Hastings, battle of (1066)

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Hastings, battle of (1066). Fought on 14 October 1066, between the forces of William ‘the Conqueror’, Duke of Normandy and King Harold (Godwinson) II of England, Hastings was one of the most decisive battles in the history of western Europe. William had a claim to the English throne and Harold expected him to invade, but William fortuitously landed on the Sussex coast when Harold was preoccupied with an invasion in the north. On hearing of William's arrival, Harold immediately began a forced march south from York, refusing to wait in London for reinforcements, and arriving in the vicinity of Hastings on the night of 13 October. Less than three weeks earlier, at Stamford Bridge, he had defeated the army of Norwegian King Haraldr Harðraða, which he had caught completely by surprise. Now he hoped to repeat this successful strategy against William, but the latter was forewarned by his scouts and attacked Harold's force before a third of it was drawn up, forcing him into a strong but confined defensive position on Senlac ridge. Harold, moreover, had lost some of his best men in the earlier battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge on 20 and 25 September.

The Norman archers, supported by heavy infantry, began the battle, but made little headway against the close infantry formations of the Anglo-Saxons, so densely arrayed, noted Duke William's biographer William of Poitiers, that the dead could not even fall. Assaults by the Norman cavalry initially fared little better, and the well-equipped housecarls did terrible execution with their great two-handed axes. William's left, comprised of Bretons, broke in panic amidst rumours that the duke was slain, and William narrowly avoided catastrophe by rallying his fleeing men and removing his helmet to show he was still alive. Launching a counter-attack, the Normans cut down those Saxons who had broken ranks in pursuit, and, exploiting the efficacy of this manoeuvre, they executed several ‘feigned flights’ with considerable success. Renewed assaults by Norman archers and knights gradually thinned the remaining English formation, which lacked sufficient archers to neutralize the Norman missilemen. Harold's death effectively ended the battle; wounded first in the eye by an arrow, he was then cut down by Norman knights.

Hastings was by no means the inevitable triumph of feudal heavy cavalry over ‘outmoded’ Germanic infantry; the battle raged from dawn to dusk, the Normans came close to complete disaster, and it was chance alone that Harold, not William, was slain. Contemporaries regarded the battle as so closely fought that only divine intervention could explain William's eventual victory.

Bibliography

• Bradbury, Jim, The Battle of Hastings (Stroud, 1997).
• Brown, Reginald Allen, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies 3, repr. in Matthew Strickland (ed.), Anglo-Norman Warfare (Woodbridge, 1992), and in Stephen Morillo, The Battle of Hastings (Woodbridge, 1995), a collection of articles on the battle

— Matthew Strickland