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

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2:45Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Dremple. 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's the great account of our time for the general reader. And I recommend it entirely to all Empire listeners.

3:50Now, Mark, welcome back. Set the scene for us now, because William, you left us on a cliffhanger. Well, yes, 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? Well, he goes home, obviously, and that's the end of the story. They all live happily ever after. There is actually, to annoy you even further, there is a pub down my way in Rye, just across the border into Sussex.

4:34And it has a pub called the William the Conqueror. And it does have a fake bio tapestry 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 the villages with the peasants in and you burn all the crops and you burn the town down until the people there eventually say, please

5:10stop harrying us. We will recognise 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. It's the person who determines the outcome of battles in the minds of people at the time is God. OK, God gives you the victory because, you know, anyone, it doesn't matter how powerful a warrior you are. You can be like, you know, Harold Hardrard, apparently in Legendary, get an arrow through the neck, or Richard the Lionheart. You know, it doesn't matter.

5:48Your horse can stumble and you can die. So 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. 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 if you bottle it now you will be driven into the sea and drown

6:34you know so they are they are um they are going out into the countryside again as you see on the tapestry and harrying the surrounding area as 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 the 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 oh it's the woman and the child tell me it's a woman and the child so so for those of you who haven't yet had the privilege of going to see this, I found that really upsetting.

7:09It's a woman holding the hand of a small human. It's the one that spoke to you, Anita. It's the woman with her small boy. Predictably, of course, it did. And the, you know, sort of the depiction of the building around them is on fire. It's a Guernica type thing, isn't it? Oh, it's awful. Just awful. I found it really upsetting. 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 bernie's also remember he's he's in sussex which is part of the much greater former kingdom of Wessex, which is Harold's own earldom.

7:47So he is attacking not just the kingdom of England, but Harold's own patch of it, Harold's own tenants and terrorising them. So Harold at this point cannot do an Ethelred the Unready and kind of shrug and say, oh, I'll have one of my a alderman 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. He is that kind of king. William has met him. William has gone on campaign with him. So, you know, he's 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, of course,

8:30again, 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 Ouse, the river of 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. Also, they've got fields. They've got families. They want to go home. That's the reason he was forced to dismiss them in the first place. We're told that by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

9:09When he lets them go in early September, it's because he couldn't keep them there any longer. As far as they're concerned, the dragon has been slain and back up through the provinces with them. And then, presumably having let that army go, a few days later he's told... He's here. He's finally here. And so he has to get south very quickly. Now, that's the point a few days later, he's told... He's here. He's here. He's finally here. And so he has to get south very quickly. Now, that's the point where it's like, 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...

9:40They 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 foot-sore soldiers will allow you. But if you want to get somewhere quick with 200 or 300 men, put them on horses, you can do York to London in three or four days. You can 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 to provoke him into battle. Is Harold going to rise to that bait? And there is some sources saying he was urged to slow down. He was told by his brother or his mother, I can do this for you, says one of his younger brothers. You should wait until more troops have gathered.

10:23That'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 favours. And we're specifically told he rushes south from London or from York and they're via London into Sussex, hoping to catch the Normans 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. OK, but you know what? I've often wondered about this because that's a high risk strategy that

11:03they won't know that you're coming and that you can pull it off twice it is the dead sir 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 well that was clearly an argument at the time but to repeat i mean he he could i mean, William clearly could have been bringing more reinforcements over. There could have been a second, you know, second instalment. And it isn't, remember, it isn't just Normans. He's recruited guys from Brittany and all sorts of areas. Yeah. So there's a kind of very varied sort of French soup being. Yeah. But I mean, I think, you know, whatever that we don't know how many Normans there were, we don't know how many troops

11:46Harold 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 caught napping. 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 lance, the horse, the charge,

12:25and 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 in 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. 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. Oh no, it's October the 14th. So, you know, 4pm, 5pm. In terms of technology, no, 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

13:09their arrival in frankia 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 um 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 a complete disaster. They get their bottoms handed to them on a plate. So there are different ways of doing it, different tactics. There are different weapons as well. It's possible that the Normans had crossbows and the English did not. 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?

