403. The Norman Conquests: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)

For weeks, William the Conqueror has been stuck on the Normandy coast, waiting. Then the wind changes. The Normans land in England, and the stage is set for the most famous battle in English history. The Bayeux Tapestry made these events immortal, but what really happened at Hastings in 1066? In Episode 3 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined again by Marc Morris, author of The Norman Conquest and The Anglo-Saxons, to go through the battle moment by moment and weigh up its aftermath. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:25Speaker 03

  Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  And me, William Derempel. And we are joined again by the wonderful Mark Morris, whose books on both the Anglo-Saxons, which I've got my copy here, this wonderful cover, and The Norman Conquest is very much the book which, well, certainly the British Museum welcomes you to its bookshop with a great wall of Mark Morris. It is the great account of our time for the general reader, and I recommend it entirely to all Empire listeners. Now, Mark, welcome back. Set the scene for us now, because, William, you left us on a cliffhanger.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, let me remind listeners. So the wind changed. William, who'd been waiting and waiting and patiently waiting and driving himself nuts waiting, finally gets the right wind, finally makes it over to England, doesn't, as Mark told us, know which Harold he's going to be fighting, because he has no idea who's won at Stamford Bridge. Then somebody comes and tells him, actually, it's Godwinson you're going to face. With that knowledge, what happens next, Mark?

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Well, he goes home, obviously, and that's the end of the story.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  And they all live happily ever after. Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  There is actually, to annoy you even further, there is a pub down my way in Rye, just across the border into Sussex, and it has a pub called The William the Conqueror, and it does have a fake biotapestry of William and Harold having a pint, which is a nice counterfactual history. Yeah, so the whole point, just to say, as a kind of character note for William and about the campaign as a whole, William's warfare up to this point has been kind of conventional European-style warfare or Norman-style warfare, which is basically cautious and attritional in that you might want to take the land of the guy next door. And the way you do that is you invade and you harry and you destroy his villages with the peasants in and you burn all the crops and you burn the town down, until the

• 3:18Speaker 04

  people there eventually say, please stop harrying us, we will recognize you as our lord. What you don't do is march your troops into enemy territory and then say, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, come and fight us, we want to have a battle, because battle is what you want to avoid at all costs. Only an idiot would commit to battle, because it's so incredibly risky. The person who determines the outcome of battles in the minds of people at the time is God, okay? God gives you the victory. Because it's, you know, it doesn't matter how powerful a warrior you are, you can be like, you know, Harold Hardrada, apparently, in legendary Get an Arrow Through the Neck, or Richard the Lionheart, you know, it doesn't matter. Your horse can stumble and you can die. So

• 4:00Speaker 04

  you do not risk battle. And yet, when William goes to England at this point, it's a battle-seeking strategy. Why? Because he's not arguing with Harold over a scrap of land. They're not going to be able to divide the crown between them. It is a succession dispute, and only one of them can wear that crown. So he has to engage Harold, and Harold has to die. So this is the argument he's making to his troops, is that, you know, they're effectively almost not actually, I think, physically, but metaphorically, they're burning their boats. They're saying, the only way, he does make a speech to this effect in one of our sources, is the only way you survive this is if we win. If we lose, if you bottle it now, you will be driven

• 4:43Speaker 04

  into the sea and drown, you know? So they are going out into the countryside, again, as you see on the tapestry, and harrying the surrounding area. There's a nice line by someone who taught me years ago, said, you know, one person's foraging is the other person's harrying. So they're getting all the food they need, they've brought a certain amount of provision with them, but they're getting in food from all the surrounding lands and taking it forcibly. And there's a wonderfully depicted scene of a terrible scene on the tapestry.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Oh, it's the woman and the child. Tell me it's the woman and the child. I find that so. So for those of you who haven't yet had the privilege of going to see this, I found that really upsetting. It's a woman holding the hand of a small human.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  It's the one that spoke to you, Anita. It's the woman with her small boy.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Predictably, of course, it did. And the, you know, sort of the depiction of the building around him is on fire.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  It's a Guernica-type thing, isn't it?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Oh, it's awful. Just awful. I found it really upsetting.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  And even though it's just one heart and one woman and one child, you know it stands for thousands of people suffering that experience. But the point is, he's doing that partially to get what you see going around him on the tapestry, to get food. But he's also, remember, he's in Sussex, which is part of the much greater former kingdom of Wessex, which is Harold's own earldom. So he is attacking not just the kingdom of England, but Harold's own patch of it, Harold's own tenants, and terrorizing them. So Harold, at this point, cannot do an Ethel Reddy Unready and kind of shrug and say, oh, I'll have one of my aeldermen take care of it. I will send an army, but I won't lead it. Harold is being baited to come and defend his people. And, you know, absolutely fair play to Harold.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  He is that kind of king. William has met him. William has gone on campaign with him. So, you know, one thing you could say about Harold entirely to his credit is whenever, sort of, you know, danger rears its ugly head, he doesn't do a brave Sir Robin, he goes and confronts it head-on. And so Harold is told, to sort of pivot to Harold, Harold is, again, if you think about the way information travels, Harold is probably by the start of October, in my estimation, he's already dismissed his army, because he's gone north with a hurriedly put-together army to confront the Scandinavians, the Norwegians, which he's done. They're all sort of lying slaughtered in the river, who's the river, you know,

• 7:00Speaker 04

  the Humber now, or they've gone back to Scandinavia. You don't keep an army in readiness if you think, well, job done, because it's just all that provisioning and paying them and whatever.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Also, they've got fields, they've got families, they want to go home.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  That's the reason he was forced to dismiss them in the first place. We're told that by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When he lets them go in early September, it's because he couldn't keep them there any longer. They've got, as far as they're concerned, the dragon has been slain and back up for the provinces with them. And then, presumably having let that army go, a few days later, he's told.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  He's here.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  He's here, he's finally here. And so he has to get south very quickly. Now, that's the point where it's, how did he get south? You know, the answer is the sources don't tell us, which probably means it was just unremarkable. And they probably just galloped south as quickly as they could, because while the Anglo-Saxons don't ride into battle like the Normans. They do have horses. They do have horses. The elite certainly has horses to move themselves around. So you're marching infantry in any age, you can only go as fast as the footsore soldiers will allow you. But if you want to get somewhere quick with two or 300 men, put them on horses, you can do York to London in three or four days, do 50 miles a day, 60 miles a day. So he gets south very quickly. And he then has a choice, Harold. So William is trying

