Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Battle of Hastings About this episode On 14 October 1066, the armies of William, the Duke of Normandy, and the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson clashed near Hastings in one of the most famous battles in history and one that would decide the fate of the English throne. We all know the outcome, but how and why did the battle take place? To answer this question, Dan returns with another explainer episode to tell the incredible story of how William was able to defeat Harold on that bloody day in 1066 to become King of England.
Written by Dan Snow, produced by McKenna Fernandez and edited by Matthew Wilson & Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript 10,826 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:57 Dan Snow? Battle doesn't really do it justice. It was murder.
2:04 Dan Snow? It was a spear tip ripping open a thigh. A short stabbing blade looking for eyes, throats, armpits. The bigger men fought for space to bring a two-handed axe down in a blow that could sever a horse's head from its body.
2:20 Dan Snow? You pushed and you killed. You tried not to drown in a sea of iron.
2:27 Dan Snow? It was October the 14th, 166. On a hillside a few miles north of the English town of Hastings, two armies clashed in a battle that decided the fate of a kingdom.
2:40 Dan Snow? On the ridgeline, the Anglo-Saxon shield wall stood firm. Elite, full-time warriors, the housecarls of King Harold Godwinson's army, lock their shields, forming a wall of wood and iron to repel the Norman invaders.
2:58 Dan Snow? On the slopes below them, that invading army of Duke William of Normandy. It surges forward, ranks of armoured knights on horseback, archers loosing volleys into the sky, foot soldiers trudging up again and again, trying to top the high watermark of blood and corpses that denoted the English front line.
3:21 Dan Snow? The fighting grinds on all day. A riot of rearing horses, eyes bulging. A hail of iron-tipped arrows, of punching, stabbing and biting, of screams of the living and dying. The crown of England is for the taking. And the outcome of this battle will determine the course of British history.
3:46 Dan Snow? This is the story of Hastings and what led up to that bloody October day. Why warlords and armies came to England to win a crown that fateful year. And it's also about the battle's aftermath. In this explainer episode, I'm going to guide you through the tangled web of rival claims, the English throne, follow them as they gallop to battle and throw you into the muddy field of combat to unpack how the year 1066 reshaped England. The story's just been brought to life here in the UK by the new King and Conquer series. It's on BBC One, it's been sold internationally, so watch out for it wherever you live. So I thought it was a good time to tell you all about the history behind it.
4:29 Dan Snow? I recently got the chance to interview James Norton, who played Harold Dobbinson in the series, you can check that out on the YouTube channel. Make sure you head over to History on YouTube and while you're there, like and subscribe. In the meantime, let's get into it.
5:03 Dan Snow? 1066, it was a year in which history seemed to move at a gallop. There weren't glacial changes and subtle shifts. This was a year that saw no less than three men ruling as kings of England. There were three great battles and other skirmishes as well. There were at least three pretenders to the English throne slinging it out on English soil. And it's a year that's come to just represent gigantic change, a moment of discontinuity. It is rightly remembered as one of the most famous years of British history. First, let's have the context. And I say this in most of our explainers, which is a bit sad and a bit worrying, but
5:47 Dan Snow? this was an era in which violence was the norm, in which might was right, and in which war was common, particularly wars around succession. Nature abhorred a vacant throne.
6:02 Dan Snow? The British and Irish Isles, the North Atlantic Archipelago, you call it what you will, was a patchwork of competing groups in that period. There were kingdoms and statelets and tribal areas almost right across the Isles, from Donegal to Kent. You've got England itself, a relatively big unit, taking up much of the southern part of Britain. It had been united really for only a couple of generations, since the conquests of Athelstan, or arguably his little brother Edmund. I'm not prepared to die on the hill of who was the first English king. It could have been Athelstan, could have been Edmund, could have been Edgar the Peaceful. Let's not get into it right now, okay, that's another podcast. But it was one of them. And that was only around 150 years or so before 1066. To the north of England, you've got Alba, roughly
6:46 Dan Snow? we would call it Scotland. And in the 11th century, that is busy conquering a British kingdom. You might say more accurately, a Welsh kingdom, Strathclyde. There's a whole other story there. That's a part of western Britain not yet conquered by the English-speaking Anglo-Saxons or other Germanic settlers from the continent. You've got Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, islands like Mull, Aranska, you've got Cintyre, where my mum's family are from. They're Viking, effectively. They're ruled by Norsemen. And Ireland and Wales? Where do we even start? They were a tapestry, a mosaic of competing principalities, kingdoms. And all that meant that there was competition, there was rivalry, there was violence in
7:28 Dan Snow? pursuit of wealth and power. Violence was celebrated, it was seen as the natural order of things. Now, this feels disturbingly similar to my introductions for the First and Second World War explainers, and I think we might be hitting on a problem, folks. We've got a problem with violence in our species. But anyway, around succession in particular, the passing of the crown from one to another, there was always the potential for violence, for conflict. It was a terrible point of danger. And I'm really struck by how rarely stable successions were carried out in this period, how infrequent it was that a dynastic line could be set up, not just in England, but in Normandy as well, across the channel. Power was focused on, it was exercised by
8:11 Dan Snow? a single individual, a king, a ruler. There weren't really capital cities in this period. There wasn't really a bureaucratic state like we get based in Whitehall today or Washington DC, because the kingdom was, the centre of the kingdom was really where the king laid his head that night. Continuity of government depended on the heartbeat of the king, and the minute that heartbeat stopped, well, there was no telling what would happen. Internally, there was division or competition between warlords or his sons, but externally, there might be invasion. There was almost certainly going to be violence around that moment of succession, and therefore nearly every generation of ruler had to establish themselves. It's
8:54 Dan Snow? almost like the hereditary blood claim in this period. It was necessary, but it wasn't sufficient to take over from the previous generation. It was a violent business ruling in the early Middle Ages. I mean, let's check this out. Let's look at a case study, the Kingdom of England. You've got King Edmund of England, killed in 946. His son, Edwig, was a wrongen. The country is partitioned between him and his brother Edgar. They got rid of Edwig. Edgar ruled pretty successfully, but Edgar's son, Edward, was killed by an opposing faction within the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in 978. If that doesn't smack of an unstable succession, I don't know what does. And if we're being honest, that's where the rot set in, because guess who came to the throne after that? Ethelred the Unready. Edward, his half-brother, had
9:39 Dan Snow? been murdered, as I said. A great schism, therefore, within the English state. The Vikings sensed that, they returned. This was terrible timing, and there followed a great onslaught of Norsemen at the end of the 10th century and into the 11th century. And Ethelred just wasn't up to it. He was chased off the throne. England was conquered by Swain Forkbeard, the king of Denmark and Norway, and after even more fighting, conquered again by Sunkenute. Anyway, you get the picture. This was not a time when the automatic transition from father to son was as assured as it was in other periods. Nearly every succession was contested.