13:53Well, I'll say as a sort 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 technicolour. 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. The Carmen. Yeah, the Carmen. I'll probably call it that rather than the longer word version. So the Carmen, which is 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

14:30Carmen and reacting to what's said in the Carmen by a chap called William of Poitiers, who 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 catch the Normans unawares. William out generals 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. So William, rather than waiting to be attacked, why would you? He gets his men up good and early on the morning of the 14th of October 1066. And they march from their camp,

15:11which 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 draw themselves up in their traditional formation, which is the shield wall, something that they have borrowed from the Scandinavians or sources for pre-conquest battle tactics are pretty much non-existent. But they are standing to fight. Even the elite, even Harold and his younger brothers, the surviving ones, are arrayed on foot with all their shields locked together. They drive away their horses, one of the sources says.

15:52Yes, absolutely. So the horse is just going to be an encumbrance. 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, 1, a thousand men whatever they are mounted so there's that's 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 rising ground to try and break through that wall so all the onus is on the normans to attack and that you say out general but actually this is harold thinking through quite clear he knows that the horses are a problem and by standing at the top of really quite a steep

16:29ridge if you go there today it's it is a bit of a puff to get up it yeah and if you're on a horse back it's going to completely nullify much of the impact of a charge the advantage of being high up yeah i know harold harold chooses his ground well on the day. My point about being out-generaled was William nixes Harold's plan of a surprise attack by sending out scouts. 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 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 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 volley 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. And of course, this is an important point amidst all the

17:25sort 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. 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 battle comes at some point, say, you say, towards the middle of the afternoon,

18:05when there is panic in the Norman lines and the rumour flies along the line that William is dead and the Normans start to turn tail and flee. Now, the question amongst military historians has always been, is this true or is it a ruse? Because there are completely other different military contexts where the Normans are said to have practiced running away. The feint. A feint flight. Yes, feint. And the question is whether they were doing it on this occasion. From the absolute knots that William's biased propagandist biographer, William O'Poitier, 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 one stage one of you mentioned and said oh the breton line the breton wing collapses

18:52that's willie mapoitier saying it wasn't the norman wasn't the normans wasn't us he says but those you know feckless hopeless cider drinkers yeah yeah bloody bretons yes so this is the thing william 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 um 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

19:33earth even they would retreat so then actually they weren't retreating out of cowardice it was more like sadness that they're leading so he absolutely gets all his excuses in a big dirty mess it's great. And in Bayeux Tapestry, we have that famous scene where William lifts up his helmet and you see his unmustachioed face. And you see at that point, you see Otto of Bayeux riding in and it says, here is Otto 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 route in that version of events. So I think the bottom line is, from all these multiple sources with slightly different versions of was it deliberate, was it genuine, was it Odo, was it someone else, it happened.

20:16The Norman line starts to collapse. And the English, as they do every time it's a year that ends in 66, they think it's all over and they run on to the pitch. Nicely done. Not my first rodeo. So they run on to the pitch and that compromises the shield walk. Now, whether the Normans 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. I mean, I'm just sort of freewheeling a bit here now, but there's that wonderful bit in the film version of Tolkien where the riders of Rohan reform the line, reform the line, and they get it back together. So the Normans get their line back together and now the English line is compromised.

21:01There 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, it's like the Titanic or something. It's going down. The English line is going down. And Girth and Lee Offwine, two of the brothers, get killed early on, according to the tapestry. Well, Harold's brother, so we should say. Yeah, Harold's brothers. They're formerly named in the tapestry yeah they are yeah yeah and they certainly printed 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 well-told story at some point probably prior to harold's death his brothers are killed but the crucial

21:40thing 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 and that's again you'll be surprised to hear a controversial death okay 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 well he could well have done you know this is the thing there are thousands tens of thousands of arrows being loosed that day and you know possibly he got an hour in the eye the problem with the air in the eye as you probably know because of the 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 and large, the bio-tapestry. And there are sources that are written within, say, a living memory, within 50, 60 years of the conquest, that say Harold got an arrow in the face or he got an arrow in the brain.

22:36In the case of the tapestry, you'll know that the tapestry has been heavily restored from at least the 19th century onwards. And it seems that based on those latest sources, the embroiderers or the restorers might have said, oh, well, we know he got an arrow in the eye, so let's generously interpret these stitch marks here as an arrow. What? They put it in? So that's one possibility. So you'll see people say, well, the tapestry is compromised. Right. The main thing I have, the reason that I, because when I wrote my book on this, I was desperate to believe the arrow in the eye. You know, I don't like to lightly discard. Well, ruin our lives. Yeah, exactly. But you've got to really kind of convince me that this didn't happen.

