554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)

28:35And it is evident that Tostig, like William, is out for vengeance and is keen to obtain backing for it wherever he can find it. So what does all this mean for England? Because it means not only is that the looming threat of William, there is the possible threat, at this point seems quite unlikely, of an attack from Scandinavia, but there's also Tostig hanging around. So there must be a massive sense of uncertainty, anxiety, dare I say dread, as the months pass. Yeah. And then Easter comes and goes. So the campaigning season is now upon England. And then it was, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded in its entry for 1066, that a portent was seen all over England, such as no man had ever witnessed before.

29:24Some called it a comet, others the long-haired star. and it generates much dread and there is no more infallible portent of a looming crisis than a fiery-tailed star blazing day after day across the sky. Oh my word, what a terrifying moment. So that's Halley's Comet, isn't it? Halley's Comet has appeared. Everybody knows what that means. Bloodshed is coming. And do you know what? We might have a little bit of it after the break. See you then.

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31:13Welcome back to The Rest is History. We are in the weeks after Easter 1066. England has just been visited by Halley's Comet. So Halley's Comet was named after the astronomer Edward Halley, who in 1705 calculated that this comet reappeared about every 75 years. However, that's not how people view it in 1066, is it, Tom? Because they say, comet, disaster is coming. Yeah, absolutely. And sure enough, even as the tail of the comet is flickering away into the inky varsimages of space, Ominous news is being brought to Harold from the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight? Oh, no. That's the place you don't want to get news from.

31:59So it is reported that an enemy fleet has landed there and extorted money and provisions. Is it the Normans? No, it's not the Normans. It's Tostig. So to quote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the Isle of Wight, he then sailed onwards and ravaged everywhere he could make landing along the south coast until he came to Sandwich. But at Sandwich, he finds that Harold is ready for him. that Harold has gathered again to quote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a larger force, both in terms of ships and land forces, as no king in England had ever done before. So Tosti feels, well, I can't make a landing here.

32:31So he press gangs sailors from Sandwich and the coast around it to serve in his fleet. And he then heads northwards and he sails with 60 ships, we're told, by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle up the Humber and he starts ravaging Lincolnshire. But Edwin and Morka, his great Bane, the two people who'd kicked him out, they raise the various kind of levees from their own lands and they confront him. And Tosti finds his own men melting away. So it's evident that, you know, the people of Mercia and Northumbria want nothing to do with him. Basically, everybody hates Tosti. Everyone hates him. And so he escapes the Humber and we're told that, you know, what had been a fleet of 60 ships is now only 12 ships.

33:17And so according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and there are later sources which give further detail and we'll be coming to them in our next episode. But according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he then sails northwards for Scotland and the court of King Malcolm. Who, of course, had succeeded to the throne in the wake of the overthrow of Macbeth. And this is very humiliating for Tosdick because Malcolm had swallowed up a large chunk of his earldom of Northumbria in the form of Cumbria, the late district. and he'd raided Lindisfarne, you know, and now Tostig's having to go and kind of... Do you know what he's like?

33:49He's like Ted Cruz paying homage to Donald Trump, isn't he? That is what he's like. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, maybe this is the end of the road for him. Doesn't really seem a comeback, does it? Or is it? We will see. Right. So Harold has this big force that he has assembled to defend his kingdom. He has raised the feared, he's raised the levies. And of course, he's done it partly because, you know, Tostig is hanging around. but there is a much more formidable opponent than Tostig and this of course is William of Normandy and Harold, everybody should remember, has met William of Normandy. He has been to Normandy.

34:26When he was messing around with the saints' bones and stuff, he has seen at first hand how formidable the Norman war and how modern the Norman war machine is with its knights, its cavalry, its castles and so on. So he knows this is going to be a very, very stern test. Yeah, and I think there can be no doubt that Churchill writing about this must have felt a sense of identification with Harold. And what happens in due course must have cast a slight shadow. Because William, when he has brought the news of Harold's election as king, is furious. And he sees it not just as a political challenge, but directly as a personal affront.

35:07So we know what his response to this is because we have an account of 1066 and its aftermath by a knight who had served William and then gone on to become his personal chaplain, a man called William of Poitiers. and William of Poitiers writes, Duke William, having consulted his men, decided to avenge this offence, so the events of Harold's election, and regain his inheritance by force of arms, despite many who used clever arguments to dissuade him from such an arduous enterprise as being well beyond the power of the Norman forces. So you have there resolve from William, but also clearly a certain nervousness on the part of many of the people in his court and the broader dukedom.

