Battle of Hastings

Thus Harold was forced to depend on his huscarls and the hastily raised levies from Wessex. Determined to act on the defensive, he took up his position on a small hill a few miles from Hastings, near which the Normans had established their camp. On October 14, 1066, the famous battle was fought. The Normans were formed in a triple line of feudal knights on horseback, with heavy-armed infantry before them, and archers and crossbowmen in the front line. The English under Harold consisted only of the huscarls, clad in helmets and armor, and bearing two-handed Danish axes. They formed a front line, protected, as they stood shoulder to shoulder, by a wall formed of their joined shields. Behind the huscarls were the light-armed levies of thegns and ceorls, carrying spears, sharpened stakes, and rude implements of agriculture; and on the crown of the hill was raised the standard of Harold, the golden dragon of Wessex. Against this solid mass William hurled his forces in vain. For six hours the battle raged, until at last, having failed to break the English ranks by charges of horsemen and showers of arrows, the Normans ordered a feigned flight in order to draw the English from their position. The ruse succeeded. While the light-armed English levies were pursuing the retreating foe, a body of Norman horsemen thrust themselves between the pursuers and the huscarls on the hill. Fiercely fighting to the last, the huscarls held out till evening, when Harold fell, mortally wounded, and the great battle was over.' The Normans were

HIC : EST : WADARD : HIC : COQUITUR : CARO ET HIC : MINISTRA VERUNT MINISTRI Here is Wadard. Here meat is cooked and here the servants serve.

[HIC : FRANCI FUGNANT ET CECI]DERUNT QUI ERANT : CUM HAPOLDO: HIC [HAROLD: - REX: - INTERFECTUS : EST]

Here the French fight and those who were with Harold fell.
Here King Harold was slain.

FROM THE BAYEux TAPESTRY.

victorious at Hastings because they were better equipped and better disciplined than the English, who, though they knew how to fight, did not know how to manoeuvre; and the victory is significant because in winning it the Normans displayed in military matters that same superiority which they were afterward to show in government and law as well.

Completion of the Conquest

The flower of Wessex was slain at Hastings, and further resistance was useless. The earls of the north refused to come to the rescue, and without opposition, William marched toward London. There the witan had hastily elected the aetheling Eadgar, grandson of Eadmund Ironside, the last male descendant of the house of Alfred; but without an army Eadgar's position was untenable. After William, passing by London, had crossed the Thames at Wallingford and pitched his camp at Berkhamstead, Eadgar with his earls submitted, and the witan chose William for king. On Christmas clay, 1066, the Norman duke was crowned in London by the archbishop of York, and became the legally elected king of southern England.

But what the south had done could not bind the north. Though Eadwine and Morkere submitted, and William returned to Normandy in 1067, the real conquest of England was only just begun. The very rivalries which had enabled William to conquer at Hastings now made slow and difficult the subjugation of the rest of the English; and had the earls stood by each other in this crisis, the conquest begun at Hastings might never have been completed, and. William might never have been called the Conqueror. But the defeat of the south taught the north no lesson. William, on sailing for Normandy, had left as regents Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and William FitzOsbern, whose rule seemed oppressive to a people unaccustomed to any efficient centralization of power. Roused by the excesses of the Normans, the unconquered English rose in revolt. But there was no unity of plan or action : the men of Devon and Cornwall gathered about the sons of Harold; the Northumbrians took up the cause of the theling Eadgar and were assisted by Malcolm III of the Scots, who in 1070 married Eadgar's sister Margaret; Sweyn of Denmark entered the struggle in his own behalf as the successor of Cunt; while in Mercia, a local thegn, Eadric, asserted his right to the Mercian earldom.

Such a variety of personal ambitions rendered hopeless the national cause. William, returning from. Normandy in December, 1067, took up each contest in turn. Exeter submitted after a siege of eighteen days, and Devonshire and Cornwall were subdued. The trouble with Yorkshire and Lincolnshire was more serious. At first the shires seemed to yield, and a Norman earl was placed in authority over theism. But the revolt in Yorkshire broke out afresh in 1069, and a bold attempt was made by Cospatric, the earl, acting in conjunction with the aetheling Eadgar and Malcolm his brother-in-law, to set up a separate kingdom in the north. William captured York, and in order finally to put down the rebellion, laid waste the country from the Humber to the Tees. Later he crossed the Tweed and forced Malcolm to become his vassal. This harrying of the north, whereby villages were burned and fields laid waste, broke the strength of the resistance, though it did not destroy the spirit of local independence; and William, respecting this feeling, was crowned a second time at York in 1069, as if he had become the king of a separate kingdom. This freedom of the northern borderland was for many centuries to be an important factor in the history of England.

By 1071 the last opposition was overcome. Eadric was driven into Wales, Cheshire and Shropshire were ravaged, and the famous struggle of the English under Hereward, a man" of the abbot of Peterborough, among the marshes of Ely, was brought to an end.