Pod Insights Gone Medieval 1066 New Discovery: The Myth of Harold's March About this episode What if one of the most famous stories in English history never happened? What if King Harold did not march his exhausted troops 200 miles before the Battle of Hastings?
Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Tom Licence whose explosive research argues that King Harold’s legendary march never happened, revealing a far more sophisticated Anglo-Saxon military strategy than always thought. So how did Harold get to Hastings? And how does this discovery change our understanding of the Norman Conquest?
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Harold Godwinson
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Battle of Hastings
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Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
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0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:40 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
1:20 Matt Lewis? Here at Gone Medieval, we try to keep you up to date with breaking news. And sometimes, there's breaking news from the medieval world. In this case, we're bringing you something from almost a thousand years ago that changes the way we think about one of the most critical moments in English history. The events of 1066 are pretty well-known. I thought I had a handle on what happened. Turns out, there's one very important aspect we might all have got wrong. I'm delighted to be joined today by Tom Licence, Professor of Medieval History and Literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge. Tom has some news for us that I think you'll find interesting.
2:03 Matt Lewis? Welcome back to Gone Medieval Time. It's great to have you with us.
2:05 Speaker 01 Great to be back, Matt. Thanks for having me.
2:07 Matt Lewis? Last scene here with Eleanor talking about Edward the Confessor, but we've got something something that qualifies as medieval breaking news here. This is going to be really, really interesting to get into, I think.
2:15 Speaker 01 Yes, I hope so. Something to do with Harold's use of the fleet in 1066.
2:20 Matt Lewis? Yeah. Right. Before we get there, though, I mean, most people think they know what happened in 1066. It's usually presented in quite a perfunctory matter of fact way. Harold marches north, fights Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, then marches south to face William, Duke of Normandy, at Hastings. I always have to say William, Duke of Normandy there as well, because I want to say William the Conqueror, but I'm not sure Harold would have appreciated us calling in that just yet.
2:43 Speaker 01 A bit premature, I guess.
2:44 Matt Lewis? So you're here with us today to challenge some of that perception, but let's go back and work our way up to that moment if we can. Can you just give us a little brief recap of how Harold has become King of England?
2:58 Speaker 01 Well, on the 5th of January 1066, Edward the Confessor died, and Harold emerged from his bedchamber saying, "Ah, I am king", and had himself crowned the very next day, the day of Edward's funeral, the crown being put on his head the moment Edward was lowered into the ground. And of course, those around Harold said that he was Edward's chosen candidate to succeed him, but other people had a different view, including William of Normandy, it seems.
3:26 Matt Lewis? And that fact that there's no clear kind of rules or direction about the succession opens the door for problems for Harold, really, doesn't it?
3:32 Speaker 01 There may have been guidance given by Edward the Confessor. He seems to have been lining up his great nephew and adopted son Edgar Etheling as his heir, but for one reason or another Edgar Etheling didn't make it that far, and Harold put himself upon the throne with the support perhaps of the great and the good. But this did raise a question, because of course, he's not of the royal blood, and every monarch up until that point had been of a particular bloodline. So you could imagine today, someone coming and taking the throne who wasn't related to the current royal family, just as today, back in the 11th century, this raised eyebrows and caused a lot of upset. And it was equivalent to putting a sign on the throne saying, "Anyone may not..." Now apply, which is of course what William did and what Harold Hardrada may have been up to as well.
4:16 Matt Lewis? And what do we know about Harold Hardrada and his assault on England? Does he believe he has a valid claim to the throne of England or is he just chancing his arm?
4:24 Speaker 01 It's traditionally been the view that Harold Hardrada is claiming the throne for himself. I'm not so sure. I think he was one of these battle hardened warriors who can't sit still for very long without having a good fight somewhere. And his wars with Denmark had concluded with a peace treaty a couple of years earlier. He had a lot of troops in the field. He needed to raise money from somewhere and he might have seen his chance to invade a country that looked a little bit wobbly with a new ruler that was divided because there had recently been a rebellion in the north where the king had fallen out with his brother Tostie, who of course has gone dashing to Harold Hardrada here saying, come invade with me. I think Harold Hardrada is maybe a chancer looking to to get whatever he can out of the situation.
5:06 Speaker 01 If that's a throne, great, but if it's money or hostages, he'll settle for that.
5:11 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I guess from the Norse perspective, England has always looked like fairly rich pickings.
5:15 Speaker 01 Well, of course, there's a long tradition of Vikings, Scandinavian seafaring warriors going to England to invade from Denmark, from Norway, from Sweden, and unveiling all around the northern coast. So I think, yes, England, England is possibly the most prosperous nation at this point in Northwest Europe in terms of its structure and the quality of its currency and sort of its, yeah, its general wealth. So I think, yes, rich for the pickings.
5:43 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And someone else who, you know, definitely is going to make a bid for the crown is William, Duke of Normandy. So how strong should we consider William's claim to be in comparison to Harold? What is he basing his belief that he should be king on?
5:58 Speaker 01 We know in hindsight that he's definitely going to make this bid, but the interesting thing is that if you read the contemporary biography of Eber the Confessor written around about 1065, 1066. The author of that, who's a court insider, doesn't see it coming. The worst thing he can anticipate is a civil war between Harold and Tosti, who he knows is going to make a comeback. So if William had been planning it, he'd been keeping his cards very close to his chest. And the suggestions from the contemporary chronicles are that Harold doesn't have any word of William's plans until spring, when Harold responds by calling together the fleet. And then there's a question mark as to whether he'll really pull it off, because at the end of the day, William is just a duke, and no duke of Normandy has so far managed to put together a fleet and mount an invasion of England before.
