Upon the death of Edward the Confessor the election and coronation of Harold, son of Godwine, followed with the briefest possible interval. No serious notice seems to have been taken, at the time, of any claim to the crown which might be made on behalf of Edgar the Etheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside, the undoubted heir, on what we call legitimist principles, of the house of Cerdic. Though the year of Edgar’s birth is doubtful, he was certainly little more than a boy at his great-uncle’s death, and it is probable that the ascertained weakness of his character made the Wise Men of the kingdom unwilling to entrust even the nominal government of England at such a critical time to his nerveless hands.

The election of Harold was undoubtedly contrary to all the traditions of West Saxon royalty, but there are some considerations which may have made it seem a less revolutionary proceeding, and the new king somewhat less of an upstart, than they have appeared to later ages. Let the cloud which rests over Godwine’s birth and parentage be admitted, but it must be remembered that Harold was on his mother’s side a near kinsman of Canute, that in his veins flowed the blood of Gorm the Old and Harold Bluetooth, kings of Denmark in the preceding century, and that the then reigning King of Denmark was his own first cousin. As has been already said, Godwine and his tribe must have always appeared half-Danish to the Saxon people, and though the claims of the house of Cerdic were disregarded by his election they had been equally disregarded by the elections of Canute, Harold and Harthacnut of whom Harold Godwineson may have seemed in some sort the natural successor.

But that this view of the case would not be accepted in Normandy, all men knew full well, and none better than the new king himself. The Bayeux Tapestry, almost immediately after its picture of Harold enthroned, represents “an English ship coming to the land of Duke William”. Whatever this may mean, whether the flight of some Norman favourite to his native land, or a desperate attempt at self-exculpation and reconciliation on the part of Harold, it is followed with ominous rapidity by the picture, “Here William orders ships to be built,” in which the axes of the woodmen are felling the trees of the forest; that again by a picture, “Here they drag the ships to the sea,” and that by a lively scene, “These men carry arms to the ships and here they drag a cart with wine and arms”. After this in a scene which is not pictorially represented and at a date of which we are not accurately informed, William assembled his barons at Lillebonne and endeavoured to obtain from them a vote in favour of an expedition for the assertion of his rights to the throne of England. The expedition, however, appeared to the Norman nobles too dangerous, the naval power of England too great to give a hope of success, and notwithstanding the eloquent pleadings of William’s trusty henchman, William Fitz Osbern (son of one of the murdered guardians of his childhood), the assembly broke up in confusion without giving the desired promise of support. The assent, however, which he had been unable to obtain from the united baronage of the duchy, he succeeded in winning by entreaties and promises from the barons singly in private conference. The contingents of men, the numbers of ships which each baron undertook to furnish, were all set down in a book, in which were found the names not only of William’s own subjects but of volunteers from the neighbouring provinces of Brittany, Maine and Anjou. It was, so to speak, the memorandum of a great Joint Stock Company of conquest, which was entered in that “Domesday Book of the Conquerors,”248 and though the precise rate of dividend was not there set down, it is evident that the lordships and estates in the doomed land, which William promised to his shareholders, bore some definite relation to the size of their contributions.

It remained only, according to medieval ideas, to get the blessing of heaven’s representative on the great spoliation. William had himself in his earlier days all-but brought an interdict on his realm by his marriage with Matilda of Flanders who, for some reason not very clearly explained, was held to be canonically unfitted to be his wife. But that breach with the Holy See had been healed through the mediation of the great churchman Lanfranc, Prior of the Abbey of Bec; and Lanfranc’s influence may probably now have been employed to obtain from Pope Alexander II. a formal approval of the invasion of England. The oath of Harold, so solemnly taken and so flagrantly broken, and his marriage to Aldgyth, after having promised to marry William’s daughter Adela, may possibly have been pressed against him at the court of Rome and may have helped towards the composition of the bull which was now issued denouncing Harold as a usurper and proclaiming William as Edward’s rightful heir. It is probable, however, that in the mind of Hildebrand, the master-spirit of the papal court, though not yet actually Pope, the independent attitude which the English Church had sometimes assumed, and notably the unfortunate fact that Archbishop Stigand had, during the lifetime of his own predecessor, received his pallium from the anti-pope Benedict X., were the chief reasons for the Church’s enthusiastic partisanship on the Norman side. The word Crusade was not yet heard in the Christian world, nor was it to be heard till near thirty years later, when Peter the Hermit at the Council of Clermont was to utter his fiery declamation against the misbelievers; but a virtual crusade was preached against Harold and his adherents, and all Europe knew that whenever William’s shipbuilding should be ended and he should be ready to sail, his troops would march to battle under the protection of a banner consecrated by the successor of St. Peter.

