The Battle of Hastings 1066: The Uncomfortable Truth
The Battle of Hastings is the most famous military encounter in English history. This is partly because of the seismic social change that followed William the Conqueror’s decisive victory over his English rival, Harold Godwineson, on October 14th, 1066. It is also because of the quality of the original source material, notably the Bayeux Tapestry. What other medieval battle can we teach to schoolchildren using contemporary pictures?
Despite the quality of the primary sources, almost everything about Hastings is up for debate: the course of the action, the numbers on each side and, famously, whether or not Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. As one of the foremost experts of the previous century, R. Allen Brown, once ruefully observed, sometimes the only certainty about Hastings seems to be that the Normans won.
The one other fact that has remained certain down the ages is the battle’s location. Until recent times it has been universally accepted that the action took place in the town of Battle, some seven miles north-west of Hastings itself. According to tradition William the Conqueror marked his victory by building a great abbey on the spot where Harold fell. Happily the abbey survives and so enables us to identify the battlefield with some precision.
The authors of the present volume are unhappy with this tradition. The site at Battle, they insist, does not fit with the primary source material. They contend that the fighting in 1066 took place at a different location, not far away, called Caldbec Hill.
It is impossible to catalogue here all the contortions, omissions, misconceptions, mistakes and absurdities required to sustain this view. The argument for Caldbec Hill ultimately rests on the statement of the ‘D version’ of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that Harold came to oppose William at ‘the grey apple tree’. In the 1960s it was suggested that this long-lost landmark stood on top of Caldbec Hill. This is an unprovable assumption, so the authors settle for repeatedly stating it as fact (‘It is universally accepted’, we are told).
What of the traditional site? The authors assert that the story of the abbey’s altar being erected on the spot where Harold raised his standard occurs only in the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, written a hundred years after the event. On the basis that the same chronicle contains other known distortions, they then rule its testimony out of court. But the Battle Chronicle is far from being the only source of the altar story. Half a century earlier the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury said exactly the same thing. Even more compelling is the testimony of the ‘E version’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, recording William the Conqueror’s death in 1087: ‘On the very spot [On ðam ilcan steode] where God granted him the conquest of England he caused a great abbey to be built.’ Thus an English source, demonstrably written before 1100, confirms what is alleged here to have been a Norman conspiracy.
The authors find no room to mention either of these two sources; in their first chapter, they cheerfully admit to cherry-picking ‘the information which best suits our hypothesis’. That’s the bit that ought to leave readers feeling truly uncomfortable.
How did the Battle of Hastings affect England? 1066 & the Battle of Hastings
Significance of the Battle of Hastings:
Language
One of the most obvious changes was the introduction of Anglo-Norman, a northern dialect of Old French, as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing Old English. Even after the decline of Norman, French retained the status of a prestige language for nearly 300 years and has had (with Norman) a significant influence on the language, which is easily visible in Modern English.
Governmental systems
Before the Normans arrived, Anglo-Saxon England had one of the most sophisticated governmental systems in Western Europe. All of England was divided into administrative units called shires (shares) of roughly uniform size and shape, which were run by officials known as "shire reeve" or "sheriff". The shires tended to be somewhat autonomous and lacked coordinated control. English government made heavy use of written documentation which was unusual for kingdoms in Western Europe and made for more efficient governance than word of mouth.
The English developed permanent physical locations of government. Most medieval governments were always on the move, holding court wherever the weather and food or other matters were best at the moment. This practice limited the potential size and sophistication of a government body to whatever could be packed on a horse and cart, including the treasury and library. England had a permanent treasury at Winchester, from which a permanent government bureaucracy and document archive begun to grow.
This sophisticated medieval form of government was handed over to the Normans and grew stronger. The Normans centralised the autonomous shire system. The Domesday Book exemplifies the practical codification which enabled Norman assimilation of conquered territories through central control of a census. It was the first kingdom-wide census taken in Europe since the time of the Romans, and enabled more efficient taxation of the Norman's new realm.
Systems of accounting grew in sophistication. A government accounting office called the exchequer was established by Henry I; from 1150 onward this was located in Westminster.