• 8:15Speaker 04

  to provoke him into battle. Is Harold going to rise to that bait? And there is, you know, some sources saying, he was urged to slow down. He was told by his younger brother or his mother, I can do this for you, as one of his younger brothers, you should wait until more troops have gathered, that's said by one of the sources. But Harold, if he has a preferred strategy, I mean, what's just worked as his strategy at Stamford Bridge? Surprise. And a similar thing when he goes into North Wales a few years earlier, he surprises the Welsh ruler Griffith, you know, sort of forces him to flee. So surprise seems to be a tactic that Harold favors. And we're specifically told, he rushes south from London or from York, and then via London into Sussex, hoping to catch the Normans

• 8:59Speaker 04

  similarly unawares, hoping to catch them when they're out foraging, and especially if they think there's no way he can get from Yorkshire in that amount of time. Oh, my God, here he is, you know?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Okay, but you know what? I've often wondered about this, because that's a high-risk strategy, that they won't know that you're coming and that you can pull it off twice.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  It is.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  The dead cert strategy surely is, you know how many they've got? They're not going to be sailing more men over in the interim. They have got a finite number of troops. Just wait till you outnumber them.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Well, that was clearly an argument at the time. But to repeat, I mean, he could, I mean, William clearly could have been bringing more reinforcements over. There could have been a second, you know, second insta. And it isn't, remember, it isn't just Normans. He's recruited guys from Brittany and all sorts of areas. So there's a kind of very varied sort of Fred soup being. Yeah. But, I mean, I think, you know, whatever, we don't know how many Normans there were, we don't know how many troops Harold had, but certainly caution was something that was being urged on him. And Harold seemed to think that, it's always worked really well for me, getting down there before they've got their act together, stealing a march on them, sneaking up, and we will fall upon their camp at night when they're literally, you know, caught napping.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  Mark, we obviously all know the outcome of this battle. It's one of the most famous battles, arguably the most famous battle in British history. But if you're in England in 1066, is there any reason to think, as we were all trained to do as historians, that the Normans have got the new weaponry, the lance, the horse, the charge, and that the English are behind? Who would you have backed if you'd been a bookie at this time? I mean, unless I had a DeLorean, I wouldn't know which way to place my bet. I think if I was now, I would of course say, oh, the Normans. But as I keep repeating, you know. Battles are utterly unpredictable, especially if the leadership gets killed one side or another.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  And we know Hastings was a very close run thing because it goes on all day. It starts at nine in the morning and it goes on until the sun is starting to set. On, it's October the fourteenth, so you know, four, 4pm, 5pm. In terms of technology, no, I, I don't think, I think the two sides are evenly matched. They've got very different ways though, as you say, of making war, uh, when, especially when it comes to battle. So the Norman elite, ever since their arrival in Francia, as, as Vikings 150 years earlier, they have been learning how to mount cavalry charges, whereas the English, there's a couple of sources that say, the, the French friends of Edward the Confessor, the ones who've been building castles in the Welsh Marches, you'll recall. They were told to ride on horseback in one engagement against the Welsh and it's a complete disaster.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  They get their, their bottoms handed to them on a plate. So there are different ways of doing, there are different tactics, there are different, um, um, uh, weapons as well. It's possible that the Normans had crossbows and the English did not.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  I love the idea that you've got two fairly evenly matched sides and that, you know, it could have gone either way. Take us through the day. How does it start? What happens?

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Well, I'll, I'll say as a sort of, of a preface to this, let's just talk very briefly about the sources, because I'll constantly refer to them. So in terms of like how we know what we know, there are three good, strong contemporary sources for this battle. One is obviously the Bayeux Tapestry, where we see the battle unfolding in glorious technicolor. The other one is something I mentioned in the previous episode, which is called the Song of the Battle of Hastings, which was written very soon after the event.

• 12:25Speaker 05

  The Carmen.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Carmen, I'll probably call it that rather than the, the longer word diversion. So the Carmen, which is, um, written within a few months of the battle. And then a biography of William the Conqueror, which is written after the Carmen and using the Carmen and reacting to what's said in the Carmen by a chap called William of Poitiers, who is, is the most sycophantic biographer of William the Conqueror, but very, very well informed. So hugely biased, hugely well informed. There are our three main sources, Poitiers, the Carmen, the Bayeux Tapestry. Now, the day itself, so we should say Harold's strategy was to, to catch the Normans unawares. William outgenerals Harold at this point, because what he does is he sends out scouts into the countryside and they say he's coming, he's 20 miles away, he'll be here in the morning.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  So William, rather than waiting to be attacked, why would you? He gets his men up good and early on the morning of the fourteenth of October, 1066, and they march from their, their camp, which was at Hastings, about six or seven miles to the northwest. And they encounter the English coming towards them at a place which didn't have a name at the time. It was subsequently and always has been called Battle, Bellum. So the two armies catch sight of each other and the English, as is their wont, they form, they draw themselves up in their traditional formation, which is the shield wall, something that they have borrowed from the Scandinavians or sources for, for pre-conquest battle tactics are pretty much non-existent. But they, they, they are standing to fight, even the elite, even Harold and his younger brothers, the surviving ones,