6:43 Speaker 01 So one or two past dukes might have dreamed of doing so. But the idea of England being on red alert because of the ambitions of this pushy duke is perhaps something that wasn't felt at the time.
6:55 Matt Lewis? Yeah, that's really interesting. Don't worry about it, Harold, it'll be fine. And why do we end up in a situation there when Harold has to go north? So he's going to face, we know he's going to face two effectively invasions of England.
7:07 Speaker 01 We know, yes.
7:08 Matt Lewis? Is there a reason that Harold arrives first? Is there a chance that they could have both landed at the same time and caused him even more problems?
7:14 Speaker 01 Well, to answer that second question first, yes, they could both have arrived at the same time. William had been planning, I think, to invade earlier in the summer. He'd been delayed by storms in the Channel, and there's often a lot of bad weather in the Channel in August or September. So William had been planning to arrive earlier in the summer, and had the weather not kept him at bay, then he and Harald Haradur might have invaded simultaneously, which would have been a real challenge for Harold to face Harold of England.
7:42 Matt Lewis? And what do we know then about the events of the Battle of Stamford Bridge? And presumably, we're not talking about the football match between Chelsea and Tottenham in 2016.
7:51 Speaker 01 What we might or might not know about Stamford Bridge is something I've been busy rewriting in my forthcoming biography of Harold, because I think we still have a lot to find out about the Battle of Stamford Bridge, including what Harold used his ships for, and whether there were two battles simultaneously. You know, the main battle in which King fought against King and Harald Haradur of Norway and Tosti were killed, but also possibly a skirmish or a secondary battle around. The fleets, the two fleets, which pops up in some of the Icelandic and Norwegian sources. The main thing I think we know is that Harold advanced the north very quickly and was able to catch Harold Hardrada unawares. Harold Hardrada had divided his forces.
8:33 Speaker 01 He had left one half with the ships and he had taken the other to march to a place called Stamford Bridge to gather hostages from the surrounding shires, having already taken hostages from York. And he felt so secure in his march that he and his men left their armour behind, presumably because it was hot weather and they weren't expecting to encounter an enemy. And Harold was able to get up to York very quickly, march through York and then surprise Harold Hardrada, riding up behind him presumably very quickly at or just beyond Stamford Bridge, where the English did so much slaughter upon the Viking invaders that the contemporary chronicler says that of the 300 ships in which they came, only 24 were required to transport the survivors back to Norway.
9:17 Matt Lewis? Yeah, which is a fairly destructive image of dozens and dozens of these Norse warriors, hundreds of Norse warriors not making it home. And I guess, as you say, the important part there is that Harold has taken them by surprise. He's caught them unawares and caught them unprepared.
9:34 Speaker 01 And without their armour too, because armour, they would have had male vests. Male vests deflect a lot of blows, but if you don't have armour and you're facing swords and axes, it gets very ugly.
9:45 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah. And we're going to get to your revelation in a moment, but what do we know in the aftermath of the Battle of Stamford Bridge? What do we know about how much Harold would have been aware of a need to get back down south? Does he know what William is up to at this point in the immediate aftermath of Stamford Bridge while he's in the north?
10:03 Speaker 01 We don't know, but it may be his suspicion is that William will never come now. You know, William hasn't come so far. It's getting late, very late in the campaigning season. Once we're into October, it's sort of after the campaigning season. Perhaps he's hoping or banking on William not showing up. Certainly, if he's still in Yorkshire, Battle Stamford Bridge is 25th September. If he's still in Yorkshire when he hears the news of William landing, and William lands around about 28th, 29th September, probably overnight, it would have taken a messenger a minimum of three or four days of riding as fast as he could to get the news up to Harold if he's still in Yorkshire. He then has limited time, I think, to do something to contain this threat
10:44 Speaker 01 in the south. I think what we need to understand and appreciate there, which isn't always factored into the accounts that we read, is that whichever commanders had been left to guard the south in Harold's absence in the north, as soon as they heard of William's landing, would already have called out the men of the Shires adjacent and probably further afield. So some opposition to William will already be organising prior to Harold's return.
11:09 Matt Lewis? And so this brings us to the crux of your research, which is around that, particularly that journey back south. So again, just to give us a little bit of a recap, in the aftermath of Stamford Bridge, what does the traditional version tell us happens next?
11:25 Speaker 01 The traditional version is that Harold hears the news, probably somewhere near York or perhaps on his return journey, and then engages his men in this incredible march. One historian in the 19th century called it almost miraculous. This incredible march, 250 to 300 miles, depending on exactly where he heard the news and exactly what route he took, but over a period that can't possibly have been more than about 12 days, all the way from Yorkshire down to Battle where the battle was fought. So this march, the forced march, as it's been termed, because he would have been forcing his men, day in, day out, day and night presumably, to cover this distance, has been a part of his legend for the best
12:07 Speaker 01 part of, well, more than 200 years. And doubts have been raised about it before. I mean, since the 1950s, historians have been suggesting that such a march was impossible. And there was subsequent debate about whether, well, maybe the men were mounted, you know, could infantry have covered that distance in that time? There have been attempts to compare it to other marches. Where we know infantry have been pressed over long distances in very short periods of time. But the idea of this march has become central to Harold's legend. And also central to the question of why the English lost at the Battle of Hastings. Because some scholars, some very eminent scholars have accused Harold of recklessness and rashness and impetuous haste.
12:49 Speaker 01 In putting his men through such an ordeal to get down south perhaps faster than he should.