23:17The thing that really did it for me was a book written about 40 years ago on the tapestry, and I'm afraid I can't remember the name at this distance, but it was 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 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 right you can can copy this Last Supper out of this illustrated manuscript. So it does that on at least a dozen occasions. And in the case of the death of Harold,

23:52it seems to be borrowing from 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 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. But basically, he has his sons killed in front of him and his punishment is to be blinded. And it's not so much about the who and the where. If you look at the tapestry, you can see very clear borrowings how interesting 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 we should perhaps

24:35explain 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. Yeah. And the Interfectus S, the dead is dead. Yeah. Is above a guy who's being knocked down by a horseman with a sword. Yeah. So there's no way of telling with the with the beta, which of the two figures, because Harold Rex Interfectus S covers both. Yeah. But my I mean, this is the sort of argument that's been going back and forth for decades from decades since the 1950s, at least in academic articles and with the general public etc 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

25:18to 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 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 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.

25:53Now that, to repeat, that's the closest contemporary record, the most detailed description we have of the tapas, of the death of Harold. A Norman death squad. And for a long time, people, I mean, the problem with the Carmen was for about 40 or 50 years, it was some historian called R.H.C. Davis said, oh, it's much later, it can't be relied upon. And then its reputation was restored in the 1990s. Ralph Davis, I got him to lecture at my school. And it was Frank Barlow who said, no, no, no, it's legit. It's actually, it's the earliest description 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,

26:36i.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 of Poitiers, who when he gets to that point, remember, he's copying the Carmen. He just goes, 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 sycophantic biographer to go and say, well, I don't want this bit where he looks really unchivalrous. No, no, he has to be defeated in battle. Mano a mano. That's when it's going to be like that. Yeah no he has to be defeated in battle mano a mano that's when it's going to be like that yeah he has to be delete and and if you're going to spin a a story about

27:10yeah how god gave you the victory you say oh you know a lot of arrows flying about you got 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. Discover what's possible with Trimfiya. Guselcamab. Trimfiya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them in liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis.

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29:06It's also open source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com. Welcome back. So, Mark, there is a sort of dusky end to this battle. Harold is dead. The Normans are pursuing the English and some of them fall into the Malfos, into this ditch. Yeah. There's a kind of dodgy moment when a lot of the Normans trip over in their horses in the dark. But at the end of it, it's definitely a victory and the king is dead. Right. Well, yes. So, I mean, I won't rehearse any of the stuff you've just said about the Malfoy. 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.

30:00And 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 gourd 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 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 the archbishop of canterbury the witness 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

30:33week or more uh and no submissions come what he does have mark before we before we um have the non-appearance of the of the of the peace bring have a visit, though, from Geetha Godwin, from Harold's mum. Yes. Who turns up and offers gold for her son's corpse. And William the Bastard, as we're going to call him now, says no, very unchivalrously. I mean, it's not just any old amount of gold. The mum says, I will give you my son's weight in gold. Just give me his body bag give me his corpse that's that is kind of like uh i think the what they say is huge if true um the problem with that you spoil everything well no you know to be fair i told you that there was a norman death squad that you didn't know yeah we like that so what i like to do is privilege the sources that

31:24were written at the time and maybe put a little faint question mark at the end of the story and you are more than a century later 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 apotia writing very close to events and the carmen but again writing 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 not chivalrous again this is this is not showing william in it's not, the other version of events,

32:05which 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,

32:45you know, and a place for people to rally opposition to me, you know, even if it's just kind of the numinous power of the dead. You know, you don't want him to become Saint Harold. I think William of Poitiers, 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 Poitiers 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. This is like Osama bin Laden's body being sort of dropped out in sea,

33:20so you can't have a cult of mortars. Exactly, exactly that. I normally can't have a cult of mortars. Exactly. Exactly that. I normally can't abide that kind of modern parallel, but since I've done about half a dozen myself, that is spot on. You don't want to make a martyr out of him. No, you don't. No, he's not going to be Harold the Martyr. So I think the monks of Waltham are full of crap, basically. Now, Mark, we all know that the Battle of Hastings gives William the Conqueror England. Yeah. But is there any reason to believe that actually it was a fait accompli at this point? Because there's the whole of the rest of England? No, I think that's a leading question. No. So no one submits and he therefore has to sort of go