• 13:55Speaker 04

  are arrayed on foot with all their shields locked together.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  They drive away their horses, one of the sources said.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. So they, they are, the horses are just going to be an encumbrance, yeah. Whereas the Normans, they have thousands of foot with them, we don't know how many, but they brought lots of foot soldiers with them, but the elite, say 500, a thousand men, whatever, they are mounted. So there's, that's the, the main tactical difference. So the English are standing stock still on the top of this ridge and the Normans are forced to ride up the ground, the, the, the, the rising ground to try and break through that wall. So all the onus is on the Normans to attack.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  And that, you say outgenerald, but the, actually this is Harold thinking through quite clearly. He knows that the horses are a problem and by standing at the top of really quite a steep ridge, if you, if you go there today, it's, it is a bit of a puff to get up it.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  And if you're on horseback, it's going to completely nullify much of the impact of, of a charge.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  The advantage of being high up.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. Harold, Harold chooses his ground well on the day. My point about being outgenerald was he, uh, William mixes Harold's plan of a surprise attack by, by sending out scouts. So, so William has kind of turned the tables in that he has gone out to meet Harold in battle on terms of William's choosing to some extent, but Harold, Harold does pick a very strong defensive position. You're right. Now, the question of what happens next is basically they go at it for periods for the, for several hours. So they're not fighting constantly, but the Normans are sending sort of sorties up the hill to try and break through that line. And we're told, you know, first of all, the men at arms do it and then they sort of send in the, a volley of, uh, of arrows and then the cavalry try and none of them can break through. This is the point. It's a stalemate that goes on from one hour to the next.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  And of course, this is an important point, you know, amidst all the sort of the blood and thunder and the specifics. A stalemate is perfectly fine for Harold, thank you very much. All he has to do is not die. Okay. I could never remember, I should try and remember it because I always quote it. There's a wonderful line from the Civil War of the 17th century, which is, "If we beat the king 99 times, he is still king. If we lose once, we're all dead men." Same applies to William. It doesn't matter how many times they, if they don't kill Harold, then he's still king. He's still anointed at the start of the year and they're just, they're all going to get slaughtered. So there's a very, it's a really do or die moment for the Normans. The crucial turning point in the, in the, in the battle comes, uh, at some point, say, you know,

• 16:13Speaker 04

  towards the middle of the afternoon, when there is panic in the Norman lines and the rumor flies along the line that William is dead. And the Normans start to turn tail and flee. Now, the, the question amongst military historians has always been, is this true or is it a ruse? Because there are other, other, completely other different military contexts where the Normans are said to have practiced running away.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  The feint.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  A feigned flight, yes, a feint. And well, the question is whether they were doing it on this occasion. From the absolute knots that William's biased propagandist biographer, William of Poitiers, from the absolute knots he ties himself into trying to explain it, I would say that they did absolutely start to collapse. And I think at some, one stage, one of you mentioned that said, oh, the Breton line, the Breton, uh, wing collapses. That's William of Poitiers saying.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  It wasn't the Normans.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Wasn't the Normans.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Wasn't us.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Wasn't us, he says, but those, you know, feckless.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  Hopeless cider drinkers, yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, bloody Bretons.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  So this is the thing, William of Poitiers is always kind of like the unconquerable Norman race. That's his shtick, okay? And our unconquerable, insuperable leader, William the Conqueror, who is better than Julius Caesar, he's better than, you know, Hercules kind of thing.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  You have to account for the fact that they suddenly bottled it. And he says, "But the Normans are unconquerable and the Normans never run away, but in this case, they thought their leader was dead. And even the Roman army, which as everyone knows was the greatest army that ever ruled the earth, even they would retreat." So then actually they weren't retreating out of cowardice, it was more like sadness that they're leaving. So he absolutely gets all his excuses in a big dirty mess.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  And in Bayeux Tapestry, we have that famous scene where William lifts up his helmet and you see.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 05

  Unmoustachioed face.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  And you see at that point, you see Odo of Bayeux riding in and it says, here is Odo encouraging the lands, confortat Pueros. He is again, one of the heroes of the Bayeux Tapestry. He is the man who single-handedly stops the rout in that version of events. So I think the, the bottom line is, from all these multiple sources with slightly different versions of was it deliberate? Was it, uh, genuine? Um, was it Odo? Was it someone else? It happened. The Norman line starts to collapse and the English, as they do every time it's a 10, it's, it's a, it's a year that ends in 66, they think it's all over and they run on, they run on to the pitch.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Nicely done, nicely done.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Not my first rodeo. So they, they run on to the pitch and that compromises the shield wall. Now, whether the Normans did intended to do that, they are them because they're much more mobile and they're on horses and they can regroup. They get the line back together. There's, I mean, I'm just a bit, you know, sort of free wheeling a bit here now, but there's that wonderful bit in, um, uh, at least the, the film version of Tolkien, where the, the riders of Rohan, reform the line, reform the line, you know, and they get it back together. So the Normans get their line back together and now the English line is compromised. There are holes punched in it and they're able to pick off the guys who've run halfway down the hill and surround them and encircle them and chop them to pieces. So from that point, I think it's kind of like, you know, this like the Titanic or something.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  It's going down, the English line is going down.

• 19:25Speaker 05

  And Gerth and Leofwine, two of the brothers get killed early on according to the tapestry.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Well, Har- Har- Harold's brothers, so we should, we should say.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, Harold's brothers.

• 19:34Speaker 05

  They, they, they're formally named in the tapestry.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And they're, they certainly pre, but you know, the tapestry is a work of art, you know, and it's, it's, uh, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a well-told story. At some point, probably prior to Harold's death, his brothers are killed. But the crucial thing, and this is, you know, not to deprive you of any, any other details, but the crucial thing that decides the battle is of course Harold's own death.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  And that's, again, you'll be surprised to hear, a controversial death.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  All right, okay, so wait, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait a minute. We all know he got an arrow to the eye, Mark. What are you trying to say here?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Well, he could well have done. You know, this is the thing, there are thousands, tens of thousands of arrows being loose that day. And, you know, possibly he got an arrow in the eye. The problem with the arrow in the eye, as you probably know, because of the sarcasm laden question, is that there are any number of problems with that interpretation. The, the arrow in the eye is based upon, by and large, the biotapestry. And that there are sources that are written within, say, a living memory, within fifty, sixty years of the conquest, that say Harold got an arrow in the face, or he got an arrow in the brain. Within the case of the tapestry, you'll know that the tapestry has been heavily restored it from at least the nineteenth century onwards.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  And it seems that, based on those later sources, the embroiderers or the restorers might have said, oh, well, you know, we know he got an arrow in the eye, so let's generously interpret these stitch marks here as an arrow.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  What? They put it in?

• 21:06Speaker 04

  So that's, that's one possibility. So you'll see people say, well, the tapestry is compromised.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  The, the main, the main thing I have, the, the, the, the reason that I, because when I wrote the book, uh, my book on this, I was desperate to believe the arrow in the eye. You know, I, I don't like to lightly discard.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  What, ruin our lives?