Anglo-Norman and French relations
After the conquest, Anglo-Norman and French political relations became very complicated and somewhat hostile. The Normans retained control of the holdings in Normandy and were thus still vassals to the King of France. At the same time, they were their equals as King of England. On the one hand they owed fealty to the King of France, and on the other hand they did not, because they were peers. In the 1150s, with the creation of the Angevin Empire, the Plantagenets controlled half of France and all of England, dwarfing the power of the Capetians. Yet the Normans were still technically vassals to France. A crisis came in 1204 when French King Philip II seized all Norman and Angevin holdings in mainland France except Gascony. This led to the Hundred Years War when Anglo-Norman English kings tried to regain their dynastic holdings in France.
During William's lifetime, his vast land gains were a source of great alarm to the King of France and the counts of Anjou and Flanders. Each did his best to diminish Normandy's holdings and power, leading to years of conflict in the region.
English cultural development
A direct consequence of the invasion was the near total elimination of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. As William subdued rebels, he confiscated their lands and gave them to his Norman supporters. By the time of the Domesday Book, only two English landowners of any note had survived the displacement.[9] By 1096 no church See or Bishopric was held by any native Englishman; all were held by Normans. No other medieval European conquest of Christians by Christians had such devastating consequences for the defeated ruling class. Meanwhile, William's prestige among his followers increased tremendously because he was able to award them vast tracts of land at little cost to himself. His awards also had a basis in consolidating his own control; with each gift of land and titles, the newly-created feudal lord would have to build a castle and subdue the natives. Thus was the conquest self-perpetuating.
Legacy
As early as the 12th century the Dialogue concerning the Exchequer attests to considerable intermarriage between native English and Norman immigrants. Over the centuries, particularly after 1348 when the Black Death pandemic carried off a significant number of the English nobility, the two groups largely intermarried and became barely distinguishable.
The Norman conquest was the last successful conquest of England, although some historians identify the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the most recent successful invasion from the continent. Major invasion attempts were launched by the Spanish in 1588 and the French in 1744 and 1759, but in each case the combined impact of the weather and the attacks of the Royal Navy on their escort fleets thwarted the enterprise without the invading army even putting to sea. Invasions were also prepared by the French in 1805 and Nazi Germany in 1940, but these were abandoned after preliminary operations failed to overcome Britain's naval and, in the latter case, air defences. Various brief raids on British coasts were successful within their limited scope, such as those launched by the French during the Hundred Years War, the Spanish landing in Cornwall (Huernwall) in 1595, the Dutch raid on the Medway shipyards in 1667 and raids by Barbary pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries.
What happened in the battle of hastings?
Well first of all, there was the battle of Stamford Bridge (which happened up north of England) , so Harold Godwinson (the current king of England at the time) and his men had to march all the way up to Stamford from London, to fight Harold Hadraada, then Harold Godwinson won. After that, someone informed him that William Duke of Normandy had come over from France to invade and was down North ready to fight. So, all Harold Godwinson's men and him, had to march back down north to fight William Duke Of Normandy. Harold and his men were at the top of the hill and William and his men were at the bottom. William decided to get straight in with the fight and attack first. William's men charged up to the top of the hill and tried to get through the strong Shield Wall that Harold's men were forming at the top of the hill. After a while Williams men found that they weren't having much luck trying to get through the shield wall , but there was also another problem, William was missing so everyone started to think that he was dead. Williams men were just about to give up hope when William came out from the back of his crowd of men and shouted out 'Im Not Dead, I'm Alive!' then all his men got motivated. They were still having no luck getting through the shield wall so they decided to come up with a plan. They would run away pretending to be scared and then they would turn round and kill them! They did this and William won the battle and got crowned king of England!
In the battle of Hastings King Harold got shot in the eye and the Normans ran away to trick the Saxon's then the fyrn (not fully trained soldiers) ran down the hill to slaughter
them but the Normans turned round and killed them. the first time they ran away was because they thought that William was dead so William had to lift his helmet off to show them he was not but they ran away three times each time some of the fyrn ran down to kill the Normans but they all got killed. William had an advantage because he had archers and soldiers on horses all of which king Harold did not have but Harold did have an advantage because he was on a hill and William was not so it was harder to climb and they could just kill the Normans when they reached the hill it was also a lot easier for them to fight because the Normans would find it hard to balance and attack at the same time so the Saxons had time to kill them before they could. At the end of the battle the Saxons fled and they gave William time to celebrate for he was now king of England because Edgar Harold's nephew gave William the crown and the throne because he couldn't really do anything about it.