The Norman preparations, begun in the early months of 1066, lasted on through the summer and almost up to the autumnal equinox. Meanwhile, a portent in the heavens and the attacks of another foe were depressing the spirits of Englishmen. Soon after Easter “the comet star which some men call the hairy star,” which had for some time been creeping nearer to the sun, unnoticed in the early morning hours, began to blaze forth in the north-west in the evening sky. From April 24 till May 1 was the period of its greatest brilliancy, and it probably disappeared early in June. In the Tapestry we see six men pointing fearful fingers towards a star which trails a rudely drawn streamer of light behind it, and we are informed that “These men are marvelling at the star”. The comet here depicted is now known to be one which regularly returns to our firmament at intervals of some seventy-five or seventy-six years. Its return in 1758 verified the prediction of the astronomer Halley, then no longer living, and it is expected that once more in the year 1910 Englishmen will be gazing upwards, and with less fearful hearts than of old, will “wonder at the star”.

The less shadowy terror of the spring of that year came from the king’s banished brother Tostig, who now by right or wrong was determined to win back his lost earldom. He had gathered a considerable force of ships and men, no doubt chiefly in “Baldwin’s land,” among the subjects of his brother-in-law; and he had probably already made overtures of alliance to the Duke of Normandy and the King of Norway. He came, however, unaccompanied by allies “from beyond sea into Wight with as large a fleet as he could procure and there people paid him both money and provisions; and he went thence and did all the harm that he could along the sea-coast until he came to Sandwich”. The naval armament which Harold had collected in anticipation of the Norman attack availed to keep the southern coasts clear from further ravages by Tostig, who took on board a large number of butse-carlas, some willingly and some unwillingly, and steering northwards entered the Humber, and began to ravage Lincolnshire. The two northern earls, Edwin and Morkere, however, having summoned the fyrd succeeded in driving him out of the country. Most of his butse-carlas took the opportunity to desert, and with a dwindled force of twelve smacks he sailed for the Forth. The Scottish King, Malcolm Canmore, took him under his protection and helped him with provisions, and there he abode all summer.

The delay of these summer months, during which invasion was impending from two quarters at once, was disastrous for England. When Harold had collected his fleet and army, “such a land force both by land and sea as no king of the land had ever gathered before,” he went to the Isle of Wight and there lay at anchor all the summer, keeping the land force always close beside him on the coast. Had William made his invasion then, it may fairly be conjectured that he would never have sat on the throne of England. But when the day of the Nativity of St. Mary (September 8) was come, the men’s provisions were exhausted, and it was impossible to keep them longer under the standards. They were accordingly allowed to go home, and the king rode up to London, while his fleet sailed round to the Thames, and meeting unfortunately with bad weather, many of the ships perished ere they reached their haven.

