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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 14, 1066
Near Hastings, Sussex, England
960 years ago
The Battle of Hastings, fought on October 14, 1066, in which the Norman army of Duke William defeated and killed King Harold II, beginning the Norman Conquest of England.
When the childless King Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, three men claimed the English throne. Harold Godwinson, the most powerful earl in the kingdom, was crowned at once. Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, and William, duke of Normandy, each prepared to invade. Hardrada landed first, in the north. Harold marched his army about two hundred miles in a few days, surprised the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge near York on September 25, and destroyed them. Three days later, William's fleet landed unopposed at Pevensey on the south coast.
Harold turned around and marched back. On the morning of October 14 he drew up his tired army, perhaps seven thousand men, all on foot, along a ridge about seven miles from Hastings. They formed a shield wall, a tight line of overlapping shields bristling with spears and long axes. William's force was of similar size but more varied: archers, infantry, and two or three thousand mounted knights.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Bayeux Tapestry, the embroidered cloth nearly seventy meters long, made within a few years of the battle, that tells the story of the Norman Conquest in pictures.
The battle lasted from around nine in the morning until dusk, which was exceptionally long for a medieval engagement. For hours the Norman cavalry rode uphill at the shield wall and could not break it. At one point a rumor spread that William had been killed, and he had to lift his helmet and ride along the line to show his face. The turning point came when parts of the English line broke ranks to chase retreating Normans down the slope and were cut off and killed on open ground. Whether those retreats were panic or a deliberate trick is still debated. Late in the day, with the wall thinned, Harold was killed. Tradition, supported by an ambiguous scene in the Bayeux Tapestry, says he was struck in the eye by an arrow. With the king and both his brothers dead, the English army dissolved.
William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. Over the next twenty years he replaced almost the entire English ruling class. By the time of the Domesday Book, his great survey of 1086, only a handful of major landholders were English. Norman lords built stone castles across the country, including the Tower of London, and Norman bishops rebuilt the cathedrals. England's political attention swung from Scandinavia toward France, where its kings would hold lands and fight wars for the next four hundred years.
The most lasting change was to the language. For three centuries the court, the law, and the aristocracy spoke French, while the peasantry kept English. When English reemerged as the language of government, it had absorbed thousands of French words. That is why English speakers raise cows, pigs, and sheep in the field using Old English words but eat beef, pork, and mutton at the table using French ones, and why the language so often has two words for one thing, such as ask and demand or freedom and liberty.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Hastings was one of the most decisive battles in European history. A single day's fighting transferred a wealthy kingdom to a new ruling class, and no later invasion of England has ever succeeded. The line of English monarchs is still counted from William.
It transformed the English language. The fusion of Old English with Norman French produced the large, mixed vocabulary of modern English, the feature that most distinguishes it from its Germanic relatives.
It bound England to continental Europe. The Norman kings and their successors ruled lands on both sides of the Channel, setting up centuries of rivalry with France that shaped both nations.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 14, 1066, two armies of about seven thousand men fought from morning to dusk on a ridge in Sussex. By nightfall the last Anglo-Saxon king was dead. England got a new aristocracy, a rash of castles, and a language with twice the vocabulary it strictly needed.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Here King Harold has been killed.”
— Latin caption on the Bayeux Tapestry ('Hic Harold rex interfectus est'), embroidered in the 1070s
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Battle of Hastings, the three rivals for the English crown in 1066, the Bayeux Tapestry, and the effects of the Norman Conquest on England and its language?
