SYMHC Classics: The Battle of Hastings

Today we're traveling back to a episode from 2014 about the Battle of Hastings, which is often boiled it down to a sentence: The Normans invaded Britain in 1066, and their victory ended the Anglo-Saxon phase of English history. But of course, that brief description really doesn't do the event justice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have gotten a few notes from
listeners lately who have told us they would like to
hear more episodes about events rather than people, so we
have gone into the archive today for the Battle of Hastings,
which first came out in January. Also, our listener suggestion
list has way more people than events, the at least
five times as many people as events, so if events

(00:25):
are more your bag, feel free to suggest something that
you would like to hear about. We are as always
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome

(00:47):
to the podcast. I'm Chasey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
I discovered when we talked about the Hessian I kind
of like talking about battles. I know I did cry
blood lust until just now. So today we're going to
talk about a battle that long time listeners may remember
a little bit about thanks to our episode on the

(01:08):
Baiou Tapestry, which was hosted by Sarah and Dablina back
in two thousand eleven. The Bayou Tapestry, which is really
a piece of embroidery and not a tapestry is a
visual account of the Battle of Hastings and the events
that led up to it. So if you know anything
at all about European history, you can probably at least
boil the Battle of Hastings down to a sentence, which

(01:30):
is that the Normans invaded England in ten sixty six
and their victory ended the Anglo Saxon phase of English history.
If you actually grew up in England, you probably know
a whole whole lot more about it than that. It
tends to be something that's covered extensively, uh in English schools,
because it is so central to the history of England. Yeah,

(01:51):
and it's one of those things where sadly, when you
mentioned it, at least when I mentioned it to most
people that I know, and I'll say, oh, Battle of Hastings,
they will do what I have done previously in my
life on ten sixty six, and that's the one thing
they remember. Yes, So yeah, I I had that exact
conversation with the boyfriend where I said, we're gonna talk
about the Battle of Hastings and he said, oh, ten
sixty six, husband as well, and and I said yes,

(02:14):
and He's like, we won, right, And I said, you
don't know what? Who is the we? In this case?
We had almost an identical conversation at our house. So so,
just like with our recent episode on the Hessians, where
people can boil down the Hessians to a sentence that's
not really indicative of what actually happened to that one
sentence description does not do the whole battle of Hastings justice.

(02:37):
So today we're gonna look at that in a lot
more detail, including lots of stuff that's not covered in
the Baiou Tapestry episode. Yeah, because that's a lot to
cover in one piece of sewing. Well, but it's a
very long piece of sewing. And now I think of
the Futurama episode where they kind of did a spoof
of it that's funny about invading a spider play in it,

(03:00):
and they were weaving the tapestry from the silk of
the spiders as the battle was happening. Wow, I need
to go watch that. I love my Futurama. There's no
secret there. So first though, we're going to get back
to history and talk about the backstory on this little ditty,
and we have to go back a little bit of
a ways to get a feel for what was really
going on. When the Normans hopped into the picture and

(03:22):
invaded In the fifth century, Germanic people's known as the Angles,
the Saxons and the Jutes began to immigrate to what
we now know as England, and at the time this
area was mostly inhabited by Celts. As the Germanic people's
moved in, they pushed the Celts into what we would
now call Scotland, Wales and Ireland. So the word England

(03:43):
comes from these Germanic peoples. It actually means land of Angles.
By the eighth century, Christianity had really started to spread
through a lot of England and people from Denmark had
also started to move into the area as well, and
so with all of these influences, the Land language kind
of evolved, and so what we now know as Old English.

(04:04):
So at this point England was a mostly Christian nation
and it mostly spoke one language, although there were several
distinct dialects, and it was ruled by a king with
earls who were responsible for specific regions within the kingdom.
And the Vikings started invading Britain in the ninth century
and over the span of roughly a hundred and fifty

(04:25):
years Vikings conquered a lot of England, but then the
Anglo Saxons UH living in Wessex, led by Alfred the Great,
staved them off and started pushing them back out again.
In the process, they were honing their battle abilities and
really making the Anglo Saxon world a power to be
reckoned with on its own. After this point there was

(04:46):
a period of relative calm which lasted about fifty years
before the Vikings came back and started up a new
cycle of pillaging and plundering and then retreating back to
where they came from before coming back for more pillaging
and wondering. It sounds very exciting, but it was actually
quite dangerous. Well, yes, often exciting things are uh, and