If Harold thought that peril from either of his foes was over for that year he was terribly mistaken. Even while the fleet and army were scattering from the Isle of Wight, the whole aspect of affairs in the north was being changed by the sudden and unexpected arrival off the northern coast of Harold, King of Norway, with an immense fleet of more than three hundred ships. This Harold, surnamed Hardrada (the man of hard counsel), was, even if we may not believe all that the saga-men told concerning him, one of the most romantic figures of the time. A half-brother of the sainted Olaf, by whose side he fought when but fifteen years old at the fatal battle of Stiklestadt, he appears, after some four or five years of a fugitive existence, as one of the chiefs of the Varangian soldiery at the court of Constantinople. The tall statured Scandinavian—his height is said to have been nearly seven feet—rose rapidly in the Byzantine service, and it was hinted that the inflammable Empress Zoe would have gladly welcomed him as one of her numerous husbands or lovers. The life of a soldier was, however, more to his taste than the dissipations of a luxurious court. He wrought great deeds in the eastern waters and shared with the veteran Byzantine general, George Maniaces, the glory of a temporary re-conquest of Sicily. Even then, however, that element of keen egotism in his character which won for him his title of Hardrada made itself visible; and his country’s skalds delighted to tell of the clever but dishonourable stratagem by which he out-witted his brother general when they were casting lots for choice of quarters. Strange to say, one of the most interesting memorials of this Norwegian chief is still to be seen amid the lagunes of Venice. There, in front of the noble gateway of the arsenal, sit two great marble lions, brought by the Venetian general Morosini from the Piraeus, trophies of that fatally memorable expedition in which he converted the Parthenon into a ruin. On the flanks of one of these lions is a nearly effaced Runic inscription, recording the conquest of the port of Piraeus by three chieftains with Scandinavian names. “These men,” says the inscription, “and Harold the Tall, laid considerable fines on the citizens because of the insurrection of the Greek people.” With difficulty Harold escaped from the prison in which he was confined by the jealous caprice of Zoe, and after charging over the great chain which was stretched across the Bosphorus, sailed out into the Euxine and thence up one of the great rivers into the heart of Russia. The king of Novgorod gave him his daughter Elizabeth to wife, and in the year 1045 Harold reappeared laden with treasure in his native Norway. He was sometimes the ally, sometimes the foe of his nephew Magnus the Good, on whose premature death in 1047 he succeeded peaceably to his throne. For fifteen years he waged almost incessant, generally successful, war with the King of Denmark, but in 1062 he concluded a treaty with that prince, which left him free to attempt the larger and more daring enterprise to which he was tempted by the example of Canute and the overtures of Tostig, even the conquest of England.

Harold made first for the Orkneys, then under the rule of the sons of the Norseman, Earl Thorfinn. From thence he sailed along the coast of Scotland, till, either in the Forth or the Tyne, he met his promised ally, Tostig, who “bowed to him and became his man”. They went both together, landed in Cleveland, which they harried; set fire to Scarborough; and at last reaching the mouth of the Humber, sailed with all their enormous fleet up that river and the Ouse, and landed near York. The Earls Edwin and Morkere came forth to meet them with as large a force as they could muster, but were utterly defeated in a great battle fought at Fulford, two miles from York, on September 20, 1066. The two earls escaped alive from the field, but were unable to make any further opposition to the invaders, who entered York in triumph and received the submission of the city. “Then after the fight came Harold and Tostig into York with as many people as to them seemed good, and they took hostages from the city and also received provisions, and so went thence to their ships, having agreed to full peace, that they [the people of York] might all go south with them and conquer this land.” It was to be an expedition of Northumbrians, Scots and men of Orkney, as well as Norsemen, under the command of Harold Hardrada, against Harold Godwineson and the men of Mercia and Wessex.

The invaders had in this instance reckoned without their host. They thought they had only the young and somewhat inefficient sons of Elfgar to deal with, whereas the namesake of Hardrada, “Harold our king” (as one of the chroniclers calls him), had heard the unwelcome news of their presence in his kingdom, and with almost Napoleonic swiftness of decision, was bearing down upon them. It was only on September 8 that he had dismissed his fleet and army in Hampshire. His journey to London may have occupied a day or two, and we know not how soon the tidings of the invasion reached him; but already on September 24, with all the fyrd that he could assemble in the south, he was at Tadcaster, and on the following day he marched through York. Hardrada and Tostig, whom he had perhaps hoped to surprise cooped up within the city, had marched eastwards some seven or eight miles to Stamford Bridge, on the river Derwent, where they expected to receive the hostages whom Yorkshire was to offer for her fidelity. Against them marched the English Harold, so suddenly, and with such successful precautions against their obtaining information of his movements, that at first when Hardrada saw afar off the steam of the horses and thereunder fair shields and white byrnies (coats of mail), he asked Tostig what host that might be. Tostig answered that they might be some of his kinsmen coming in to seek the king’s friendship, but that he feared it meant “unpeace,” and so it proved. The host drew nearer and nearer, and like the flashing of the sunlight reflected from a glacier was the gleam of their weapons.249

