Part 10

This was the most critical period of the day’s fight. The varlets who had been set to guard the harness of the Normans, began to abandon it. The priests who had confessed and blessed the army in the morning, and had meanwhile retired to a neighbouring height, began to take themselves off. In this extremity Odo interfered, and turned the fate of the battle. The description in the _Roman de Rou_ precisely corresponds with the drawing in the Tapestry. Wace says, “Then Odo, the good priest, the Bishop of Bayeux, galloped up, and said to them ‘Stand fast, stand fast! be quiet and move not! fear nothing, for if it please God, we shall conquer yet.’ So they took courage, and rested where they were; and Odo returned galloping back to where the battle was most fierce, and was of great service on that day. He had put a hauberk on, over a white aube, wide in the body, with the sleeves tight; and sat on a white horse, so that all might recognize him. In his hand he held a mace, and wherever he saw most need, he led up and stationed the knights, and often urged them on to assault and strike the enemy.” With this description the Tapestry exactly accords, except in the colour of the horse; it however represents it as being sufficiently conspicuous.

The inscription is HIC ODO EPISCOPUS TENENS BACULUM CONFORTAT PUEROS--Here Odo holding a staff exhorts the soldiers.[99] The staff which Odo wields is, I suspect, the badge of command--the marshal’s baton as it were--and not a weapon, as some writers suppose. William himself, in the next group, is represented with a similar implement. During the middle ages the priests of the sanctuary were not unfrequently to be found in the battle-field. Some of them were much more at home in the midst of the _melée_ than in guiding sin-stricken souls to a Saviour. The bold Bishop of Durham, Anthony Beck, never left the precincts of his castle but in magnificent military array. He fought personally at the battle of Falkirk, and drew from a soldier, who felt perhaps a superstitious dread at aiming a deadly blow at one invested with the sacred office, the merited rebuke, “To your mass, O priest.” Richard I., when at war with Philip of France, took a French Bishop prisoner. The Pope sent to demand his liberation, claiming him as a son of the church. Richard upon this sent the Bishop’s coat of mail to the Pope, just as it was, besmeared with the blood of the slain, employing the words of Jacob’s sons, “This have we found; know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no.” The canon laws indeed forbade a priest to shed blood; but this was evaded, it is said, by the use of a mace instead of a sword. The warrior-priest did not stab a man; he only brained him. It is on this ground that the baton held by Odo has been considered by some writers to be a weapon.

In consequence of the confusion and panic which attended the disasters in the Malfosse, a report was spread among the Normans that William was dead. At the same time, too, according to one writer,[100] Eustace Count of Boulogne strongly urged the Duke to withdraw his forces from the field, considering the battle to be lost beyond recovery. A Saxon shaft at that moment laid Eustace low, and delivered William from his importunity. The Duke, nothing daunted by this disaster, rushed among his troops, encouraged his men to maintain the combat, and to assure them of the falsehood of the report of his death, raised his helmet and exhibited himself to his people. This act is exhibited in the Tapestry (_Plate XV._); at the same time, his standard-bearer, who never left him throughout the day, draws attention to the circumstance. The group is labelled, HIC EST DVX WILEL:--Here is Duke William. By these energetic means the Normans returned to the onset.

The Tapestry shows us the fearful slaughter which took place on that hard-fought field. The border is filled with dead men and horses lying in every conceivable position; a head is not unfrequently deposited at some distance from the body to which it once belonged. We can scarcely look upon the drawing without being impressed with the idea that the designer of the Tapestry had been the witness of some fight. It is said that when a man receives a mortal wound, his body is thrown for the moment into violent spasmodic action. So much is this the case, that you may tell the effect of a death-bringing volley by noticing how many unhappy wretches make a sudden leap. In the Tapestry something of this spasmodic action is manifested, and some of the men are coming to the ground in such a posture as they could only do after having sprung up from it.[101]

