The Norman Conquest (28 page)

In the wake of their victory, the Norwegians entered York. We might imagine that the city would have been put to the sack, but this was clearly not the case. ‘After the battle,’ says the C Chronicle, ‘King Harold of Norway and Earl Tostig went into York with as large a force as suited them, and they were given hostages from the city as well as provisions.’ This sounds very much as if the citizens of York had surrendered without a fight and obtained good terms. John of Worcester, when he later rewrote this section of the Chronicle, actually stated that there was an
exchange
of hostages between the two sides, with 150 townspeople being swapped for an identical number of Norwegians. Here indeed was the friendly collaboration that Hardrada had been led to expect. Tostig may have been the target of Northumbrian hostility the previous year, but he could evidently call upon the support of at least some sections of society in Yorkshire – especially now he had a victorious Viking army at his back. The Anglo-Danish aristocracy of York had always worn its loyalty to the south lightly; faced with the choice between a new Scandinavian ruler or a recently crowned earl of Wessex, they readily chose the former. According to the Chronicle, discussions were held between the citizens and Hardrada with a view to concluding a lasting peace, ‘provided that they all marched south with him to conquer the country’.
¹⁸

Having been favourably received in York and won the support of its citizens, the Norwegians withdrew to their ships at Riccall. Before they set out to conquer the south, however, it had been agreed that there would be another meeting, at which hostages from the rest of Yorkshire would be handed over. For reasons that remain obscure,
¹⁹
the location selected for this meeting was neither Riccall nor York, but a small settlement eight miles to the east of the city, a crossing of the River Derwent known as Stamford Bridge. Hardrada and Tostig were waiting there on 25 September in expectation of a final round of submissions before they advanced to subdue the rest of the kingdom.

What they encountered in the event was Harold Godwineson at the head of a new royal army. The English king had advanced northwards and reassembled his host far more quickly than his opponents had anticipated. After leaving London around the middle of the month, he had arrived in the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster on 24 September, having covered the intervening 200 miles in
little more than a week. According to the Chronicle, he had expected to find Tostig and Hardrada holding York against him and had drawn up his forces against an attack from that direction. But the following morning he discovered that his brother and the Norwegian king had left for their appointment at Stamford Bridge, evidently quite oblivious to his approach. It was an opportunity not to be missed. Harold marched his men straight through York and out towards the crossing on the Derwent, a distance of some eighteen miles. The day must already have been well advanced by the time the English king fell upon his unsuspecting enemies.
²⁰

The accounts of the Battle of Stamford Bridge are not much better than those for the encounter at Fulford five days before. Snorri is once again on fine (i.e. unreliable) form, giving an account of the preliminaries entirely at odds with that of the Chronicle, including an improbable interview between the two King Harolds before the onset of hostilities (notably for its oft-quoted line that Hardrada would be granted only ‘seven feet of ground’). One element of Snorri’s account which does merit attention, however, is his claim that the Norwegians had gone to Stamford Bridge wearing their helmets and carrying their weapons, but without their mail shirts because the weather was warm and sunny. Special pleading, you might think, but the story is corroborated by a contemporary chronicler called Marianus Scotus. The C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contributes a few more details, confirming that the English king caught his enemies ‘unawares’, describing the fighting as ‘fierce’ and adding that it lasted until late in the day. It concludes with a story, added in the twelfth century and repeated by several other writers, of how the English were for some time prevented from crossing the bridge over the Derwent by a single Norwegian warrior, apparently wearing a mail shirt, until at length an inspired Englishman sneaked under the bridge and speared the Viking in the one place where such armour offers no protection. This was supposedly the turning point of the battle: Harold and his forces surged over the undefended bridge and the rest of the Norwegian army were slaughtered. Both Hardrada and Tostig were among the fallen.
²¹