10:17 Dan Snow? And few were more famously contested than the one in 1066. Because in 1066, there wasn't even a son to take the throne. It was open season. It began in the depths of winter. King Edward the Confessor, the old king, he'd reigned for 24 years. He'd come to the throne as a result of a compromise hammered out between the Danish conquerors of England and the indigenous elite. He was Ethelred the Unready's son, but he'd sworn to respect the laws and the changes that had taken place under Danish rule. So he was a compromised candidate. He reestablished a kind of equilibrium that papered over the fissures within England.
10:59 Dan Snow? And one of those fissures was sort of embodied by one of King Edward's worst enemies, Godwin, Earl of Wessex. He was an Anglo-Saxon, but he'd switched sides to become a key figure in the Danish administration of England. And now he sought to maintain his power after Edward the Confessor came to the throne, and he'd forced Edward to marry his daughter Edith. Now, Edward the Confessor had not produced any children with Edith. Arguably, they'd never had sex with each other. He possibly abstained as a final act of defiance against his hated father-in-law, as they had no kids. And so, England had a succession problem.
11:39 Dan Snow? Edward the Confessor breathed his last on the 5th of January 1066. The next 12 months makes Game of Thrones look like a game of patty cake. The question on everyone's lips is, who is going to rule England? There was a blood relative, but he was a child. And nothing spells trouble for the kingdom like putting a child on the throne. Now, that child in question is 13 years old. He's called Edgar the Ethling. He really is the last candidate from the line of Alfred, the last of this royal line of England, the royal line of Wessex. Edward the Confessor had been his great uncle. So he's got the blood in his veins, but he's young, and England was a rich country that needed a warrior to defend it.
12:25 Dan Snow? So when the thinking of Harold Godwinson, the local strong man. Harold was the son of Godwin from his Danish wife. So he got Harold Godwinson, the classic English leader with a Danish mother. When Earl Godwin had died in ten fifty three, Harold inherited from him the Eldom of Wessex and the mantle as the most powerful aristocrat in the kingdom. By the mid ten sixties, the Godwins had practically taken over. Three Godwin brothers in particular controlled the great earldoms of England between them. There were some other Godwin brothers who had been exiled or were just troublemakers and wound up dead, but these three main brothers have an earldom each. And they've got a huge gang of supporters and friends they've put into positions of power.
13:10 Dan Snow? They are the top of a huge pyramid of patronage. They run the show. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a supporter. The Archbishop of York is a Godwinson man. The newly widowed Queen, don't forget Edward the Confessor's wife, she is Harold's sister. So when Harold claims that Edward the Confessor, just before his death, had awoken from his coma and had anointed Harold as a successor. Well, there's not many people high up in the kingdom who are going to disagree with that. So you've got Harold, he's the homegrown choice for the crown of England. But there were other claimants. There was one in particular claimant who I think, deep down, Edward the Confessor certainly
13:54 Dan Snow? probably had preferred. And I think Edward the Confessor probably had promised him the throne. I say probably because, look disclaimer alert folks, we have got very, very fragmentary evidence for all of this. So this is a story, there are other interpretations. We cannot be certain about this. But it is perfectly possible that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to someone else. And that's because in ten fifty one. Edward had had a particularly bad falling out with his father-in-law Godwin and his brothers-in-law. He'd sort of found his backbone briefly. He'd managed to expel the Godwin family, and he'd put his Godwin wife immediately into a nunnery.
14:36 Dan Snow? And at around that time, critically, he had invited Duke William of Normandy to come to England. The evidence for this is pretty solid. It's mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example. No one denies this happened. Now, who are these Normans? Norman comes from the root word Norse men, north men. So the first Normans are basically Vikings. Much-feared Scandinavians who invade, who raid, who ended up settling in northern France in the late 9th century, the early 10th centuries. And they gradually became Francified. They became more French. They intermingled with the local population. They adopted Christianity. They swapped their ships for horses and castles.
