The Norman Conquest (26 page)

As such spiritual preparations suggest, by mid-June the Normans were nearing a point where the planned invasion would be possible. The fleet to transport them across the Channel, begun several months earlier, must have been nearing completion, with ships – bought, borrowed or newly built – being assembled at the mouth of the River Dives in the port of Dives-sur-Mer. As both Wace and the Bayeux Tapestry make clear, they were all different shapes and sizes: some were warships, akin to the familiar Viking longboats, which could have measured anywhere between fifteen and thirty-six metres (49 to 118 feet); others were cargo vessels with deeper draughts, suitable for transporting large quantities of food and wine, or for fitting with stalls for the transport of horses. The closest surviving examples are the ships sunk at Skuldelev in Denmark towards the end of the eleventh century, excavated in the 1960s and now on display in the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde. Wace also writes of smaller boats and skiffs that were used to ferry arms, harnesses and other equipment.
³⁸

How large this highly miscellaneous armada was remains a matter of conjecture. The Ship List, arguably our surest guide, states that William’s magnates had furnished him with 1,000 ships, though the actual total of its individual quotas comes to only 776. It also states that the duke had many other ships from other men, though it is highly unlikely that these uncounted extras would be sufficiently numerous to create the kind of monster fleet imagined by some chroniclers: William of Jumièges, for instance, who offers the utterly incredible figure of 3,000 vessels. Interestingly, Wace, writing a century later, expressed his doubts about such inflated figures because they
conflicted with the oral tradition that had come down to him. ‘I heard my father say, and I remember it well, although it was before I was armed as a knight, that there were seven hundred ships less four.’ A figure of 696 (which, Wace makes clear, included even the little boats and skiffs) fits far better with the evidence of the Ship List, and still constitutes a very big fleet.
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A big fleet was necessary because William, like Harold, was in the process of recruiting a very large army. The Ship List suggests that, as with the ships, individual Norman magnates had agreed to support the invasion with a certain number of knights, but sadly it records such quotas in only four cases. Clearly, many more Normans must have agreed to serve, either in fulfilment of existing obligations to the duke or in exchange for new inducements. Moreover, it was not just Normans that were turning out for William. ‘Foreign knights flocked to him in great numbers’, explains William of Poitiers, ‘attracted by the well-known liberality of the duke, but all fully confident of the justice of his cause.’ Liberality, of course, is a polite way of saying that William was recruiting mercenaries: ‘men with a lust for war’, as Orderic Vitalis put it, ‘panting for the spoils of England’. They came from all over Francia and possibly even further afield – between them these two chroniclers mention the men of France, Brittany, Maine, Aquitaine, Poitou, Burgundy, ‘and other peoples north of the Alps’.
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Alas, we cannot say with any certainty how many men William eventually recruited. Medieval chroniclers are notoriously bad guides when it comes to estimating troop numbers. William of Poitiers, for example, offers us the figure of 50,000 men, and then a few pages later increases it to 60,000; Orderic Vitalis, who may have taken his information from Poitiers, suggests that there were 50,000 knights ‘and a great company of foot soldiers’. Other chroniclers put the total even higher: at least two say that it was 150,000. No medieval armies were ever so large. The peak figures in Britain during the Middle Ages, derived from muster rolls rather than monastic observation, occurred during the reign of Edward I, whose largest armies numbered around 30,000 men. Needless to say, if this was the maximum for a king of England in the more populous and prosperous thirteenth century, it would have been difficult for an eleventh-century duke of Normandy to match, let alone exceed it. Modern historians have tried to arrive at better estimates for
William’s invasion force, but invariably end up basing their figures on conjecture (extrapolating, for example, from the number of ships, a pointless exercise if ever there was one, since their size and number are also unknowable).
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The best we can do in such circumstances is to look at comparable situations in subsequent centuries. When it came to crossing the Channel, no English king in the later Middle Ages ever managed more than 10,000 men. Given the disparities in power and population mentioned above, if William managed to assemble an army of even half that size he would have been doing extremely well. The consensus among Victorian scholars – who, whatever their other faults, knew a thing or two about landing cavalry forces on foreign shores – was that the Norman army may have measured around 7,000 men. Despite recent attempts to dismiss it, this is a conclusion that remains valid and compelling.
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To judge from comments made by William of Poitiers, the Norman invasion force, both army and fleet, was fully assembled by the first week of August, but the duke’s desire to set sail was frustrated for a whole month thereafter by unfavourable winds. In recent times, historians have been very sceptical of this statement. What William was actually doing, they aver, was waiting for Harold’s army to disband, either because its supplies had run out or else because the majority of men would have had to return home in time for the harvest. There are good reasons, however, for rejecting such scepticism. In the first place, comparative evidence suggests that delay in crossing the Channel due to contrary winds occurred all the time. In later, better-documented centuries, we see armies and ambassadors held up for weeks on end by bad weather, or dashed to pieces at sea when in desperation they attempt a crossing in such conditions. Experts with greater nautical experience tend to the opinion that, had the wind been blowing in the right direction that August, William would have been extremely foolish had he not seized the moment and got on with it. More to the point, the question of resources cuts both ways. Waiting for Harold’s army to run into difficulties and disband was all very well, but it would only have worked if William could keep his own equally large army well supplied and disciplined for the same duration.
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This was no mean feat. Some years ago, an American scholar named Bernard Bachrach wrote a paper looking at the logistics involved in keeping the Norman invasion force supplied during its month-long stay at Dives-sur-Mer. For unconvincing reasons (essentially, the testimony of an obscure contemporary chronicle) he assumed an army of 14,000 men, i.e. twice the generally accepted figure, but even if we halve his totals, they remain arresting. Supposing the men subsisted only on grain (highly unlikely, of course), it would have required fourteen tons a day to keep them fed, and a similar amount to feed an estimated 2,000 horses. Between them the men and their mounts would have also needed around 30,000 gallons of fresh water
every day
, and the horses, in addition, would have needed four to five tons of straw a day for their bedding. The resulting totals for a whole month are mammoth: thousands of tons of food and water, all of which had to be transported to the encampment, either ferried down the Dives or carted along rutted roads. Equal forethought, of course, had to be given to sanitation. That many men and horses would have produced a mountain of manure and a river of urine (2,000 tons and 700,000 gallons are Bachrach’s respective figures for the horses alone). Lastly, of course, they all required shelter: tents for the men, stalls for the horses. These, it bears repeating, are minimum requirements for keeping people alive for a month, more in keeping with a refugee camp than a volunteer army. To keep his men together, and to maintain their morale, William would have had to have found many more items – meat, fish, wine and ale – in similarly colossal quantities.
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Just to keep his army supplied, therefore, was a major undertaking – but one which William evidently managed to pull off. ‘Such was his moderation and wisdom that abundant provision was made for the soldiers and their hosts’, says William of Poitiers, who was also at pains to stress that the duke had forbidden his army from plundering the local people. ‘The crops waited unharmed for the scythe of the harvester, and were neither trampled by the proud stampede of horsemen nor cut down by foragers. A man who was weak or unarmed could ride singing on his horse wherever he wished, without trembling at the sight of squadrons of knights.’ Even if, as usual, Poitiers is laying it on here with a trowel, his overall claim
must be broadly true. The Norman army could not live off the land while it remained in Normandy. Order and discipline had to be maintained.
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At last, on 8 September, the stalemate was broken, when Harold was forced to stand down his army. ‘The men’s provisions had run out’, explains the Chronicle, ‘and no one could keep them there any longer.’ The troops, we are told, were given permission to return home. The king, still on the Isle of Wight, sent his fleet back to London, and then set out for the city himself. As the Chronicle says, he had managed to keep his army together for the whole summer, and he must have hoped that whatever was delaying his opponent would continue to detain him a little while longer. Very soon it would be too late in the year for William to attempt a crossing.

