell how the last of the brethren to issue from the
gate turned and cursed him with the doom of the sacrilegious. “By fire
and water,” he declared, his line should end. We are not told whether
Sir Anthony Browne quailed—as on the stage he certainly would have
done—or if he merely laughed; but there can be no doubt that the people
of Battle awaited the issue with great interest, and that, when nothing
happened, they were disappointed. Instead of Sir Anthony Browne or any
of his family being cut off untimely, they flourished exceedingly, and
his son became a peer, under the title of Viscount Montagu.
The estates of Battle passed from the family in the time of the sixth
Viscount, who in 1719 sold them to Sir Thomas Webster, the first of a
long line of Baronets who (with an interval from 1857 to 1901) have
held them ever since. In all that time the curse slept, and possibly
when the sixth Viscount Montagu parted with Battle and retired wholly
to his great mansion and beautiful park of Cowdray, he thought the
spell had been effectually broken by this severance.
But the long-dormant curse woke up and worked itself out in 1793,
when the beautiful mansion of Cowdray was destroyed by fire. In the
following month the eighth Lord Montagu, while yet ignorant of this
disaster, met his death by drowning in the Falls of Lauffen, near
Schaffhausen, when attempting to shoot the rapids in a boat. He was but
twenty-four years of age.
The next heir to the estates of Cowdray, the ninth and last Viscount,
was a Roman Catholic priest, who died childless, in 1797, in spite of
the fact that he was dispensed from his vows in order that he might
marry and continue the line. The property was then inherited by his
sister, Mrs. Stephen Poyntz, whose two sons were shortly afterwards
drowned at Bognor. Her husband then sold Cowdray.
All this proves how very careful it behoves those to be who launch
curses on roving commissions. Even the Websters seem to have shared
to some degree in this malediction, for the fourth Baronet committed
suicide, June 3rd, 1800, by shooting himself with a pistol at his
London house in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square. He had been
embarrassed by heavy losses at cards. This eccentric and unfortunate
man, Sir Godfrey Webster, married Elizabeth Vassall, a great Jamaican
heiress, who in 1795, at Florence, while her husband was away in
England on business, left him and her two children for the third Lord
Holland. Lord Stavordale, in his memoir, skates cautiously over the
thin ice of this affair. He says the meeting of that guilty pair “was
destined to alter the whole course of their lives. They became deeply
attached to one another, and after many months spent in various parts
of the Continent, returned to England in 1796.”
Sir Godfrey obtained a divorce in July, 1797, and two days later Lord
Holland married the lady, known to diarists and writers of memoirs
as “the celebrated Lady Holland.” Had she been less rich she would
doubtless have been merely “the notorious.” Her entertainments and her
biting wit (she was a kind of female Douglas Jerrold) absolved her
from the ostracism that would have been the lot of one less wealthy,
less acid, and less hospitable. She lived a long life in the centre of
political and social functions, and died in 1845.
This Sir Godfrey Webster is “the very worthy Baronet” referred to
by “Thomas Ingoldsby” in the preface to the second edition of the
“Ingoldsby Legends” as “protesting against a defamatory placard at a
general election”:
Who steals my purse steals stuff!—
’Twas mine—’tisn’t his—nor nobody else’s!
But he who runs away with my GOOD NAME,
Robs me of what does not do him any good,
And makes me deuced poor:
a novel reading of Iago’s passionate declaration, _Othello_, Act iii.,
Scene 3:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he, that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that, which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
His also was the reading:
Pray, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty cock-horses?—
a new version of Bolingbroke’s speech in _Richard the Second_:
Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
[Illustration: A DESCENDANT OF THE SAXON CHURLS.]
Sir Godfrey Webster, sixth Baronet, in 1857 sold Battle Abbey to Lord
Harry Vane, afterwards Duke of Cleveland, chiefly because of the
extraordinary situation brought about by there being at that time
no fewer than five dowager Lady Websters drawing jointures from the
already impoverished property. It had long been a cherished dream of
the Websters to repurchase their old home, and this was realised
in 1901 by Sir Augustus Webster, the present and eighth Baronet, on
the death of the Duchess of Cleveland. But although he effected that
aim, he could not maintain the Abbey itself, and accordingly let it
to Mr. Grace, the wealthy American who resides there now and lords it
over this historic spot and this beautiful park occupied by English
gentlemen when the place whence he came was the primeval forest roamed
by the North American redskin. It is a picturesque example of the newer
conquering of England by the dollar, over eight hundred years after
the famous battle that won it with the sword.
It is in a remote and picturesque corner of the park, in Powder
Mill House, that Sir Augustus Webster resides; in a house which, as
indicated by its name, was one of those gunpowder factories whose
numerous accidents, according to Horsfield, historian of Sussex, “it
would be harrowing to relate and uncharitable to publish.”