On the morning of 14 October 1066, two armies faced each other across a low ridge in Sussex, and by dusk the course of English history had been rewritten in Norman French. The man who lost, Harold Godwinson, had been king for barely nine months. In that single year — remembered ever since as the year of three kings — the English crown passed from the dying Edward the Confessor to Harold, and then to a Norman duke posterity would call William the Conqueror. Rarely has so much turned on so few weeks, or on the stamina of one exhausted army.
Edward the Confessor died childless on 5 January 1066, leaving a tangle of rival promises. Harold, the most powerful earl in England, was crowned the very next day. But two others believed the throne was theirs. William, Duke of Normandy, claimed Edward had promised it to him and that Harold had sworn an oath to support that claim. Harald Hardrada, the fearsome King of Norway, pressed an older Scandinavian claim. Both prepared to invade, and Harold spent the summer of 1066 watching the wrong coast, waiting on the south shore for William while the winds kept the Norman fleet penned in harbour.
The long march south
The Norwegians struck first. Hardrada landed in the north with Harold's own estranged brother Tostig, and on 20 September routed the northern earls at the Battle of Fulford, near York. Harold reacted with astonishing speed, marching his army roughly 190 miles north in a matter of days and catching the invaders by surprise at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. It was a crushing victory: both Hardrada and Tostig were killed, and the Norwegian survivors sailed home in a fraction of the ships they had come in. The battle is often called the end of the Viking age in England.
Harold's triumph lasted three days. On 28 September, William landed unopposed at Pevensey on the Sussex coast. Harold turned his tired, depleted army round and drove it back south — another gruelling march of around 250 miles — pausing only briefly in London to gather reinforcements. He need not have hurried into battle; time and supply favoured him. But he pressed on, and on 14 October took up a strong defensive position on Senlac Hill, near the town now aptly called Battle.
The fighting lasted most of the day, unusually long for a medieval battle. Harold's men formed a shield wall along the ridge, and for hours William's cavalry and archers broke against it. The turning point, according to tradition, came when the Normans feigned retreat, luring the English into abandoning their line to give chase, then wheeled about to cut them down in the open. As the shield wall thinned, the Norman advantage in cavalry and archery finally told.
The arrow and the aftermath
Harold died on the field, and the manner of his death became one of history's most durable images: an arrow through the eye. The scene appears on the Bayeux Tapestry — the astonishing embroidered strip, nearly 70 metres long, that narrates the conquest — where a figure near the words "Harold rex interfectus est" seems to clutch an arrow to his face. Yet historians treat the arrow-in-the-eye story with caution. The tapestry is ambiguous, later restorers may have altered the stitching, and some accounts say Harold was hacked down by Norman knights. The vivid detail may be as much legend as fact.
What is not disputed is the scale of the consequences. William marched on London and was crowned king in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. He replaced the English aristocracy almost wholesale with Norman lords, planted castles across the country, and in 1086 ordered the great survey recorded in the Domesday Book. Above all, he changed how England spoke. For centuries the ruling class conducted its business in Norman French, and English absorbed thousands of French words — which is why we tend to raise Anglo-Saxon cattle, sheep and swine in the field but eat Norman-French beef, mutton and pork at the table. One battle, lost by an army that had already won another, reshaped a language that a fifth of the planet now speaks.
Quiz nuggets
- The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066; the site near the East Sussex town of Battle is traditionally called Senlac Hill.
- Days earlier, on 25 September 1066, Harold Godwinson defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada and Harold's brother Tostig at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
- The famous story that Harold was killed by an arrow through the eye is disputed; the Bayeux Tapestry image is ambiguous and may have been altered by later restorers.
- William, Duke of Normandy, was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066 and later commissioned the Domesday Book in 1086.
- The Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidery nearly 70 metres long, narrates the Norman Conquest and is the main visual source for the events of 1066.