(05:08):
this was kind of the state of things when one
of Alfred the Great's direct descendants, Edward, entered the picture.
And today we know of Edward as Edward the Confessor,
but that was a name he was given about a
hundred years after his death, when the Pope recognized him
as a saint. So Edward was born in about one
thousand and three, and because of all these ongoing Viking attacks,

(05:30):
he and his family took refuge in Normandy for a
number of years, and there they naturally built a lot
of ties to Norman society, so they made a lot
of friends there were influenced in their politics while they
were living there. It took several failed attempts, but Edward
finally returned to England and became king in ten forty two,

(05:51):
and he brought a lot of Norman advisors and kind
of Norman politics along with him, and Edward marrying a
woman named Edith, although they had children, so this left
a question of who the heir was going to be.
And there's no written account of exactly what transpired there,
but the general historical consensus is that in March of
ten fifty one he announced it a council meeting that

(06:12):
he wanted his kinsman William of Normandy, to take the
throne after his death. This did not sit at all
well with a guy named Godwine, who was the Earl
of Wessex and Edith's father, so Edwards father in law.
He had actually been a favorite to become the king
himself and was hoping to see one of his own
children or grandchildren eventually on the throne, and the top

(06:35):
of these own aspirations of power that he had. He
really was a legitimately powerful person, and he had a
much stronger backing than Edward did among the other leaders
of England, and this tension between Godwine and the king
really took England to the brink of a civil war.
But eventually Edward outlawed Godwine after he refused to punish

(06:57):
the people of Dover, which fell under his earl him
for an attack on Edward's brother in law, and Godwine
and his sons and most of his family fled to
Flanders and Ireland, and then Edward banished his wife to
a nunnery. It seems kind of ruthless on Edward's part,
didn't want anything to do with those people anymore. Yes,
that's like a brutal divorce at that point, it is.

(07:18):
And and he also in the aftermath made kind of
a critical mistake. He got rid of a tax that
had been used to fund a mercenary naval fleet. The
idea was that he was basically giving some everyone who
was being taxed a tax break, and he probably thought
that if he really needed an army or a naval force,
that he could just call it up because he was

(07:39):
the king um and in a lot of circumstances that
probably would have worked. But that unfortunately or fortunately, depending
on whose side you're on, meant that when Godwine came
back across the channel with his own fleet in ten
fifty two, Edward did not have a force ready to
fight him off. And on top of Edward not having

(08:01):
enough manpower to resist Godwine's attack, public sentiment was pretty
firmly on Godwine's side at this point. People just did
not like the idea of a Norman line of succession,
and they didn't even like how many Normans the king
had among his advisers. So Edward was basically politically forced
to pardon Godwine and his family and they once again

(08:24):
took up their positions of power in England. So when
Godwine died, his son, who was known as Harold Godwine's
and continued to be a very powerful figure in England.
And this would turn out to be a problem when
it came back around to the line of succession. So
now we're going to hop into the Norman back story

(08:45):
on it. Yes, uh So, over in Normandy William was Earl,
his wife was Matilda of Flanders, and Flanders in England
were not on terrific terms. Uh. This may have been
one of the reasons why Edward promised the throne to William,
to help keep him in line and discourage him from
lining up with Flanders against him. But thanks to this

(09:07):
whole idea that he was being promised to become the
King of England and his marriage to Matilda of Flanders,
Henry the First of France saw William as a really
huge threat. So William had to fend off multiple invasions
from France and its allies during the ten fifties. And
it was really only after William had a particularly decisive

(09:28):
victory against them, uh, that France and its allies left
William alone. And only after his major rivals died did
he really seem to get any rest. He was pretty
much constantly having to fend off one attack after another. Yeah,
that brings us back to Harold, and about ten fifty
four or ten fifty five, Harold visited Normandy because of

(09:49):
a storm. He actually wound up landing in Flanders and
was taken prisoner at first, and William had to come
and secure his release. And at some point during this
little excursion, for reasons that different accounts report, completely differently.
Harold swore an oath to honor Williams claim to the
throne once Edward died. Norman writers say that Edward had
sent Harold specifically for this purpose, but English sources either

(10:14):
don't reference it at all, or they say that Harold
was in Normandy to secure the release of some of
his kin from imprisonment. So there's a little bit of
disagreement about whether or not there was intrigue in the
mix at this point. This is it's a thousand almost
years ago, and both sides writing about it definitely have

(10:34):
an agenda. But either way, the sources all pretty much
agree that Harold swore to uphold William's claim to the throne,
and then he went back from Normandy across the English
Channel to England in about ten sixty five. So we're
coming up on the happenings. Uh So, at this point
the stage seems to be set for one would hope

