The Battle of Hastings

The Battle of Hastings is often boiled it down to a sentence: The Normans invaded Britain in 1066, and their victory ended the Anglo-Saxon phase of English history. But of course, that brief description really doesn't do the event justice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I discovered
when we talked about the Hessian I kind of like

(00:21):
talking about battle and now I did blood Less until
just now. So today we're going to talk about a
battle that long time listeners may remember a little bit
about thanks to our episode on the Baiou Tapestry, which
was hosted by Sarah and the Polina back in two
thousand eleven. The Baiou Tapestry, which is really a piece
of embroidery and not a tapestry, is a visual account

(00:44):
of the Battle of Hastings and the events that led
up to it. So if you know anything at all
about European history, you can probably at least boil the
Battle of Hastings down to a sentence, which is that
the Normans invaded England in ten sixty six and their
victory ended the Anglo Saxon phase of English history. If
you actually grew up in England, you probably know a

(01:05):
whole whole lot more about it than that. Intends to
be something that's covered extensively. Uh, in English schools because
it is so central to the history of England. Yeah,
and it's one of those things where sadly when you
mentioned it, at least when I mentioned it to most
people that I know, and I'll say, oh, Battle of Hastings,
they will do what I have done previously in my

(01:25):
life and on ten sixty six, and that's the one
thing they remember. Yes, So yeah, I I had that
exact conversation with the boyfriend where I said we could
talk about the Battle of Hastings and he said, oh,
ten sixty six husband as well, and and I said yes,
and he's like, we won, right, And I said, you
don't know what the who is the we? In this case,
we had almost an identical conversation at our house. So so,

(01:49):
just like with our recent episode on the Hessians, where
people can boil down the Hessians to a sentence that's
not really indicative of what actually happened to that one
sentence description does not do the whole Battle of Hastings justice.
So today we're gonna look at that in a lot
more detail, including lots of stuff that's not covered in
the Bio Tapestry episode. Yeah, because that's a lot to cover.

(02:12):
In one piece of sewing. Well, but it's a very
long piece of sewing. And now I think of the
Futurama episode where they kind of did a spoof of it.
That's funny about invading a spider planet and they were
weaving the tapestry from the silk of the spiders as
the battle was happening. Wow, I need to go watch that.
I love my Futurama. There's no secret there. So first though,

(02:35):
we're gonna get back to history and talk about the
backstory on this little ditty, And we have to go
back a little bit of a ways to get a
feel for what was really going on when the Normans
hopped into the picture and invade it. In the fifth century,
Germanic people known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the
Jutes began to immigrate to what we now know as England,

(02:56):
and at the time this area was mostly inhabited by Celts.
As the Germanic people's moved in, they pushed the Celts
into what we would now call Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
So the word England comes from these Germanic peoples. It
actually means land of Angles. By the eighth century, Christianity
had really started to spread through a lot of England,

(03:17):
and people from Denmark had also started to move into
the area as well, and so with all of these
influences the language kind of evolved, and so what we
now know as Old English. So at this point England
was a mostly Christian nation and it mostly spoke one language,
although there were several distinct dialects, and it was ruled

(03:38):
by a king with earls who were responsible for specific
regions within the kingdom. And the Vikings started invading Britain
in the ninth century and over the span of roughly
a hundred and fifty years, Vikings conquered a lot of England,
but then the Anglo Saxons uh living in Wessex, led
by Alfred the Great, saved them off and started pushing

(04:00):
them back out again. In the process, they were honing
their battle abilities and really making the Anglo Saxon world
a power to be reckoned with on its own. After
this point there was a period of relative calm which
lasted about fifty years before the Vikings came back and
started up a new cycle of pillaging and plundering and
then retreating back to where they came from. Before coming

(04:22):
back for more pillaging and plundering. It sounds very exciting,
but it was actually quite dangerous. Well, yes, often exciting
things are, uh. And this was kind of the state
of things when one of Alfred the Great's direct descendants, Edward,
entered the picture. And today we know of Edward as
Edward the Confessor, but that was a name he was