15:18 Dan Snow? But importantly, they don't seem to have lost that warlike nature that the Vikings are famous for. And they carved out an area which became known as Normandy. It was a Duchy of Normandy. And they do adapt quite well to Frankish customs. By the way, they have also got the best series of names in the history of the world, so let me just run through those. Rollo's successor was called William Longsword. And then we get his son, Richard the Fearless. His son was Richard the Good. He was father of Robert the Magnificent, who was the dad of William one day to be William the Conqueror. So this is not a family you want to mess with.
16:00 Dan Snow? Now, Edward the Confessor had been exiled as a child. He'd grown up in Normandy. His mother was Norman. And he was a big fan of the place. He'd been happy there. And it seems that Edward may have promised the throne to William of Normandy when William came to England to visit. He'd grown up with William. He liked him. They were cousins. But Harold Godwinson cares not for the old celibate king's wishes. He's dead, the throne is vacant, and he's the man on the spot. He's on hand, and he had himself crowned within days of Edward the Confessor dying, possibly on the same day that Edward the Confessor was buried in Westminster Abbey.
16:42 Dan Snow? When news reached Normandy, William, Duke of Normandy, went absolutely bonkers. The Normans subsequently claimed that Harold had once visited Normandy. It's unclear why, and when he visited Normandy, he'd sworn an oath to uphold William's claim to the throne. He'd sworn on holy relics bits of old bone associated with saints. Now, that's a big deal, because it makes him an oath breaker in the eyes of the Normans, which in the 11th century is really, really bad. So William of Normandy is able to message the Pope. The Pope legitimizes the invasion. He says it's a holy crusade against this oath breaker. That legitimized Duke William's claim to the English throne, and it meant that anyone
17:26 Dan Snow? who died for his cause on the battlefield would get fast-tracked into heaven. So the invasion is divinely sanctioned, and that's useful. It's good to have God on your side. So William, he's got the papal backing. He sends word out across Western Europe, particularly to neighboring parts in northern France and the Low Countries. He says he's going to invade, and he asks for mercenaries. He asks for volunteers. The wealth of England was famous. William makes it clear that there were going to be rewards for anyone who joined him under this papal banner, this papal flag. They're going to defeat the oath-breaking Harold, and he was going to take back the crown of England that was justly his. In England, Harold's well aware that all this is coming. He knew he was going to have to fight William, and he gathers an army. It's called a great army, in fact.
18:10 Dan Snow? They spend the summer in the south of England, hanging about in and around the Solent, which is the closest part of England to Normandy, and he waits for William. And the year 1066 is made even more dramatic by the fact that there was a conveniently timed arrival of Halley's Comet, which blazed through the skies above England. And gave those of a superstitious bent a rather nervous feeling. Did it portend the death of kings? Well, this time round, yes, it very much did. So while William is assembling volunteers from as far away actually as Sicily in southern Italy for his invasion force, Harold is calling out his own English army. We call it the Third,
18:53 Dan Snow? the militia, if you like, of England. What you've got with the English army is the elite corps of the so-called housecarls. These are full-time professional troops, some of the most highly-trained, effective warriors in Europe at the time. You can imagine royal bodyguards in full mail armour wielding swords and double-handed battle axes. But he's also got a huge pool of part-time soldiers as well. They're called the Third, and they make up the bulk of the army. Each earldom into which the kingdom was divided was then subdivided into shires, and each shire had to produce this levy of men, the food. A small group of farms, perhaps a hamlet, would have to produce one fighting man with
19:36 Dan Snow? the right equipment and enough supplies to spend two months of the year at war in the service of the king. And so Harold gathers this force together. But the problem is, by the end of the summer, that term of service has run out. They've been sitting around. They've done their months of service, and the harvest has to be collected. Food supplies have run out, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle just tells us that that army had to disband. And lo and behold, just four or five days later, we don't know if it was luck, the timing, it was great intelligence, we're not sure, the Norman fleet set sail from Deiv in Normandy. But William sets out in less than ideal conditions,
20:17 Dan Snow? and that fleet, so carefully prepared for months and months, is blown not to England, but it's blown eastwards along the coast of northern France. Now, I always thought as a child, this was ridiculous. I mean, how hard can it be to get across the Channel? I mean, it's a 12, it's a 14-hour sail with a decent wind behind you. I now know, let me tell you, that the weather in the Channel can be absolutely appalling, and that's in the summer. Waiting for the right window to get a fleet of sail-powered ships safely across can take weeks and weeks on end, particularly quite primitive ships which are packed with horses and troops and supplies. Actually, William ends up, not in England, but at a town called Saint Valery, and he
21:01 Dan Snow? spends the next two weeks there, looking at the weathercock on the top of Saint Valery Church, praying every day for the wind to change and for the rain to stop. He even goes to the extraordinary extent of exhuming the body of Saint Valery himself, parading it around the Norman camp and getting everyone to pray for decent wind. Remember that a thousand years ago, the person who decides battles at the end of the day, the person who decides the fate of a campaign, the wind direction, is God. And William believes to the depths of his soul that if God isn't on his side, this isn't going to work. Finally, on the 27th, 28th of September, the wind does change direction and William begins crossing the English Channel.
21:44 Dan Snow? God must have answered his prayers this time because he gets decent weather and it gives him a little window to nip across. But we're going to come back to that in a second because while William has been waiting for the weather and exhuming corpses, all hell has been breaking loose in England. Let's cross the Channel. Harold, remember, had disbanded his army. He'd hoped that the threat might be over the year and his men can go and help with the harvest. He got back to London and suddenly, there, he is hit with a thunderbolt. Harold discovers that England has been invaded, but not in the south, by William of Normandy, at the other end of his kingdom, in the north.
