Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Hastings

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

On 14 October 1066, the armies of William, the Duke of Normandy, and the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson clashed near Hastings in one of the most famous battles in history and one that would decide the fate of the English throne. We all know the outcome but how and why did the battle take place? To answer this question Dan returns with another explainer episode to put the battle in its proper context and explain how William was able to defeat Harold on that bloody day in 1066 to become King. You'll also hear clips from the archive as Historian Marc Morris and Professor Virginia Davis help set the scene for one of the most dramatic events in English history.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. You can run, but you can't hide from 1066. The most famous date in English history. Exercises a strangely enduring grasp over people. We are fascinated by it. Just the other day I was talking to a very brilliant historian. She is writing a history of England, and guess when she is starting it? 1066. It's like an immovable

landmark. It's like the curtain coming down on one act of history and another act beginning. Whether it deserves that reputation or not, well, that's perhaps partly what this podcast is about. We're going to talk about the Battle of Hastings, the climactic battle in that year marked by so many battles and raids and invasions. This is the battle in October 1066 that saw the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons, the English army, struggle for mastery of this sceptered isle. This is an episode I first broadcast in October 2021. It's an explainer I did about the battle on the anniversary of the battle, and we got interviews with brilliant historians, Mark Morris and Virginia Davis. You're going to be hearing from them as well.

Hastings is always very special for me. I've been there so many times, personally and professionally. It was the site of one of the first documentaries I ever made for the BBC. And one of the first documentaries I ever made for History Hit as well. I've been to that battle with my dad to talk about history, what it meant for our country. And now I've been to that battle with my dad to talk about history, what it meant for our country,

and now I've taken my kids too. So enjoy this podcast unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. 1066 was a year in which history seemed to move at a gallop. There was no glacial change, no subtle shifts. This was a year that saw three men crowned King of England. It saw two mighty battles and other skirmishes as well. It saw at least three pretenders to the English throne slug it out on English soil. And it was a year that's come to represent a

gigantic change, a huge moment of discontinuity in English and British history. It's rightly remembered as one of the most infamous or famous years in British history, 1066. Before we move on to the kind of day-by-day events of that year, let me step back a bit and give you a bit of the context here. And you'll hear wonderful podcasts on this feed with people like Mark Morris, Dan Jones, who can give you a sense of the medieval world. But for what it's worth, this is what I think about the background 1066. It was an era, I think I say this in most of my explains, which is rather worrying, but it's an era in which violence was the norm, in which war was common, particularly war around succession. I'll come to that in a sec. The British Isles,

the North Atlantic Archipelago, call it what you will, was a patchwork of competing groups in that period. There were kingdoms and statelets and almost tribal areas right across the Isles from Donegal to Kent. England itself was a relatively big unit, taking up most of the southern part of Britain. It had been united really for only a couple of generations, since the conquests of Athelstan or his little brother Edmund. Do you know what? Who was the first English king? It seems like an obvious question. It's not a hill I'm prepared to die on, okay? Was it Athelstan? Was it Edmund? Was it even Edgother Peaceful? I don't know, okay? But it was one of them, and it edmund was it even edgar the peaceful i don't know okay but it's one of them and it was only a couple of generations before 1066 then north of

that you've got alba scotland it's in the 11th century absorbing the british kingdom or you might more technically accurately maybe the welsh kingdom of strathclyde that's the whole story there a piece of the western part of Britain not yet conquered by English-speaking Anglo-Saxons or Germanic settlers from the continent. You've got Orkney, Shetland, Hebrides, islands like Mull, Arran, Skye, the Mull of Kintyre, where my mum's family are from. They were Viking, effectively. They were ruled by the Northmen. And Ireland and Wales, I mean, where do we even start? They were a tapestry, a mosaic of competing kingdoms there. And all that meant that violence in the pursuit of wealth,

of power, was the norm. It was celebrated. It was seen as the natural order of things. This feels disturbingly similar to my interactions for the First and Second World War explainers. And I think we might be hitting on something here, folks. We've got a problem with violence in our species. Anyway, succession in particular was a terrible point of danger. I was really struck reading Mark Morris's book on early English history. On the very, very rare occasions on which a stable succession was carried out, on which a dynastic line could be set up in this period, not just in England, but in Normandy, as we'll hear too across the channel. Power was focused in and exercised by an individual,

the body of a king. There were no capital cities in this period. There wasn't really a state like we get in Whitehall Day or in Washington DC, because the centre of the kingdom was where the king laid his head that night. Continuity of government was dependent on the heartbeat of a king. And the minute that heartbeat stopped, there was absolutely no telling what would happen. Internally, with division or competition among magnates for warlords to succeed him, but also externally, invasion. It feels to me this period particularly unstable, if you like, because unlike in some culturism periods where there is that importance of the body of the monarch, this period doesn't seem to necessarily have the unswerving loyalty

of subjects to that family's bloodline. So in other periods, other dynasties, for example, I mean the Plantagenet family, don't get me wrong, they had their ups and downs, but at times the old king would die and the young king would step into those shoes. In the 11th century, it doesn't feel to me like those families commanded the loyalty. There was a legitimacy in that kind of hereditary transition that you get in other periods. So although the son would have the best claim on his father's throne, he would almost certainly have to see off competitors. There would almost certainly be violence, competition around that moment of succession. And therefore nearly every generation had to establish themselves. It's almost like a blood claim, a hereditary claim

in this period was necessary, but not entirely sufficient to taking over from the previous generation. I mean, check this out. It was a violent business in the early Middle Ages. King Edmund of England, killed. His son, Edwig, a total wrong-un. The country was effectively partitioned between him and his brother, Edgar. Edgar ruled very successfully, but Edgar's son, Edward, was killed by factions within the Anglo-Saxon state. Edward was killed in 978. Let's be honest, that's where the rot set in, because guess who came to the throne? Æthelred. Æthelred the Unready. His half-brother had been murdered, probably not his direct doing. A great schism, therefore, existed within the English state. The Vikings returned.