35:51So to look at the nervousness first, why would there be so many in Normandy anxious that they lack the capabilities to conquer England? And William of Poitiers is very contemptuous of them. He says, inspired by cowardice, they exaggerated in discussions the strength of Harold's army and the weakness of their own. But actually, you know, the Normans who are nervous about attacking England are not wrong to be nervous. because as we've been talking throughout the first series we've been doing on this, England is a very wealthy and powerful kingdom. It has a very precociously efficient system of government and it has a military infrastructure to match.

36:36And it may surprise listeners to hear this insisted upon. Because England was conquered in 1016 by Canute and there have been succession crises and there's been lots of internal feuding. So could you not look at England from Normandy and say, well, they lost, you know, exactly 50 years ago. They were conquered, so it's doable. Plus, you know, a lot of these earls actually hate each other. We might be able to pay them off. You know, once we get in, this might not be so difficult after all. That would be my counter-argument. But I think the other way of looking at it is to say, England has gone through conquest.

37:07It has gone through all these upheavals and turbulence. And yet the frameworks of governance and the military infrastructure, which had been set up by Alfred the Great, honed by his heirs, They are still going strong. So because of these reforms that Alfred had set in place, and which have endured for almost two centuries now, the depths of manpower that an English king can command and muster remains extremely impressive and much greater than anything that a Norman Duke could do. And under a competent king, which Harold definitely is, there are armies potentially in the tens of thousands that can be summoned.

37:49And we know this because we have a record of the military obligations that are imposed upon the various lords of the kingdom. So to be the lord of an estate, a thane, is to owe military service. So to quote from an early 11th century tract about this, to equip freemen with arms and to stand sentry on the coast and to guard one's lord. Now that lord might be the king, but it might equally not be. Like an earl or something. Yeah, the king doesn't own all the lands. There are earls who have their own lands. And so there are lots of thanes who own duties to, I don't know, Gith or Morkar or whatever.

38:26And these lords, their thanes, many of the kind of the wealthier freemen, the churls as they're called, you know, these would be quite as well armoured as Norman knights. They'd be skilled in the use of swords, of spears, of axes. They would even own horses. In addition to these men who can be raised as needed, the king would have paid specialist troops. So the equivalent, I guess, of the Varangians who defend the emperor in Constantinople. And these are the House Karls, which is a celebrated name. I mean, anyone who knows anything about Hastings knows about the House Karls. And again, these seem to date back to the time of Alfred, who had raised troops, paid troops to serve kind of as his bodyguard.

39:14The great earls of the kingdom, they have their house carls as well. And these are probably the most formidable infantry in northern Europe. Perhaps one difference, though, between the house carls and their Norman equivalent is that England has been turbulent and there has been feuding between the different earls and stuff. But life in England is surely relatively peaceful compared with the very competitive arena of northern and central France and its environs. So might it be the case that even the best trained housecarl, their skills have not been, as it were, honed in competition as much as those of their Norman equivalent?

39:56I mean, I think there are very particular reasons why the Normans are menacing in a way that the English aren't, that we'll come to in due course. I mean, are they not always fighting in Brittany and in Maine and all these kinds of places? But Harold has been fighting against, say, against the Welsh. Right. I mean, Harold is a very practiced and experienced warrior. Yeah. And he commands troops who have done a lot of fighting. So these are very, very formidable forces. Do you know what's happened, Tom? what's happened is that once again in the rest is history we've forgotten about the Welsh I haven't forgotten about the Welsh I had forgotten about them though and that's sad I feel bad now I think that it does not pay to underestimate the enormous reserves of really quite skilled manpower that Harold can command and also of course he has the right in the time of national emergency which 1066 patently is to essentially summon every able-bodied freeman in England and that is about 90 % of the population so 10 % of slaves 90 % are free.

40:54And, you know, the kind of the lower orders are not well armed, but they can do sentry duty, garrison duty, whatever. They can wave a pitchfork. That kind of thing. And I think that these troops would feel a sense of duty as well as of obligation. So one of the great, the famous old English poems about the Battle of Malden, which we talked about in one of our first episodes, Earl Britworth standing against the Viking invaders. And he pledges himself to the defence of what he calls Folk and Folden, his people and his native soil. And we're told by an English chronicler writing in the early 12th century that Harold had drawn on these sentiments, that he had called his people to exert themselves by land and sea for the defence of their country.