34:01around. He goes around the coast of Sussex and into Kent, terrorising, again, doing what he's been doing up to this point, harrying and terrorising people into submission. So he goes to Dover, spends a few days there. 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. Bad oysters in Dover. Yeah, whatever. I mean, that happened to Knut's father, Svein 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 heads towards London. The Londoners kind of ward him off from Southwark. And so he moves round the south bank of the Thames,

34:41crosses the Thames in Oxfordshire to a place called Wallingford, where some Anglo-Saxons submit, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Stigand. 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. Edgar Athling. Edgar Athling, yeah. He's been made king. The English in London have said, he's our new guy. How do they do that? Do they have a ceremony? Do they have a coronation? What do they do? No, you see, this is the thing. Remember, coronation isn't a confirmation. Right. But they've elected him king. And even William's main cheerleader, William of Poitiers,

35:18he says, in their stupidity or something, they had made another man king. So this is acknowledged even by the Normans. How old is Edgar Athling? He's about 15 at this point. Oh, he's little. Yeah, he's little. This is Edward the Confessor's nephew, is this right? 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, you know, there's a sympathetic line to him. But he's a 15-year-old kid. And William has got an army of thousands of men and he's torching everything around London with the threat, you know, we're

35:56going 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 probably in early December. They come to Berkhamstead in Hertfordshire, I think Berkhamstead is. It's on the border. But they come to him and submit just north of London. Okay. I mean, if you've been to Berkhamstead, it's really strange that these things aren't marked more clearly. This was the supplication and the capitulation of England. It's really interesting to me. If you go to Berkhamstead Castle, I'm sure that's set on a plaque there somewhere 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

36:33to the kid the kid is a separate podcast oh really he goes off to scotland doesn't he 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 is edgar roughing on the first crusade curthose doesn't i'm pretty certain ethel goes curtis does edgar doesn't he goes off to hungary well he he has adventures in europe let's put it this way i may have got that bit wrong but he basically he

37:09lives to be an old man and i think he dies in in someone like somerset in the 1120s or something right right so i mean he's um i dare say i don't read historical novels unless um i'm paid or compelled in some other way but he would be a great historical novel. God, he really would. Yeah. But look, now, now, now we get to the point. So you've got ostensibly a victory, a wholesale victory by William when, you know, the Witton 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 bête noire and any mother who has a child at school and has had to create one of these things the rise of the modern bailey castle which arguably

37:51is the symbol of conquest norman conquest in england tell us a bit more about that well it's one of them we talked a bit earlier about the normans having the edge when it came to battlefield technology so probably crossbows that the anglo-axons didn't have, and certainly cavalry tactics. One thing that the Normans have been doing for a couple of generations in the English haven is building castles. The common or garden type of castle, the most popular, is the so-called Mott and Bailey. The Mott being a giant mound of earth, an artificial hill, and the Bailey being the larger, shallower enclosure where you keep 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

38:29compared to stone. And also the crucial thing about Mott & Bailey's, which you wouldn't believe if I took you to a big one, they're small because prior fortifications in England, burrs, had been built to defend huge communities. So they are acres and acres and acres of land. Mott and Bailey's are, by contrast, 20% 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 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

39:09out of four martin bailey style one for his own protection with presumably impressed labor or or his squaddies you know if he's taking in 500 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 overseer with it, you know. How long does it take to put up a Martin Bailey? If you read books like my book on castles, there were experiments done in the 60s and 70s and TV producers always phone me and say, could we try and if we got a 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

39:48days for your own safety. You know, it's just creating camp. A motte, that's an entirely different proposition because you can't just kind of say, dig, It will just wash away with the first shower of rain. When people have illegally cut into mottes, 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. Really? Yeah, because otherwise they would not survive. I didn't know that. All the moths I've climbed up in my life, yeah. Well, they just erode. Well, they're not just made of mud, you know, they just wash away. So, they are, some of them are 70, 80, 90 feet tall. And they survive. One sees them all over the country. They are, yeah,, 90 feet tall. And they survive.