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But you've got to, you've got to really kind of convince me that this didn't happen. The thing that really did it for me was a book written about forty years ago on the tapestry, and I'm afraid I can't remember the name at this distance, but, um, it was brilliantly, brilliantly argued. It says, the essential point about the tapestry is, it's an artistic source, right? That's, that's obvious. But it's also an artistic source that is based on other artistic sources. In other words, the tapestry artist, whoever that was, not necessarily the, the women stitching it, but the person who designed it was saying, I need, I need a meal scene. And someone said, oh, here's a last supper.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  You can copy this last supper out of this manuscript, illustrated manuscript. So it does that on at least a dozen occasions. And in the case of the death of Harold, it seems to be borrowing from a, a, a bit of biblical apocrypha. And without, you know, you'd have to look at the pictures side by side in my book, but you can see in that scene, the, the Harold's death scene, that it seems to be borrowing from an illustration of the death of King Zedekiah at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. And I feel I didn't need to elaborate on that well-known story. Um, but basically, he has his sons killed in front of him and he gets, his, his, his punishment is to be blinded. And if, it's not so much about the, the, the who and the where, it's if you look at the tapestry, you can see very clear borrowings.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  How interesting.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  So it seems that this story, that he got an arrow in the eye, if the tapestry is saying that, is just a bit of artistic borrowing from another source.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  We should perhaps explain that the description is very clear. It says Harold Rex Interfectus S. Now, the Harold Rex bit is about now above the figure with the arrow in his face.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 05

  And the Interfectus S, the dead is dead.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  Is above a guy who's been knocked down by a horseman with a sword.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 05

  So there's no way of telling with the, with the bit of which of the two figures, because Harold Rex Interfectus S covers both.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. But my, I mean, this is the sort of argument that's been going back and forth for decade, from decades since the nineteen fifties at least, in academic articles and with the general public, et cetera. But my point is, even if you pick one of those guys, say, that's Harold, no, that's Harold, no, he didn't get an arrow in the eye. Even if you accept all of the things, like, the tapestry artist intended to show a man with an arrow in the eye, and that guy with the arrow in the eye is Harold, the tapestry artist was an artist copying from other artistic sources. And the other, the, the other thing to say, besides all of that, put the tapestry to one side, is I mentioned we have other sources describing the Battle of Hastings. The tapestry is a bit maybe ambiguous about how he died. The Song of the Battle of Hastings, the Carmen, is absolutely not. The Song of the Battle of Hastings says, William, seeing that, you know, Harold might

• 23:53Speaker 04

  escape and seeing the light was fading and knowing that he had to have a clear win, put together a death squad and rode up the hill and they surrounded Harold and chopped him into little pieces.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Now that, to repeat, that's the closest contemporary record, the most detailed description we have of the tapas, of the, the death of Harold.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  A Norman death squad?

• 24:12Speaker 04

  A Norman death squad. And, and for a long time, people, I mean, the problem with the Carmen was for about forty or fifty years, it was some, a historian called R H C Davis said, oh, it's much later, it can't be relied upon. And then its reputation was, was restored in the nineteen ninety.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  Ralph Davis, I got him to lecture at my school.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  And it was Frank Barlow who said, no, no, no, it's legit, it's actually, it's the earliest description of the ta, of the ba, of the battle. So the earliest written description we have of the battle says, he was deliberately done in by William and a cohort of knights, which accords exactly with the kind of strategy we know William had to adopt, i.e. Harold could not come off that battlefield alive. And the other thing is, there's a telling silence from William's sycophantic biographer, William Apoitier, who, when he gets to that point, remember, he's copying the Carmen, he just goes, uh, yeah, well, Harold died. And he doesn't go into any of the detail about the death squad, which is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect a, a sycophantic biographer to go and say, oh, well, I, I don't want this bit where he looks really unchivalrous.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  No, no, he has to be defeated in battle, mano a mano. That's what I mean, it's got to be like that, yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  He has to be deli, and, and, and if you're going to spin a, a, a story about

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  how God gave you the victory, you say, oh, you know, a lot of arrows flying about, you got an arrow in the eye.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  So interesting. Listen, we're going to take a break because we all need to lie down, frankly, uh, that it might not have been an arrow in the eye. Go get yourself a cup of tea. Uh, after the break, we are going to talk about what happens after.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Welcome back. So, Mark, there is a, a sort of dusky end to this battle. Harold is dead, the Normans are pursuing the English, and some of them fall into the Malfoss, into this ditch. Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  There's a kind of dodgy moment when a lot of the Normans, um, trip over in their horses in the dark. But at the end of it, it's definitely a victory and the king is dead.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Right, well, yes. So, I mean, I won't rehearse any of the stuff you've just said about the Malfoss. So the Normans pursue the fleeing English through the night. So the English free, as they do on the tapestry, and that's said by our written sources as well. And William, to stick with him for a second, he spends the night on the field of slaughter. So he sort of says thousands of dead, maimed, gored men around him, and he sort of camps in the middle of that battlefield for the night. And on the morrow, we're told, you know, we get these vivid descriptions, probably not eyewitness, but you can, you know, reasonably accurate of, of the, the, just the slaughter around him. And what he does is he waits, we're told, for the rest of the English to surrender. So Harold is dead, but he's now expecting other prominent people, the Bishop of London,

• 27:09Speaker 04

  the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Whittington, whoever, anyone else powerful in London, to come and fall at his feet and submit to him. And he waits and he waits and he waits for, I think, a week, week or more, uh, and no submissions come.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  What he does have, Mark, before we, before we, um, have the non-appearance of the, of the, of the peace bringers, um, he, you do have a visit though from Geetha Godwin, from Harold's mum.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:33Speaker 05