There was a short parley ere the armies closed. English Harold sent to offer his brother a third of his kingdom, that there might be peace between them. “’Tis pity,” said Tostig, “that this offer was not made last winter. Many a good man had then been living who now is dead, and better had it been for the whole realm of England; but if I accept these terms, what shall Harold of Norway have in return for his labour?” Then came the celebrated answer (and it is worthy of note that the Norse story-teller has preserved it): “Seven foot’s room, or so much more as he may need, seeing that he is taller than other men”. Tostig honourably refused to make any peace by the sacrifice of his ally; and the battle was joined, a terrible battle which lasted all day long and wrought great slaughter. The English at last succeeded in breaking the invaders’ shield-wall, and, surrounding them on all sides, poured their missiles upon them with deadly effect. Mad at this breach in his ranks, Hardrada leapt in front of his men and made a clear space round him, hewing with both his hands, but he was at last wounded in the throat by an arrow and fell dead upon the field. There was a little lull in the conflict, and Harold Godwineson offered peace to Tostig and the surviving Northmen, but they all whooped out with one voice that they would rather fall each one across the other than take peace of the Englishmen. Tostig seems to have fallen in this second battle. Then another pause, and a host of men, well-armed but breathless, came rushing up from the Norwegian ships in the river. They wrought great havoc in the English ranks, and had well-nigh turned the fortune of the day; but it was not to be. The new-comers were so spent with their march, that at last they threw away their “byrnies” and so fell an easier prey to the English axes.

So ran the story of the fight of Stamford Bridge as told by the descendants of the Norsemen. The English chronicler, with much less detail, describes Harold Godwineson’s unlooked-for attack upon the Scandinavians. According to him, the bridge itself was the key of the position and victory was impossible for the English until it was crossed. In its narrow entrance one Norwegian long held the English host at bay: an arrow availed not to dislodge him, but at length one of Harold’s men crept under the bridge and pierced him through the corselet. Then the king of the Englishmen came over the bridge and the victory was won. Great slaughter was made both of the Norsemen and Flemings, but Olaf, the son of Harold Hardrada, was left alive. With him, with a certain bishop who accompanied him, and with the Earl of Orkney, the English Harold made terms. “They all went up to our king,” says the chronicler, “and swore oaths that they would ever keep peace and friendship with this land; and the king let them depart with twenty-four ships. These two folk-fights [Fulford and Stamford Bridge] were both fought within five days” (September 20 to 25, 1066).

Short time had Harold for rest at the great northern capital, York. It was probably in the earliest days of October that news was brought to him that on September 28 William of Normandy had landed at Pevensey. Let us hear the story of what happened from that day to the fatal October 14 in the few simple words which are all that the only Saxon chronicler (he of Worcester) can bring himself to devote to the subject. “Then came William, Earl of Normandy, into Pevensey, on the eve of St. Michael (Sept. 28), and as soon as his men were fit [a possible allusion to sea-sickness which they had endured], they wrought a castle at Hastings-port. Tidings of this were brought to King Harold, and he gathered then the great host and came towards him at the Hoar Apple Tree, and William came against him at unawares ere his people were mustered. But the king nevertheless withstood him very bravely with the men who would follow him, and there was a mighty slaughter wrought on both sides. There was slain King Harold and his brothers, the Earls Leofwine and Gyrth, and many good men, and the Frenchmen held the place of slaughter.”

“He dies and makes no sign.” This is all that the Saxon chroniclers, whose guidance we have followed through six centuries, or any native English historians have to tell us of the death of the Saxon monarchy. One is half disposed to leave the matter there, and not to repeat the stories, many of them, as we may suspect, falsely coloured or absolutely untrue, and often quite inconsistent with one another, with which the Norman chroniclers and poets have enriched their jubilations over England’s downfall. But as this can hardly be, an attempt will be made to present only the broad outlines of the story, omitting all reference to recitals obviously fictitious, and for brevity’s sake declining to enter into any of the controversies which have been fiercely waged round certain parts of the narrative.