22:28 Dan Snow? And to make matters worse, at the head of the invading army, one of the greatest warriors of the Middle Ages, a giant veteran Viking called Harold Hardrada. And by his side, he has a very useful advisor. He has King Harold of England's troublesome brother, Tostig Godwinson. The family drama has just intensified. Throughout the 1050s and early 1060s, Harold and his brother Tostig had collaborated very well. They'd won victories in Wales together and Tostig had been made Earl of Northumbria. But Tostig had eventually fallen out with Harold because during a rebellion against
23:11 Dan Snow? Tostig's rule in Northumbria, Harold had refused to back him and Tostig had been forced into exile. And from that point, the brothers were enemies. And it's not entirely clear what happens with Tostig because we only know the story from later legends, from stories written down hundreds of years later. But it seems like he goes around the courts of northern France and certainly those of Scandinavia, looking for military support. Tostig may have had his eye on the crown himself, or he just wanted to get back at his brother and restore his power base the north of England. He's up for revenge. And Harold Hardrada is the man who he ends up persuading to have a punt at invading England.
23:56 Dan Snow? So Harold has been betrayed in the most brutal and personal way imaginable by his brother. It's all getting a bit Godfather here, folks. But before we see how Harold responds to this, let's just pause and talk about Harold Hardrada. Because he is a figure that I have been obsessed with for years. Harold Hardrada, well, Hardrada bit roughly translates as hard ruler, severe, resolute. You get the sense. He's a gigantic super Viking. He was an adventurer from his earliest days. He'd been chased into exile. He'd headed east along the arteries of the Viking world, deep into Europe and even Asia. He turns up with the Kievan Rus. The Rus are the people that give their names eventually to the Russians.
24:41 Dan Snow? These are Vikings, these are Scandinavians pushing down the great rivers of Russia and Ukraine. He meets Jaroslav the Wise, and old Jaroslav must have been wise because he had one look at Harold Hadrada and gave him command of his forces. And then Harold Hadrada fought everyone really on behalf of Jaroslav the Wise. He fought the Poles, he fought the Steppe nomads, he fought the Byzantines, he fought the Estonians. And there is no one, Harold Hadrada doesn't fight actually in this period. And then he heads even further south through those rivers and he signs up to fight with the Byzantines in their elite so-called Varangian Guard. Now, the Varangian Guard sounds like something out of the Game of Thrones, but it's actually much cooler than that because it actually existed.
25:23 Dan Snow? It is a kind of Praetorian Guard, I suppose you might say it's an elite body of troops around the emperor. They're drawn often from North and North West Europe, so there's lots of Anglo Saxons in there, there's Franks, there's Northmen in their ranks. It was thought they might be kind of outside the political and national and regional loyalties and competitions within the Byzantine Empire and they'd be able to quell dissent, put down rebellions without shedding a tear. And that's exactly what they did. And predictably enough, they then also played a role in the court intrigue, in palace politics, until it seems that they actually got to the point of installing candidates on the throne of the Byzantine Empire itself.
26:05 Dan Snow? King Harold Hadrada, on behalf of that Byzantine Emperor, he fought the Arabs. We think he went as far as Iraq and Syria. He went to Italy, he became known as the Bulgar Burner in Bulgaria because of his devastating campaigns there. He may have taken part in one particular palace coup where he blinded an emperor and put another candidate on the throne, all of which meant he became fabulously wealthy. Amazingly, and somewhat predictably...
26:33 Dan Snow? He decided he wanted to go home, so he headed north. He arrived back at the court of Jaroslav the Wise and immediately attacked the Byzantine army straight away, because of course by then he knew everything about them. And he kept journeying north through Kiev, he married a princess. And with all of this wealth, he headed home to claim the throne of Norway. Because you see, deep down, all he wanted was to go home, was to return to his native Norway and become king. And unsurprisingly, given what I've just told you, he got exactly what he wanted. He arrived back in Norway and took the throne. As king, he defeated the Danes several times in battle. His dream was unifying Denmark and Norway. He helped to forge certainly modern Norway.
27:17 Dan Snow? He explored the Arctic. I mean, the guy is completely extraordinary. One historian has a great quote about him, which I thought was one of the most euphemistic things I've ever read in my life. The historian wrote, "His personal morality appears not to have matched the Christian ideal." Yeah, do you think? Anyway, this is the guy who has just crunched his keel into the gravel shores of Yorkshire. It's not great. He lands his ship, called Serpent, naturally. He unfurls his standard, known as the Landwaster, and he got down to business. He seems to have had about 300 longships, perhaps 12, perhaps 15,000 men, we can't be sure.
27:59 Dan Snow? Tostig has got some troops with him, but what Tostig really brings is intelligence and local connections, much more than raw manpower. Tostig and Hardrada sail up the river Ouz towards the city of York. And if I've said it on this podcast one time, I've said it a thousand times. Rivers, folks, rivers. Until the invention of the steam engine, that is how people transported armies and goods and things around Europe. Anyway, so they go up the river towards York, and then they fought a remarkable battle on September the 20th, just outside York. It's called the Battle of Fulford, and it's against the northern Earls, the men who had actually replaced Tostig, Earls Edwin and Morcar. It's a bit of a complicated battle. What seems to have happened is the Norwegians used a path along the riverbank to outflank
28:43 Dan Snow? the English, and there was a slaughter. York surrendered to the Norsemen a few hours later, and it was then arranged that hostages would be brought to the Norwegian army at a place called Stamford Bridge, which is around 10 miles east of York as a token of loyalty and submission. So Harold Hardrada... Has effectively conquered the north of England. He returns to his ships and he made his plans to gather up those hostages at Stamford Bridge a few days later. And that is when King Harold of England makes one of the boldest moves in English history.