(04:44):
given about a hundred years after his death, when the
Pope recognized him as a saint. So Edward was born
in about one thousand and three, and because of all
these ongoing Viking attacks, he and his family took refuge
in Normandy for a number of years, and there they
naturally built a lot of ties to Norman's society. They
made a lot of friends there were influenced in their

(05:07):
politics while they were living there. It took several failed attempts,
but Edward finally returned to England and became king in
ten forty two, and he brought a lot of Norman
advisors and kind of Norman politics along with him. And
Edward married a woman named Edith, although they had no children,
so this left a question of who the heir was

(05:27):
going to be. Uh. And there's no written account of
exactly what transpired there, but the general historical consensus is
that in March of ten fifty one he announced it
a council meeting that he wanted his kinsman William of Normandy,
to take the throne after his death. This did not
sit at all well with a guy named Godwine, who
was the Earl of Wessex and Edith's father, so Edwards

(05:50):
father in law, he had actually been a favorite to
become the king himself and was hoping to see one
of his own children or grandchildren eventually on the throne.
And the top of these own aspirations of power that
he had, he really was a legitimately powerful person and
he had a much stronger backing than Edward did among
the other leaders of England, and this tension between Godwine

(06:14):
and the king really took England to the brink of
a civil war. But eventually Edward outlawed Godwine after he
refused to punish the people of Dover, which fell under
his earldom, for an attack on Edward's brother in law,
and Godwine and his sons and most of his family
fled to Flanders and Ireland, and then Edward banished his
wife to a nunnery seems kind of ruthless on Edward's part,

(06:38):
didn't want anything to do with those people anymore. Yes,
that's like a brutal divorce at that point, it is.
And and he also in the aftermath made kind of
a critical mistake. He got rid of a tax that
had been used to fund a mercenary naval fleet. The
idea was that he was basically giving some everyone who
was being taxed at tax break, and he probably thought

(06:59):
that if he really need it an army or a
naval force, that he could just call it up because
he was the king um and in a lot of
circumstances that probably would have worked. But that, unfortunately or fortunately,
depending on whose side you're on, meant that when Godwine
came back across the channel with his own fleet in
ten fifty two, Edward did not have a force ready

(07:21):
to fight him off. And on top of Edward not
having enough manpower to resist Godwine's attack, public sentiment was
pretty firmly on Godwine's side at this point. People just
did not like the idea of a Norman line of succession,
and they didn't even like how many Normans the king
had among his advisers. So Edward was basically politically forced

(07:45):
to pardon Godwine and his family and they once again
took up their positions of power in England. So when
Godwine died, his son, who was known as Harold Godwin's
and continued to be a very powerful figure in England.
And this would turn out to be a problem when
it came back around to the line of succession. So

(08:07):
now we're going to hop into the Norman back story
on it. Yes. Uh, so over in Normandy, William was Earl,
his wife was Matilda of Flanders, and Flanders in England
were not on terrific terms. Uh. This may have been
one of the reasons why Edward promised the throne to
William to help keep him in line and discourage him

(08:27):
from lining up with Flanders against him. But thanks to
this whole idea that he was being promised to become
the King of England and his marriage to Matilda of Flanders,
Henry the First of France saw William as a really
huge threat. So William had to fend off multiple invasions
from France and its allies during the ten fifties, and

(08:50):
it was really only after William had a particularly decisive
victory against them uh that France and its allies left
William alone, and only after his major rival died did
he really seem to get any risks. He was pretty
much constantly having to fend off one attack after another.
That brings us back to Harold. In about ten fifty

(09:11):
four or ten five, Harold visited Normandy because of a storm.
He actually wound up landing in Flanders and was taken
prisoner at first, and William had to come and secure
his release. And at some point during this little excursion,
for reasons that different accounts report completely differently, Harold swore
an oath to honor Williams claim to the throne once

(09:31):
Edward died. Norman writers say that Edward had sent Harold
specifically for this purpose, but English sources either don't reference
it at all, or they say that Harold was in
Normandy to secure the release of some of his kin
from imprisonment. So there's a little bit of disagreement about
whether or not there was intrigue in the mix. At
this point, it's a thousand almost years ago, and both