By about the middle of August William’s preparations were completed, and his fleet, collected near Caen at the mouth of the river Dive, was ready to sail. For a whole month the wind was contrary to them—a fateful month during which, as we know, but as William possibly did not know, Harold’s crews were being paid off and his army disbanded. A slight westward veering of the wind enabled the ships to creep a hundred miles up the Norman coast to St. Valery, at the mouth of the Somme. Some vessels seem to have been lost by storm, but at last, after a fortnight’s further detention at St. Valery, a favourable breeze blew—men said as the result of the exhibition of the relics of the saint and prayers for his intercession—and on the night of September 27 the fleet set forth on the great expedition. Though one chronicler puts the number of ships as high as 3,000, we are informed on what seems to be good authority250 that they were 696. William’s own ship, named the Mora, the fastest of the fleet, had a lantern at the mast-head to serve as a signal to her consorts, a vane above the lantern to show the direction of the wind, and on the prow a bronze figure of a child with bow and arrow aiming for England. When dawn was breaking the Mora found herself alone, having outsailed all the others. A sailor sent to the mast-head reported that he saw nothing but sky and sea. The duke cast anchor, told his companions not to lose heart, and cheered them and himself with a mighty breakfast, accompanied with copious draughts of wine. On a second journey to the mast-head the sailor reported that he saw three or four ships; on a third, that the whole fleet were in sight and approaching rapidly. By nine o’clock in the morning, September 28, 1066, the fleet was all assembled off the coast of Sussex, a few miles north-east of Beachy Head, and the landing, absolutely unopposed, was effected without difficulty on the long flat shore of Pevensey, in sight of the ruins of Roman Anderida.

The most notable incident of the landing, if true, is the well-known story of William’s fall. It is said that he, being first to spring to land, stumbled and fell with both his hands on the shore, that all round him raised a cry: “A bad omen is that,” but he with a loud voice said: “Lords, by the splendour of God, I have taken seizin of this land with my two hands. No property was ever let go without a challenge. Now all that is here is ours.” From Pevensey the army marched eastward to Hastings (a distance of about fifteen miles), and there entrenched themselves in a strong camp with high earthen ramparts, fosse and palisades. They also began to ravage the country for some miles round Hastings, a fact which is attested both by the entries in Domesday Book and by a picture in the Bayeux Tapestry, “Here a house is being burnt”. The tidings of William’s landing, however swiftly carried to York, can hardly have reached Harold before October 1. They, of course, necessitated another forced march back to London, so rapidly had the shuttle to fly backwards and forwards in the loom of war. Harold reached London probably about October 6, and waited there for a short week, expecting the arrival of the troops whom he summoned from all quarters for the defence of the country. This summons seems to have been well responded to from the home counties and East Anglia; and some fighters came, we are told, from Lincoln and Yorkshire. But Edwin and Morkere, the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, are accused of not having rallied as they should have done to the support of the king, who had saved them from utter destruction at the hands of Hardrada. The accusation which comes to us on the authority of so well-informed and generally so impartial an historian as Florence of Worcester, is one which cannot be passed over in silence. At the same time it is but fair to observe that the troops of the two northern earls had suffered severely at Fulford, and that there was very little time to collect new levies and bring them into the field from Northumberland and Cheshire before October 14. The impression left on one’s mind by the conduct of these two young earls, is rather one of inefficiency than of deliberate treachery. At the same time it must be admitted that when Harold broke with Tostig, perhaps also with his sister Edith, and allied himself with the house of Leofric, he adopted a policy which brought him little help abroad or happiness at home.

On October 12—after a hasty visit to Waltham where he had built a great minster in honour of the Holy Rood—Harold marched southward and took up a position on the last spur of a low range of Sussex hills, about seven miles to the north-west of Hastings. He is said to have been earnestly entreated by his younger brother, Gyrth, Earl of East Anglia, to adopt a more cautious line of policy, to anticipate William’s ravages of Sussex and Surrey by ravaging them himself, and to force the Norman to advance through a wasted land and attack him in the strong position of London. The advice would seem to have been wise; and surely a fortnight’s delay would have given Harold a better fighting instrument than the hasty levies which reinforced the war-wearied and march-wearied men of Stamford Bridge. But Harold was exasperated by the ravages which William had already begun in the country round Sussex. He patriotically refused to imitate those ravages in counties which had ever shown a special affection for him and for his father’s house. There are also some slight indications that he somewhat under-rated the strength of William’s army, and hoped by a sudden stroke like that at Stamford Bridge to sweep it into the sea.