(10:58):
a fairly smooth succession. Edward the Confessor has promised the
throne to William of Normandy, and the surviving person with
the next strongest claim to the throne, Harold Godwinson, has
sworn an oath to honor Edward's decree. It seems like
it should be cool. It does. There there's a third
person with kind of a tide to the throne. He
will talk about a little bit later, but at this

(11:18):
point it's really between uh William and Harold. But even
though it should not have been really But what happened
next is that King Edward died after an uprising in Northumbria.
He had tried to raise an army to put down
the rebellion, but winter was coming and people were pretty
reluctant to get involved in what was really a civil war,

(11:40):
so eventually Edward just had to give into the rebels demands,
and he was apparently so distraught by his failure to
bring Northumbria back in the line that he got sick
and never got better again. He died at the beginning
of January ten sixty six, and the king was buried
on January six of ten sixty six, and that day,
even the he had sworn an oath to honor Williams

(12:02):
claim to the throne, Harold stepped in and took it
for himself. We don't really have a lot of clear
historical documentation conclusively telling us why he did this. At
the time, though, succession wasn't always a straight up matter
of father to son inheritance, or of the king designated
designating who was going to follow him to the throne.

(12:22):
In England, a man wasn't really considered to be king
until he had the support of a majority of England's
most powerful men. Like we said, England was not super
keen on the idea of having a Norman king, and
there are also some accounts, including the Life of King Edward,
which Queen Edith later had written, that said Edward either
gave the kingdom to Harold on his deathbed or that

(12:45):
he had entrusted it to him. In the Baieux Tapestry,
Harold is shown being given the crown, and almost one
thousand years later we still don't entirely know what went down.
So whatever the circumstances are of Harold being round, King
William objected, and so apparently did Harold's brother Toasting, who

(13:08):
then mounted two different invasions of England. The first came
from Flanders and the second came with backup from the Vikings.
So Harold had to spend the start of his reign
fighting off his brother in the far northern reaches of England.
But thanks to the lay of the land and the
position of the English Channel, any invasion from Normandy would

(13:28):
make landfall hundreds of miles to the south, and this
meant that when William invaded, Harold would have a long
way to travel to fight him off. So, since we've
said ten sixty six a bunch of times, we know
that that invasion is eminent. And before we get to it,
let's take a moment and talk about a word from
our sponsor. Now we're going to get back to the

(13:56):
actual battle. And since we know from the top of
the episode that this is what Tracy has gotten excited
about talking about, very excited, go crazy. So it took
a little while before William made it to England. He
had to raise a bigger army than he already had,
and he had to build at least some of the
ships that were going to be required to take them
across the channel. The weather was also against him for

(14:17):
a while, so they had to put off setting sail.
He finally landed in England on September of ten sixty six,
and he was on the southeast coast at Peven's E
and he took that town and marched to Hastings, which
was twelve miles away, also pretty much on the coast,
and at both of these locations the Normans seized a
fort and then modified it to suit their own ends

(14:40):
by adding ramparts and moats. And it would have taken
days for the news to reach Harold of the Norman
forsa Hastings, and he had to march his men all
the way from Yorkshire, which was about two hundred miles away.
They basically rode south as fast as they could, most
likely dismissing the soldiers who didn't have horses to ride,
and mustering more as they went. So yeah, he was

(15:01):
replacing the people who were on foot and couldn't keep
up as they went. Basically, Harold met William and Hastings
on October and the battle took place on the next day.
And although Harold's forces had ridden horses to Hastings, they
all fought on foot, which was typical and English warfare
at the time. William, on the other hand, had archers

(15:22):
and cavalry in addition to his uh boots on the
ground infantry and the English secured a defensible position on
high ground and the Norman's approached them from below So
that's just sort of to set up the picture here. Yeah,
if you know much about uh, you know, medieval warfare,
or if you've ever played any kind of strategy game
that involves the soldiers, this looks like a really one

(15:45):
sided battle because you had you had people who were
on foot versus people who had archers and horses. Yeah,
we're going to talk about why it was not nearly
that clear cut. Here's how William of Mom's Bray describes
the English all on foot, armed with battle axes and
covering themselves in front by the juncture of their shields.
They formed an impenetrable body. The English were also armed,