  Who turns up and offers gold for her son's corpse. And William the Bastard, as we're going to call him now.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Says no, very unchivalrously.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not just any old amount of, of gold. The mum says, I will give you my son's weight in gold, just give me his body back, give me his corpse.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  That's, that is kind of like, uh, I think the, what, what they say is huge if true. Um, and the, the, the problem with that is.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  You spoil everything.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Well, no, you know, to be fair, I told you that there was a Norman death squad that you didn't know about.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, we like that, yeah, we like that.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  So what I like to do is privilege the sources that were written at the time and maybe put a little faint question mark at the end, the ones that were written. Are more than a century later.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  So in the case of Harold's death, we know he died, we know he died at Hastings, we're certain of that, to answer William's question, we're certain he died. The question is, what happened to his body? And William's biographer, William Apoitier, writing very close to events, and the Carmen, but again, writing the, the earliest source, they say he was buried under a mound near the seashore, with a mocking inscription on top saying, now you can guard the seashore as long as you want, or words to that effect.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Not chivalrous, again, this is, this is not showing William in.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  It's not. Now, the other version of events, which is the Chronicle of Waltham Abbey, which was kind of refounded by Harold in the years before his death, writing about a century later, they big up Harold and they say, well, not only was he very generous to Waltham Abbey, but his body was brought for burial here at Waltham. And it's in that context, it tells the story of, and his mother went to offer his weight in gold and she was, you know, spurned, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a tale told more than a century later. The question of whether he was buried at Waltham, my instinct again is to say, if William the Conqueror had said, do you know what? This guy was a noble king and he was a worthy adversary and I'm a chivalrous king and I will allow his body to be carried to Waltham, where it might become a sort of a cult focus,

• 29:28Speaker 04

  you know, and a sort of place for, for people to rally opposition to me, you know, even if it's just kind of the, the numinous power of the dead, you know, you don't want him to become Saint Harold. I think William Apoitier, his biographer, would have said, he was so noble and so magnanimous in his victory that he even allowed Harold, perjured though. He was to be, you know, given a Christian burial. I think William of Twatia would have laid that on with the biggest trowel you could imagine. So I think the fact that he endorses the Carmen statement that Harold was buried under in an anonymous grave by the seashore. I think that argues for the greater credibility of that.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  This is like Osama bin Laden's body being sort of dropped out in sea. So you can't have a cult of mortars. Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly that. I normally can't abide that kind of modern parallel, but since I've, since I've done about half a dozen myself. That, that is, that is spot on. You don't want to make a martyr out of him.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  No, you don't.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  No, he is not going to be Harold the Martyr. So I think the monks of Waltham are full of crap, basically.

• 30:25Speaker 05

  Now, Mark, we all know that the battle facings gives William the Conqueror England.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  But is there any reason to believe that actually it was a fatto comple at this point? Because there's the whole of the rest of England.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, no. I think that's a leading question. No. So no one submits. And he therefore has to sort of go around. He goes around the coast of Sussex and into Kent, terrorizing. Again, doing what he's been doing up to this point, harrying and terrorizing people into submission. So he goes to Dover. Spends a few days there. He gets, this is an incredible what if moment. We're told he gets really, really sick and lots of his army die from dysentery. And William himself falls ill for several days.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  Bad oysters in, in Dover?

• 31:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, whatever. But that happened to Knut's father, Svein of, of Denmark. You know, he just dropped dead after conquering England. So, you know. That's a very powerful counterfactual, but William gets better. He, he heads towards London. The Londoners kind of ward him off from Suffolk and so he moves round the south bank of the Thames. Crosses the Thames in Oxfordshire at a place called Wallingford, where some Anglo Saxons submit, including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Stigand.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Stigand, yes. Eventually, having harried most of the home counties, the leaders in London, including for those with long memories. The man who would be king, the teenager who would be king.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Edgar Athling.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Edgar Athling, yeah. He, he's been made king. The English in London have said, he's our new guy.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  How do they do that? Do they have a ceremony? Do they have a coronation? What do they do?

• 31:53Speaker 04

  No, this is the thing. Remember coronation is any confirmation.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  So that they've elected him king. And even William's main cheerleader, William of Twatia, he says. In their, in their, in their stupidity or something, they had made another man king. So this is acknowledged even by the Normans.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  How old is Edgar Athling?

• 32:10Speaker 04

  He's about fifteen at this point.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Oh, he's little.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's little.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  This is Edward the Confessor's nephew, is this right?

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Great nephew, great nephew. Yeah. And so Edward the Confessor hadn't done anything for him because he, Edward the Confessor was in the power of the Godwins. They're not going to, you know. But he has the best blood claim. And the Anglo Saxon Chronicle at this point is just saying, you know, he was made king as was his right. So that, you know, there's a sympathetic line to him. But he's a fifteen year old kid. And William has got an army of thousands of men and he's torching everything around London with the threat like, you know, we're going to come into London next. You can surrender now and get good terms or you can, you know, die a horrible death. So they submit to him in the, probably in early December. They come to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, I think Berkhamsted is, it's on the border. But they come to him and submit just north of London.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Okay. I mean, if you've been to Berkhamsted, I mean, it's just really strange that these things aren't marked more clearly that this was, you know, the, the supplication and the, the capitulation of England. It's, it's really interesting to me.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  If you go to Berkhamsted Castle, I'm sure that's said on a, on a plaque there somewhere.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course I'm going to ask what happens to the kid. Because, you know, again, you've got somebody who they've chosen. I mean, do we know what happens to the kid?

• 33:18Speaker 04

  The kid is a separate podcast.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 33:21Speaker 05

  He goes off to Scotland, doesn't he?

• 33:22Speaker 04

  He flees to Scotland. Um, his sister marries the King of Scots. She becomes Saint Margaret of Scotland. He goes to the King of France. He fights against William in Normandy for a bit. Eventually, his brother and sister in law, the King of Scots, Queen of Scots, they say you ought to submit. He submits. He becomes very good friends with William's eldest son, Robert Curthose. They go off on crusade together.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Is Edgar Athling on the first crusade?