(09:57):
sides writing about it definitely have an into and death.
But either way, the sources all pretty much agree that
Harold swore to uphold William's claim to the throne, and
then he went back from Normandy across the English Channel
to England in about ten sixty five. So we're coming
up on the happenings. Uh So, at this point the

(10:19):
stage seems to be set for one would hope a
fairly smooth succession. Edward the Confessor has promised the throne
to William of Normandy, and the surviving person with the
next strongest claim to the throne, Harold Godwinson, has sworn
an oath to honor Edward's decree. It seems like it
should be cool. It does. There there's a third person

(10:39):
with kind of a tide of the throne. He'll talk
about a little bit later, but at this point it's
really between uh William and Harold. But even though it
should not have been really. But what happened next is
that King Edward died after an uprising in Northumbria. He
had tried to raise an army to put down the rebellion,
but winter was coming. People were pretty reluctant to get

(11:01):
involved in what was really a civil war, so eventually
Edward just had to give into the rebels demands and
he was apparently so distraught by his failure to bring
Northumbria back in the line that he got sick and
never got better again. He died at the beginning of
January ten sixty six, and the king was buried on
January six of ten sixty six, and that day, even

(11:24):
though he had sworn an oath to honor Williams claim
to the throne, Harold stepped in and took it for himself.
We don't really have a lot of clear historical documentation
conclusively telling us why he did this. At the time, though,
succession wasn't always a straight up matter of father to
son inheritance or of the king designated designating he was

(11:45):
going to follow him to the throne. In England, a
man wasn't really considered to be king until he had
the support of a majority of England's most powerful men.
Like we said, England was not super keen on the
idea of having a Norman king, and there are also
some accounts, including the Life of King Edward, which Queen
Edith later had written, that said Edward either gave the

(12:08):
kingdom to Harold on his deathbed or that he had
entrusted it to him in the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold is
shown being given the crown, and almost one thousand years later,
we still don't entirely know what went down. So whatever
the circumstances are of Harold being crowned, King William objected,

(12:30):
and so apparently did Harold's brother Toasting, who then mounted
two different invasions of England. The first came from Flanders
and the second came with backup from the Vikings. So
Harold had to spend the start of his reign fighting
off his brother in the far northern reaches of England.
But thanks to the lay of the land and the

(12:50):
position of the English Channel, any invasion from Normandy would
make landfall hundreds of miles to the south, and this
meant that when William invaded, Harold would have a long
made to travel to fight him off. So, since we've
said ten sixty six a bunch of times, we know
that that invasion is imminent. And before we get to it,
let's take a moment and talk about a word from

(13:10):
our sponsor. Okay, now we're going to get back to
the actual battle. And since we know from the top
of the episode that this is what Tracy has gotten
excited about talking about very excited, so crazy. So it
took a little while before William made it to England.
He had to raise a bigger army than he already had,
and he had to build at least some of the
ships that were going to be required to take them

(13:31):
across the channel. The weather was also against him for
a while, so they had to put off setting sail.
He finally landed in England on September of ten sixty six,
and he was on the southeast coast at pevense E,
and he took that town and marched to Hastings, which
was twelve miles away, also pretty much on the coast,

(13:51):
and at both of these locations the Normans seized a
fort and then modified it to suit their own ends
by adding ramparts and moats. And it would have taken
days for the news to reach Harold of the Norman
force at Hastings, and he had to march his men
all the way from Yorkshire, which was about two hundred
miles away. They basically rode south as fast as they could,

(14:12):
most likely dismissing the soldiers who didn't have horses to ride,
and mustering more as they went. So yeah, he was
replacing the people who were on foot and couldn't keep
up as they went. Basically, Harold met William and Hastings
on October and the battle took place on the next day.
And although Harold's forces had ridden horses to Hastings, they

(14:33):
all fought on foot, which was typical and English warfare
at the time. William, on the other hand, had archers
and cavalry in addition to his UH boots on the
ground infantry, and the English secured a defensible position on
high ground and the Norman's approached them from below. So
that's just sort of to set up the picture here. Yeah,
if you know much about uh, you know, medieval warfare,