This wasn't terrific timing, lads, because there was a great onslaught of the Norsemen, onslaught of the Vikings at the end of the 10th century, into the 11th. Æthelred was not up to it, chased off the throne. England was conquered briefly, swain forkbid, etc. Æthelred's son, Edmund Ironside, fought back. He was wounded in battle, may have died those wounds, may have been killed on the toilet, we don't know. Edmund's sons were exiled, they're lucky to escape being murdered. Edmund Ironside's younger brother was murdered. You get the vibe. This is not a time when the automatic transition

from father to son or from parent to child is as assured as it is in other periods. So nearly every succession was contested and few more famously than the one in 1066. Because in 1066, there wasn't even a son to take the throne, and it was open season. It began in the depths of winter. He had with the confessor, the old king. He'd reigned for 24 years. He'd come to the throne as a result of a compromise hammered out between the Danish conquerors of England and the indigenous elite. He was of the

line of Alfred. He was of the line of Wessex's royal family. So he'd re-established a kind of equilibrium, but that disguised fishers within England. And one of those fishers was represented in the person of one of his worst enemies and also his father-in-law, Godwin, Earl of Wessex, an Anglo-Saxon who had switched sides and become a key figure in the Danish administration of England under the rules of Cnut and his sons. He had sought to maintain his power after Edward the Confessor had come to the throne and forced Edward to marry his daughter. Now Edward had not produced any children with that daughter. Arguably they'd never had sex, he'd abstained. As a final act of defiance to his father-. Arguably, they'd never had sex. He'd abstained.

As a final act of defiance to his father-in-law, he'd perhaps abstained from having sex with his wife. And so no children. So England had a succession problem. Edward the Confessor breathed his last on the 5th of January 1066. And the next 12 months, folks, the next 12 months makes Game of Thrones like a game of patty cake. Let me tell you, who's going to rule England?

There is a blood relative. He's a child. And when there's a child on the throne, the nation is in danger. A 13-year-old called Edgar the Ethling. He's the last of the line of Alfred. He's of the royal line of Wessex. He is a, oh God, I don't know what relative he is to be able to confess. I mean, he's a cousin, basically. He has got the blood of Alfred in his veins, but he's young. And England was a rich country that needed a warrior to defend it. So went the thinking of Harold, the local strongman, Edward's brother-in-law, the son of Godwin, Harold Godwinson. As I mentioned, his father Godwin had switched times a few times in the 11th century. In fact, he switched more times than Talleyrand, Napoleon's famous foreign minister. Anyway, so Harold was born from a Danish wife.

So there you go, Harold Godwinson, English champion, Danish mother. So when old Godwin had died in 1053, the Godwins had had the earldom of Essex, which Harold inherited. But by the mid-1060s, they have taken over. They've got a bevy of earldoms, all three Godwin brothers. There are some other Godwin brothers who've been exiled or imprisoned or just absolute troublemakers, dead. They have an earldom each, these three. They have a huge gang of supporters and friends they've put in position at the top of a huge pyramid of patronage. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a supporter. The Archbishop of York is a Gobinson man. The newly widowed queen, as you'll remember, Edward the Confessor's queen, is Harold's sister. So when Harold claimed that Edward the Confessor had awoken from his coma in order to anoint him

as his successor, there's not many people in the kingdom who are going to disagree with that. So Harold is the homegrown choice for the kingdom, for the crown of England. So Harold is the homegrown choice for the kingdom, for the crown of England. There were other claimants. There was one particular claimant who I think, deep down, Edward the Confessor probably did prefer. I think he probably had promised him the throne. I say seemed because, disclaimer alert, folks, we've got very, very fragmentary evidence for this.

So if I'm telling a good yarn here, remember that we cannot be certain about most of this. So always bear that in mind as I'm talking. But it does seem perfectly possible that Edward promised the throne to someone else. In 1051, Edward had had a falling out with his fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law. He'd sort of found his backbone briefly, and he managed to expel the Godwin family. And he'd put his wife into a nunnery. And in that time, critically, he'd invited Duke William of Normandy to come to England. And the evidence for that is pretty solid. It's mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and no one actually denies this happens. Norman sources subsequently suggest that in that visit in 1051,

Edward, who grew up in Normandy, he was an exile, he grew up in Normandy, his mother was Norman, he was a big fan of Normandy. It does seem that Edward may have promised the throne to William of Normandy. Let's hear from Professor Virginia Davis, brilliant historian, explaining what the Normans were there to claim. Post 1066 Norman writings claim that William had been promised the throne by Edward the Confessor. These pro-Norman chroniclers argued that William's invasion promised the throne by Edward the Confessor. These pro-Norman chroniclers argued that William's invasion was a legitimate one and that Harold Godwinson had usurped the throne and therefore William was forced to invade. Edward was fond of William because he spent his

formative years in Normandy. His mum had been William the Conqueror's grandpa's sister, so his mum was William the Conqueror's great-aunt, so he was a cousin of William. And who are these Normans? Well, the Normans are from the root word Norsemen. They were basically Vikings. They'd settled in the area of Neustria, I don't know how to pronounce that, in France, now Normandy. It was part of Frankia. It was settled by the Scandinavians from the late 9th, early 10th centuries. The first one was called Rollo. He calls his son William, and they then slowly become Francified. They adopt Christianity, but they don't seem to lose that certain warlike nature the Vikings are infamous for. They build castles, they embrace kind of European mainland architecture, castles, monastic building. They start fighting on horseback.