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Curthose doesn't. I'm pretty certain Ethel goes with him.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Does Edgar doesn't. He goes off to Hungary.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Well, he, he, he has adventures in Europe. Let's put it this way. I may have got that bit wrong, but he basically, he lives to be an old man. And I think he dies in, in somewhere like Somerset in the eleven twenties or something.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  So, I mean, he's, I dare say, I don't read historical novels unless I'm paid or compelled in some other way, but he would be a great historical novel.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  God, he really would.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  But look, now, now, now we get to the point. So, so you've got ostensibly a victory, a wholesale victory by William. When, you know, the Witten and everyone else comes and finally, after all his waiting comes and says, you know, we give up, you win, we accept you. We're very loyal now. Please don't kill us. Then you've got my bet noire and any mother who has a child at school and has had to create one of these things. The rise of the Motten Bailey Castle, which arguably is the symbol of conquest, Norman conquest in England. Tell us a bit more about that.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Well, it's one of the, we talked a bit earlier about the Normans having the edge when it came to battlefield technology. So probably crossbows that the Anglo Saxons didn't have and certainly cavalry tactics. One thing that the Normans have been doing for a couple of generations that the English haven is building castles. The common or garden type of castle, the most popular is the so-called Motten Bailey, the Mott being a giant mound of earth, an artificial hill. And the Bailey being the larger, shallower enclosure where you keep all your, all the rest of your buildings that aren't the tower on top of the mound. Not exactly easy to build because they require lots of labour for many months, but cheap, cheap compared to stone. And also the crucial thing about Motten Bailey is which you wouldn't believe if I, if I took you to a big one, they're small.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Because prior fortifications in England, burrs had been built to defend huge communities. So they are acres and acres and acres of land. Motten Baileys are by contrast, you know, one twenty, twenty percent of that size. So in relative terms, they're small. And they are built to defend a Norman lord, whether it's the king or a, or a baron or whatever, and his riding household. So you go into a new area, you're told the king has granted you this part of eastern Yorkshire. You are to hold it at no matter, you know, at any cost. So the first act of any Norman lord when he goes into a new territory is to build, um, a castle, three times out of four, a Motten Bailey style one, for his own protection.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  With presumably impressed labour.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Or, or his squaddies, you know, if he's taking in five hundred men, he probably, probably safer to get your men to do it than say. You know, everybody get a spade, you know, please don't hit your, your overseer with it, you know.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  How long does it take to put up a, a Motten Bailey?

• 36:12Speaker 04

  If you read books like my book on castles, there were experiments done in the sixties and seventies and TV producers always phoned me and say, could we try and. If we got few rugby teams, could we build one in an afternoon or three? It's like, no, you can't. Can we do a major sort of civil engineering project in a couple of days? No. You peg out your enclosure and you can create a ditch and palisade probably within a few days for your own safety. You know, it's just creating camp. A Mott, that's an entirely different proposition because you can't just kind of say dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. It will just wash away with the first shower of rain. When people have illegally cut into motts, you see that they are consolidated. So they are a layer of chalk and a layer of clay and a layer of sand and a layer of earth.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  Really?

• 36:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, because otherwise they would, they would not survive.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  I didn't know that. All the motts I've climbed up in my life, yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Well, they're just erode.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Well, they're not just made of mud, you know, they, they just wash away. So they are, and they're sort of, some of them are seventy, eighty, ninety feet tall.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  And they survive. We, one sees them all over the country. They are, yeah, they're still there.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  The most impressive thing, a year ago now, I went to see the newly reopened, um, Great Tower at Norwich, built by, begun by William Rufus, William the Conqueror's son. The Mott there, he enlarged it and enlarged it. It's phenomenal. You would, it's, it's like Silbury Hill or something, you know, you just think. That wasn't put up overnight. And it's, it's got a hu, it's got a, a building on top of it, the size and weight of the Tower of London. And it hasn't subsided in the past nine hundred years. So motts very, can be very, very big and serious.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Proper Norman engineering there. So as these things are kind of blistering across the map, I guess, I mean, you know, apart from anything else. You've got garrisoned men who can move very quickly to put down any kind of rebellion, but you've also got the psychological impact on people that, oh. Right, they're in charge then. Cause you just look up and you see the Motten Bailey.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, nowadays you see a Motten Bailey, or at least you see a picture of a Motten Bailey, probably on the cover of a guidebook or a calendar or something. You go, oh, that looks nice. We should go there, you know. Not so much in ten sixty nine or something because they are weapons of oppression. They're weapons of conquest. And they're all covered in grass now and they've got, you know, the nice little paths around them. And of course, all the instruments of oppression. The wooden walls and palisades, you know, as you say, garrisoned with men with sharp things that will kill you. That's all gone. So they, they're absolutely muted now, whereas at the time they were crude and they were hugely effective and they were hugely dangerous.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  I've got two questions here, Mark. First of all, in the Beotabsture exhibition at the British, at the British Museum. There is a very small case opposite the, the main tabsture where there's a tiny little charter. That William issues to the people of London.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Oh, I know the one you mean, yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  Saying they can keep all their privileges and, uh, and they're going to be absolutely fine. Is there a lie that, that William tells that he's basically going to allow everything to continue as before? And everyone's going to be absolutely fine, which only later turns into the entire Anglo Saxon aristocracy being demoted to peasants. And, and secondly, why is there no second army massing? Because there's a huge country.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Let me try and stitch all this together. This is a challenge. That writ charter that you mentioned to the citizens of London, I think it's to the Bishop of London and the citizens of London. It says William King, William Biscop, you know.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  Very neat little calligraphy too.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Very, very small, very neat. Yeah. And written, of course, in Old English. William is now King of England and he's right, his chancery is producing writs in Old English. And it says basically, don't, don't panic. It's going to be exactly the same privileges now as you had before the conquest. So he's trying to get London to kind of, he's trying to quieten the horses. And that, it seems, is William's attitude to the whole country from the off. Remember his line is not, is not, he's not like King Knute or Harold Hardrada would have been. He's like, here I am covered in blood, the conqueror. He doesn't style himself William the Conqueror. He says, I am William, the officially designated successor of your previous king.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Edward the Confessor. Harold was the usurper. I am now your legitimate king. So he's issuing these charters and, and, and confirmations. And saying, everybody calm down and we're going to get on absolutely fine. And now I've been crowned, you know, we didn't talk about his coronation, but he's crowned on Christmas Day, ten sixty six. Everyone go about your business and we'll all get on famously. And the problem with that is the English. No, there's two problems with that. One is that he's got about, let's say, conservatively, seven thousand men at his back, some of whom will be content to go home with their pockets full of silver, but others have come expecting reward in the form of land. So from the very first, he's having to dispossess English families and say, well, your father died at Hastings, and that was a really naughty thing to do, to fight against me, you're his legitimate

• 40:51Speaker 04

  king, so I'm afraid you've lost all your lands. And all your brothers as well. So in rewarding Normans from the off, he's dispossessing English families who have no stake in society. And those Englishmen, if they've learned anything from fighting the Vikings, it's kind of like, well, you can win one battle, but we just get together the next week, as you say, we get another army together. We know ten sixty-six is the absolute line in the sand historically, that it's never going to be undone. As far as they're concerned, one more battle, we drive these guys out. So what the English do for the next two or three years is one rebellion after another. They go up in the West Country, there's a Godwin rebellion in the West Country.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  Are there any Godwins left? Or all the Godwins, yeah?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've got, well, Gethor. This is where Gethor has a proper legitimate story.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  This is the mother?