(14:56):
or if you've ever played any kind of strategy game
that involved soldiers, this looks like a really one sided
battle because you had you had people who were on
foot versus people who had archers and horses. We're going
to talk about why it was not nearly that clear cut.
Here's how William of Mom's Prey describes the English all
on foot, armed with battle axes and covering themselves in

(15:17):
front by the juncture of their shields. They formed an
impenetrable body. The English were also armed, we should say,
with slings and spears, But it seems as though they
did not really have many archers, probably because of the
speed at which they had to move to Hastings, so
it wasn't like they could rouse all of the archery
skilled gents in the area to help. Here's how William

(15:40):
of Mom's Brey describes the Normans their infantry with bows
and arrows one of the vanguard, while their cavalry, divided
into wings, was placed in the rear the duke that
duke is is William with serene countenance. The clearing allowed
that God would favor him as being the righteous side.
Call for his arms, and when through the haste of

(16:02):
his attendants he had put on his halbert behind part before,
he corrected the mistake with a laugh, saying, the power
of my dukedom shall be turned into a kingdom. Basically
a story here that he accidentally put his armor on
backwards and and then tried to turn that to his advantage,
rather than seeing is seeing it as a poor omen

(16:23):
and a nickel for every time I put my armor
on backward knew. William of Malmsbury also describes the English
as having stayed up all night drinking and singing, while
the Normans instead spent the night confessing their sins and
having communion in the morning, which is in all likelihood
added color commentary and not a real thing. But both
sides were clearly pretty worn out, the English from having

(16:46):
traveled so far from getting to battle, and the Normans
from having stood at the ready all night just in
case an attack happened. So whether they were drinking or confessing,
no one had gotten sleep, and they were all really tired. Yeah.
This this account was written a little bit later in
the eleventh century, and and there are parts of it
that people pretty much agree are probably right. But then

(17:07):
when it gets to and then the English were up
all night drinking, kind of like the Hessians thing, right,
they were all drunk, clearly because they lost, they must
have all been inebriated. And that's really not not true. So,
as we said earlier, the battle began with the English
behind this shield wall, and then the Normans were arranged
into lines, with their crossbowmen at the front, and then

(17:30):
their soldiers on foot, and then their knights on horses.
And it would seem, of course, as though the English
were at a vast disadvantage since They had neither cavalry
nor very many archers, but they did have the high ground,
and they had a shield wall and battle axes, which
are in fact horrifying though maybe to think about very
effective weapons when it comes to battling men on horseback. Yes,

(17:54):
so if you do not hit the rider with your axe,
you will hit the horse and it will go down. Yes,
which makes my sad faith happened. I knew when I
was typing this that Holly was going to be very
sad about the predictable with the animals. So William moved
his men and kind of waves. They would fire a
volley of arrows and then alternate charges with the footshield,

(18:17):
the foot soldiers and the knights. And there were a
lot of casualties on both sides, but the English shield
wall held for a really long time. This battle went
on basically all day. The tide of the battle turned
when the Normans either retreated or feigned a retreat. Some
accounts say this was a deliberate strategy on William's part,

(18:38):
and others suggested that Norman's actually lost their nerve when
a rumor spread that William had been killed. So we
don't know why they turned yeah, it it's pretty much.
The English writers say that that the Normans all kind
of freaked out when their leader apparently fell but had
not really fallen, and the Normans, on the other hand,

(18:59):
say that it was a skilled battle maneuver on William's part.
I meant to do that. Yeah. Either way, when the
Normans started to flee, the English broke their ranks and
went after them, and then the Norman's turned on them
and cut them down. And it's also unclear whether the
sequence of events actually happened once or twice. So maybe

(19:21):
one time it was out of fear and one time
it was on purpose, we don't know. But regardless, the
shield wall started to fail and the Norman's really started
to gain ground. Yeah. I described this whole battle to
do the boyfriend, and he was like, they fell for
that more than once, and I said, well, that's a
little We don't know historically. Possibly. What we do know
is that later in the afternoon Harold was killed. The

(19:46):
Bioux tapestry depicts them as being shot with an arrow
through the eye and an extremely memorable sequence, but that's
actually a later account, like that's not something that seems
to have persisted on the day, so that might be
sort of a romanticized, horrifying edition of a later historian