They do adapt quite well to Frankish customs. They've got the best series of names in the history of the world, so it means run through those. You've got William Longsword, whose son was Richard the Fearless, whose son was Richard the Good, who was father of Robert the Magnificent, who was father of William, soon to be the Conqueror. So, not a family you want to mess with.

And that's exactly what Harold Godforson chose to do. He had himself crowned within days of Edward the Confessor dying, possibly on the same day that Edward the Confessor was buried in Westminster Abbey, his new Westminster Abbey, Harold had himself crowned King of England. When news reached Normandy, William, Duke of Normandy, goes bonkers. The Normans subsequently claimed that Harold had visited Normandy. It's very unclear why. He'd visited Normandy and he'd sworn an oath to uphold William's claim to the throne on holy relics, on bits of bone associated with saints. This is a big deal. So he's an oath breaker,

which in the 11th century is really bad. The Norm deal. So he's an oath-breaker, which in the 11th century is really bad. The Normans claim that Harold's an oath-breaker. William of Normandy sends a message to the Pope. The Pope agrees this can be a holy crusade against an oath-breaker, which has all kinds of advantages. It means that it's backed by the Catholic Church. It meant that if they died, they'd get the fast track into heaven. It meant that it was divinely ordained. Always good to have God on your side. William then sent out word across Western Europe, particularly neighbouring parts of Northern France, that he was going to invade. He asked for mercenaries, asked for volunteers. This would be an expedition on which there would be rich pickings. The wealth

of England was famous. And William made it clear there'd be rewards for those who joined him under the papal banner to defeat the oath-breaking Harold and take back what was justly his. In England Harold was well aware that he would have to fight William and he gathered an army, a great army, to spend the summer in the south of England in and around the Solent, possibly on the Isle of Wight nearby, the closest point in England to Normandy, to wait for William's arrival. Things were given a particularly dramatic feel that year by a neatly timed arrival of Halley's Comet, blazed in the skies above, giving those of a superstitious bent rather nervous feeling. Would it mean the death of kings? Well, yes it would. So whilst William is assembling volunteers from as far away

as Sicily for his invasion force, Harold is calling out the third. He's calling out the militia, if you like, of England. He's got a corps in his army of so-called housecarls. These are full-time professional troops, some of the most highly trained, effective warriors in Europe at the time. But he's got a huge pool of part-time soldiers as well. Each earldom was divided into shires and each shire had to produce a levy of men known as the third. A small group of farms, maybe one hamlet, would have to produce one fighting man with the right equipment, the right supplies

to spend two months a year at war in the service of his king. So Harold's gathered, probably very near where I'm recording this now on the south coast of England, looking out over the Solent. Perhaps, dare very near where I'm recording this now, on the south coast of England, looking out over the Solent. Perhaps, dare I dream, even on this exact spot, Harold could have spent the summer looking out over the empty sea. And the problem was, by the end of the summer, the harvest had to be collected. Food supplies had run out. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the army had to disband. Food had run out out and no one could keep them there. Here's the very

brilliant Mark Morris telling us what happened next. We're told by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, very accurate information from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that on the 8th of September, Harold stands down his army and because he can't keep them there any longer, they'd run out of material, they'd run out of foodstuffs. So Harold is forced to disband. And sure enough, about four or five days later, as far as we can determine, the Norman fleet does set sail. William sets sail around about the 12th or 13th of September from the place he'd mustered his fleet, which is the mouth of the River Deves in Normandy. But what happens then is William sets out in terrible conditions. He sets out in less than ideal conditions and is blown, his whole fleet, so carefully prepared for months

and months and months, his whole fleet is blown not to England, but eastwards along the coast of northern France to a neighbouring province, Pontieu, to a town called Saint-Valéry. So William is clearly desperate to get going. He sees the fact that Harold has disbanded as a great opportunity, but the weather is still against him. And he ends up at Saint-Valéry and he spends another fortnight there, we're told, looking at the weathercock of Saint. Valerie Church, praying every day for the wind to change and for the rain to stop, and even going to the extent of exhuming the body of St. Valerie himself and parading it round the Norman camp to obtain prayers from the whole of the Norman army, because they need God on their side. However you regard it, these aren't cynical

moves. This is a thousand years ago. And the person who decides battles at the end of the day is God. So you need to have God on your side. And they must think all this time after weeks and weeks of rain and contrary winds, God is against us. This isn't going to work. And then what happens on 27th or 28th of September is finally the expected wind blows. The wind changes direction. So William is struggling to cross the channel. And I always thought as a kid, this was ridiculous. I mean, how hard can it be to get across the channel? Let me tell you something. This summer, the weather was appalling here in England. If you'd had a fleet of ships on the north coast of France, you tried to get across to England, you wouldn't be able to do it. You wouldn't be able to do it

for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. And interestingly, guess what happened in mid-September? Quite nice weather. Little window to nip across to a bit of invading, but we'll come to that. So a day or two after Harold's disbanded his army, he thinks it might be over for the year. He gets back to London and there is a thunderbolt. A thunderbolt. Harold discovers that England has been invaded, but not in the south, not by William of Normandy, but in the north. And in charge, at the head of this army landing in the northeast of his kingdom, is one of the greatest warriors of the Middle Ages, a gigantic Viking called Harold Hardrada. And by his side, perhaps even more strangely, is Harold's brother, Tostig Godwinson. Here's Mark Morris to tell us more. Tostig Godwinson, Harold Godwinson's troublesome younger brother. Throughout their career,

really throughout the 1050s and early 1060s, Harold and Tostig had collaborated very well. They'd invaded Wales together successfully in the 1060s. But Tostig had been made, in 1055, he had been made Earl of Northumbria. So Earl of everything, not the modern county of Northumbria, but a whole huge swathe of land, everything north of the River Humber up as far as the Scottish border. He's made Earl of that area and contrives very quickly to alienate Northumbrian society. So there's a big rebellion against him in 1064 and Harold and Tostig fall out because Harold refuses to back Tostig against the Northumbrian rebels.

And Tostig is sent into exile. So from that point, Harold and Tostig are enemies. And it's not entirely clear what happens with Tostig because we only know the story from much later legends, either 12th century chronicles or even 13th century Norse sagas. But it's clear Tostig goes walkabout around the courts of northern France, possibly, but certainly Scandinavia, looking for military support. Certainly to topple Harald, I don't think Tostig is aiming at the crown himself. I think he's more likely aiming at toppling his brother, so it's a revenger's strategy, and also restoring his own power. So, you know, a new candidate, Harold Hardrada, is the one he ends up persuading to have a punt. Someone he can invade with and be restored to his earldom. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the Battle of Hastings.

More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans,

kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit

wherever you get your podcasts. so harold has been betrayed in the most brutal way imaginable by his big brother it's all a bit godfather here folks but before we see how harold responds to this let's talk about harold hardrada let's talk about his enemy because. Let's talk about his enemy, because he is a figure that I've been obsessed with for years. Harold Hardrada, which roughly translates as a hard ruler, severe, resolute. I think resolute might be a bit of a euphemism there, but you get the sense of it. He's a gigantic super Viking, a vague distant relative to the King of Norway. He was an adventurer from his earliest days. He was chased into exile.

He headed east on the arteries of the Viking world of Eurasia that Kat Jarman has spoken so beautifully about in this podcast. Please go and listen to that one. He turns up with the Kievan Rus, the Rus that gives the name eventually to Russians. The Rus, which may mean sort of rower. These Vikings, these Scandinavians are pushing down into the great rivers of Russia.

And he meets Yaroslav the Wise. He was wise, old Yaroslav, indeed, because he made Harald Hardrada immediately commander of his forces. Took one look at the kid and went, right, you can leave my army. And then he fights everyone, folks, on behalf of Yaroslav the Wise. The Poles, the steppe nomads, the Byzantines, the Estonians. I mean, there is no one who Harald Hardrada doesn't fight. He heads south along those rivers. He actually nomads, the Byzantines, the Estonians. I mean, there is no one who Harold Hildred doesn't fight. He heads south along those rivers.

He actually signs up with the Byzantines in their Varangian Guard. Now, the Varangian Guard sounds like something out of Game of Thrones, but it's much cooler than that because it actually existed. It was a sort of bodyguard, a kind of praetorian guard, I suppose. You might say around the emperor, an elite body of troops who were drawn from the north and northwest of Europe. So lots of Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Northmen. It was seen that therefore they'd be outside the overlapping political, national, regional loyalties or competition within the Byzantine Empire. So they'd be able to quell dissent, put down rebellions without shedding a tear. And that's exactly what they did.

Predictably enough, they also played a role in court intrigue, the palace politics, to the point at which it seems like they would install candidates on the throne of Byzantium itself. In fact, Harold Hadrad may indeed have had a hand in the succession of the Byzantine Empire. But he ended up fighting Arabs. We think he journeyed as far as Iraq and Syria. He went to Italy, Bulgaria, became known apparently as the Bulgar burner in Bulgaria. He may have taken part in one particular palace coup where he blinded an emperor and put another candidate on the throne, all of which means he became fabulously wealthy. Amazingly, and somewhat predictably, once he arrived back at Yaroslav the Wise's court, he then attacked the Byzantines straight away, apparently, because of course,

by that stage, he knew everything about them. Anyway, he returned north through Kiev. He married a princess, and with his vast wealth, he headed home to claim the throne of Norway. You see, deep down, all he wanted all that time was to be back in his native Norway and be a claimed king. Unsurprisingly, he did so. He arrived back in Norway and became king. I mean, you don't want to get that message that Hardrada's back from the east. He defeated the Danes several times in battle, never managed to unify Denmark and Norway, but defeated the Danes quite often, helped forge modern Norway, explored the Arctic. I mean, this guy's absolutely extraordinary. One historian has a great

quote about him, which I thought was just one of the most remarkably euphemistic things I've ever read in my life. He said, his personal morality appears not to have matched the Christian ideal. Do you think so? Anyway, this is the guy who just crunched his keel into the gravel of Yorkshire. He lands in his ship, called Serpent, naturally. He unfurls his standard, known as the Land Waster, and, well, he got to business. He may have had around 300 longships, perhaps 12,000, 15,000 men, that kind of thing. Tostig has got some troops, Harold's brother, but what Tostig really brings is intelligence and local connections, much more than manpower. Tostig and Hardrada sail up the river Ouse towards the city of York.

If I've said it on this podcast one time, I've said it a hundred times. Rivers, folks, rivers. That is until the steam engine, boats, rivers, see, that's how people transported army goods, trade themselves around Europe. The Norsemen penetrated the isles via the rivers. They were like arteries. And Norsemen were like, I don't know, red blood cells or something. Anyway, they penetrated up the river to York, and then they fought a very remarkable battle just outside York called the Battle of Fulford against the Northern Earls who'd replaced Tostig, Edwin Morcar. It's a complicated battle. It's one that features in my TV show on History Hit TV that I made two years ago on 1066, going through the excellent Chas Jones,

who's transformed the archaeology of the battlefield of Fulford. He's discovered there what seems to be one of the few sites in Europe where they found a series of artisanal smelting sites established after the battle. So the idea is there's all this arms, armour, broken weapons lying around the battlefield, and immediately blacksmiths have come in, they're smelting sites established after the battle. So the idea is all this arms, armour, broken weapons lying around the battlefield and immediately blacksmiths have come in, they're smelting, they're recycling, they're using that metal, creating, fixing and making new. And what seemed to have happened at that battle is that the Norwegians used the mobility given

by the river, outflanked the English and there was a slaughter. York surrendered to the Norsemen hours after and it was then arranged that hostages would be brought to the Norwegian army at a place called Stamford Bridge which is 10 miles east of York as a sign of loyalty and submission. So Harold Aldrada returned to his ships, returned to his camp, and made his plans to meet these hostages at Stamford Bridge a few days later. Harold of England made one of the boldest moves in English military history while this fighting was going on at York. As soon as he heard the news of Hardrada's landing, he gathered his professional troops around him, sent messengers to summon northern counties to gather there, third, south of York, and then made the journey, on horseback we think, 185 miles in just four days.

It was a lightning march. This was characteristic of Harold, we think. He was a warrior. He'd established himself, particularly in war against the Welsh. He'd subdued several Welsh leaders. He knew his way around the battlefield. in war against the Welsh, he'd subdued several Welsh leaders. He knew his way around the battlefield and he surmised the quickest way to deal with this new Viking invasion would be to march as fast as he could, as quickly as he could, and snuff it out. In the eyes of Nathan Bedford

Forrest, the legendary Confederate cavalry commander in the American Civil War, his idea was clearly to get there first with the most. Get up into Harold Hardrada's face before Harold Hardrada was prepared with a big enough force to inflict decisive defeat upon him. So it's extraordinary four days force march he gets from London to York. He marches through the city of York, hears that there's going to be a meeting at Stamford Bridge and continues marching towards Stamford Bridge. Harold Hardrada was overconfident. He and his troops advanced up from their camp towards Stamford Bridge. Many of them left their armour behind. It was a sweltering hot day. He only took

perhaps a third of his army with him. They left behind shields, the bulky equipment that would be a pain when you're marching. And he left the rest of his force behind by his ships in Rickle, which is sort of halfway up the U's between York and where it meets the mighty Trent River a bit further south. The Viking sagas tell us that when Harold Havrata reached Stamford Bridge, he saw advancing from the west a force clad in armour, off which the sun sparkled like the glint of sunshine on broken ice. He realised that he'd been caught. This was the English army under his rival King Harold, and he was at a great disadvantage. He was outnumbered, he was ill-equipped, and he was taken completely by surprise. Sanford Bridge is a bridge over the

Derwent River, and the Viking army was split on both sides. The English charged in and massacred troops on one side. The great story goes that one berserk Viking, an enormous Viking warrior, held the bridge himself, held off the English army single-handedly, a great axe-wielding warrior, killing something like 40 Englishmen before an Anglo-Saxon got in a barrel, went under the bridge and stabbed up into his unprotected groin through the slats of the bridge. It's a great story and it might just be true. In the second phase of the battle, as the English rushed across the river and threw themselves at the Viking army, Harald Hardrada was himself killed, possibly taking an arrow to the throat, and Tostig,

Harald's brother, was killed as well. The victory was so decisive that Hardrada's 16-year-old son, Olaf, who'd remained with the ships, returned with just 24 of the 300 ships with which they'd arrived in Britain just a week or two earlier. It was a stunning achievement, particularly given the recent history of the Viking invasion and occupation of England. This was a very different result, a decisive defeat. The last major battle fought on English soil against the Northmen, in many ways the end of the Viking era in England. At this point, Harold, King of England, had won a victory to rank him alongside the greatest of English kings. The battle being won, the dragon having been slain,

he disbands his army for a second time. So all the call-up troops are sent home. Well done, mission accomplished. And then, about a week later, probably around the first few days of October, I think, again, it's reasonable to assume Harold is still in Yorkshire because he needs to pacify Yorkshire. Lots of people in Yorkshire had been very pleased to see the arrival of a Scandinavian king because that part of the world has strong cultural ties, political and cultural ties to Scandinavia. So Harold wants to spend time in Yorkshire, I would think, pacifying Yorkshire, having a serious conversation with the people of York about their loyalty, burying his dead brother, Tostig, those sort of things. And then just as

he's kind of settling down again and thinking that might be it for the year, a messenger arrives post haste from the south and says, you're not going to like this, but a whole bunch of Normans has just landed in Sussex. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder,

rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You can imagine Harold's dismay at hearing that the invasion had finally come in the south, just as he'd dealt so successfully with an invasion in the north. Interestingly and understandably, he tries to pull the same move. He marches to London, and without pausing the same move he marches to london and without pausing for long he marches south some sources say that his family his brothers other people

tried to get him to stay in london wait to a large enough army could be assembled to recall the third from the west country from the midlands and not rush south to precipitate a battle against william he could send someone else to fight a holding action, but he obviously believed he couldn't do that. If you're a king in the 11th century, there's a pretty clear lesson of the previous few generations, and that is a king must wield personal command of his force in the face of an invader. Charismatic, heroic battlefield leadership is an essential attribute of a monarch. If Harold looked back at Æthelred the Unready, the mistakes that he made, looked back at Edward the Confessor, who I'm sure he didn't have a huge amount of respect for,

and then further back towards Æthelstan and Alfred, the message seemed to be pretty clear. A king had to move fast, to crush, to neutralise, to drive back invaders. And don't forget, Harold was, well, many thought he was a usurper. He did not have the blood of Serdic, the blood of Alfred and his veins. If your whole shtick, if your reason for becoming king is that you're a warrior who's ready to rule from day one, who's shovel ready, and you should be king instead of the 12, 13-year-old boy, Edgar the Ethling, then you've got to live up to that. If you're the man who's helped conquer Wales, if you're the man who's just seen off Harold Hardrada, you've got to maintain that vibe. You can't send someone else to fight the Normans. And at this point, in September 1066,