41:42So maybe kind of Churchillian rhetoric is being employed by Harold. Do you know what it is, Tom? It's now is the hour. Riders of Rohan, oaths you have taken now fulfill them all to lord and land. That's that's basically what this is. And William of Poitiers, William's chaplain, would agree. He says that the English are absolutely motivated by patriotism. And just to quote Michael Lawson, who wrote the definitive book on the Battle of Hastings itself, an absolutely, I mean, amazingly detailed, subtle treatment of all the sources and the evidence. I mean, it's a passage that really struck me when I read it.

42:21The more that becomes known about the ways in which English armies assembled and fought in this period, the more it may become apparent that it saw the mobilisation of the country and its resources for war to an extent that was not to be repeated until the total wars of the 20th century. Tom, do you know what that reveals? Michael Lawson has never heard of the Napoleonic Wars. Well, I was thinking that, but the militia in the Napoleonic Wars, I mean, it's pretty minor. The Napoleonic Wars is a massive, total war. It's a total mobilisation of English society, British society. He's talking about the manpower.

42:55All right. I'm just being mean to Michael Lawson for no reason. I mean, I did kind of ponder, you know, what would Pitt say about that? What would Nelson say of that, Tom? Unbelievable scenes. But the Navy, I mean, the Navy is really where England does its fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Yeah. Anyway, so essentially it would be foolish to underestimate the resources that Harold can command. and William does not underestimate them. And so it is that far from rushing into an attack on England, he prepares for it with a kind of remorseless care and attention to detail. So he needs to organise quite a lot before he can have a hope of invading England.

43:35So most obviously he needs ships. And these are not just to transport his army, but to guard against the English fleet. And the Normans who were hostile to William's plans had explicitly cited a dread of English naval superiority. And they say of Harold, for he had a numerous fleet and seaman expert in nautical matters. That's William of Poitiers there. The fleet is presumably not built entirely from scratch. Although if you look at the Bayeux Tapestry, it seems to suggest as much, but it was clearly a huge effort. And so you would imagine all the way through the summer, The dockyards of Normandy are echoing to the sound of hammer blows.

44:15This is like Adventures in Time. It's unbelievable. It's great prose, Tom. And then, of course, he needs men. And William is not like Harold. He has to recruit essentially an ad hoc force. He doesn't have a military apparatus that he can just click his fingers and it all leaps into being. These are men fighting not for love of land and patriotism, Tom. They're fighting for money and greed. Oh, they're fighting for love of land. It's just other people's land. Yeah. And there are lots of people in France who are very interested in getting a bit of England. So William of Poitiers lists men who come from the Royal Heartlands of France.

44:50So Paris and Orléans, from Maine, from Brittany, from Aquitaine. And when on the Bayeux Tapestry, you know, there are those kind of Latin stitching describing what's going on. And it shows William's army. He describes it not as an army of Normans, but of Frankie, of Franks, of French. And the fact that William is able to recruit so many people from so many different parts of France beyond his dukedom, I think, is tribute not just to the greed and avarice of a Frenchman for English wealth and land, but also to William's fame as a warrior. I mean, it's a tremendous tribute to his renown and charisma.

45:29And then on top of that, of course, William is a very, very able, strategic planner. And he knows that if you are going to recruit large numbers of men, loads of whom are going to be bringing horses, the huge challenge is to keep them supplied while you're waiting to sail. And there's a famous essay by Bernard Bachrach, so not related to Bert, which demonstrated the challenge of stabling horses for one month. So he supposes that there were 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 horses. And he says that this would have generated 700 ,000 gallons of urine, 5 million pounds of dung, and it would have taken 5 ,000 cartloads to remove.

46:11And it has to be said that clearing dung kind of absolutely plays to William's strength. This is the kind of detail that he's all over. He's not just about leading battle charges. He's also about the natural métier of a Frenchman. So even with all this, even with all his carts of dung and his hard-faced, greedy Frenchmen and whatnot, it's still a challenge, isn't it? He's got to basically get them across the channel. He's got to land. He's got to win battles. He's got to get to London. All of that stuff. That, I think, is the key thing. The only way he can hope to win is to force a battle, which means effectively to gamble everything, his life, everything, on a single decisive encounter.