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32:53 Dan Snow? As soon as he heard the news of Harald Rada landing, he gathers that professional corps of his troops around him. He sends messages to the northern counties to get them to mobilize their food. He gets everyone to meet him just south of York. And then he made the 185-mile journey in just four days, a lightning march. Now, this is characteristic of Harold, we think. He was a warrior. He'd established himself, particularly against the Welsh. He subdued several Welsh leaders. He knew his way around the battlefield. And he worked out that the quickest way to deal with this new Viking invasion was to march towards it as quickly as he could, to snuff it out. He wanted to get up, run up in the grill of Hadhrada before the Vikings were prepared.
33:37 Dan Snow? And he wanted to take a big enough force to inflict a decisive defeat upon him. So he makes this extraordinary four-day dash from London to York. He marches right through the city of York, doesn't stop there. He hears there's going to be a meeting at Stamford Bridge, just continues marching straight to Stamford Bridge. Meanwhile, Hadhrada, overconfident. He and his troops leave their camp, where their ships are, they mosey up to Stamford Bridge. Many of them left their armour behind, it's a late summer day, it's hot. Perhaps he only took part of his army with him. And they left behind shields and their bulky equipment, that would all be a bit of a pain when they're marching. And he left some of his force behind with the ships, so he divides his forces. The Viking sagas tell us that when Hadhrada reached Stamford Bridge, he was surprised
34:22 Dan Snow? because suddenly he saw clouds of dust to the west. And then, suddenly, below those clouds, he saw men marching. He saw the sun sparkling off their armour like the glint of sunlight on broken ice. And he realised that he'd been caught. Here was the English Royal Army, under his rival, King Harold. He was at a great disadvantage. He was outnumbered, he was ill-equipped, he was taken completely by surprise. The Viking army was split on both sides of the river Derwent, and the English just charged straight in. They massacred the troops on one side.
35:05 Dan Snow? We have this wonderful story about a berserk Viking warrior, an enormous, powerful man. And he held the bridge himself over this river against the English army. Supposedly, he single-handedly killed something like forty men with his axe, before an Englishman got in a barrel, managed to sort of float down the river and got under the bridge, and stabbed up into this Viking's unprotected groin through the slats of the bridge. It's a great story, and I would love it to be true. In the second phase of the battle, the English rush across the river, they threw themselves at the Viking army. Haradada himself was killed. Possibly, he took an arrow to the throat. Harold's brother, Tostig, killed as well.
35:50 Dan Snow? The Vikings were routed. It was a victory so decisive that Haradada's sixteen-year-old son Olaf returned to Norway with just twenty-four of the three hundred ships in which they'd arrived just a week or two earlier. It was a stunning achievement, particularly given the recent history of the Viking invasion and occupation of England. This was a very different result. This was a decisive defeat. It was the last major battle fought on English soil against the Norsemen. In some ways, this was the end of the Viking era in England. At this point, King Harold of England
36:35 Dan Snow? has won a victory that ranks him up alongside the greatest of English kings. The battle was won, the dragon had been slain, and he starts to disband his army for a second time. So those northern troops, they're sent home. Well done to them, mission accomplished. And then, around a week later, probably the first few days of October, a messenger from the south arrives on an exhausted horse, panting, lips a froth of spit. And that messenger says, "You're not going to like this, but a whole bunch of Normans have just landed at Pevensey on the south coast of England in Sussex."
37:18 Dan Snow? And you could just imagine Harold's dismay at hearing that the invasion had finally come in the south, just as he dealt so successfully with this invasion in the north. And interestingly, understandably, he tries to pull the same move again. He dashes to London and without pausing for long, he heads south. Some sort of say that his family, his advisers, his brothers, they tried to get him to stay in London. Wait until a large enough army could be assembled to recall the Third from the West Country, from the Midlands. Not just to rush south and precipitate a battle against William. They implored him to send someone else to fight a kind of holding action.
38:01 Dan Snow? But obviously, Harold believed he couldn't do that. If you're a king in the 11th century, you must take personal responsibility. You must lead the army yourself in the face of the invader. Charismatic, heroic battlefield leadership was an essential attribute for a monarch. He obviously felt that the king had to move fast, to crush, to neutralise, to drive back invaders that were torching villages and crops and brutalising his people. Don't forget, many people thought that Harold was a usurper. Maybe he felt insecure himself. He didn't have the blood of Arthur and Afflestein in his veins.
38:41 Dan Snow? If your whole shtick for becoming king is that you're the warrior that's ready to rule from day one, unlike the boy Edgar the Ethling. Then you've got to live up to that. If you're the man who'd helped to smash the Welsh, if you're the man who'd just seen off Harold Hardrada, then you've got to maintain that. You can't just send someone else to go and fight the Normans. At this point, Harold's reputation is flying high. He wants to back himself and William's being very clever. Because ever since he landed at Peven's, he's making a real nuisance for himself. He is taunting Harold, he is burning, he is ravaging, he is laying waste to southern England, what is now East Sussex. And bear in mind, Harold had been Earl of Wessex before he became King of England. This was Harold's manor. He knew this land, he knew this area.
39:26 Dan Snow? William was deliberately provoking him. He was causing misery. He was reminding the English of what life was like under a weak king that was unable or unwilling to defend them. He was gnawing away at Harold's legitimacy. So Harold, he takes the bait. He marches south, I think with fewer troops than he would have liked. With many of his seasoned veterans, tired, carrying injuries.