On arrival in London, however, Harold was greeted with terrible news. Hostile sails had at last been sighted on the horizon; an invasion fleet had landed. But, once again, it was not the enemy he had been expecting.
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It was Tostig, come back for a second try. And this time he had brought some Vikings.

10

The Thunderbolt

C
ontemporaries, it is clear, stood in awe of Harold Sigurdson. ‘The thunderbolt of the North’, was how Adam of Bremen, who wrote in the 1070s, remembered him; ‘the strongest living man under the sun’, said William of Poitiers (albeit reporting the words of somebody else). A half-brother of King Olaf II of Norway, born around 1015, Harold had been forced to flee from his native country while still in his teens, and ended up spending several years at the court of Yaroslav the Wise, king of Russia. From there he ventured south, like countless generations of Vikings before him, to Constantinople, capital of Byzantium, the eastern rump of the Roman Empire, and rose to great power and eminence by rendering military service to successive emperors. His reputation and his fortune won, he returned to Scandinavia in the mid-1040s and used his well-honed skills to make himself king of Norway, where he subsequently reigned with a fist of iron, fighting his neighbours and executing his rivals. Small wonder that when later Norse historians looked back on his life they dubbed him ‘the Hard Ruler’, or Hardrada.
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The fact that his famous nickname was not recorded until the thirteenth century, however, alerts us immediately to an inescapable problem. Harold’s contemporaries may have been impressed by his epic tale, but they did not write it down – unsurprisingly, for eleventh-century Scandinavia was still for the most part a pagan society and hence largely illiterate. The first sources to deal with his reign in any detail are Norse sagas dating from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, almost 150 years after the events they
purport to describe. The most celebrated account of all – the so-called
King Harold’s Saga
– was told by an Icelandic historian called Snorri Sturluson, who died in 1241 and wrote in the 1220s and 1230s – that is, almost two centuries after Harold’s own time.

How much trust can we place in such late sources? On the positive side, we can see from similarities in his text that Snorri drew on earlier sagas, as well as oral traditions. He also considered himself to be an objective writer, and in several passages seeks to reassure his readers of his conscientiousness as a historian. Halfway through
King Harold’s Saga
, for example, he explains that he has omitted many of the feats ascribed to his protagonist, ‘partly because of my lack of knowledge, and partly because I am reluctant to place on record stories that are unsubstantiated. Although I have been told various stories and have heard about other deeds, it seems to me better that my account should later be expanded than that it should have to be emended.’
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There is no reason to doubt Snorri’s sincerity but, alas, we cannot set as much store by his stories as we could with a contemporary source, especially when it comes to points of detail. Take, for instance, his account of Harold’s adventures in the east. On the one hand, we can be absolutely certain that the future king went to Constantinople, and that he rose to a position of prominence there, because he appears in contemporary Byzantine sources (as ‘Araltes’). These same sources confirm Snorri’s statements that Harold fought for the emperor in Sicily and Bulgaria, and show that he ultimately obtained the rank of
spatharocandidate
, just three levels below the emperor himself. But, on the other hand, when it comes to the details of Harold’s eastern adventures, the same local sources show that Snorri was often wrong. Sometimes he gives events in the incorrect order, and at other times he gets the names of key individuals confused. Harold, for instance, is said by Snorri to have blinded Emperor Monomachus, whereas contemporary sources show that the true victim was the previous emperor, Michael Calaphates.
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This leads us to a general conclusion about the value of Snorri’s work. The broad thrust of his story may well be true, but on points of detail it has to be regarded as very suspect, and all but useless unless it can be corroborated by other, more reliable witnesses.