40:26One sees them all over the country. They are, yeah, they're still there. The most impressive thing, a year ago now, I went to see the newly reopened Great Tower at Norwich, built by, begun by William Rufus, William the Conqueror's son. The mot there, he enlarged it and enlarged it. It's phenomenal. It's like Silbury Hill or something. You know, you just think that wasn't put up overnight. And it's got a building on top of it, the size and weight of the Tower of London. And it hasn't subsided in the past 900 years. So Mott's can be very, very big and serious. Proper Norman engineering there. So as these things are kind of blistering across the map, I guess, I mean, you know, know apart from anything else you've got garrisoned men who can move very quickly to put down any kind

41:09of rebellion but you've also got the psychological impact on people that oh right they're in charge then because you just look up and you see the mott and bailey yeah i mean nowadays you see a mott and bailey or at least you see a picture of a mott and bailey probably on the cover of a guidebook or a calendar or something. You go, oh, that looks nice. We should go there. Not so much in 1069 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 the nice little paths around them. And, of course, all the instruments of oppression, the wooden walls and palisades, as you say, garrisoned with men with sharp things that will kill you.

41:46That's all gone. So they're absolutely neutered now, whereas at the time they were crude and they were hugely effective and they were hugely dangerous. I've got two questions here, Mark. First of all, in the Bay of Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum, there is a very small case opposite the main tapestry where there's a tiny little charter that William issues to the people of London. Oh, I know the one you mean, yeah. Saying they can keep all their privileges and they're going to be absolutely fine. Is there a lie 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

42:26aristocracy being demoted to peasants. And secondly, why is there no second army massing? Because there's a huge country. 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. Very neat little calligraphy too. Very, very small, very neat, yeah. And written, of course, in Old English. William is now King of England and his chancery is producing writs in Old English. And it says basically, 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.

43:02And that, it seems, is William's attitude to the whole country from the off. Remember his line is not, he's not like King Knew 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, Edward the Confessor. Harold was the usurper. I am now your legitimate king. So he's issuing these charters and confirmations and saying, everybody calm down and we're going to get on absolutely fine. And now I've been crowned. We didn't talk about his coronation, but he's crowned on Christmas Day 1066. Everyone go about your business and we'll all get on famously. And the problem with that

43:45is the English. There's two problems with that. One is that he's got about, let's say, conservatively 7,000 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 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 1066 is the absolute

44:29line 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 are there any godwins left or all the godwins yeah yeah we've got well githa this is where githa has a proper legitimate story this is the mother 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 Edwin and Morcar,

45:11he'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 1066. And there is resistance. There is, I mean, there is serious resistance. There is 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. I stole this from my school library, and I'm ashamed to say I've still got it 40 years later. Do you know, that's still my favourite book on the subject? It's a great book. It's a great book. The Norman

45:49Conquest of the North. Think of the fines on that. Just think of the fines on that. Worth its weight in gold, like Harold Godwinson. I'm very sorry, Ampleforth College. I will bring this back at some point. The Norman Conquest of the North. 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 1069. So why don't we know these battles? What are these battles called? They're not anything I've studied. They're very localised. The problem is, of course, after 1066, the English have got no leadership. They've had the Godwinsons for a generation, and all the Godwins have been wiped out except

46:33for these teenage grandsons. So you are, again, as an author, 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. The pickpockets. Yeah, exactly. You're literally saying now, I haven't mentioned, you know, Colesvane of Lincoln until this point, but he's very important in Lincoln, at least. So they don't have any obvious leadership. The one person they're trying to rally around, we've already mentioned, is Edgar Ethling, because he's the man with the royal blood in his veins, although he's only 15, 16 years old.

47:10So what's happened to Edgar Ethling? He's submitted at Berkhamstead? Is he still in play? He submits, and for a couple of years, they keep close tabs on him at William's Court. But when the North rebels, first of all in 1068, and then 1069 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 around 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

47:50the locals rise up and massacre his garrison so he goes up to york the following summer he builds another castle on the opposite bank of the ooze same thing happens eventually they have a scandinavian army invades and the the english are really at this point, 1069, going, this is it. This is where we absolutely reverse this. And this is the 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. And just to give the scale, there are tens of thousands slaughtered, we believe. Well into six figures, we think.