The battle had now lasted the greater part of the day. “From nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon the battle was up and down, this way and that, and no one knew who would conquer and win the land. Both sides stood so firm and fought so well that no one could guess which would prevail. The Norman archers with their bows shot thickly upon the English; but they covered themselves with their shields, so that the arrows could not reach their bodies.... Then the Normans determined to shoot their arrows upwards into the air, so that they might fall on their enemies’ heads and strike their faces. The archers adopted this scheme, and shot up into the air towards the English; and the arrows in falling struck their heads and faces, and put out the eyes of many, and all feared to open their eyes or leave their faces unguarded.” “The arrows now flew thicker than rain before the wind. Then it was that an arrow that had been thus shot upwards struck Harold above his right eye and put it out. In his agony he drew the arrow (_Plate XVI._) and threw it away, breaking it with his hands; and the pain to his head was so great that he leaned upon his shield.” Still the English did not yield, and Harold, though grievously hurt, maintained his ground.

At length the device was adopted which put victory into the hands of the Normans. Harold, knowing William’s skill in strategy, exhorted his troops at the beginning of the fight to keep their ground, and not suffer themselves to be drawn into a pursuit. Had his troops been well-trained men, to whom obedience is a second nature, that battle had probably not been lost. Many of them however had been brought from the fields, and were unable to resist the prospect of inflicting deserved vengeance upon their adversaries. Harold’s troops were the more likely to fall into the snare laid for them, in consequence of the success which attended, in an earlier part of the day, the attack upon the pursuing Normans in the Malfosse.

William’s army fled by little and little, the English following them. “As the one fell back, the other pressed after; and when the Frenchmen retreated, the English thought and cried out that the men of France fled and would never return. ‘Cowards,’ said they, ‘you came hither in an evil hour, wanting our lands, and seeking to seize our property, fools that you were to come! Normandy is too far off, and you will not easily reach it ... your sons and daughters are lost to you!’ The Normans bore these taunts very quietly, as indeed they easily might, for they did not know what the English said.”

At length the time arrived for the assailants to come to a stand. The English had broken rank; the valley, too, had been crossed, and the Normans were now standing above the Saxons on the flank of the hill on the top of which they had formed in the morning.

At the word of command, DEX AIE, the Normans halted, and turned their faces towards the enemy. Now commenced the fiercest part of that bloody day’s encounter. Neither party was wanting in courage. All the chroniclers do justice to the contending forces. “One hits, another misses; one flies, another pursues; one is aiming a stroke, while another discharges his blow. Norman strives with Englishman again, and aims his blows afresh. One flies, another pursues swiftly; the combatants are many, the plain wide, the battle and the _melée_ fierce. On every hand they fight hard, the blows are heavy, and the struggle becomes fierce.”

As neither the horrors nor the gallantry exhibited on a battle-field can be comprehended by a general description, it may be well here to introduce an account of one or two of the individual encounters occurring at this period, with which Wace supplies us.

“The Normans were playing their part well, when an English knight came rushing up, having in his company a hundred men furnished with various arms. He wielded a northern hatchet, with the blade a full foot long; and was well armed after his manner, being tall, bold, and of noble carriage. In the front of the battle, where the Normans thronged most, he came bounding on swifter than a stag, many Normans falling before him and his company. He rushed straight upon a Norman, who was armed, and riding on a war-horse, and tried with a hatchet of steel to cleave his helmet; but the blow miscarried, and the sharp blade glanced down before the saddle-bow, driving through the horse’s neck down to the ground, so that both horse and master fell together to the earth. I know not whether the Englishman struck another blow; but the Normans who saw the stroke were astonished, and about to abandon the assault, when Roger de Montgomery came galloping up, with his lance set, and heeding not the long-handled axe which the Englishman wielded aloft, struck him down, and left him stretched upon the ground. Then Roger cried out ‘Frenchmen, strike; the day is ours!’ And again a fierce _melée_ was to be seen, with many a blow of lance and sword; the English still defending themselves, killing the horses, and cleaving the shields.”