12:54 Matt Lewis? Yeah, because we've traditionally had this view that Harold won't wait for any kind of reinforcement. You know, his family are encouraging to wait in London and rebuild his forces until he's ready to go. And as you say, he's impetuous and he insists on leaving London immediately. And then also the impact that that has at Hastings in that Harold and a chunk of his men arrive there. Presumably exhausted from almost a fortnight's worth of relentless marching south. And that that impacts what happens at the Battle of Hastings.
13:23 Speaker 01 Yes, and presumably having suffered losses of men and desertions along the way. And people who couldn't keep up with him and all these questions. And another dimension of it too is this idea that William was goading Harold. By attacking his family lands down in Sussex, he was provoking him into this sort of action. And Harold, being this sort of headstrong, angry figure, walked straight into this trap. Anxious as he was to avenge, avenge himself against this slight upon his honour. So the way Harold has been constructed in this, this story that we tell ourselves. I think puts him in this light that he's not necessarily the most shrewd or responsible general. And England, you know, lost as a result of his, his headstrong, very heroic, but sort of headstrong foolhardiness.
14:06 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah. I can't keep everyone in suspense for too much longer. I'm desperately trying to. Was there a specific thing that led you to this research? Were you actually trying to find what you'd found? Was it a response to the disbelief in, in the possibility of this march that led you to challenge it? Or is this something that you kind of accidentally came across? I don't want to say accidentally, actually, that's not fair, but.
14:27 Speaker 01 I was already commissioned to write the biography of Harold for the Yellings monarch series. After having written there with the Confessor. So I was researching Harold's reign and I'm a conquest scholar and I've had ideas on this for a long time. I I I've been floating the idea in small scholarly circles for quite a while that Harold might have used ships and one or two other historians think the same, certainly are open to that. I I think what changed was I got to the point in my biography that I really had to look carefully at exactly how he was defending England in ten sixty six, and that meant what he was doing with the fleet, what he was doing with his troops. And so, as I always do with my detective's hat on, I went back to the primary sources
15:09 Speaker 01 in the Latin and the Old English, leaving aside what historians have written and assumed over the years, to see what they actually said. And I was looking for all the references to the fleet and its movements in the most early incredible sources, and also for Harold's troops. And I stumbled upon a couple of things that hashed up at it, surprised me.
15:28 Matt Lewis? I mean, let's get to it then. What did you uncover?
15:31 Speaker 01 Well, the first thing I I I had noticed is that historians of the conquest, going all the way back to Sharon Turner, who established the idea of Anglo-Saxon studies, I might call it early medieval studies now, but Anglo-Saxon history as a thing, and wrote the history of Anglo-Saxon England. And then Freeman, Ebert Augustus Freeman, the great conquest scholar of the mid nineteenth century, who who wrote a six-volume history of the Norman conquest, and basically set the field on its footing. All of those scholars had arrived at the idea that in September ten sixty six, after Harold had kept his troops and his fleet waiting for William, who never showed, that he had sent his troops home and that he had disbanded the fleet. Meaning, of course, that he had no ships when shortly afterwards he heard news of Harold Hardrada arriving in the north. And that was already confusing
16:16 Speaker 01 me somewhat, because the chronicle that contains the statement, the ships were sent home, shortly afterwards tells us that he went up north and marshalled his fleet on the River Wharf, a river which in those days was much wider and had the capacity to accommodate a number of large ships. So this reference to him having a fleet up in up in Yorkshire has never sat easily with historians who thought that he'd disbanded the fleet. And they've tried to explain it away in various terms. Maybe he gathered a few ships at the last minute, or some of those that had been sent back, he was able to pull back for this operation. Or maybe it has been suggested the word fleet here doesn't mean fleet at all, it means marine forces or something. So there was this sort of bit of cognitive dissonance going on. And
17:02 Speaker 01 I just then asked the question, well, the chronicler tells us Harold sent home the men, the men will have to go back because they had no provisions anymore. So he sent that all the Shire forces home. It says he then sent the fleet to London. And then it says, and after the ships came home, Harold heard the news of Harold Hardrada arriving in the north. And it just went through my mind, maybe when the chronicler says after the ships came home, he doesn't mean the ships were sent back to their various ports that had dispatched them in the first place. Maybe he just means London, you know, the ships went to London and after they came home, as in home to their home base at London, Harold heard the news of Harold Hardrada. And so I thought, well, I better check how this chronicler uses the word home in relation to the fleet. So I went
17:44 Speaker 01 back to previous instances with the same chronicler writing of the fleet. And I found that in ten fifty two with a fleet, he describes the fleet going homeward to London. And there's another instance where he's talking about London being the home of the fleet coming home to London. So it clicked in at that point that this statement that for over 200 years had been taken to mean that the fleet was just dispersed and therefore no longer available, actually meant that the fleet was right there at ready at hand in London and had gone home and Harold had it with him. And then everything began to fall into place. So the reference to the fleet on the River Wharf, obviously, is just the chronicler tracking the movements of the fleet. And then interestingly, the two earliest detailed accounts of the Battle of Hastings itself, Latin accounts, one of
18:28 Speaker 01 them, the Song of the Battle of Hastings, written by Guy of Pontir, round about ten sixty seven, the other one, William of Puttiere's Deeds of Duke William, written in the ten seventies, they both describe Harold sending a fleet of hundreds of ships around the coast to trap William after William had arrived, that is to say in October. So we've for a long time had these two sources describing Harold having a fleet of hundreds of ships in October. And again, historians have been very confused by that and haven't quite known how to handle it. It has been suggested that maybe it's hyperbole, that the Norman writers are exaggerating the nature of the opposition that William had to face, or that it's some misunderstanding, or that maybe Harold had got together a few ships from somewhere else at the last minute.