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Harold's mother. Never mind that the later cobbler's about, you know, offering his weight in gold for his body. She's down in Exeter, rallying all the other sort of matrons and all the men she can get, and getting Harold's sons, because although Harold was very lately married to Edith, the sister of Edward and Morcar, he's had a long-term relationship with a woman called Edith Swanneck, he has several teenage sons there in Ireland trying to raise troops. So this is, this is a brand new story of resistance to the Normans kicks in after ten sixty-six.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  And there is resistance. There is, I mean, there is serious resistance.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  There is, there's very serious resistance. And in the South West, I mean, that's one story, the sort of last, the sort of death throes of the Godwin clan. But the really serious one is the North. The North's kind of always lightly governed by the South.

• 42:23Speaker 05

  I stole this from my school library, and I'm ashamed to say I've still got it forty years later.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Do you know, that's still my fav-, my favourite book on the subject.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  It's a great book. It's a great book. The Norman conquest of the North.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Think of the fines on that. Just think of the fines on that.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Worth its weight in gold, like Harold Godwinson.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  I'm very sorry, Appleforth College, I will bring this back at some point. The Nor-, the Norman conquest of the North.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Very, very good, solid book. It's all slightly dated now, but very well told for an academic book. Anyway, the North goes up, and not only are the Northumbrians up in arms and really determined to resist William, they invite the Scandinavians back in to help them. So it's King Svein of Denmark who's sending troops over in ten sixty-nine.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  So why don't we know these battles? What are these battles called? They're not anything I've studied.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  They're very localised. The problem is, of course, after ten sixty-six, the English have got no leadership. They've had the Godwinsons for a generation, and all the Godwins have been wiped out except for these teenage grandsons. So, you are, as, again, as an author, you're, you're trying to tell these very exciting tales, but you're sort of, it's like in the middle of a film saying, now, you know, yes, of course, the Joker and the Riddler are dead, but let me introduce you to, you know, lesser character number four.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  The pickpockets.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So you're literally saying, now, I haven't mentioned, you know, Cole Svein of Lincoln until this point, but he's very important in Lincoln at least. And so they are, they don't have any obvious leadership. The one person they're trying to rally round, we've already mentioned, is Edgar Ethling, because he's the man with the royal blood in his veins, although he's only fifteen, sixteen years old.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  So what's happened to Edgar Ethling? He's submitted at Berkhamsted? Is he still in play?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  He submits, and, and for a couple of years, it's kind of kept, you know, they keep close tabs on him at William's court. But when the North rebels, in, first of all, in ten sixty-eight, and then ten sixty-nine again, he is, he is the focus of that rebellion. He is going to be king, or at least play a very important role. But he is the obvious person that the English can rally round. He's a direct descendant of Alfred the Great, for heaven's sake. But, as again, to repeat, repeat myself, we know that this is all a complete hail mary, this is never going to work. But William doesn't know that at the time. And what happens is, he marches an army up to York, he builds a new castle in York, he goes back south, he goes to Normandy even, going, that's that. And the, the locals rise up and massacre his garrison. So he goes up to York the following summer, he builds

• 44:39Speaker 04

  another castle on the opposite bank of the Euse, same thing happens. Eventually, they have a Scandinavian army invades, and the, the English are really, at this point, ten sixty-nine, going, this is it. This is where we, we absolutely reverse this. And this is the part, point where William decides, if I can't hold Yorkshire, if I can't hold the North in conventional ways with castles and garrisons, then no one's going to be able to hold it. I will reduce it to a desert. And that's the infamous harrying of the North.

• 45:07Speaker 05

  And just to give the scale, there are, there are tens of thousands slaughtered, we believe.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Well into six figures, we think.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Wow, six figures, even at that time.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  The thing about the harrying of the North is medieval chroniclers, when they say, oh, a hundred thousand people fought at Hastings, you just say, well, that's just, he just means a large number. There's no way the armies were that big. In the case of the harrying of the North, Audric Vitalis is writing in the eleven twenties, very well informed, but, you know, not great with numbers. He says, it's thought that more than a hundred thousand Christian souls were carried off. And you, everyone always went, well, he just means a lot, a lot of dead people.

• 45:36Speaker 05

  But the doomsday book shows that in fact it was a real mess, yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Doomsday book, yeah. And of course, doomsday book, you can't crunch the data properly till you've got computers. John Palmer did it in the nineteen nineties, and he said, in Yorkshire alone, never mind the rest of the North, in Yorkshire alone, you're looking at a death toll well into six figures. So, it's one of those rare cases where the chroniclers, if anything, understate the amount of, of human, uh, uh, loss. But the crucial thing here is, people often say, oh, this is, this is a deliberate punishment beating. There is an element of that. None of the sources, despite what it often says on kind of schools websites, none of the sources say he went around killing people and sorting the earth, et cetera. All it says is, the Normans went around in small groups, setting fire to the barns that the harvest was in, and setting fire to all the animals, and all the, all

• 46:24Speaker 04

  the crops, and all the, the food.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Scorched earth. It's, I mean, it's, it's the first scorched earth policy that we're seeing, I guess, isn't it?