(16:08):
we should say, with slings and spears, but it seems
as though they did not really have many archers, probably
because of the speed at which they had to move
to Hastings, so it wasn't like they could rouse all
of the archery skilled gents in the area to help.
Here's how William of Mom's Bray describes the Normans. Their
infantry with bows and arrows formed the vanguard, while their cavalry,

(16:31):
divided into wings, was placed in the rear. The Duke.
That duke is as William with Serene countenance, declaring allowed
that God would favor him as being the righteous side,
called for his arms, and when through the haste of
his attendance, he had put on his halber the hind
part before, he corrected the mistake with a laugh, saying,

(16:51):
the power of my dukedom shall be turned into a kingdom.
Basically a story here that he accidentally put his armor
on backwards and and then tried to turn that to
his advantage rather than uh seeing as seeing it as
a poor omen, I had a nickel for every time
I put my armor on backward. William of Malmsbury also

(17:12):
describes the English as having stayed up all night drinking
and singing, while the Normans instead spent the night confessing
their sins and having communion in the morning, which is
in all likelihood added color commentary and not a real thing.
But both sides were clearly pretty worn out, the English
from having traveled so far from getting to battle, and
the Normans from having stood at the ready all night

(17:34):
just in case an attack happened. So whether they were
drinking or confessing, no one had gotten sleep, and they
were all really tired. Yeah. This This account was written
a little bit later in the eleventh century, and and
there are parts of it that people pretty much agree
are probably right. But then when it gets to and
then the English were up all night drinking, that's kind
of like the Hessians thing, right, they were all drunk,

(17:57):
clearly because they lost, they must have all been inebriated
it and that's really not not true. So, as we
said earlier, the battle began with the English behind this
shield wall, and then the Normans were arranged into lines,
with their crossbowmen at the front, and then their soldiers
on foot, and then their knights on horses. And it
would seem, of course, as though the English were at

(18:19):
a vast disadvantage since they had neither cavalry nor very
many archers. But they did have the high ground, and
they had a shield wall and battle axes, which are
in fact horrifying though maybe to think about very effective
weapons when it comes to battling men on horseback. Yes,
so if you do not hit the rider with your axe,

(18:39):
you will hit the horse and it will go down. Yes,
sad faith happened. I knew when I was typing this
that Holly was going to be very sad about the
predictable with the animal stuff, so William moved his men
and kind of waves. They would fire a volley of
arrows and then alternate charges with the foots, the foot

(19:00):
soldiers and the knights, And there were a lot of
casualties on both sides, but the English shield wall held
for a really long time. This battle went on basically
all day. The tide to the battle turned when the
Normans either retreated or feigned a retreat. Some accounts say
this was a deliberate strategy on Williams part, and others

(19:21):
suggested that Norman's actually lost their nerve when a rumor
spread that William had been killed. So we don't know
why they turned. Yeah, it it's pretty much. The English
writers say that that the Normans all kind of freaked
out when their leader apparently fell but had not really fallen,
and the Normans, on the other hand, say that it

(19:42):
was a skilled battle maneuver on William's part. I meant
to do that. Yeah, either way. When the Normans started
to flee, the English broke their ranks and went after them,
and then the Norman's turned on them and cut them down.
And it's also unclear whether the sequence of events actually
happened once or twice, So maybe one time it was

(20:06):
out of fear and one time it was on purpose,
we don't know. But regardless, the shield wall started to
fail and the Normans really started to gain ground. Yeah.
I described this whole battle to do the boyfriend, and
he was like, they failed for that more than once,
and I said, well, that's a little we don't know historically.
Possibly what we do know is that later in the
afternoon Harold was killed. The Baiou tapestry depicts him as

(20:30):
being shot with an arrow through the eye and an
extremely memorable sequence, But that's actually a later account, Like
that's not something that seems to have persisted on the day,
So that might be sort of a romanticized, horrifying edition
of a later historian or writer and not something that

(20:53):
actually happened on that day. But when he felt that's
definitely when English soldiers really started to scatter um and
as the sun started to set, the battle was pretty
much over, with the Normans hoping to clean up the stragglers. Yeah,
the Normans went after the stragglers and they slaughtered a

(21:13):
lot of them, but many of the Normans were also
killed after the battle itself was over. After piling onto
one another against a rampart that was hidden in tall grass,
And so this thing ended with just scores of bodies,
the big body count for this particular battle. So after

(21:39):
the battle Harold had died, William had one. But coming
to the throne wasn't quite as simple as all that.
It wasn't so much that William killed Harold in the
battle and that William consequently got to be king. There
was still actually one other heir to the throne alive
at this point. That was Edgar Atheling, who was son