The Battle of Hastings is the most famous military encounter in English history. This is partly because of the seismic social change that followed William the Conqueror’s decisive victory over his English rival, Harold Godwineson, on October 14th, 1066. It is also because of the quality of the original source material, notably the Bayeux Tapestry. What other medieval battle can we teach to schoolchildren using contemporary pictures?
Despite the quality of the primary sources, almost everything about Hastings is up for debate: the course of the action, the numbers on each side and, famously, whether or not Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. As one of the foremost experts of the previous century, R. Allen Brown, once ruefully observed, sometimes the only certainty about Hastings seems to be that the Normans won.
The one other fact that has remained certain down the ages is the battle’s location. Until recent times it has been universally accepted that the action took place in the town of Battle, some seven miles north-west of Hastings itself. According to tradition William the Conqueror marked his victory by building a great abbey on the spot where Harold fell. Happily the abbey survives and so enables us to identify the battlefield with some precision.
The authors of the present volume are unhappy with this tradition. The site at Battle, they insist, does not fit with the primary source material. They contend that the fighting in 1066 took place at a different location, not far away, called Caldbec Hill.
It is impossible to catalogue here all the contortions, omissions, misconceptions, mistakes and absurdities required to sustain this view. The argument for Caldbec Hill ultimately rests on the statement of the ‘D version’ of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that Harold came to oppose William at ‘the grey apple tree’. In the 1960s it was suggested that this long-lost landmark stood on top of Caldbec Hill. This is an unprovable assumption, so the authors settle for repeatedly stating it as fact (‘It is universally accepted’, we are told).
What of the traditional site? The authors assert that the story of the abbey’s altar being erected on the spot where Harold raised his standard occurs only in the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, written a hundred years after the event. On the basis that the same chronicle contains other known distortions, they then rule its testimony out of court. But the Battle Chronicle is far from being the only source of the altar story. Half a century earlier the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury said exactly the same thing. Even more compelling is the testimony of the ‘E version’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, recording William the Conqueror’s death in 1087: ‘On the very spot [On ðam ilcan steode] where God granted him the conquest of England he caused a great abbey to be built.’ Thus an English source, demonstrably written before 1100, confirms what is alleged here to have been a Norman conspiracy.
The authors find no room to mention either of these two sources; in their first chapter, they cheerfully admit to cherry-picking ‘the information which best suits our hypothesis’. That’s the bit that ought to leave readers feeling truly uncomfortable.
How did the Battle of Hastings affect England? 1066 & the Battle of Hastings
Significance of the Battle of Hastings:
Language
One of the most obvious changes was the introduction of Anglo-Norman, a northern dialect of Old French, as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing Old English. Even after the decline of Norman, French retained the status of a prestige language for nearly 300 years and has had (with Norman) a significant influence on the language, which is easily visible in Modern English.
Governmental systems
Before the Normans arrived, Anglo-Saxon England had one of the most sophisticated governmental systems in Western Europe. All of England was divided into administrative units called shires (shares) of roughly uniform size and shape, which were run by officials known as "shire reeve" or "sheriff". The shires tended to be somewhat autonomous and lacked coordinated control. English government made heavy use of written documentation which was unusual for kingdoms in Western Europe and made for more efficient governance than word of mouth.
The English developed permanent physical locations of government. Most medieval governments were always on the move, holding court wherever the weather and food or other matters were best at the moment. This practice limited the potential size and sophistication of a government body to whatever could be packed on a horse and cart, including the treasury and library. England had a permanent treasury at Winchester, from which a permanent government bureaucracy and document archive begun to grow.
This sophisticated medieval form of government was handed over to the Normans and grew stronger. The Normans centralised the autonomous shire system. The Domesday Book exemplifies the practical codification which enabled Norman assimilation of conquered territories through central control of a census. It was the first kingdom-wide census taken in Europe since the time of the Romans, and enabled more efficient taxation of the Norman's new realm.
Systems of accounting grew in sophistication. A government accounting office called the exchequer was established by Henry I; from 1150 onward this was located in Westminster.