It was, said the D Chronicle, ‘a very stubborn battle’. When the remaining Norwegians tried to flee back to their ships at Riccall, the English attacked them as they ran. Some drowned, says the Chronicle, some burnt to death, and others died in various different
ways, so that in the end there were very few survivors. The author of the
Life of King Edward
, weeping for the death of Tostig, wrote of rivers of blood: the ‘Ouse with corpses choked’, and the Humber that had ‘dyed the ocean waves for miles around with Viking gore’. Only those who made it back to Riccall – the D Chronicle names Hardrada’s son, Olaf, among them – were given any quarter, their lives spared in exchange for a sworn promise never to return. Above all, the scale of the Norwegian defeat is indicated by the Chronicle’s comment that it took just twenty-four ships to take the survivors home.
²²

After the battle, the bodies of thousands of Englishmen and Norwegians were left in the field where they had fallen; more than half a century later, Orderic Vitalis wrote that travellers could still recognize the site on account of the great mountain of dead men’s bones. But the body of Tostig Godwineson was recovered from the general carnage and carried to York for an honourable burial; William of Malmesbury, who had a fondness for such human details, reports that it was recognized on account of a wart between the shoulder blades (the implication being that all the earl’s other distinguishing features had been too badly maimed). His older brother, it is as good as certain, also returned to York in the aftermath of his victory. Apart from anything else, he would have wanted to have a serious conversation with its citizens about the alacrity they had shown in supporting his Norwegian namesake. Quite possibly, therefore, Harold Godwineson was present at Tostig’s funeral, whipped by the wind that continued to blow from the north.
²³

Two days after the battle, however, the wind changed direction.

11

Invasion

I
f we believe William of Poitiers, the late summer of 1066 must have been a time of immeasurable frustration for the duke of Normandy and his army of would-be invaders. Although apparently ready since the start of August, the fleet that was supposed to carry them across the Channel to England had been unable to put to sea, its departure indefinitely delayed by bad weather and adverse winds. As late as the second week in September, the 700 ships were still beached and anchored in the port of Dives, leaving the thousands of knights, soldiers and horses idling in the nearby encampment.

If we believe most modern historians, on the other hand, this is simply nonsense. A delay of that length, they maintain, must have been deliberate; William of Poitiers, not for the first time, is twisting the facts to fit his own sensationalist agenda. What the duke was really doing during these weeks, say the sceptics, was waiting for Harold’s army to disband, so that the Normans could land in England unopposed.
¹

It is easy to see why this argument has commanded so much credence: apart from anything else, it seems well supported by the timing of subsequent events. Harold stood down his army, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, around 8 September. Very soon afterwards – just four or five days later, as far as we can determine – William’s fleet finally put to sea. And yet, a closer examination of the evidence suggests that the sceptical line is unjustified. The duke, it seems,
was
delayed by contrary winds. For once, William of Poitiers appears to have given us the unvarnished truth.

The principal reason for believing Poitiers is that his testimony is corroborated by a new source – the so-called
Carmen de Hastingae Proelio
, or ‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’. The
Carmen
, as it is known for brevity’s sake, has a controversial history of its own. An epic poem, 835 lines long, it was discovered in 1826 in the Royal Library in Brussels. The text as it stands is anonymous, but it was quickly ascribed to Guy, bishop of Amiens, a contemporary of the Conqueror, chiefly because Orderic Vitalis, writing a couple of generations later, tells us that the same Bishop Guy had written just such a poem about the Battle of Hastings. Doubts about this attribution, and indeed the poem’s authenticity, have persisted almost since the moment of its discovery; such academic scorn was poured upon it in the late 1970s that many books and articles written soon thereafter simply ruled it out of court as evidence. Latterly, however, the
Carmen’s
fortunes have been greatly revived. Scholars are now inclined to accept that it
was
the poem described by Orderic, and, since he tells us that it was composed before the spring of 1068, it is reckoned as one of the earliest sources we have for the events of 1066. It remains, of course, a poem, with all the potential for artistic licence that that implies, but nevertheless the
Carmen
is now regarded as one of the key texts for the study of the Conquest.
²