19:13 Speaker 01 But actually, if we read that coming home, as I think the chronicler means it, coming home to London, then you can trace the movement of the ships up to the north and down to the south again. And that means that Harold is most likely transporting men by ships because he just would, wouldn't he? And it's also what he does in previous campaigns and what other commanders do, and what William later does. So he's transporting men up to the north and down to the south. And then that made me think, well, if he's transporting some men in ships, what do the sources say about the forced march?
19:44 Matt Lewis? And do they say anything?
19:47 Speaker 01 What do the sources say about the forced march? Well, as a sort of professional researcher in this field, I have to pose a series of questions to the sources. And I went again and looked for that forced march. I thought, you know, that's got to be in there. There's got to be references to a forced march. Surely everyone knows about the forced march. And I got hold of the Latin sort of English edition, the best edition of the deeds of Duke William by William of Poetia, as translated by Ralph Davis and Marjorie Chibnall in the 90s. And it's the standard edition, Oxford Medieval Text edition. And I went to find the relevant passage and I got their translation. And there it was. It said, yes, he is advancing against you by forced marches in the Latin. And then later, you know, reference to, yes,
20:31 Speaker 01 he's speedy up his march. Okay, it's in there. And then I looked at the Latin. And I looked at the bit that they had translated as advancing against you by forced marches. And all it says is festinus reddit in te. He is coming against you quickly or very quickly or in haste. And then I looked at the bit later where it said he's quickening his pace, he's speedy up his march in the translation. And the Latin just says accelerabat, that is to say he's getting a move on. He's moving even more quickly because he
21:02 Speaker 01 The point is, this was again a lightbulb moment because I realised that it's sort of a cognitive bias thing. If scholars have been told, generation after generation, that there's a forced march, and they're translating a Latin text, that very moment where this forced march is supposed to have occurred, they will read it in there, even if it's not in there. We all do this, you know, we read into the sources what we think is in there, but if you look at it and what it actually says, it doesn't say that at all. And then I looked at all the Latin sources from the 11th century, the Old English sources, I went into 12th century sources. John of Worcester, who's a 12th century English writer, using a lost Old English version of a chronicle from the 11th century, he refers to Harold moving his troops. He uses the verb movio, and you can move troops by
21:44 Speaker 01 land or you can move them by sea. But what I discovered is that none of the sources refers to a march, none of the sources specifies whether Harold is moving his troops or accelerating or hurrying by land or by sea. There certainly aren't any of the particular words, particular verbs associated with marching turning up in the sources, and what there are, are lots of references to ships and fleets. So two things I can say for certain are that there's no reference to the forced march in any of the contemporary sources, and that there are lots of references to Harold using ships, in fact hundreds of ships, throughout the campaigning season. I then had a dig around in some of the early modern histories, and I, the earliest reference I could find to the forced march or marching is in John Milton's
22:29 Speaker 01 History of England of 1670, in which he describes Harold marching his men down from the north very quickly. And I can only conclude that this is surmise on Milton's part, possibly because Milton himself is very much involved in the English Civil War, when there's a lot of marching of troops up and down, and was thinking about marching rather than ships and fleets. But that idea gradually crept in that, you know, Harold was doing all this marching. I was, I was surprised that it wasn't there in the sources.
22:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so you're ending up in a situation where someone has used the word march and everyone has gone, oh, so he marched. And then everything that you look at from that point onwards becomes predicated on the fact that it's a march. So he's moving faster means he's marching faster. If he's increasing his pace, he's increasing the pace of the march.
23:13 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And I've seen, as I mean, as a historian, working closely with texts and revising old narratives, I've seen this sort of thing happen before. You know, one person suggests something and then everyone else just follows it because that person's a professor of some way or other, an authoritative historian. And of course, you know, we will respect what they say, but as I teach my students, always go back to the sources and check what they actually say. Because we're all prone to this sort of error. We're all prone to just, you know, assuming something's there that isn't.
23:37 Matt Lewis? And it sounds like, you know, you've gone back to almost every source that we have for this period in Latin and in Old English. And they all kind of bear out the fact that Harold is using ships and none of them mention a march. It's not even like, you know, it's half and half or it's a bit muddy. It sounds like we've just got this completely wrong for centuries.
23:57 Speaker 01 Well, I am, I'm afraid obsessively thorough. And yes, I really do drill into every little source and look at every item of vocabulary. And I'm not saying that no troops went down the landward route. But here's the thing, if you've got ships, hundreds of ships, possibly a number of ships enlarged by captured Viking ships. Because you remember earlier, I said the Vikings came in 300 and left in 24. What happened to the other 200 or so? I mean, we should be a bit sceptical about these numbers. But let's say Harold has captured 200 Viking ships. He's already got 100 or 200 ships with him. If you've got 200 ships up in the north and an army and you want to get them down south. Do you A, march them all the way down 12 days, day and night, and break them to exhaustion point?