(20:08):
or writer and not something that actually happened on that day,
but when he felt that's definitely when English soldiers really
started to scatter um and as the sun started to set,
the battle was pretty much over, with the Normans hoping
to clean up the stragglers. Yeah, the Normans went after
the stragglers and they slaughtered a lot of them, but

(20:31):
many of the Normans were also killed after the battle
itself was over, after piling onto one another against a
rampart that was hidden in tall grass, and so this
thing ended with just scores of bodies the big body
count for this particular battle. So after the battle Harold
had died, William had one. But coming to the throne

(20:55):
wasn't quite as simple as all that. It wasn't so
much that William killed Harold in the battle and then
William consequently got to be king. There was still actually
one other heir to the throne alive at this point.
That was Edgar Atheling, who was son of Edward the Exile,
who was son of Edmund Ironside, who himself had been
king for several months. So Edgar was only about thirteen

(21:19):
years old, but he did have a much clearer line
of successions straight to the throne than either Harold or
William did, and while he was not full of supporters
all over England, he did have the backing of the
archbishop and the citizens of London. And there's really all
kinds of disagreement about what exactly took place next, how

(21:40):
much force William used making his way to London, and
how much the death toll continued to climb. Those all
still have a lot of question marks around them. We
know that it was a really bloody campaign, though, and
in the end Edgar's supporters did back down. William moved
on to London and was crowned king on Christmas Day
ten sixty six. He built Little Abbey on the site

(22:01):
of the battle, uh approximately as as we think today.
The town of Battle grew up around it, and the
altar in the abbey is said to stand on the
spot where Harold had stood at the center of the
shield wall. The aftermath of the Norman invasion really could
be its own whole other podcast topic. The next several

(22:23):
years were very grizzly, as the English rebelled against their
new Norman king and William definitely put down their rebellions.
Case in point, the Harrying of the North, in which
William did a whole lot of conquering and pillaging in
Northumbria and as many as a one hundred thousand people
starved to death, which is just a huge It was
a huge death toll, mammoth. There was. There's a lot

(22:46):
of killing and and and pillaging for many years. And
even though this was definitely a bloody and oppressive conquest,
there are some modern beliefs about the Norman invasion that
don't quite hold up. For example, the Normans did not
introduce the idea of a class system to England and

(23:07):
Anglo Saxon England, about ten per of the people were
actually slaves and most of the free people were peasants.
There was a very very small, very wealthy aristocracy and
an even smaller ruling class that held actual power, So
Anglo Saxon England like was not some kind of utopia

(23:28):
where everyone was Yeah, it's also not true that women
were better off before the Norman invasion. Uh. That comes
up pretty often to this idea that that women were
equal to men before the Normans and the Normans started
subjugating them. So while it's totally true that women didn't
have many rights and privileges after the Battle of Hastings,
they really didn't before either. This did, though, have one

(23:52):
really huge impact that is recognized and I think most
people know about, which is that it radically changed the
English language through the influence it's of Norman speaking rulers.
So by the twelfth century people were speaking what we
know today as Middle English, which is the language of
the Canterbury Tales. So it definitely had a huge impact
on the culture of England, the direction of history, for sure.

(24:16):
It's it's sort of considered a watershed moment in English
history especially. Uh But if you hear people say that,
uh the Normans were universally a terrible influence on England,
that doesn't quite. William was quite a grizzly and bloody ruler, yes,
especially lots of bad and unfortunate things going on already. Yes.

(24:39):
Uh So today you can still visit the battle site
in Sussex, although there's been some debate really recently about
whether our modern idea of where the battlefield was is
exactly the right one and uh in which is just
as research was starting. On this episode, the UK television

(24:59):
show Time Team claimed that the site of the battle
was really about two meters away on what's now a roundabout,
and they used uh light our technology to map the
area near what's believed to be the actual battlefield. So
whether this is actually true is either up in the
air or roundly dismissed depending on who you talk to.