(22:00):
of Edward the Exile, who was son of Edmund Ironside,
who himself had been king for several months. So Edgar
was only about thirteen years old, but he did have
a much clearer line of successions straight to the throne
than either Harold or William did, And while he was
not full of supporters all over England, he did have

(22:21):
the backing of the archbishop and the citizens of London.
And there's really all kinds of disagreement about what exactly
took place next, how much force William used making his
way to London, and how much the death toll continued
to climb. Those all still have a lot of question
marks around them. We know that it was a really
bloody campaign though, and in the end Edgar's supporters did

(22:43):
back down. William moved on to London and was crowned
king on Christmas Day ten sixty six. He built Battle
Abbey on the site of the battle uh approximately as
as we think today. The town of Battle grew up
around it, and the altar in the abbey is said
to stand on the spot where Harold had stood at

(23:05):
the center of the shield wall. The aftermath of the
Norman invasion really could be its own whole other podcast topic.
The next several years were very grizzly as the English
rebelled against their new Norman king, and William definitely put
down their rebellions. Case in point the Harrying of the North,
in which William did a whole lot of conquering and

(23:26):
pillaging in Northumbria and as many as a one hundred
thousand people starved to death, which is just a huge
It was a huge death toll. Mammoth there was. There
was a lot of killing and and and pillaging for
many years, and even though this was definitely a bloody
and oppressive conquest, there are some modern beliefs about the

(23:48):
Norman invasion. That don't quite hold up. For example, the
Normans did not introduce the idea of a class system
to England and Anglo Saxon England about ten of the
people were actually slaves and most of the free people
were peasants. There was a very very small, very wealthy
aristocracy and an even smaller ruling class that held actual power,

(24:13):
So Anglo Saxon England like was not some kind of
utopia where everyone was Yeah, it's also not true that
women were better off before the Norman invasion. Uh. That
comes up pretty often to this idea that that women
were equal to men before the Normans, and the Normans
started subjugating them. So while it's totally true that women

(24:35):
didn't have many rights and privileges after the Battle of Hastings,
they really didn't before either. This did, though, have one
really huge impact that is recognized and I think most
people know about, which is that it radically changed the
English language through the influence of Norman speaking rulers. So
by the twelfth century people were speaking what we know
today is Middle English, which is the language of the

(24:57):
Canterbury Tales. So definitely had a huge impact on the
culture of England's the direction of history. It's it's sort
of considered a watershed moment in English history especially. Uh
but if you hear people say that, uh the Normans
were universally a terrible influence on England, that doesn't quite.

(25:21):
William was quite a grizzly and bloody ruler, yes, especially
lots of bad and unfortunate things going on already. Yes.
Uh So today you can still visit the battle site
in Sussex, although there's been some debate really recently about
whether our modern idea of where the battlefield was is

(25:41):
exactly the right one and uh in which is just
as research was starting on this episode, the UK television
show Time team claimed that the site of the battle
was really about two meters away on what's now around
about and they used uh light our technology to map
the area near what's believed to be the actual battlefield.

(26:03):
So whether this is actually true is either up in
the air or roundly dismissed depending on who you talk to.
There have been several other alleged quote real sites of
the battle over the years, though, um, it's one of
those things where it was it was a pretty big
space people would have been fighting in people keep sort

(26:24):
of trying to pinpoint an exact spot. It kind of
is the center of an amiba. Yeah, it's it's not
quite that simple. Yeah. English Heritage also known as the
Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England disputed this whole
time Team Finding, basically saying what we just said, that
the battle took place over a wide swath of the area,

(26:46):
So really, what was the point in trying to say
this spot is where it happened. There are also three
completely different sites that have been bandied about as the
exact spot in quotation marks. And then there's also a
cool thing on line that you found that I know
you're yearning to talk about. Did It is a Battle
of Hastings game you can play at the BBC. We
will link to it in our show notes. You can

(27:08):
play as William or you can play as Harold and
you can see you what the what the results are
if you make different decisions as a as a leader
in the battle. At first I thought it was somehow
rigged because I kept trying to play as as William,
and this was before I had researched exactly how the
battle unfolded, and I failed a whole lot of times,

(27:31):
and then I played it again after I had read
it and went, oh, yes, I see, I see how
this works. Now. Thank you so much for joining us
on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address
or a Facebook you are l or something similar over
the course of today's episode, since it is from the

(27:53):
archive that might be out of date. Now, you can
email us at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
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(28:15):
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