24:40 Speaker 01 And allow the possibility of desertion and collapse of people along the way? Or do you plonk them into the ships where they can have a nice little break and where you can contain them so that none of them get lost en route? And take them down from the Humber to London in about three or four days, allowing yourself time as commander from London to coordinate operations against William. Obviously, it's a no brainer. The thing is though, that option has been off the table. Because of this very entrenched idea that Harold had disbanded the fleet, and this even more entrenched idea of this miraculous march. I mean, it's interesting that Freeman, who described Harold as the perfect Englishman, and who really was Harold's biggest fan,
25:21 Speaker 01 even he displays a little element of doubt by describing the march as almost miraculous. That is to say, it was a near impossible feat. So I think the combination of there being no march in the sources and lots of ships, coupled with what a commander in Harold's position had done in the past himself, which is send men by sea, and would do in such circumstances. There's a nice sort of set of currents in the North Sea that conveniently travel north, south, down the East Coast. So riding that current in fair weather is a very easy thing to do. For me, it's pretty clear what would have happened.
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27:04 Matt Lewis? And do we know, can you trace back to the point at which someone has sort of mistranslated that idea of the fleet going home, or misinterpreted it from going home to London to going home being dispersed? Is there a point where that clicks into place and we've just followed it ever since?
27:21 Speaker 01 Yes, so I'm thorough. I haven't checked every permutation of the various 18th century histories, but the point I identify as being influential, just thinking about which books were read and when and by whom, and which ones prevailed in the construction of the story and which ones didn't. It would be Sharon Turner's History of Anglo-Saxon England in 1801. He was the first person, I think, to influence other scholars writing later, who interpreted that as meaning that Harold had sent the fleet back to the various ports and locations that had supplied it. That is to say, the fleet had been dispersed, disbanded, no longer available, no fleet. Harold is on his own to march up north. And then people like Freeman and others were building on the narratives created by Turner.
28:04 Speaker 01 But it's a really important point you raise here because I think it just underlines the fact how much of our history was constructed, was written in the 19th century by nation builders and the past nation identity builders like Freeman, Turner, and hasn't been subjected to the sort of rigorous scrutiny that academics today would normally apply to the sources.
28:27 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I mean, anyone who listens to me on Gone Medieval often enough will know my slight obsession with the idea that we are still so heavily influenced by kind of Whigish history that wants to see the creation of the British state moving closer to empire as almost inevitable. And so anyone who contributes to that is good and anyone who does anything that doesn't appear to contribute to that is bad. That still holds such a sway over our view of particularly medieval history, I think.
28:53 Speaker 01 Absolutely, and the interesting thing, looking at Freeman's writings, of course, is in the 19th century, you've got these, all these discourses around nationhood, but also colonialism, empire, race as well. And 1066 becomes such an important part of our story because, I'm afraid, there is this idea of the, this sort of the digemonic, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon blood mixing with the second generation Viking blood of the Normans, which is seen as also a sort of Teutonic blood, to create this, this, this super English race, whose mission is then to go on and conquer the world. That sort of narrative is being peddled by Freeman and some of his contemporaries in the 19th century, happily
29:33 Speaker 01 not one we subscribe to in contemporary history. But it, it does partly explain why 1066 was seen as so important and why it became such a landmark in, in what the Edwardians coined as our island's story.
29:46 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah. So in your kind of reinterpretation of these events, should we think of Harold sailing north too? Does he march north or does he sail north? Do we know?
29:57 Speaker 01 The Chronicle sheds some light on this. So after tracing the movements of his army and fleet towards the north, it then says that he arrayed his forces at Tadcaster, just southwest of York, and marshalled his fleet there on the wharf. So he has a land army and a ship army, which is standard, incidentally. I mean, if we look at all the previous campaigns, Harold's previous campaign in Wales in 1064 with his brother Tostie, they have a land army and a ship army. Seward's campaign against Macbeth, as immortalised by Shakespeare in 1054, he takes a land army and, and a ship army. So he has both, but the thing to bear in mind is we don't know where that land army had come from. They're not necessarily
30:39 Speaker 01 men who've marched up from London. They might have been men who've been notified by a rider from different shires to muster at a certain point, and the men who hadn't been deployed yet, perhaps from the Midlands or the north. There's a question mark over, over where those troops originated from. And this is something we have to keep in mind too, that Harold's army throughout the campaigning season of 1066, when he has to fight first against Harold Haradra and then against William, it's Potentially a fluid body, some men will be serving for part of that and then then leaving behind, or some men might be serving on land and then joining the fleet. Some shires might be coming along halfway through or towards the end, while other ones are being sent home to rest and recuperate. I don't think we should see it as one monolithic body of men marching up and down the country all the time either.
31:24 Matt Lewis? And so what does this understanding that Harold was moving troops in this kind of way, that he's using a fleet, that he's sailing north, that he's sailing back down south, that isn't this kind of forced march, what does that do? What impact does that have on our understanding of Harold as a general and the resources at his disposal? Because we often think of him being, as you said, rash and impetuous and poorly, you know, I don't want to say poorly advised, because his family, we're told, was telling him not to do what he did. But not, you know, a competent general, not clearly thinking through the best way to deal with this. But it's not as we thought it was. So does this, does this change our view of Harold as a general, as a military leader in 1066?
32:10 Speaker 01 I think it has to, I mean, to put it mildly. I think some of that stuff has to go in the bin now. Everything we know about Harold's career as a general before 1066 suggests very sophisticated operations, combining movements by land and sea. And this impression we have of this rather desperate, landlocked figure, dashing from one end of the country to another, faced with seaborne invaders who are using both the ships and the land, really does a great injustice to English military and naval power in the 11th century. In Eber the Confessor's reign, the English fleet is the talk of the northern seas. When Sven Estrason, the king of Denmark, is at war with Harold Hardrada in the 1040s, he sends to Eber the Confessor for England ships.
