It was perhaps England’s most decisive battle. The year was 1066, and power in the nation was about to experience its most rapid-fire and dramatic shift. The Anglo-Saxon kings of the past would be no more. They were destined to be vanquished and replaced by the invading, foreign Normans who, like the Romans in 43 CE, had come to plunder the land’s inexhaustible resources and take control of its population. Exit Harold Godwinson, or Harold II, the last of the old set of kings. Enter William I, otherwise and famously known as the William the Conqueror.
Before becoming a feared and mighty conqueror of 11th-century Europe, William’s moniker was actually William the Bastard. He was born illegitimate and was an unlikely successor to two thrones, being the love child conceived by Robert I, Duke of Normandy, and his mistress, Herleva of Falaise.
Yet his royal blood and being a strong and healthy male made him enough of a contender by medieval standards, and he was designated as his father’s heir in Normandy. However, being born out of wedlock earned him many an adversary, who considered his background an indicator of immorality and carnal sin.
The opportunity for another kingdom presented itself in William’s adulthood. William was a confirmed cousin of King Edward the Confessor, and he traveled to England to visit Edward’s politically fragile court in 1051. There, it is believed that the childless Edward informed William that he intended to make him his heir.
Even if such a verbal promise was extracted from the last ruling monarch of the House of Wessex, William’s personal claim was still considerably weak. If William wanted the English throne, he would have to seize it, not succeed relatively smoothly to it as he had in Normandy. After all, he wasn’t even Edward’s son.
Edward passed away on the fifth of January in 1066. A violent succession crisis promptly broke out. It was a chaotic and confusing state of affairs. Edward’s council selected Harold Godwinson, the brother of Edward’s wife Edith of Wessex, as England’s new king. It is reported that on his deathbed, Edward reportedly changed his mind about William and declared Harold to be the next protector of England. However, William I had the backing of Pope Alexander II. As England was still a Catholic country at the time, its inhabitants felt the tug-of-war pull between their loyalty to their leaders and their loyalty to their faith.
William would ultimately claim England through a political science concept called the “right of conquest.” This is the practice of a conqueror lawfully obtaining power through force of arms and defeating an established ruler on the battlefield. Typically, in William’s time period, the conqueror had to possess royal blood and a sizable army to establish security and infrastructure on their new land after the victory. William had both, along with a relentless streak of ambition for himself and the family he had sired with his wife and cousin, Matilda of Flanders.
On September 27th, 1066, he would cross the sea from Normandy accompanied by 4,000 to 7,000 trained soldiers. They landed in Pevensey in Sussex and wasted no time preparing for an attack.
William’s forces quickly mobilized on land and started marching east, creeping down the crashing coast of Hastings towards Harold and the native, awaiting Englishmen. The Normandy army stayed by the shores so William could keep a close eye on his precious fleet of nearly 700 ships, in case a hasty retreat or a naval battle was necessary. Harold marched his own army from York to meet William and defend England’s coasts from the rule of the outsiders. It was on October 14th, 1066, when the armies of William and Harold finally met on the battlefield, on the hills close to Hastings, an important fishing port town on East Sussex.
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Harold had just about as many soldiers fighting for him as William, and the armies were formidable rivals for one another. The upper hand that the Normans had over the English was their outstanding archery and warriors fighting on horseback. William’s archers and crossbowmen led the attack at the front, with the infantry in the back. Harold’s army, on the other hand, was disgracefully short of both archers and cavalry. Their best (and only) hope was the fight on foot at the summit of a ridge with their powerful handheld weapons.
Harold’s greatest force was his housecarls, or trained household bodyguards, but there was no denying that William had the tactical advantage on the landscape. Harold’s infantry, though armed, could be easily clustered together on the hills and shot down by William’s archers. Harold’s most armoured and trained men promptly made a human shield of themselves that William’s men had to break through. The battle raged on for a gruelling nine hours, and both William and Harold’s will held on until their men were clinging to their last stores of strength.
The downfall of Harold’s army came when they broke formation of the human shield to pursue retreating Norman soldiers. This allowed William’s army to infiltrate and surround Harold’s men, with both sides already considerably weakened. But William prevailed.
According to popular legend, Harold himself was taken down by a Norman arrow that pierced him through the eye, a symbolic (perhaps too symbolic) end for a monarch who had set his eye on more power than he could ever hold. Another story has him being hacked to pieces by the enemy. Either way, the Battle of Hastings ended Harold’s life and his short reign over England. His disheartened and exhausted remaining men abandoned the battle shortly after.
William the Conqueror is the confirmed ancestor of the current British royal family. By winning the Battle of Hastings and ripping the crown from Harold’s hands, William had ensured that his bloodline would continue to hold precedence in England for nearly a thousand years. The current Prince of Wales is set to become King William V of England when he succeeds his father, King Charles III, bringing the English monarchy full circle in a way. The Hastings battlefield is now a popular tourist attraction for enthusiasts of military history.
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