(25:21):
There have been several other alleged quote real sites of
the battle over the years, though, um, it's one of
those things where it was it was a pretty big
space people would have been fighting in. People keep sort
of trying to pinpoint an exact spot. It kind of
ra what is the center of an Amiba? Yeah, it's

(25:41):
it's not quite that simple. Yeah. English Heritage also known
as the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England disputed
this whole Time Team finding, basically saying what we just
said that the battle took place over a wide swath
of the area, so really, what was the point in
trying to say this spot is where it happened. There
are also three completely different sites that have been bandied

(26:03):
about as the exact spot in quotation marks. And then
there's also a cool thing online that you found that
I know you're yearning to talk about. Did It is
a Battle of Hastings game and you can play at
the BBC. We will link to it in our show notes.
You can play as William or you can play as
Harold and you can see what the what the results
are if you make different decisions as a as a

(26:26):
leader in the battle. At first I thought it was
somehow rigged because I kept trying to play as as William,
and this was before I had researched exactly how the
battle unfolded, and I failed a whole lot of times.
And then I played it again after I had read
it and went, oh, yes, I see, I see how
this works. Now do you also have listener mail for

(26:50):
us to enjoy? I really do, and hey, it's kind
of related. This is from Andrew. Andrew says, Hi, guys,
I'm a long term listener living on the outskirts of
West London and I often into your show whilst walking
my dogs on the old Hounslow Heath. I hope I
said that correctly. Home to high Women, Gunpowder and the
Armies of James the ban. I've just enjoyed your episode

(27:12):
on the Boston massacre a subject that I find interesting,
as my wife lived in Boston for two years and
I've spent some happy times there with the locals. I
thought that you might like to hear how the British
view on this unfortunate quote incident on King Street, as
well as other events like the infamous quote Boston tea party.
It always seems to me that many Bostonians now view

(27:35):
these events through the eyes of modern Americans and fails
to take into account the context. There's often bitter anger
about the fact that quote we tried to text quote
them on goods to fund the troops, that quote we
sent to govern quote them. The mistake, of course, is
to separate the people living on either side of the
Atlantic into two disparate groups. At the time, all these

(27:57):
people were British subjects living in a British colony, and
as such were liable to legitimate taxation to fund the
services provided by the British government. A more accurate view
of this situation is to imagine that one of the
current American states decided that it wanted independence from the
Union and no longer wish to pay any taxes to Washington,
but still expected to have all the assistance, financial, military, administrative,

(28:20):
etcetera that are afforded to the members of the United
States of America. When the members of the public of
Boston in seventeen seventy are viewed as a group of
rebellious subjects led by people with a questionable connection to
the smuggling trade to attack the appointed representatives of the
law over the fact that they didn't want to pay
government taxes, you come closer to seeing the way that

(28:40):
these incidents are viewed from the old country. I hope
that you find our views on this interesting and not
too archaic. Keep up the good work, and I look
forward to hearing more of your brilliant podcasts. Regards Andrew,
thank you so much and so cool. I love this,
so I love this, uh this email for a couple
of reasons. One, it is pretty awesome to here from

(29:01):
the other side of the pon on this particular subject. Yeah,
it's a perspective. We never ever are taught as American
children in school, not at all. Our our education on
the Revolutionary War is really really about us fighting off
the big bad them, like and I imagined, really, uh,
most places when they're you know, most countries raising their

(29:24):
children that's kind of how their stories go. It's about
a little more of a patriotic to wherever they are slant. So,
so yes, number one, it's awesome to hear that the
perspective of somebody who who did not grow up here.
And the other reason that it's awesome is that when
researching that episode, I didn't try really hard to present

(29:46):
both sides of how it went down, which I think,
uh I did as well as I could considering that,
you know, my entire education has been steeped in the
idea that there was a wee aligned against us during
the American Revolution. Um, so I still think I did
an okay, they're reasonably okay job portraying that, but hearing

(30:11):
the first person in perspective of somebody else is definitely awesome.
So thank you, thank you, thank you Andrew for writing
this wonderful letter. I especially like the reference to highwaymen.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
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and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are
also aren't pinterest. If you are interested in learning about
something else that started roughly around the same period that
we talked about today, you can come to our website
with the word crusades in the search bar, and you
will read how the Crusades Work. You learn all that
and a whole lot more at our website, which is

(30:54):
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because at hostof works dot com.
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