32:55 Speaker 01 He says, can you send me 50 ships to to help me defeat Harold Hardrada? Harold Hardrada signs a peace treaty with Eber the Confessor because he doesn't want to fight the English particularly at sea. And then the the German emperor also requests the help of English ships in 1049 to blockade the Count of Flanders in. So this idea that England is somehow not a naval power and that we'd end up in a situation, I say we, the English would end up in a situation where Harold has to dash from one end of the land to the other without having any ships at his disposal. Really does a great injustice to Harold and English maritime capabilities at that point in time. And to restore the fleet into the story does a number of things. First of all, it puts him on a level with his two opponents, certainly at least or level with
33:40 Speaker 01 Harold Hardrada and William, who are operating by land and by sea. Secondly, it shows him as a much more versatile and resourceful general who is able to coordinate a very complex and sophisticated operation opposite ends of the country using both maritime and landward tactics and troop types. And then finally, it demolishes, I think, this idea of recklessness. I mentioned Alan Brown, who's a great figure in conquest studies through the 70s and 80s. He wrote a great book on the Norman conquest. He was one person who accused Harold of reckless haste and who always trumpeted the superiority of Norman arms as a factor in defeat of the English, the exhausted English, I should say. But
34:24 Speaker 01 actually, when we recognise that Harold had most likely sent most of his troops by ship in three or four days, rather than marching them over 12 days, arresting them and coming to London and commanding operations from there. And when we also add into the picture, because this is an important detail I think we need to add too, the fact that not only did he march down himself at the head of an army to block William on the road out of what is now battle, but he also sent a fleet, a large fleet around the coast to blockade William from the rear. We see him trying to capture William in a pincer movement on the Hastings peninsula. Now, in those days, the Hastings, where the land around that part of Sussex was more like a peninsula, there were watercourses either side of a
35:07 Speaker 01 ridge of land. And William had his ships in Pevensey Bay to the west. He had made his headquarters in what is now Hastings Castle. And then there was a little ridge of land from which he had to exit that peninsula onto the main road network, which he needed to do in order to conquer England. And Harold, as a very sophisticated tactician, had realised that the best thing he could do was bottle William up in that peninsula by Locking him off at the bottleneck, which is exactly where Battle Abbey is, where the ridge dips down before rising up again in the thickly wooded, rough terrain as it was then, and sending a fleet round behind him to trap him. So Harold was actually trying to trap William in a pincer movement. That's not part of the story we're told.
35:52 Speaker 01 So all these sort of, these new elements begin to kick in and weigh in in important and surprising ways.
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37:07 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, I was going to ask next whether there was any suggestion that Harold had used ships down to Hastings too. You mentioned earlier, there's a couple of Norman sources that sort of hint that he had. But this, I mean, this completely changes what we had thought we understood about the Battle of Hastings, because we've, for so long, we've had this image of these desperate, exhausted Englishmen against these kind of relentless, superpowered Normans.
37:32 Matt Lewis? And it was almost like, you know, just how long could they possibly hold out? But it seems now that Harold had a genuine master plan, you know, he knew what he was doing. He was doing more than one thing at once. As you've said, much more sophisticated than it would have appeared. And I guess then, do we have to think about Hastings? You know, we get those retreats by the Normans that are often framed, you know, the Normans will later claim it was a joke. You have a feigned retreat, it was a tactic and all of this kind of thing. But it starts to feel like maybe that's more genuine because they're trapped and they kind of run away, but they can't get away because they're trapped by Harold's forces and they almost have to go back and fight. But it's got to completely change our, our understanding of the dynamics of the Battle of Hastings, hasn't it?
38:16 Speaker 01 Well, it focuses the light squarely on the operation around the battle itself. If we take out of the equation this idea that the English are exhausted and that there's this mad dash, then we have to explain the English defeat in other terms. So you're, you're quite right. It focuses the lens, whatever the metaphor is, it focuses attention on the battle. I would say we should focus on two things. The troop types that are available to both sides and the flexibility or lack of flexibility they allow. And the events of the battle as narrated in our earliest battle accounts. So obviously you mentioned the feigned flights and this idea that some of the Normans might have feigned a retreat to lure the English down the hill at certain point or points in the battle,
38:59 Speaker 01 wheeled round and trapped them in executed sort of large numbers that way. That may well have been something that happened in the battle. I don't know whether necessarily the defeat of the English can be pinned on that alone. The other thing to think about though, is what types of troops both armies had? And this is also where it gets very interesting in relation to the fleet. Because if you look at the Bay of Tapestry, for example, or you read the early accounts, we know that William has cavalry, he's got foot soldiers, he's got archers, he's got crossbowmen.
39:30 Speaker 01 Harold has foot soldiers, no cavalry, but then he doesn't really want them because he's fighting a defensive position on a hill, so it's not the sort of place you would deploy cavalry. He wants a shield wall, and charging uphill against a shield wall is not good for cavalry. So effectively, by adopting that position, Harold is largely neutralising William's cavalry. But he's got foot soldiers. What about archers? If you look at the tapestry, the Normans have a lot of archers there, both in the main frieze and in the border, particularly towards the end where they're coming into play, and the English have all got arrows sticking in their shields and in their bodies. But there's only one archer depicted on the English side, and that must be either deliberate, or it shows an awareness on the part of the tapestry's designer, that the English had
40:12 Speaker 01 fewer archers, considerably fewer archers, at the battle than the Normans. Now, questions have been raised over that in the past, and why should that be, given that all generals at this period realised the tactical value of archers? Were all the archers killed at Stamford Bridge? Were they able to keep up on the march, perhaps? The Norwegian sources say that Harold Hadrada was killed by an arrow to the throat. Presumably, it wasn't a Norwegian arrow, so there must have been some English archers up there, if that's true. So the question is then, why doesn't Harold have archers who might have helped him, you know, raining arrows down on the Normans as their column bunches up in that dip before the land rises to the battle site?