48:29Wow. Six figures, even at that time. The thing about the harrying of the North is medieval chroniclers, when they say 100,000 people fought at Hastings, you just say, well, he just means a large number. There's no way the armies were that big. In the case of the harrying of the North, Aldrich Vitalius, who's writing in the 1120s, very well informed, but, you know, not great with numbers. He says it's thought that more than 100,000 Christian souls were carried off. And everyone always went, well, he just means a lot of dead people. But the Doomsday Book shows that, in fact, it was a real mess. Yeah. Doomsday Book. Yeah. And, of course, Doomsday Book, you can't crunch the data properly till you've got computers.

49:02John Palmer did it in the 1990s. 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 occasions where the chroniclers, if anything, understate the amount of human loss. But the crucial thing here is people often say, this is a deliberate punishment beating. There is an element of that. None of the sources, despite what it often says on schools' websites, none of the sources say he went around killing people and salting the earth, etc. 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 crops and all the food.

49:42The scorched earth. I mean, it's the first scorched earth policy that we're seeing, I guess, isn't it? 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 it's indirectly causing the sort of genocide, if you like, of the local people, but he's doing it to stop a Scandinavian invasion happening. So with the harrowing of 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? It's even further than England, isn't it, Mark?

50:26I mean, it's not right just to talk about England. I would talk about England in the first instance, because 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 1066 and 1086. In 30 seconds, the wonderful thing about Doomsday is not only is it so voluminous, it's like 2 million words over about 13,000, 14,000 places. Not only is it the greatest survey of any kingdom, any polity until the modern age, really, until the 18th century, until the Industrial Revolution. Not only is it all those things, it also, the commissioners who

51:05were going around the country saying, who owns this? What are its economic resources? They're saying, what is it worth now? Who owns it now? And who owned it in 1066? 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 1066 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 changed in that 20 year period. And what we see is the changes devastating and catastrophic or at least wholesale. The crucial thing is the aristocracy has gone. So whereas when you look at 1066,

51:45the aristocracy is almost to a man, English, man and woman, English. When you look at the landowners in 1086, of the top 500, the most powerful individuals, only 13 have English names. Thorkell of Arden and Colswain of Linthcombe being the famous ones. They're the famous ones because they're mentioned by Stenton, but there's 13 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 8,000 names. And of those 8,000, only 10% are English. So the ruling class of England, and I'm defining ruling class here, is going down to like the lord of your local manor. more than nine times out of ten, they will be a foreigner.

52:28They'll be Norman, French, French speaking. They'll be French speaking, but they could be Angevin, they could be Breton, they could be Monceau, they could be Flemish. But overwhelmingly Norman, 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

53:02in the space of 50 years. And a whole rejig of the church. And some of Beck is brought over and he rejigs the whole church hierarchy. 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 10% 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 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 the last little while

53:45about 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 slit in a very Game of Thrones way. That's what the Godwinsons did. You remember Godwin, the father, does in Edward the Confessor's younger brother, Harold. He surprises him, he blinds him. The Normans, for all their savagery and warfare don't do politics like that they are in a single word chivalrous and they don't execute one another going forward now all of these changes because the aristocracy has been replaced overnight more or less or at least within 10 years all of these

54:21new attitudes towards warfare towards architecture towards, towards the church, towards human life, they very quickly become the new norm in England. Within 50 years, the English are kind of writing as if this has always been the case. But what happens is by the 1120s and 1130s, they're looking western north into Wales and Ireland and Scotland 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,

54:58and 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. 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 sort of upper peasantry. But this is carried on very shortly afterwards within a generation to Wales, 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.

55:43The Stuarts. Yeah. My wife's family, the Frasers. All these guys turn up the bruce's the bruce's yeah the baliels and the crucial thing with scotland which i didn't i mean i have to sort of as a sort of uh 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. And Cumbria is completely not part of it. 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,

56:23which is carved up in the two or three decades after the conquest. It's going to be rip roaring stuff if I ever finish it. This is, as you said, Mark, 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. 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. I think England has so far never undergone a greater change. I mean, that's a fabulous place to leave it. But Mark Morris, thank you so much for leading us through something that if you have ever been schooled in Britain, you will know something about.

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