Harold is one of the great warriors of early medieval history. He defeated the Welsh. He secured the English kingdom. He just smashed the land waster himself, the mighty Harold Hardrada. Harold of England is backing himself. William's coming up from his camp at Hastings, which is about six or seven miles that way, and surprising Harold, who assembles his army on the ridge, as I say, where you can see Battle Abbey is now. Harold seems to have a favorite strategy, which is kind of, ta-da! He surprised the Vikings' Hardrada in the north and won that battle by surprise.

So he's hoping to do the same thing here with William. But William's reconnaissance is very good. His spies report that Harold is getting near and William on the morning of the 14th of October marches out to engage Harold. So neither of them perhaps would have picked this precise site. It's not ideal for either of them. William because he's rushing up the hill, Harold because we're told it was a narrow place so he can't deploy his whole army. We don't really know how big any of the armies were. William of Poitiers gave a figure of about 60,000 Normans and implied that Harold had many

more. Historians are rightly sceptical about the numbers cited by contemporary chroniclers and most modern historians have concluded that the numbers on both sides were fairly balanced with about seven to eight thousand in each army. What the Normans had, which the English did not, were the mounted knights, the cavalry. Prisoners were not taken in line with Anglo-Scandinavian practice. Leaders and participants were slaughtered rather than captured and ransomed. William had been very clever since he landed at Pevensey.

He had made a nuisance of himself. He had taunted Harold by burning, ravaging, laying waste to southern England, what is now East Sussex. Bear in mind, Harold had been Earl of Wessex before he became King of England. This was Harold's manor. We know he had land in this area. And William was deliberately provoking him, causing misery, reminding the unfortunate English of what life was like under a weak king who was unable or unwilling to defend them. He was gnawing away at Harold's legitimacy. So Harold marches south, and William hears about this, and marches north to meet him. He marches north out of Hastings, and we hear from, I think it's William Poitier, who said the battle starts at the third hour. So

sunrise, perhaps 6.30. So we're talking 9, 9.30. The battle will commence with a great blast on the trumpets and a Norman attack up the road that runs from Hastings North eventually to London, which was being blocked by Harold's army on a mighty ridge, a very commanding ridge. Now, if you've been to battle, it's very hard to get a decent sense of that battlefield. It's been so messed about with. It's been so changed after over a thousand years. For a start, the great Weirin of Battle Abbey, now on top of that ridge, required a lot of landscaping. The top of the ridge was sort of chopped off and levelled. But there are places where if you stand, you look down, and it's a serious hill. It was a very powerful position that Harold was occupying. And so when William had marched his six or seven miles north of Hastings,

he would have seen, and his army would have seen, a pretty terrifying sight, and that is a bristling wall of shields. Axes and spears above, daggers and swords pointing through chinks in the shield wall, an immovable object at the top of this hill, blocking the road to London, blocking their escape from what was then a kind of peninsula, the Hastings Peninsula. And the battle that followed, William had no choice but to try and drive Harold from that hill, from that ridge line. As for Harold, he was determined that he would stay all day and beat back those attacks,

cause sufficient casualties among William's men that would weaken him and make him more vulnerable to Harold's army, which was growing all the time. We have to imagine that troops, reinforcements are arriving at the behest of their king all the time. The battle that followed lasted much a day, and it was, for much of that time, a real stalemate. Here's Mark Morris again. Well, we're told the battle begins with a volley of arrows and projectiles being launched by the Normans, and then it's the infantry and then the cavalry riding up the hill to try and

break through that shield wall. It is essentially a stalemate, that's the most you can take away from the sources that they're trying to break through that line and the line is holding and it produces a very unusual battle. That was again something said by contemporaries, a very unusual battle because one side just stood still and kind of took it on the chin while the other side charged up the hill and tried to smash through. So it's two utterly different ways of approaching battle, which makes hasting such an exciting and unusual battle to investigate. I often think about the course of that battle

and how unbelievably intimidating it must have been for the Normans and their Breton and Flemish allies attacking up that hill. The infantrymen toiling up the hill, exhausted, panting, and as they reached the English line, hail of projectiles, hammers, rocks, spears, things thrown down upon them. And then the cavalry, horses blowing, pushing, trying to push hard up the slope to find chinks in that shield wall and drive through it, break the English apart so they could be hunted down piecemeal. Harold's shield wall was the way in which the English apart so they could be hunted down piecemeal. Harold's shield wall was the way in which the English and Vikings tended to fight.