46:55And the truth is, is that he's only fought one battle really before. And that was back in 1047 when he was about eight. He'd fought that pitch battle against the rebels against his rule. And so it's a huge gamble. And you might wonder, well, why would he take such a risk? I mean, he's built up so much in Normandy. Why would he risk it all? And I think it's because despite his respect for Harold and his military capabilities, William is confident that he will win. And that confidence is founded on various factors. The first is he is very aware of what he commands. He knows that Normandy is the most disciplined warrior society in Europe.

47:37And he knows that the Normans are capable of feats of conquest that is beyond the capacity of anybody else in Christendom. And he knows this because by 1066, those Normans who we talked about in the previous series who travel to southern Italy and started attacking the Byzantines and the Muslims, they have crossed the Straits of Messina and embarked on the conquest of Sicily. And it's going very, very well. So Norman adventurers, not even backed by Norman state power, have conquered most of southern Italy and are well on their way to conquering the whole of Sicily. William does appreciate, however, that this isn't just down to the qualities of Norman prowess, but also to factors that are common across France, but not England.

48:19And these are heavy cavalry, so people who the English are coming to call knights, the construction of castles, not just as defensive, but as offensive structures, and crossbows, which are kind of new innovation that the English haven't really caught on to. and if the Byzantines and the Muslims in southern Italy and Sicily have you know they have no idea what's hitting them when the Normans fight them then the likelihood is that neither will be English so to quote a wonderful book predatory kinship the creation of Norman power by the great scholar Eleanor Searle and she wrote the Anglo-Saxons lauded it from wooden halls and did not fight in sophisticated cavalry units nor were they organized primarily for warfare as were Williams magnates after their long testing and occupying and holding the land of enemies, England lay open without the new technology of warfare.

49:10So that's what you were saying, that even though Harold and his housegirls have been fighting, the mass of people in England are not organised for warfare in the way that the Normans are. She, like me, has forgotten about the Welsh. Anyway, obviously this is now Tom Holland bingo. Yeah, right. Because not only is there military technology that puts the Normans ahead, but dare I say there's also spiritual technology or at least a sort of ideological technology. As you say, it's not just a military revolution that Latin Christendom is undergoing. It's a religious one as well. And it's a process that is called reformatio, a convulsive and deeply contested attempt to remake Christian society by cleansing and purifying it.

49:51And what that means in practice is a conviction on the part of leading figures in the Roman church, that the church should free itself not just from sin, but from the grubby fingerprints of sinners, which in effect means kings and emperors. And in the conviction that this is what God wants, they are pushing through a program of reform. And to do this, effectively, they're a kind of cadre of revolutionaries who have seized control of the commanding heights of of the Roman church. And by 1066, the most formidable of these revolutionaries, the most influential, isn't the Pope, but an archdeacon by the name of Hildebrand.

50:33And there is lines that are said of him that is very popular by the 1060s, that if you would thrive at Rome, say this at the top of your voice, more than the Pope, I obey the Lord of the Pope. So that is Hildebrand. And actually within seven years, Hildebrand will become Pope and he will take the name of Gregory the seventh and he will take on the emperor himself and convulse the whole of europe but already in the 1060s you have a sense of this great earthquake that is to come and there is immense enthusiasm in france for this spirit of reform and the normans especially are absolutely signed up to it and they're very much hildebrand's kind of people they're very devout they're very effective at toppling people that hildebrand doesn't like the normans in italy have basically become the sword of the papal reformers.

51:20So these revolutionaries, obviously, they need men in mail with horses and spears, and the Normans are there, and it's absolutely brilliant. And so in 1063, Hildebrand had got the Pope, Alexander, to send Roger, Count Roger de Hauteville, the guy who will lead the conquest of Sicily, to send him a papal banner. And this effectively is sanctifying his invasion of Sicily, ruled by the Muslims, as a holy war. And they have also given a blessing to Normans who are fighting the Muslims in Spain. So you have there the sense that something very novel and radical, the idea that armed warfare can be blessed by the church, is starting to coalesce as an idea.

52:07And the problem about this for the English is that they are very much not Hildebrand's kind of people. They are now ruled by a king who has broken an oath sworn on the bones of saints. You don't care about this. No. But Hildebrand absolutely does. The more I hear about this Hildebrand, the less I like him. He's a man who plunges England into 500 dark years, only reversed in the 1530s. I think it's fair to say, Tom. That is as may be and to be discussed. There is also a further problem with the English church, which is that Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, He is the embodiment of everything the reformers hate.