40:53 Speaker 01 And if you read accounts of naval battles at that time, we have some accounts from Icelandic poets, and from William of Apulia, a Norman in southern Italy, writing of naval battles there. The key thing you do when you get your ships together is you load them up with archers, because men on ships are sitting ducks, and if you can get within range of your enemy, and they're all on ships, you've just got to rain lots of archers, or maybe spears on them, to kill them all. The Icelandic poets call these showers of archers, Odin showers. They talk about these showers of arrows, the Icelandic poets, they call them Odin showers. And really, what any commander is trying to do at this point is kill as
41:35 Speaker 01 many of the enemy as possible with minimum loss to yourself. And if you get chivalry, it's just about maximum execution with minimum cost to life and to resource. So it could well be that if Harold is planning a naval attack from the rear or to assault William's men who are on their ships, he put his archers, or a lot of his archers, on his ships along with other crack troops. And of course, William hears that the ship is coming around the coast and he decides, I'm not going to stick around here, I'm going to make a break for it and punch through Harold's army before it's up to full strength. The ships arrive, it's too late, and Harold has lost his archers. Those sorts of discussions then come into play as to why the English might have lost at the Battle of Hastings.
42:16 Matt Lewis? Yeah, Tom, this is blowing my mind. Because also, I guess we have to think about, Harold is taking up a defensive position at the top of a hill, you know, why is a King of England fending off an invasion by taking up a purely defensive position? Isn't his job to go on the attack? But if his part of the army's job is to form a barrier, ready for that fleet to come around and attack from the other side with the archers, that explains why he's doing what he's doing as well. It's part of a bigger plan.
42:44 Speaker 01 You said it, you got there before I did, but yes, this is the argument I make in my book. His is a containment operation, basically. He also knows, as a general, that fighting uphill, defending a position on the hill always faves as a defender. There are very few examples of battles that go the other way. I mean, Alexander the Great at Granicus perhaps. But charging uphill is not great for cavalry, certainly, or for infantry, as the reenactors who do it every year will tell you, they all get exhausted, the Normans, having to charge uphill against the English again and again and again. Harold is, I think, yes, he's fighting a defensive battle, he's able to obtain the advantage of the terrain where he positions himself.
43:22 Speaker 01 And his job, I think, as he planned it, as he foresaw it, was to stop the Normans escaping the only point they could escape, at the bottleneck pinch point of the peninsula, while being harried from the rear by his, the forces he'd sent on the ships. And the way William managed to outmaneuver Harold was in the recognition that the pincer movement was also a division of Harold's forces, and the only way William could escape it was to leave camp very quickly before the ships had A chance to get near him and do his best to punch through that that royal army, which Harold was probably thinking, oh, he won't dare. He won't dare take me on at the royal army because Harold knows from the Brittany campaign
44:06 Speaker 01 that when at the end of the campaign Geoffrey V shows up to give backing to Conan of Brittany, William decides not to go head to head with this massive force, but to retreat back into Normandy. Harold's knowledge of William is of a cautious general, which William certainly is more in his later years, perhaps less so in his earlier years. But Harold knows him as a cautious general and he's taking a risk, an acceptable risk, that Harold, that William isn't going to come and attack the king on the hill with his great army. What he might not know is that William has inside intelligence that one or two people Harold perhaps thinks are going to show up for him, aren't going to show up. And one of them is Robert Fitzwyrmark. So William Poitiers's account, the deeds of the Norman Duke,
44:50 Speaker 01 tells us that Robert Fitzwyrmark, who's a Norman by birth and a kinsman of Eber the Confessor, he's sheriff of Essex and he's a staller, which is like a senior figure in the royal hall. He writes to William or sends a spy to William saying, I'm secretly backing you, I'm on your side. And then the question mark is, did he show up? The sheriff's job was to muster the shire forces. So when the writs are going out and the messages are going out saying Essex come to fight for me and meet at the old apple tree. Does Robert Fitzwyrmark decide to drag his feet? Do the men of Essex turn up at all? And how many other people does William know aren't going to show for Harold? We think about fourteen eighty five, when another English king dies in battle.
45:32 Speaker 01 We know about the Stanleys sitting at the side of the battle, in which the Third thought they were going to fight for him. But the Stanleys sit out the battle for a little while, seeing which way it goes, before eventually throwing in their lot with Henry Tudor and swinging, swinging the course of the battle. Did William know that Harold might not be up to strength? It's an interesting question, simply because the sources, when, when the blame game begins and the Hastings inquiry is underway and everyone's blaming everyone and saying, why did the English lose in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle? A lot of those writers say William attacked Harold before all his forces had been drawn up, or they give the idea that not everyone showed up on the day. And it may well be that William's intelligence, because we know his intelligence is very good, they all used
46:14 Speaker 01 spies and heads of contacts in the country. He might have known that although this is a great royal force with Harold at its head staring him down from a hilltop, he might have known that not everyone was there, was going to be there. And then that meant that he could use that intelligence to outmaneuver Harold's tricky manoeuvre and punch through the Royal Army, which is exactly what he did. And the fleet arrived too late, which is why we don't hear anything more about it.