“There was a French soldier of noble mien, who sat his horse gallantly. He spied two Englishmen who were also carrying themselves boldly. They were both of them men of great worth, and had become companions in arms and fought together, the one protecting the other. They bore two long and broad bills, and did great mischief to the Normans, killing both horses and men. The French soldier looked at them and their bills, and was sore alarmed; for he was afraid of losing his good horse, the best that he had, and would willingly have turned to some other quarter, if it would not have looked like cowardice. Fearing the two bills, he raised his shield by the ‘enarmes,’ and struck one of the Englishmen with his lance on the breast, so that the iron passed out at the back. At the moment that he fell, the lance broke, and the Frenchman seized the mace that hung at his right side, and struck the other Englishman a blow that completely fractured his scull.”

The slaughter at this period of the day must have been fearful. The chronicler of Battle Abbey says, “Amid these miseries there was exhibited a fearful spectacle: the fields were covered with dead bodies, and on every hand nothing was to be seen but the red hue of blood. The dales around sent forth a gory stream, which increased at a distance to the size of a river! How great think you must have been the slaughter of the conquered, when the conquerors’ is reported, upon the lowest computation, to have exceeded ten thousand? Oh how vast a flood of human gore was poured out in that place where these unfortunates fell and were slain! What a dashing to pieces of arms, what a clashing of strokes; what shrieks of dying men; what grief; what sighs were heard! How many groans; how many bitter notes of direst calamity then sounded forth, who can rightly calculate! What a wretched exhibition of human misery was there to call forth astonishment! In the very contemplation of it our heart fails us.”[102]

Notwithstanding the horrors of the scene, and the hopelessness of their efforts, the courage of the Saxons failed not; sometimes fleeing, and sometimes making a stand, they slaughtered their pursuers in heaps.

The place where this havoc took place is probably the southern front of the eminence on which Battle Abbey was afterwards placed. The whole site of the contest has sometimes been denominated “Sanguelac,” or the “Lake of Blood,” but this designation properly belongs to that part in which the street of the modern town of Battle called “the Lake” is situated. Until a very recent period this place was supposed still occasionally to reek with human gore. “Thereabout,” says Drayton, “is a place which after rain always looks red, which some have attributed to a very bloody sweat of the earth, as crying to heaven for revenge for so great a slaughter.”

“ ... Asten once distained with native English blood; Whose soil, when wet with any little rain, Doth blush, as put in mind of those there sadly slain.”

The truth is “the redness of the water here, and at many other places in the neighbourhood, is caused by the oxydation of the iron which abounds in the soil of the Weald of Sussex.”[103]

To return to the battle, “Loud was now the clamour, and great the slaughter; many a soul then quitted the body which it inhabited. The living marched over the heaps of dead, and each side was weary of striking. He charged on who could, and he who could no longer strike still pushed forward. The strong struggled with the strong; some failed, others triumphed; the cowards fell back, the brave pressed on; and sad was his fate who fell in the midst, for he had little chance of rising again; and many in truth fell who never rose at all, being crushed under the throng. And now the Normans pressed on so far that at last they reached the English standard.” The Tapestry represents the eager advance of a body of horsemen. The compartment is inscribed, HIC FRANCI PUGNANT ET CECIDERUNT QUI ERANT CUM HAROLDO--Here the French are fighting, and have slain the men who were with Harold. “There Harold had remained, defending himself to the utmost; but he was sorely wounded in the eye by the arrow, and suffered grievous pain by the blow. An armed man came in the throng of the battle, and struck him on the _ventaille_ of his helmet and beat him to the ground; and as he sought to recover himself, a knight beat him down again, striking him on the thick of his thigh, down to the bone.” This is shown in the Tapestry (_Plate XVI._) Harold first of all appears standing by his standard, contending with a horseman who is making a rush at him; then he is shown pulling the arrow out of his eye; and lastly he is seen, falling--

“With his back to the field, and his feet to the foe,”

--his battle axe has dropped from his nerveless grasp, and a Norman,

stooping from his horse, inflicts a wound upon his thigh. The group is superscribed, HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST--Here Harold the King is slain.[104]