One thing that makes the
Carmen
especially interesting is that it was apparently written for the ears of William the Conqueror himself (the first 150 lines or so are written in the second person, i.e. ‘You did this, you did that’). This, of course, is true for some of our other sources, such as William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers; the difference in the case of the
Carmen
is that its author, Bishop Guy, was not himself a Norman. The city of Amiens lies in the neighbouring county of Ponthieu, and Guy himself was a scion of Ponthieu’s ruling house. As such, while he clearly sets out to praise William and the Normans, Guy does so with a greater sense of detachment, and far less sycophancy, than, say, William of Poitiers. Another thing that makes the
Carmen
an interesting source is that William of Poitiers had clearly read it. At various points in his own history we can see Poitiers responding to Bishop Guy’s poem, sometimes borrowing a word or phrase by way of endorsement, other times implicitly denying its account by substituting his own alternative version of events.
³

What bearing does all this have on whether or not William’s delay in sailing was deliberate or not? The answer is that the
Carmen
– an
early, independent source, addressed to the duke himself – begins by describing the adverse weather conditions that prevailed in the late summer of 1066: ‘For a long time tempest and continuous rain prevented your fleet from sailing across the Channel … You were in despair when all hope of sailing was denied you. But, in the end, whether you liked it or not, you left your shore and directed your ships towards the coast of a neighbour.’
⁴

William of Poitiers, following the
Carmen’s
lead, elaborates: ‘Presently’, he says, ‘the whole fleet, equipped with such great foresight, was blown from the mouth of the Dives and the neighbouring ports, where they had long waited for a south wind to carry them across, and was driven by the breath of the west wind to moorings at Valéry.’
⁵
Poitiers is probably being slightly economical with the truth here in blaming the mishap entirely on the weather – presumably the ships did not simply break their anchors and drift out to sea. What must have happened, and what the chronicler has judiciously excised from his account, is that the duke decided to set sail in less than favourable conditions. Having waited a month or more for a south wind that never came, he would have learned soon after 8 September that the English army had disbanded. It must have seemed an opportunity too good to miss, and in any case his carefully stockpiled provisions at Dives could hardly have lasted much longer. Probably around 12 or 13 September, William took a chance and launched his expedition, with near disastrous results.

‘The rough sea compelled you to turn back’, says the
Carmen
, candidly. The Norman fleet ended up, not in England as they intended, but (as William of Poitiers indicates) in the port of St Valéry, a hundred miles further east along the north French coast – ‘a dangerous rock-bound coast’, as the
Carmen
accurately describes it. William had, in truth, been very lucky to have escaped a more comprehensive disaster. Poitiers speaks of ‘terrible shipwrecks’, and tells us that men began to desert from the duke’s army. Although his comment that William tried to maintain morale by burying the bodies of the drowned in secret looks somewhat suspect (Xerxes once did something similar), Poitiers’ testimony is in general terms perfectly plausible. Indeed, it draws support from a fact we have already seen, namely that the disbanded English fleet, sailing back to London at the same time, suffered similar losses.
⁶

In mid-September, therefore, William’s planned invasion hung
precariously in the balance. His fleet was diminished by losses, his supplies were dwindling. He was no longer in his own duchy – St Valéry lies in the neighbouring county of Ponthieu (hence the
Carmen’s
credibility for these events). And the weather continued to be against him. Guy of Amiens describes the duke not only visiting the shrine of St Valéry, but anxiously watching the weathercock on top of the church’s steeple for signs of a change in the wind. ‘You were forsaken’, says the
Carmen
, ‘It was cold and wet, and the sky was hidden by clouds and rain.’ With the heavens set against them, there was nothing else the Normans could do except seek divine intervention. William himself prayed and made offerings at St Valéry’s shrine; he also (as subsequent records show) vowed to found a new church dedicated to the saint in England, should the invasion be successful. When these personal overtures had no discernible effect, he decided to get the whole army involved. According to William of Poitiers, the duke had Valéry’s body removed from its shrine and carried out of the church, in what was clearly a large-scale, open-air ceremony. ‘All the assembled men-at-arms’, says the chronicler, ‘shared in taking up the same arms of humility.’