39:55 Dan Snow? William hears of Harold's approach and he marches north out of Hastings to meet him. Now, let's talk strategy for a second. We know what Harold's favourite strategy was, which is get there with the most lightning surprise attack. That's how he'd beaten Harold Hardrada in the north and he's hoping to do the same thing here with William. But William's reconnaissance was very good. Perhaps it was spies, perhaps it was scouts, they told him that Harold was getting near. And so on the morning of the 14th of October, William marches north to give battle, to show that he's not going to be surprised by Harold. Now, we don't know how big the armies were. William's chaplain, a man called William of Poitiers, he gives the figure of about 60,000 Normans, that implies that Harold had many more, but historians are very sceptical of these numbers.
40:40 Dan Snow? And historians tend to conclude that the numbers on both sides were fairly balanced, maybe seven, eight thousand men in each army. But there was one big, critical difference, and that was that the Normans had mounted knights, they had cavalry. These are heavily armoured men, riding on mighty horses. And they could stand up in stirrups, which are reasonably recently introduced from the east, and they could hurl a spear, they could slash down with a sword or a mace, and then they could gallop off, lethal. The English, by contrast, they fought on foot, anchored to the ground, locked in a wall of comrades. So this would be a clash of two very different ways of fighting.
41:23 Dan Snow? We hear from William of Poitiers, I think it was him that said that the battle started around the third hour, so we're talking nine, nine thirty in the morning. There would have been a blast on the trumpets, officers bellowing at the men to step off together, men shouting encouragement to each other and themselves, prayers, men redoubling the grip on spear shafts, touching the cross around their neck. With measured tread, the Normans down in the valley began that first slog up the hill towards that wall of enemy. Wooden shields locked, iron tipped weapons that barred the road to London.
42:01 Dan Snow? The English standing on that infamous ridge called Senlac Hill. Now, if you've been to the site of the Battle of Hastings, is what we call it, it's very hard to get a sense of that battle. It's been so changed over nearly a thousand years. But William and his army were approaching from Hastings, they'd have seen that terrifying sight, a bristling wall of shields topped by axes and spears, daggers, swords pointing through chinks in the shield wall. An immovable object at the top of that hill blocking the way to London. William had a simple job. He had to try and drive Harold from that hill, from that ridgeline. As for Harold, his task was equally simple.
42:43 Dan Snow? He had to stay on that hill all day and beat back those attacks. He had to try and kill and maim and terrify these invaders. Harold had to drive a simple message into their brains, that England was not there for the taking, that their ships to the rear were a more attractive prospect than the fields and villages that lay beyond the English chainsaw. First came the volley of arrows launched by the Normans. An age-old tactic, you try and soften up the enemy from afar and then send in the thugs to close the deal. Arrows thumped into English shields. Some found gaps, some punched through into collarbones,
43:29 Dan Snow? but most planted themselves in solid wooden shields until that English shield wall was festooned with hedgehog-like spines. There was little softening up. This job would need trained killers at close range. Sweating, panting, up the infantry came ever closer. Now, I suspect that Norman knights, young men with fire in their bellies, with aristocratic blood, with a thirst for fame, I think they would have spurred their horses up that hill and I think they would have sought out gaps in the shield wall, galloping along, wheeling, hurling in a spear, moving on.
44:10 Dan Snow? A horse is not a suicide bomber. It will not hurl itself onto a wall of sharpened iron. So all these knights could do really was taunt to invite single combat. But the English, if they had any sense, just stayed crouched and tight in that shield wall.
44:28 Dan Snow? Once Duke William's infantry got close enough, the English would have hurled spears and rocks, and then the two lines collided. The front ranks forced together with the weight of those behind. Arms were pinned to your sides. The enemy inches away. The smell of his breakfast ale in your nostrils. Brief glimpses of the white of his eyes in the shoving, pushing mass. The smell of his bowels emptied in fear. The tang of blood. The battle reduced to a mere metre or two around you. The world shrunk to the men immediately around them. Harold and his men are in their element.
45:10 Dan Snow? They're fighting the way that the English and the Vikings have fought for generations. They called it a war hedge. And they fought, said one Norman chronicler, with great bravery, with refusal to submit. These were the elite warriors of the English kingdom. The Norman chronicler says that they counted it as the highest honour to die in arms, that their native soil may not pass under another yoke. One of the greatest descriptions of a shield wall, a war hedge, in this period, comes from the Battle of Maldon. It's a heroic poem composed about a battle that took place in Essex at the end of the 10th century, so a little bit before, during Ethelred's reign. And it's a battle we know a little bit about because of the remarkable poem that survives.
45:55 Dan Snow? And in this poem, we hear how the English leader encouraged his warriors there, directing his soldiers how they must stand and keep that place, and gave them instruction as to how they should hold their shields correctly, fast with their hands, that they should fear nothing. And then it goes on to say, "When he fortified his ferdmen, then he alighted amid the ranks where it most pleased him, in the place where he knew his most loyal half-guard to be." Those are his full-time, professional, household warriors, his housecarls. "When battle was joined," the poem says, "that there was shouting heaved up, ravens circled, eagles eager for carrion, an uproar was on the earth.