“The English were in great trouble at having lost their King, and at the Duke’s having conquered and beat down the standard; but they still fought on, and defended themselves long, and in fact till the day drew to a close. Then it clearly appeared to all that the standard was lost, and the news had spread throughout the army that Harold for certain was dead; and all saw now that there was no longer any hope, so they left the field and those fled who could.” Ingulph tells us that all the nobles that were in Harold’s army were slain;[105] we are hence led to infer that it was the untrained peasantry only who betook themselves to flight. The Tapestry is in consistency with this. The last compartment represents a group of men unprotected by body armour, and supplied only with a mace or club, retreating before a party of fully equipped horsemen. The inscription is, ET FUGA VERTERUNT ANGLI--And the English betake themselves to flight.

Happily the exact spot on which the final struggle of the day took place is clearly ascertained. The writer of the _Battle Abbey Chronicle_ tells us, that the King having resolved to commemorate his victory by the erection of a Christian temple, the high altar was placed upon the precise spot where the standard was observed to fall.[106] Long after all traces of the Abbey Church had been obliterated, the finger of tradition faithfully pointed to the spot so interesting to all Englishmen. In the year 1817, the proprietor of the soil, anxious to test the truth of the popular belief, made the necessary excavations, and in the very place indicated, at the depth of several feet below the surface, found the remains of an altar in the easternmost recess of the crypt of the church.[107]

William on that day fought well--as well he might, for he had engaged in a desperate venture--“many a blow did he give, and many receive, and many fell dead under his hand.” Two horses were killed under him. After the English had been exterminated, or had forsaken the field, the Duke returned thanks to God, and ordered his gonfanon to be erected where Harold’s standard had stood. Here, too, he raised his tent. Amidst the dying and the dead he partook of his evening meal and passed the night.

The next morning which dawned upon that sad battle field was the Sabbath. On that first day of the week no heavenly choir sang of peace on earth and good will toward men. The human family was exhibited in its most painful aspect, “hateful and hating one another”--that field but recently covered over with the golden sheaves of harvest, now bore upon its surface the gory fruits of man’s ambition.

“When William called over the muster-roll, which he had prepared before he left the opposite coast, many a knight, who on the day when he sailed, had proudly answered to his name, was then numbered with the dead. The land which he had done homage for was useless to him now.”[108] He had come to win large domains and baronial honours--six feet of common earth was all he got. “The Conqueror had lost more than one-fourth of his army.”[109] Both parties spent the day in burying the dead. “The noble ladies of the land also came, some to seek their husbands, and others their fathers, sons, or brothers.”

The account given by Ordericus of the disposal of Harold’s body is the following: “Harold could not be discovered by his features, but was recognized by other tokens, and his corpse being borne to the Duke’s camp, was, by order of the Conqueror, delivered to William Mallet for interment near the sea-shore, which had long been guarded by his arms.”[110] William of Poictiers gives a similar statement. Later writers say that his body was interred with regal honours in Waltham Abbey. This tradition, which probably had its origin in the wish of the monks to attract visitors to the shrine at Waltham, cannot be entertained, in opposition to the express statements of contemporaries. Some venture, too, to assert that, though sorely wounded at Hastings, he was not killed, and that, on escaping from the field, he first fled to the continent, and afterwards led the life of a recluse at Chester. This is a statement which may at once be rejected.

The difficulty in discovering the body to which Ordericus refers was, it is generally believed, overcome by Edith, surnamed, from her beauty, the Fair. The keen eye of affection discerned his mangled form amidst heaps of dead, which appeared to common observers an undistinguishable mass. What will not woman’s love accomplish!

Many writers have done great dishonour to this lady by stating that she was the mistress of Harold. Sir Henry Ellis, in his _Introduction to Domesday Book_, has proved that she was his Queen; “Aldith, Algiva or Eddeva, being names which are all synonymous.” Unhappy Elfgyva, how different her feelings now from what they were when the clerk announced to her, in his own familiar way, the rescue of Harold from the capture of Guy!

IX. THE SEQUEL.

“From seeming evil still educing good.”

_Thomson._