The Hastings Legend

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31221, 19 November 1966, Page 4

The Hastings Legend

(Retrieved by G.S.PJ 1066: The Story of a Year. By D. Butler. Anthony Blond. The 900th anniversary of the battle of Hastings has' been marked by a number of books of varying quality. Mr| Butlers book is a rather| curious compilation—obviously written in haste and full of typographical errors—set out in diary form from month to month but in such a way that it is very difficult for the ordinary reader to sort out the chief events. The history itself is often most peculiar, and suggests a basic unfamiliarity with the period and with the normally accepted canons of historical writing, as witness the odd remark, rather too typical, that “the English appetite for food and drink was notorious, inbred and unrelated to class: it survived the coming of the Normans and at length engulfed them.” Often Mr Butler clearly errs. Harold’s encounter with William in 1064 is given an interpretation which few specialists would accept The account of William’s meeting with his overlord of France, the boy king Phillip, is pure invention. So also is the suggestion that the Normans ventured across the Channel twice in 1066 to fight two battles with the English, one at sea at some unstated time and place, and the other at Hastings which with true antiquarian spirit he calls Senlac.

For the rest, Mr Butler ex-, aggerates the size of the armies involved on both sides. William, he suggests, had 1000 ships. 5000 horses and 12,000 men. This vast armada was assembled in a few months at most, accommodated m turn in two small harbours on the Norman, coast loaded in 24 hours,' and then oddly lost to the: duke's sight only a few hours after its departure. How so many men and horses could have been used with effect on the restricted field of Hastings Mr Butler does not tell us. nor is it necessary to suppose that William brought more than 2000 or 3000 men or needed them. Warfare in 1066 had long been an aristocratic business and contemporary armies were in consequence small. The struggle itself gives full scope to Mr Butler’s un-

aginative powers. The English, we are told, spent the night of October 13-14 1066 dancing and drinking, the Normans praying and confessing their sins. The English position was nonetheless carefully selected and may ! even have been provided with primitive entrenchments though the evidence gives no warrant for such a view. The I English apparently chose, too. to fight on foot rather than attempt a cavalry attack—and here one wonders where Mr Butler has been while this issue was being definitively settled. For a time the English held on. On the Norman side “soldier and horse stumbled, labouring to find footholds in the knee-high grass, slippery with blood.” At one stage the Norman cause seemed lost until the duke himself intervened and led a successful countercharge which paved the way for the English defeat. Then, according to Mr Butler, uncritically copying a later chronicler—a common fault throughout—the duke adopt|ed the most successful stratagem of the day: he “commanded his bowmen not to aim their arrows straight at the enemy but to shoot I them in the air. . . . Then lit was that an arrow, which was shot towards the sky, struck Harold above the right 'eye, and that one of his eyes it put out. Convulsed with pain, the axe falling from his grasp, the king wrenched the arrow from the wound; breakring the shaft between his hands, Harold threw it from 'him. and bent down over his shield in agony.” At length, two Normans and two French broke through and ended his | life. The story is nonsense from end to end. as anyone who cares to examine the relevant panel of the Bayeux Tapestry can see for himself. Harold did not die iwith his eye full of arrow. He was struck down by a mounted knight with a sword. Mr Butler ends his book in inconclusive style. For him 1066 was,decisive. A bastard duke had dispossessed a reigning king. He tried at first to rule his new land with English help “but Norman ways were alien.” In fact the English refused to cooperate and William was obliged to rely more than he had proposed on his own Norman vassals, a small band of 180 greater men. many of whom had not fought at Hast-'

ings, and whose chief interests, like William’s, naturally lay on the continent, in Normandy. It was no part of William’s purpose to unite Normandy and England and but for Robert’s fecklessness they would have remained separate. It is for this reason that modern historians are beginning to regard Henry H’s bloodless conquest of 1154, when England was absorbed into the great Angevin empire and was reduced for a time to a mere off-lying province, as incomparably more important in English history than the more famous episode of 1066.