46:40 Dan Snow? Then they let fly from their hands spears file-hardened. The spears grimly ground down, bows were busy, shields were peppered with points." I love that poem. And I like the way that the English leader took his place in the front rank. And we think that's what Harold would probably have done here at the Battle of Hastings, along with his brothers, for example, Girth and Leifwin. They would have provided that crucial leadership. And I think that poem gives us a sense of the fighting that went on for much the day at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman tide would surge up the ridge and it would reach that high water mark and there'd be a ferocious, snarling, pushing melee at the shield wall and then something
47:24 Dan Snow? would crack, exhaustion would kick in and the Normans would retreat back down the hill to regroup and prepare for another go. And so for much of the day, it's essentially stalemate. That's the message you take away from the sources. They're trying to break through the line, but that line is holding. And it produces quite an unusual battle because one side just effectively stood still and took it on the chin, while the other just charged up again and again and tried to smash through. William too, Duke William was at the thick of it and his half-brother, Bishop Odo, he was a man of the church, so he didn't like spilling blood. He apparently used a mace rather than a sword.
48:04 Dan Snow? There were other family members too, bound to William by family ties, essential to William's personal command and control of this army. And at one point, that command and control was decisive because early on, the battle teetered on a knife edge. Perhaps it was during the first attack or in a subsequent one. Either way, after one of those ferocious moments of contact, when the two lines had come together in a pushing, shoving anarchic melee, the Normans had retreated down the hill in a chaotic manner. Now, some of the Norman chronicles blame the Bretons, their allies from Brittany. Others claim it was in fact on purpose. It was a fake retreat, it was deliberate tactic.
48:47 Dan Snow? But there seems to have been a retreat and there was a general crisis in the Norman army. The rumour went round, the cry went round that Duke William was dead. The army's belief wavered. There's a fine line between a well-ordered army and a mob of fleeing individuals. And William felt that he was on that line right now.
49:11 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more to come.
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50:50 Dan Snow? Decisive intervention was needed. Every second counted. And William tore off his helmet and galloped the length of his army. And he roared, "I'm alive. I'm alive, and with God's help, I'll be victorious." Those are the seconds when reputations are made.
51:09 Dan Snow? When men become legends or footnotes in our history. And William rose to that moment. He managed to rally his army and more. The Normans actually turned that wobble to their advantage. Some English troops could not resist the sight of the fleeing backs of their enemy. And they'd chased the retreating French and Bretons and Normans, whoever. They'd chased them back down the hill. But when William rallied his army, they were able to turn around on those English troops who were now vulnerable. They were out in the open. They were away from their war hedge, away from their shield wall. They were now in ones and twos. They're in small clusters. They were running down the hill.
51:52 Dan Snow? And William's heavy cavalry could scythe into them and strike them down. No strength in numbers now, just targets. A knight versus a foot soldier is an execution, not a fight. And in desperation, the Bayeux Tapestry suggests that a small group of isolated English troops tried to form a little shield wall, but they were hacked down as the main body of the army looked on in horror. Among those men, perhaps, one source says, were both of King Harold's brothers, Gorth and Leifwin. You can imagine King Harold seeing that and carrying that torment with him through the rest of that long day. And this is really one of the crucial points of the battle.
52:37 Dan Snow? The Normans encircled these small groups of Anglo-Saxons, these Englishmen. They've come down from the hill and they're picked off. And it seems like it was in this way that William was able to grind down the English army, perhaps more than once, then Normans retreated down the hill. Sometimes it was a ruse, perhaps. And each time the English would follow and they'd be rounded upon and cut down. So that indiscipline, that over enthusiasm, whatever it was, meant that more and more of Harold's troops were being tempted out and killed out in the open, rather than staying on the ridge where they were relatively safe. And there was an attritional effect. The Normans were finding ways to kill Englishmen. And it appears that by the end of the day, gaps were starting to show in that shield wall.
53:22 Dan Snow? And a shield wall is pretty binary. You don't get a shield that's 60% effective. It's either a shield wall or it's not. And if there are gaps, if there are inexperienced or lighter armed or less committed men in the front line. And those trained killers on the other side are going to sniff them out. They're going to sense them. It's animal instinct. It's the slightly limping beast that's pounced on by the wolf pack. The slightest waiver and the Norman elite are going to sense it and exploit it. Now, Duke William needs King Harold's corpse. This isn't a war where there's going to be a compromise negotiation. It's a succession dispute.
54:04 Dan Snow? There is no space for two kings in this one kingdom. He doesn't want Harold defeated. He wants him eliminated. And the turning point that really decides this battle is the death of King Harold. Now, one annoying chronicler tells us that King Harold actually killed at the beginning of the battle, but that's terrible for dramatic retelling. So let's just ignore that particular source and go with two more reliable sources. One is the Bayeux Tapestry. Another one's called the Song of the Battle of Hastings. They were both created within a couple of years of the battle. They suggest that Harold did last until late in the day. The Bayeux Tapestry appears to say that Harold was shot fatally in the eye by an arrow.
54:47 Dan Snow? And it's become one of the most famous episodes in English history, one that we all learn about as children, but it may well not have happened. It's not mentioned anywhere else. And the Bayeux Tapestry may not even show that because in fact, if you look at the stitching on the back of the tapestry, it seems like it's a spear or something that's been reinterpreted an arrow in the 19th century by people trying to restore the Bayeux Tapestry. And even if it is an arrow, it could be allegorical because there are bits in the Bible about a king who broke an oath, being shot in the eye by an arrow. So the whole thing, the whole story is pretty obscure a thousand years on, as you'd expect. It's like trying to work out how Nelson died by a cartoon made a few years after his death. I find, to be honest, a more convincing theory is one mentioned in a source called the Song of the Battle of Hastings.