They called it a war hedge and they fought, said one Norman chronicler with great bravery, with great refusal to submit. He said they count as the highest honour to die in arms that their native soil may not pass under another yoke. One of the great descriptions of a shield wall, of a war hedge, is the Battle of Malden, this heroic poem composed about a battle that took place in Essex at the end of the 10th century during Æthelred's reign. Actually, we just had featured it in a recent podcast, so go and check out your feed for Malden. It's a battle that we know a little bit about because of this remarkable poem that survives. And we hear in this poem how the English leader encouraged his warriors there, riding and ruling, directing his soldiers, how they must stand and keep that place, and gave them instruction as to how they should hold their shields correctly, fast with

their hands, that they should fear nothing. When he had fortified his third men graciously, then he alighted amid the ranks where it most pleased him, in the place where he knew his most loyal hearth guard to be. Those are his full-time professional household warriors, the housecarls. There was shouting heaved up, ravens circling, eagles eager for carrion, and uproar was on the earth. Then they let fly from their hands spears file-hardened. The spears grimly ground down, bows were busy, shields were peppered with points. I think that gives us a sense of the fighting that lasted much of the day at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman tide would surge up that ridge. It would reach the high tide line. There would be a ferocious, snarling, pushing melee at

the shield wall. The exhaustion would kick in ferocious, snarling, pushing melee at the shield wall. The exhaustion would kick in. The Normans would retreat back down the hill to regroup. Norman archers would spray the shield wall with arrows and soon, like the poem says, the shields would have been peppered with arrows embedded into the wood. I like the way the English leader took his place on foot in the front rank. We think that's what Harold probably would have done with his brothers, Girth and Leofwin there as well, providing that leadership. William too, at the bottom of the hill, was riding a horse, using the new stirrups that were coming from the east, allowing riders to really put their full body weight behind a great blow with sword or lance.

And his half-brother, Bishop Odo, he didn't like spilling blood to demand the church, so apparently he used a mace. And other close family members, bound by familial ties, were essential to William's command and control as well in the day. Now at this point, or in a subsequent attack, after one of these ferocious moments of contact, when the two lines had come together in a pushing, shoving, anarchic melee, the Norman line, some Norman chroniclers say it was the Bretons, the Allies from Brittany, they blame them.

They retreated down the hill in a kind of chaotic manner. And that seems to have precipitated a kind of almost general crisis in the Norman army. The rumor went around that Duke William was dead. And William at this point has to tear his helmet off and gallop the length of the line and say, I'm alive, I'm alive, and with God's help, I'll be victorious. He managed to rally the army. And this is the point at which some historians think that by

rallying the army, some English troops had chased the retreating French, Bretons, Normans, whoever, down the hill. And by rallying the army, William was able to round on those English troops. And now they're out in the open, away from their war hedge, away from their shield wall. They were vulnerable because they're in ones and twos, small groups, and William's heavy cavalry could scythe into them and strike down at these infantrymen. And they were exposed. They were vulnerable to that counter-attack. The Bayer tapestry says that a small group of English troops were sort of isolated, trying to form a little shield wall, and then they were butchered. Now that possibly includes one or both of Harold's brothers, Gers and Leofwin. You can imagine King Harold possibly includes one or both of Harold's brothers,

Gers and Leofwin. You can imagine King Harold, if he was still alive and able to, receiving that news at the top of the hill and carrying that torment through the rest of the day. Bring us on to the crucial point of the battle, because the crucial point that all the sources agree on, so the detailed sources are the Carman, William of Poitiers and the Bayeux-Tapes tree, they all agree on the fact that at some point, the Normans started to run away. They disagree as to whether it was feigned or whether it was real.

The Normans start to run away and the English follow them down the hill. And then the Normans wheel round and turn it to their advantage. Now it's impossible to unpick which source is right there. Though I think the most credible one is perhaps the Normans tried to feign it. The Carmen says a flight that was started off as a ruse, as a trick, then

became real one as it went wrong. The Normans pull that off and they manage to sort of encircle the groups of Anglo-Saxons who have come down from their ideal position on the top of the hill and pick them off. And it's that breaking of the shield wall that does for Harold and the Anglo-Saxons. It does seem that this was the way in which William was able to grind down the English army. Perhaps once, perhaps more times, and whether it was deliberate or not, the Normans retreated down the hill and each time perhaps the English would follow, they'd be rounded upon and cut down. So that indiscipline, that over-enthusiasm, whatever it was, that trickery meant that more and more of Harold's troops were being killed out in the open rather than staying on the ridge

where they were relatively safe. And it seems that by nightfall, Harold's army, the gaps were starting to show in that shield wall. At this point, William launches one last major attack up the hill. Once the shield wall has holes in it, then really that was the English's primary advantage. That was what was keeping them alive, the fact that their shields were all locked together.

As soon as they've got holes in it, then the Norman cavalry have the advantage of being able to ride quickly among them, pick them off in small groups. So we don't know, of course. One annoying chronicler says that King Harold was killed at the beginning of the battle, but that's terrible for a dramatic retelling of the battle. So let's just ignore that particular source and go with two perhaps more reliable sources, the Bay of Tapestry and the Battle Song of Hastings, both created within a couple of years of the battle at most, they do seem to suggest that Harold lasted until late in the day. One of them, the Bayer Tapestry, appears to suggest that Harold

may have been shot in the eye by an arrow. Even then though, William needs Harold to be dead. You know, this isn't a war that can be solved by negotiation. This is a succession dispute. He doesn't just need Harold defeated, he needs him eliminated. The turning point, the thing that decides the battle, all the sources agree, as you'd expect, is the death of King Harold. You know, the elimination of one of the two contenders for the throne. Well, the arrow in the eye we all remember from, you know, when we're little children, because it's famously depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. So we see it on, you know, lunchboxes or key rings or tea towels, what have you. And that image of Harold sort of grasping the shaft of an arrow that's lodged in his eye socket is kind of very hard to get beyond. But the problem with the tapestry, as I always say, is that it's an artistic source.