• 46:31Speaker 04

  It means that if the Vikings come back, he's done a deal with it, if the Vikings come back, they've got nothing to eat. They can't forage, and they can't survive. What it incidentally means, and I'm not trying to downplay this, what it incidentally means is the native population starves to death that winter. So that's, he's, it is indirectly causing the, the sort of genocide, if you like, of the local people. But he's doing it to stop a Scandinavian invasion happening.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  So with the, the harrying of the, the North, with opposition now in ashes, if you like, and any possibility of an uprising burnt to the ground, what does England look like? Or what is, it's even further than England, isn't it, Mark? I mean, it's not right just to talk about England.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  I would talk about England in the first instance, because, I mean, the, one of the great things about doing the Norman conquest is doomsday book, which I just mentioned. And as well as being able to calculate the death toll in Yorkshire, we can see very clearly how much England as a whole had changed between ten sixty-six and ten eighty-six. In thirty seconds, the wonderful thing about doomsday is not only is it so voluminous, it's, it's like two million words over about thirteen, fourteen thousand places. Not only is it the greatest survey of any kingdom, any polity, until the modern age, really, until the eighteenth century, until the Industrial Revolution. Not only is it all those things, it also, the, the commissioners who were going around the country saying, who owns this? What are its economic resources? What was, they're saying, what is it worth

• 47:55Speaker 04

  now? Who owns it now? And who owned it in ten sixty-six? And what was it worth then? They're trying to sort out the value of things, presumably for fiscal purposes. But what it gives us as historians, almost a millennium later, is a snapshot of England in ten sixty-six on the eve of the conquest, and a snapshot on the cusp of William the Conqueror's death, because he dies the following year. So we can say, in incredible detail, how much change in that twenty year period. And what we see is the changes devastating and catastrophic, or at least wholesale. The, the crucial thing is, the aristocracy has gone. So whereas when you look at ten sixty-six, the aristocracy is almost to a man, English, man and woman, English. When you look at the landowners in ten eighty-six, of the top five hundred,

• 48:38Speaker 04

  the most powerful individuals, only thirteen have English names.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  Thocle of Arden and Cole Svein of Lincoln being the famous ones, yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  They're the famous ones, because they're mentioned by, um, Stenton, but there's thirteen or so. What's even more impressive than the bigwigs, if you take it down to a more local level and look at the king's subtenants, the sort of local gentry, there are about eight thousand names. And of those eight thousand, only ten percent are English.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  So the ruling class of England, and I'm defining ruling class here as going down to like the lord of your local manor, more than nine times out of ten, they will be a foreigner.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  They'll be Norman, French, it was French speaking?

• 49:14Speaker 04

  They'll be French speaking, but they could be Angevin, they could be Breton, they could be Montsau, they could be Flemish, but overwhelmingly, they have no idea what life in England is like, and they have different ideas about the way society should be regulated and governed. And just a few things off the top of my head. So they're building castles, we know that. That's a huge shock to the English. They're ripping down churches that have stood for centuries and rebuilding them in a new architectural fashion, which is called Romanesque. So far, we've only had Westminster Abbey. Now, every single major church in England, cathedrals, abbeys, all ripped down and replaced in the space of fifty years.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  And the whole rejig of the, of the church, and, and some of Beck is brought over, and he rejigs the whole church hierarchy.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  We have church reform, but I mean, in a visible way, we have churches that have stood for centuries are ripped down and replaced, without exception. In terms of attitudes towards human life, the English had done slavery prior to this point. The bottom ten percent of English society had been slaves, as in chattel slavery, as in no rights at all, as in cross your master and you can be killed, and you have no recourse to law. The Normans, for all their viciousness in warfare, and the, the thousands, tens of thousands of people they kill, they don't do chattel slavery, they do serfdom. So slaves are liberated, and the slave trade ends. And at the very highest level, we've talked in, in the last little while about how vicious the Anglo-Saxons were when it came to politics. Not warfare, but politics. So in Anglo-Saxon England, it was tolerable, it was acceptable, that you could invite people around for dinner and have their throats

• 50:39Speaker 04

  slit, in a very Game of Thrones way. That's what the Godwinsons did. You remember Godwin the father, Dazian, Edward the Confessor's younger brother, Harold, he surprises him, he blinds, the, the Normans, for all their savagery in warfare, don't do politics like that. They are, in a single word, chivalrous. And they don't execute one another going forwards. Now, all of these changes, because the aristocracy has been replaced overnight, more or less, or at least within ten years, all of these new attitudes towards warfare, towards architecture, towards the church, towards human life, they very quickly become the new norm in England. But within fifty years, the English are kind of writing, writing as if this has always been the case. But what happens is, by the eleven twenties and eleven thirties, they're looking west and north into Wales, and Ireland, and Scotland,

• 51:22Speaker 04

  and saying, these people are still doing things the old school way. They're still raiding Herefordshire, leading away innocent women and children in chains. Or when they fight us, they just chop our heads off, they don't spare us as we spare each other. And they say of these people, these people are barbarians. When it's the first time they're using that distinction within the British Isles, in, in, and rather than saying, as they did with the Vikings, these people are barbarians because they're not Christian, they're saying, well, these people are Christians, kind of. But they're so savage that we ought to conquer them as well. And so this this sets them up for going into Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the generations that follow.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  And let's just go there for one second, very briefly, because we've talked about very much what's happened to England, the entire aristocracy changed, an entire class reduced to to to sort of upper peasantry. But this is carried on very shortly afterwards, within a generation to Wales.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Within two or three generations into Ireland. And although there's not a conquest of Scotland, you're getting some of the biggest families in Scots history appearing at this point, the Stuarts.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  My my wife's family, the Frazer's, all these guys turn up.

• 52:31Speaker 04

  The Bruces.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  The Bruces, yeah, the Baleels.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  And the and the crucial thing with Scotland, which I didn't, I mean, I have to sort of as a sort of an advert for the future here, this is what I've been working on for the past five years, is my next book is kind of like post conquest, the three centuries of expansion into the rest of Britain and Ireland. And one of the things that I didn't realise is just how debatable, we talked about this previously, debatable stretch between Yorkshire and Edinburgh is.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  And Cumbria is completely not part of it.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Well, Cumbria was conquered in the 1090s by William Rufus. So there's about 150 miles of no man's land between those two kingdoms, which is carved up in the two or three decades after the conquest. It's gonna be roaring soft if I ever finish it.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  But this is, as you said, Mark, is is one of the, it's, there's a reason that 1066 is the date that everyone remembers in English history, because everything changes irreversibly at this point.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  You'd have to go quite quite basic and say, well, they are still Christians, or well, the grass still came up green every summer. But in every single measurable way, you know, everything changes, yeah. It's England, I think England never has so far never undergone a greater change.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  I mean, that's a that's a fabulous place to to leave it. But Mark Morris, thank you so much for leading us through something that if you have ever been schooled in in Britain, you will know something about. But now we know a lot more about it. It's been brilliant. It's just been brilliant.

• 53:56Speaker 05

  It's been great. Thank you very much. Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  Been an absolute pleasure.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Really enjoyed it. Listen till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  And goodbye from me, William Durham.