55:32 Dan Snow? And that is that William gathered together his elite troops around him. He saw an opportunity. He looks for King Harold's banner, the Fighting Man of Wessex, a jewel-encrusted banner featuring a fighting man, and he led his killers straight for it. And that does make sense. If you look at medieval battles, decapitation of enemy leadership is a very sensible policy. It can achieve quite a quick result. And you look, it's not just the medieval world, it's the ancient world too. You look at Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gargamel, he leads his Macedonian heavy cavalry right towards Darius of Persia, right towards the centre of the Persian line, and Darius sees death in that onslaught of men and horses, and he turns and flees. And that's the end of
56:16 Dan Snow? the battle. The Persian army collapses after that. And so I think in the same way, it's very possible that at the end of the day, William saw weakness in that shield wall, and he felt confident enough to try and ride an elite squad up the hill, seek out weakness in that ragged shield wall, find Harold, cut him down, and topple his banner. Who's going to fight for a king who's dead? Only the most committed. Many of his followers are going to look for their own survival at that point. And that's probably what happened. A group of Norman knights, according to one source, identify Harold. They hurl themselves at him and his housecarls. There's a moment of slashing fury, men hacking down from the saddle, English axemen raining down monstrous blows, swords blunted on shield
57:01 Dan Snow? rims, iron mail, human bone, grass underfoot torn, bloodied, ground crushed to mud, human faeces and entrails all around. The Crown of England at stake in this moment of crisis, in this unknowable melee. King Harold is chopped down, his body hacked to pieces, unrecognisable, almost.
57:30 Dan Snow? Harold's banners thrown to the ground. And in this dusky light, it would have been the sign on the battlefield that the English army had dreaded. Word would have spread through the ranks like wildfire as the Normans breached the shield wall. Harold, the king is dead. His brothers are dead. We are told that the killing did continue into the hours of darkness, groups of exhausted men who could barely raise a sword arm, a battlefield strewn with dead bodies, an extermination, the death rattle of Anglo-Saxon England. But without leadership, Harold's army started to melt away into the shadows and the Normans were left in possession of the battlefield.
58:15 Dan Snow? Duke William had won a bloody victory. Some ran, but as we've heard, some groups did fight rearguard actions and it was certainly a bloody evening for the Normans. As night came on, Duke William rode across the battlefield, across thousands of corpses. They were stripped in the hours that followed, valuables, armour, clothing, that process had already been begun by the Norman troops and by local people. By the following day, it would have been a mass of naked mutilated bodies. Somewhere among them, King Harold of England and much of the elite of Anglo-Saxon England.
58:58 Dan Snow? In the aftermath of that terrible battle, some nobles attempted to put Edgar the Ethling on the throne, but he was never crowned and William was pretty unstoppable. He circled London like a wolf around its prey. He locked in his control by building castles, he neutralised opposition. And the surviving lords of England bowed to the inevitable and bent the knee to their conqueror.
59:27 Dan Snow? He had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, very near the end of that extraordinary year. Hastings was pretty decisive, but it wasn't the end in itself. It wasn't a case that it was one battle and England was William's. That wasn't the reality at all. He was crowned in late 1066, but he wasn't secure on the throne. And over the next five or six years, he faced a series of rebellions across the country. One in particular led by members of Harold's family, who'd fled to Ireland after Hastings. It wasn't until a major rebellion in the north of England, which he crushed savagely, that William could really begin to feel secure on the throne.
1:00:10 Dan Snow? The English rebellions against William weren't coordinated, they were isolated, and they allowed William to defeat them and then move on to defeat the next one as it broke out. Nor was there a single English leader around whom the rebels could coalesce. So the Normans would conquer England, and they subdued much of Wales and Scotland too. The Norman conquest, which is symbolised by the year of 1066. It is probably the greatest upheaval in the last thousand years of British history. The big change was this replacement of an English elite with a French-speaking one. And it deepened that divide between the people, the peasantry, the majority of the population,
1:00:55 Dan Snow? and their rulers, their lords. You can see this reflected in the English language today. I love the fact that you have, for example, words for animals which were looked after by the English peasants. Those are old English words, cow, sheep. But when those same animals appeared as food on the lords' table, they were called by French terms, beef, mutton, pork. William also fundamentally changed the direction and the relationship that England had with Europe. During the previous century, many of England's cultural and even family links had been with Scandinavia and the broader Viking world. England was now torn from those moorings, and it was linked more closely with France.
1:01:40 Dan Snow? It tilted, changed the geopolitical axis of England. We can sum up this radical change in another way. William the Conqueror commissioned something called the Doomsday Book, which was basically an inventory of this new kingdom that he'd just conquered. It listed all the landowners and the powerful magnates in the country. There are no English earls listed in there. None of the top rank of William's aristocracy were English. There was only one English bishop. And of the thousand lords, magnates, who ruled England, who held their land directly from the king, only 13 were English. And a level down from that, the subtenants, the sort of gentry,
1:02:25 Dan Snow? 10% have English names. The Normans invaded. They fought that bloody battle at Hastings. And then they embarked on subsequent campaigns. They pacified, they built castles, they terrorised. They succeeded in replacing the native elite of a kingdom. They introduced enormous profound changes, the effect of which endure right up until today. Well, that brings us to the end of this journey through 1066, a year that changed England forever. Anglo-Saxon rule was over. The Norman era had begun. You'll be hearing more about this on this feed in the months to come.
1:03:07 Dan Snow? Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube. And you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below, and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen, if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.
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