52:45So as well as being Archbishop of Canterbury, he's also the Bishop of Winchester. He's venal. He's avaricious. He's cynical. Yeah, he's great. I love Stigand. The reformers in Rome keep excommunicating him and Stigand keeps snapping his fingers at this and saying, well, so what? Who cares about a load of excommunications and saints' bones? Come on. And he's so toxic that Harold has actually almost certainly refused to be crowned by him because he doesn't want William to take advantage of this, although the Normans will. I mean, they will say that he'd been crowned by Stigand. So he seems to have been crowned by Eldred instead.

53:19And all of this means that when William's ambassadors travel to Rome in the summer of 1066 to request a papal blessing for the invasion, Hildebrand behind the scenes is busy pulling strings to ensure that that is exactly what the Normans get. Like a corrupt and cruel spider. Or like a man determined to purge the Christian people of sin, Dominic. I mean, It depends on your perspective. Where's he now? I know we're good, I'll tell you. And the upshot is that William is given the standard of St. Peter the Apostle, and it's been blessed by the Pope himself. And it has to be said that this is massively controversial across Europe, but also in Rome itself.

53:59To equate the English with infidels and to sanction the overthrow of an anointed king is a massive, massive deal. And Hildebrand himself acknowledges this. He writes to William, There are many among my brothers who revile me for this judgment and charge me with laboring to bring about a terrible sacrifice of human lives. So that would be your take, I guess. But Hildebrand's own conscience is clear because he thinks that a reformed, cleansed, purified England is a prize well worth fighting for. He sees it as a bog of sin that needs to be drained. And if William can affect this, then William will not only have served the cause of the reformers in Rome, but also of the sin-steeped English themselves.

54:46Yes, Hildebrand is awake to sin and the English are sleeping. And obviously this is great news for William, who is unbelievably ruthless, but also unbelievably pious. and it's the combination of the two that throughout this period makes the thought was so terrifying and effective. He's going to be killing an anointed king, more Tom Holland bingo, and killing an anointed king is a big deal. But not maybe if this king is steeped in sin. Is that basically the claim? Well, he's going to put it to the test, isn't he? Because God is going to decide. And it is at massive high stakes for William. It's not just about will he die in battle if he's defeated, but where will his soul go?

55:27because, as you say, to aspire to kill an anointed king. And then, of course, in due course, William wants to become king and be anointed himself. I mean, if God is not on his side, then that is a fateful thing to be planning. You could burst on your deathbed. That could happen to you. And let's see if that happens to William. And I think that the shadow of anxiety about this must have grown over William over the summer, because throughout August and then into September, the winds are against him. And he keeps praying, you know, let the winds turn, give us a favourable wind to get us to England, but they don't.

56:03And in England, where Harold's levees are stationed, waiting for this invasion, and it doesn't come, by early September, provisions are running out. It's harvest time. And Harold must be thinking, well, I don't think he's going to come this year. I mean, it's too late. I don't think he's going to risk it crossing the channel this late in the season. And so on the 8th of September, Harold decides to gamble that William will not be coming. And he sends his men home. And he also sends his fleet to London. So from the south coast. And as it is sailing up the channel, there is a terrible storm. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports many perished before they reached London.

56:48So that is a blow. England's naval defences are not what they might have been had that storm not blown. However, Dominic, this is not the worst news to greet Harold, because when he arrives from the south coast in London, he is informed that what he had thought would not happen this late in the season has happened, that England has been invaded. It is not, however, a Norman invasion, and it has not happened on the south coast. Instead, it has happened in the north. The great war fleet has sailed into the Humber. Tostig is back. And with him, your hero, Harold Hardrada. Oh, my word. Harold Hardrada is back.

57:38Unbelievable scenes. What a bombshell. Do you know, I'm so excited that if I was a member of the Rest is History Club, I'd listen to the next episode right away to see what happens when Harold Hardrada lands what's Harold Goldwinson going to do what I know amazing stuff heart stopping drama and if I wasn't a member of the Rest is History Club I would head immediately to therestishistory.com because I would be agog with excitement to find out what happens next in this extraordinary epic story of 1066 so Tom that was so exciting I just can't wait for the next episode and on that bombshell yeah goodbye bye bye