So was Harold shot in the eye by an arrow? It's one of the most famous episodes in English history, and it may well never have happened. It's not mentioned anywhere else in any other sources. And it may be the Bayeux Tapestry doesn't even show that, because in fact, if you look at the stitching, the holes in the back of the tapestry, it seems like a sort of spear or something, a stick, has been reinterpreted as an arrow by 19th century restorers. So there may be no arrow there at all. There are no fletchings, those little feathers on the back of an arrow, if you go back beyond the 19th century. Also, if it is an arrow, it could be kind of allegorical,

because there's bits in the Bible about a king who broke an oath being shot in the eye by an arrow, or being blinded. So it could be allegorical, because Harold is an oath-breaker. So the whole thing is pretty obscure. It's a thousand years on. It's a bit like trying to work out how Nelson died from a cartoon made a few years after his death. So it's tricky. No other contemporary sources mention Harry. To be honest, I find the most convincing theory is one mentioned in a source called The Song of the Battle of Hastings,

and that is that William gathers his elite troops around him, looks for Harold's banner, the fighting man of Wessex, a jewel-encrusted banner featuring a fighting man, and charges straight for it. And that does make sense. You look at other medieval battles, decapitation of enemy leadership was a very sensible policy. It tended to achieve a quick result. Go back to the ancient world, look at Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gala Mela. He leads his Macedonian heavy horse right toward Darius's position in the centre of the Persian line. Darius flees, and that's really the end of the battle. The Persian army collapses after that. So in the same way, it is very possible that William,

towards the end of the day, felt confident enough to try and ride an elite hit squad up the hill, find Harold, cut him down and then topple his banner, at which point that would dishearten his troops. And that's perhaps what happened. A group of Norman knights, according to this one source, identify Harold, fight their way through his housecarls, and kill him savagely, chopping his body into pieces. This is the spot where it almost certainly happened, on van Ilkenstjorde, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says. We're told by the sources that the killing continues into the darkness. Mostly it's Englishmen falling. I mean, you've got to imagine this place is covered with dead bodies by this point. But really, in terms of the broader picture after that,

this is the fall of Anglo-Saxon England. Harold's banners, the Dragon of Wessex and the Fighting Man, were thrown to the ground. And in the dusky light, it would have been the sign on the battlefield that the English army had dreaded. And word, I think, would have passed through the ranks like wildfire. We don't know, but whatever happened, the Normans were able to breach the shield wall. Harold was killed. His brothers were killed. Without that leadership, Harold's army started to melt away into the shadows, and the Normans were left in possession of the battlefield. shadows and the Normans were left in possession of the battlefield. Duke William had won a bloody victory at Hastings. Some ran, small groups fought rearguard actions. It was certainly a bloody evening for the Normans. As night came on, Duke William would have rode across the battlefields.

We know there were thousands of corpses. The job of stripping them of valuables, of armour, of clothing, would already have begun by his own troops and by local people. So by the following day there had just been a mass of naked, mutilated bodies on the field. Somewhere among the dead was King Harold of England, and Anglo-Saxon England died with him. Some nobles attempted to put Edgar the Etheling on the throne, but he was never crowned, and William's march appeared unstoppable. and William's march appeared unstoppable. He circled London and had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, near the end of that extraordinary year. Hastings was decisive, but it wasn't the end in itself. We think of the Battle of Hastings as being hugely

decisive. One battle and England is William's. That wasn't the reality. Although he was crowned in late 1066, he was not yet secure on the throne. And over the next five or six years, he faced a series of rebellions led by exiled English leaders, including members of Harold's family who had fled to Ireland after Hastings. So it was not in fact until after a major rebellion in the north of England, which he crushed very savagely, that William could really begin to feel properly secure. The English in rebelling against William had two problems. One is that although rebellions occurred all over the kingdom in these four or five years,

they were not joined up. It really was the case that they were isolated incidents, allowing William to defeat them and then move on and defeat the next one as it broke out. The second problem was there was no single English leader around whom the rebels could coalesce. Although pacification had gone on for years, the Norman conquest, which is symbolised by that year, 1066, is probably the greatest upheaval of the last thousand years. A gigantic change that Professor Virginia Davis can tell us a bit more about now. The big change is the replacement of an English aristocracy with a French-speaking one. This created, I think, a divide in society between the peasantry, the majority of the rural population, and their lords. And we can even see this reflected in the English language, the ways in which it developed.

So the words for the animals who were looked after by English peasants were English words, cow, sheep. While when those same animals appeared as food on the Lord's table, they were called by the French terms, beef, mutton. Because I think in hindsight he changed the direction and the links that England had with Europe. For the previous century before 1066, many of England's links had been with Scandinavia and the sort of Viking areas of Europe. Now England was linked closely with France, and I think that just tilted and changed the sort of geopolitical axis of England.

It's quite easy to sum up that change in a different way. When William the Conqueror commissioned the Doomsday Book, which is kind of basically an inventory of this kingdom he had just conquered, he wanted to know where all the cash was and agricultural wealth and everything else. In the Doomsday Book, it lists all the landowners and all the powerful magnates in the country. There are no English earls. None of the top rank of William's aristocracy were English. There was only one english bishop

and of the thousand magnates the men who hold land directly from the king only 13 were english and the level down from them the subtenants gentry only 10 have english names the normans invaded fought a bloody decisive battle at Hastings, and then subsequent campaigns, pacifications, castle building, terrorisation, and they succeeded in replacing the native elite of a kingdom with profound changes that endure right up until today. That's 1066 for you folks. I hope you enjoyed it. Bye-bye. you