46:38 Matt Lewis? Yeah, but it just completely changes the dynamic on the battlefield. It's absolutely facet of mind blowing. I mean, hopefully listeners are sitting there with their minds blown as well, as much as I am. As you mentioned, you're writing this biography of Harold. Has this changed what you thought of Harold when you started writing it? Did you have an idea and just, you know, this a simple word in a chronicle has changed what we understand about that campaign? Does that change what you think about Harold?
47:06 Speaker 01 Yes, there are a lot of different things coming together. That word in the chronicle, the absence of the march, the joining of the dots, you know, when you realise that there are lots of ships floating around. I came at Harold with a fairly open mind. I mean, my, my approach always in writing biographies, I've written Edward the Confessor beforehand, is that I try to approach people in the past on their own terms. I try to respect them. I try not to judge them by modern standards, because there's a lot of that. I try to sort of understand the worldview that they're inhabiting and where they're coming from, what makes them tick and why they do what they do, and also why they wrote down what they wrote, because whenever they're writing something, they've got an agenda. And I didn't have a particular attitude towards Harold. I mean, I think when I was a boy, he was one of my heroes, but I'm a grown man now, that's in the past. I was
47:49 Speaker 01 curious, I suppose, to find out more. And I knew there was a lot of myth being spun around him. Just as I understood there's a lot of myth spun around Edward the Confessor when I wrote his biography. So much of what we think we know is a Victorian invention. I was fairly open minded, but when this all came together and I began joining the dots, I realised this is a very different, very different perspective on the Battle of Hastings and on Harold as a military commander. So yes, it certainly, it took me from a place of open minded unknowing to a place of, I think, more knowing. I feel I know a lot more about Harold. I can't quite describe the feeling, but it's like you discover something
48:31 Speaker 01 from the past and you know that somehow some justice has been done to that person.
48:38 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I guess the, you know, the million, billion, trillion dollar question is what else have we got this wrong for this long that is the result of a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation? And I guess it's impossible to know, isn't it? But it's, it's, I don't know. It's tempting to wonder what else might turn up. I mean, it takes people like you to be trawling through archives and being able to, to understand all of that and interpret it and, and access those sources and, and know what you're doing with them. And that requires an awful lot of resource on your part to find this, but it's, it's got to feel like it's worth it. And I'm just wondering what else might one day turn up in that same kind of way.
49:18 Speaker 01 I'm sure that there are big and bigger things that we, you know, we think we know that we don't. There are so many unknowns. And the further back you go in a way, the bigger those unknowns become. You know, obviously, working in the 11th century as I do, there are far fewer sources than there are, say, for the 19th century. So it's more a question of like having a jigsaw puzzle. You've got the bits around the outside, perhaps, or one, two bits in the middle, but there might be something massive in the middle that you can't even see because there's a big gap there. I think there's a lot, a lot still to be discovered. What I like so much about this discovery is just that it's such a central part of English history. Everyone thinks, so we know everything we should, we're ever going to know about 1066. No one's going to come along and say, oh no, that's all
49:59 Speaker 01 wrong. But actually, we don't. We don't know everything. We, you know, we can very easily fall into the habit of thinking that we do because we've been told that we do. But it really, I think validates the role of historians and researchers generally in, in going back and just posing those fundamental questions to the sources, you know, and just saying, well, I know everyone says that, but is that actually what's in there?
50:20 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And history is continually asking those questions, isn't it? Even if you think you know the answer, it's asking, you know, why, why am I so sure about that?
50:28 Speaker 01 It should be, I think that's what good history should do. I mean, we use history, we use the past for all sorts of purposes. In the Victorian period, they used it for building narratives of nation and identity, and indeed, race and empire and other things. I think now, though, with academic history, we interrogate the past more, and we're more, I think, open to understanding the past in its own terms than perhaps trying to paint figures in the past in our own image. There is still a certain amount of wanting to paint people in the past in their own image, you know, Harold being modelled as they model Englishmen by Freeman. Freeman is effectively taking Harold and setting him up as a role model and a hero for generations of young sons who are going to go off and fight and die for empire. That's what Freeman's doing, he's grading heroes and saints. Alfred
51:09 Speaker 01 the Great is another one. I'm much more interested in who the real Harold was and the world he inhabited, or indeed, other people I work on in the past, you know, where are they coming from, why do they do what they do. Studying history is putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, it's seeing the world from their perspective. And I think for that reason, it kind of develops empathy and curiosity and even, dare I say, compassion in us. That's what it's about for me.
51:33 Matt Lewis? And when will people be able to look forward to seeing your book?
51:36 Speaker 01 It's available for pre-order, but it's due out in August. It's called Harold Warrior King with the series The Yell English Monarchs, and of course, they already have Edward the Confessor in that series. But it'll be due out in August, round about the time to be ready for the arrival of the Bay of Tapestry.
51:52 Matt Lewis? Of course, wonderful, perfect timing. Thank you, Tom. I am going to go and have to sit in a dark room and rethink everything I thought I knew about 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, but in a really, really good way. I have found this absolutely mind-blowing. I've really, really enjoyed talking this through with you. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with me and with the Gone Medieval audience.
52:13 Speaker 01 Thanks, Matt. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
52:16 Matt Lewis? Well, what do you think? Does this reshape our understanding of those crucial events in 1066? What does it mean for our assessment of the Battle of Hastings? It's incredible that academics like Tom can still find new information that sheds different light on the events of almost a millennium ago. If you enjoyed this, we've got several episodes around the events of 1066 in our vaults, from an explainer on the Battle of Hastings to the Children of 1066, an exploration of what the Norman conquest meant to the next generation of Anglo-Saxon nobility. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts
53:00 Matt Lewis? and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
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