However this may be, on the morning of Saturday, October 14, Harold’s army was drawn up in line on the ridge now crowned by the abbey and town of Battle, and William’s army, having marched forth that morning from Hastings, confronted them on the hill which now bears the name of Telham. As for the battlefield itself, the chronicler, as we have seen, calls it “the Hoar Apple Tree”; one Norman historian, Orderic, calls it Senlac or Epiton, but it will probably always be best known by the name which is, of course, only approximately correct, the battlefield of Hastings. There is no evidence that there was even a village there when the battle was fought. The position of Harold’s army was on a hill of moderate height, 260 feet above the sea level, so surrounded by narrow valleys, which might almost be called ravines, as to make it singularly difficult of approach by cavalry. In order to render it yet more secure against such an attack, Harold had, according to one writer,251 strengthened it by a fence or palisade as well as by a fosse drawn, perhaps somewhat lower down, right across the field.

As to the numbers engaged on each side we have no information that is worth anything, only absurd and exaggerated estimates, especially on the part of the Norman writers concerning the size of the English army. As a mere conjecture, founded on the dimensions of the battlefield, there is something plausible in the suggestion252 of 10,000 to 15,000 as the number of William’s soldiers, and the same or a little less for those of Harold. There cannot be much doubt that the quality of the invading troops was superior to that of the defenders. William’s men were Normans, trained and seasoned by twenty years of fighting, supplemented by brave adventurers, with whom war was probably a regular profession, drawn from all parts of France. The backbone of Harold’s army was doubtless his bodyguard of house-carls, terribly thinned by the fierce fight at Stamford Bridge, and these were reinforced by the peasants of the fyrd, brave men but little used to arms and hastily summoned from the neighbouring counties. Still they had the advantage, such as it was, of standing on the defensive in a position which had evidently been chosen with considerable military skill.

The chief weapon of the Normans was the sword, of the English the great two-handed battle-axe, the use of which was borrowed from their Danish antagonists. Both sides seem to have been armed with lances, and the best troops in both armies were clothed in long coats of mail, which were wanting, however, to the peasants of the English fyrd. The long kite-shaped shield, covering the greater part of the person, was carried by both nations, but the English were perhaps superior in the defensive tactics of the shield-wall, formed by men standing close together, shoulder to shoulder, and locking their shields into what the classically educated Norman writers called a testudo. On the other hand, William was evidently much the stronger in archers and in cavalry, and it was this superiority which eventually won for him the victory. The Normans fought of course under the standard blessed by the Pope, the Saxons under the well-known Dragon-banner of Wessex, and another which was perhaps of Harold’s own devising and which bore the likeness of a full-armed fighting man. On the English side we hear of no leaders besides Harold and his two brothers, Gyrth, Earl of East Anglia, and Leofwine, Earl of Essex and Kent, both of whom seem to have fallen early in the battle. The lack of a strong lieutenant, who could have taken the direction of the defence when the king fell, had probably something to do with the issue of the fight. On the Norman side, as we might expect, the names of many leaders are given us, but we need only notice here William’s half-brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (son of the tanner’s daughter), who salved his episcopal conscience by fighting with a heavy mace instead of with a sword, thus hoping to avoid the actual shedding of blood; Count Eustace of Boulogne, the hero of the flight from Dover; and William Fitz-Osbern, the faithful friend of the Norman duke as his father had been before him.

We may pass over the account of the messages which are said to have been exchanged between the two rival chiefs, including a proposition by Duke William that, to save the effusion of Christian blood, they should settle their differences by single combat; and we may also pass over the story of the diverse ways in which the two armies spent the night before the battle, the English in song and revelry, crying “Wassail” and “Drink to me”; the Normans in confessing their sins and receiving absolution from the numerous priests who accompanied the army. Thus we come to the morning of Saturday, October 14, at nine A.M., when, as before said, the two armies stood fronting one another in battle array. As to the positions of the various divisions of the English army, we have no sufficient indication, except that we are told that the men of Kent claimed the right to march in the van, and strike the first blow in the battle, and that the Londoners made a similar claim to guard the person of the king, being grouped round his standard which was planted in the centre of the ridge. As to William’s army, we are told that he put in his first line his archers (apparently light armed), in his second his mail-clad infantry, and in a third, behind them all, he ranged his cavalry. Moreover, there was in each of these lines another threefold division according to nationalities: the Normans in the centre, the Bretons on the left, and the Frenchmen (the men from the central regions of France) on the right.

The prelude to the battle was a romantic incident which showed that the day of chivalry had dawned. A minstrel—or as one narrator calls him, an actor—named Taillefer craved of Duke William the boon of striking the first blow. He had sung on the march some staves of the great Song of Roland, describing the death of that hero and of Olivier in the gorge of Roncesvalles, and now he pranced forth before the duke—

On the rough edge of battle ere it joined.

He took his lance by the butt-end as if it had been a truncheon, threw it in the air and caught it by the head. Three times he did this and then he hurled it into the hostile ranks and wounded an Englishman. Then, after repeating this performance with his sword, while the amazed English looked on as at a feat of conjuring, he set spurs to his horse and galloped fiercely towards the ranks of the foe. One Englishman he sorely wounded and one he slew, and then a cloud of darts and javelins was hurled at him and the bold minstrel fell down dead.

For six hours the battle which was now joined raged with nearly equal fortune on both sides. No doubt the first rank of light-armed archers discharged their missiles, and the mailed foot-soldiers pressed forward to take advantage of any impression which they may have made on the hostile ranks; but also (if we may trust the Tapestry) even at this early period of the battle the cavalry were charging (uphill, of course) and dashing themselves against the English shield-wall. So far, on the whole, they dashed themselves in vain, though already thus early in the fight Gyrth and Leofwine seem to have fallen. At length the Norman horsemen, recoiling from a fruitless charge, tumbled into a fosse, ever after known as the Malfosse, which they had scarcely noticed in their advance, and rolled over and over in dire confusion, hundreds of them lying a crushed and helpless mass on the plain. Some of the English who were pursuing shared the same fate; and one of the most spirited pictures in the Tapestry shows how “Here the English and French fell together”. This disaster had very nearly proved the ruin of the invading army, for the large body of varlets or camp followers stationed in the rear to guard the harness, or stores and baggage of the troops, seeing what had befallen their masters, were about to quit the field in headlong flight, and such a movement might well have spread panic through the ranks of the army. But then Bishop Odo of Bayeux, wielding his big mace, and with a coat of mail over his alb, shouted out words of encouragement and reproof, and stayed the panic of the varlets. About the same time apparently, and under the influence of the same panic-fear, a rumour spread through the ranks that William himself was slain. He had indeed three horses killed under him in the long and dreadful struggle, but, as far as we know, he received no wound at any time, and now lifting up the nose-piece of his helmet he showed his full face to his followers whose confidence was at once restored.

As has been said, for six hours the battle hung doubtful. From three o’clock onwards victory began to incline to the Norman side, chiefly owing to two manœuvres, the credit of both of which is assigned to William personally. In the first place, finding himself otherwise unable to break the terrible shield-wall, he took a hint from the disaster of the Malfosse itself, and ordered his followers to feign flight. After men have long stood on the defensive, galled by missiles from afar, the temptation to believe that the victory is won and that they may charge a flying foe is doubtless immense. At any rate Harold’s troops yielded to it, apparently more than once, and each time when pursuers and pursued had reached the plain, the Normans turned and their cavalry encircled and destroyed numbers of the English. The other manœuvre was, we are told, an order given to the archers to shoot high up into the sky, so that their arrows might fall from on high on some unshielded part of their enemies’ persons. Perhaps we have here another illustration of the fact that, for a conflict with missile weapons, it is not all gain to occupy a position on a hill. This is what the Scots learned to their cost in 1402 at Homildon Hill and the English in 1881 at Majuba. At any rate it seems to have been by this change of tactics that the decisive blow was struck. It was by an arrow falling from on high that Harold’s right eye was pierced. The wound was mortal and the king fell to the ground. Whatever life may have been left in him was extinguished by four Norman knights (one of them the hateful Eustace of Boulogne) who not only slew but mutilated their fallen foe.

The English seem still to have fought on for some time after the death of their king, but without purpose or discipline. The Normans were not disposed to give quarter, and apparently the greater number of the mail-clad house-carls fell where they had been fighting. The lighter-armed men of the fyrd fled, and, according to one account, their pursuers followed them into a part of the field where, from the broken nature of the ground and the abundance of ditches, their own ranks—they were evidently mounted warriors—fell into some confusion, and seeing this the fugitives made a rally. Owing probably to the fading light William and his comrades believed this to be a movement of fresh troops brought up against them. They halted, and Eustace of Boulogne counselled retreat, but a blow between the shoulders dealt suddenly from behind caused him to fall to the ground, while William pressed on undaunted and found that the victory was indeed his, and in the old Saxon phrase the Normans “held the place of slaughter”. The Norman duke caused his Pope-blessed standard to be planted on the brow of the hill in the same place where Harold’s banner had floated. After rendering thanks to God for his great victory, he ordered his supper to be prepared on the battlefield in the midst of the thousands of corpses of both armies, whom the survivors all through the following Sunday were busily engaged in burying, or in removing from the field that they might be carried to their homes for burial.

The body of Harold himself, grievously disfigured, but recognised, according to a well-known story, by his lady-love, “Edith with the swan’s neck,” is said to have been given by the Conqueror to William Malet, a nobleman half Norman and half English, and a kinsman of the house of Leofric, with instructions that it should be buried under a great cairn on the coast of that Sussex which he had vainly professed to guard. According to one story, Gytha, Godwine’s widow, vainly offered to buy her son’s body back from his foe at the price of his weight in gold; but it is probable that William before long relented and allowed the body of his fallen rival to be disinterred and buried with befitting solemnity in the great minster of the Holy Rood at Waltham.

William himself, in fulfilment of a vow made on the eve of the contest, founded on the field of slaughter a stately abbey which bore the name of Battle, and in which masses were long said for the repose of the souls of those who had fallen in the fight, whether conquerors or conquered. The building of the abbey with all its dependencies must have done much to alter the face of the battlefield; and now for near four centuries the abbey itself has been hidden and changed by the manor house reared within its precincts, in Tudor style, by the family to whom it was granted on the suppression of the monasteries. Change upon change has since befallen the noble dwelling-house which still bears the name of Battle Abbey; and its gardens and groves, its tall yew hedges and terraced lawns, though all most beautiful, make it hard to reconstruct with the mind’s eye the eleventh century aspect of “the place of slaughter”. Only the well-ascertained site of the high altar of the Abbey Church on the crest of the hill enables us to say with certainty, in the language of the Bayeux Tapestry—

Hic Harold Rex Interfectus Est.

With the battle of Hastings ends the story of England as ruled by Anglo-Saxon kings. The causes of the change, so full of meaning for all future years, which transferred the English crown from the race of Cerdic to the race of Rollo, cannot be dwelt upon here: perhaps some of them have been sufficiently indicated in the course of the preceding narrative. It is enough to say that a great and grievous transformation had come over the Anglo-Saxon character since the days of Oswald and even since the days of Alfred. The splendid dawn of English and especially of Northumbrian Christianity in the seventh century had been early obscured. The nation had lost some of the virtues of heathendom and had not retained all that it had acquired of the virtues of Christianity. Of its political incapacity the whole course of its history during the last century before the conquest is sufficient evidence; and it is probably a symptom of the same general decay that for two centuries after the death of Alfred no writer or thinker of any eminence, with the doubtful exceptions of Dunstan and Elfric, appears among his countrymen. A tendency to swinish self-indulgence, and the sins of the flesh in some of their most degrading forms, had marred the national character. There was still in it much good metal, but if the Anglo-Saxon was to do anything worth doing in the world, it was necessary that it should be passed through the fire and hammered on the anvil. The fire, the anvil and the hammer were about to be supplied with unsparing hand by the Norman conquerors.