Anglo-Norman and French relations
After the conquest, Anglo-Norman and French political relations became very complicated and somewhat hostile. The Normans retained control of the holdings in Normandy and were thus still vassals to the King of France. At the same time, they were their equals as King of England. On the one hand they owed fealty to the King of France, and on the other hand they did not, because they were peers. In the 1150s, with the creation of the Angevin Empire, the Plantagenets controlled half of France and all of England, dwarfing the power of the Capetians. Yet the Normans were still technically vassals to France. A crisis came in 1204 when French King Philip II seized all Norman and Angevin holdings in mainland France except Gascony. This led to the Hundred Years War when Anglo-Norman English kings tried to regain their dynastic holdings in France.
During William's lifetime, his vast land gains were a source of great alarm to the King of France and the counts of Anjou and Flanders. Each did his best to diminish Normandy's holdings and power, leading to years of conflict in the region.
English cultural development
A direct consequence of the invasion was the near total elimination of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. As William subdued rebels, he confiscated their lands and gave them to his Norman supporters. By the time of the Domesday Book, only two English landowners of any note had survived the displacement.[9] By 1096 no church See or Bishopric was held by any native Englishman; all were held by Normans. No other medieval European conquest of Christians by Christians had such devastating consequences for the defeated ruling class. Meanwhile, William's prestige among his followers increased tremendously because he was able to award them vast tracts of land at little cost to himself. His awards also had a basis in consolidating his own control; with each gift of land and titles, the newly-created feudal lord would have to build a castle and subdue the natives. Thus was the conquest self-perpetuating.
Legacy
As early as the 12th century the Dialogue concerning the Exchequer attests to considerable intermarriage between native English and Norman immigrants. Over the centuries, particularly after 1348 when the Black Death pandemic carried off a significant number of the English nobility, the two groups largely intermarried and became barely distinguishable.
The Norman conquest was the last successful conquest of England, although some historians identify the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the most recent successful invasion from the continent. Major invasion attempts were launched by the Spanish in 1588 and the French in 1744 and 1759, but in each case the combined impact of the weather and the attacks of the Royal Navy on their escort fleets thwarted the enterprise without the invading army even putting to sea. Invasions were also prepared by the French in 1805 and Nazi Germany in 1940, but these were abandoned after preliminary operations failed to overcome Britain's naval and, in the latter case, air defences. Various brief raids on British coasts were successful within their limited scope, such as those launched by the French during the Hundred Years War, the Spanish landing in Cornwall (Huernwall) in 1595, the Dutch raid on the Medway shipyards in 1667 and raids by Barbary pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries.
What happened in the battle of hastings?
Well first of all, there was the battle of Stamford Bridge (which happened up north of England) , so Harold Godwinson (the current king of England at the time) and his men had to march all the way up to Stamford from London, to fight Harold Hadraada, then Harold Godwinson won. After that, someone informed him that William Duke of Normandy had come over from France to invade and was down North ready to fight. So, all Harold Godwinson's men and him, had to march back down north to fight William Duke Of Normandy. Harold and his men were at the top of the hill and William and his men were at the bottom. William decided to get straight in with the fight and attack first. William's men charged up to the top of the hill and tried to get through the strong Shield Wall that Harold's men were forming at the top of the hill. After a while Williams men found that they weren't having much luck trying to get through the shield wall , but there was also another problem, William was missing so everyone started to think that he was dead. Williams men were just about to give up hope when William came out from the back of his crowd of men and shouted out 'Im Not Dead, I'm Alive!' then all his men got motivated. They were still having no luck getting through the shield wall so they decided to come up with a plan. They would run away pretending to be scared and then they would turn round and kill them! They did this and William won the battle and got crowned king of England!
In the battle of Hastings King Harold got shot in the eye and the Normans ran away to trick the Saxon's then the fyrn (not fully trained soldiers) ran down the hill to slaughter
them but the Normans turned round and killed them. the first time they ran away was because they thought that William was dead so William had to lift his helmet off to show them he was not but they ran away three times each time some of the fyrn ran down to kill the Normans but they all got killed. William had an advantage because he had archers and soldiers on horses all of which king Harold did not have but Harold did have an advantage because he was on a hill and William was not so it was harder to climb and they could just kill the Normans when they reached the hill it was also a lot easier for them to fight because the Normans would find it hard to balance and attack at the same time so the Saxons had time to kill them before they could. At the end of the battle the Saxons fled and they gave William time to celebrate for he was now king of England because Edgar Harold's nephew gave William the crown and the throne because he couldn't really do anything about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment