Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
In nine short hours, William the Conqueror triumphed at the Battle of Hastings - and England was changed forever. Simon Schama recounts the saga of blood, betrayal and ambition that led up to this pivotal battle and describes the profound consequences that followed.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
In nine short hours, William the Conqueror triumphed at the Battle of Hastings - and England was changed forever. Simon Schama recounts the saga of blood, betrayal and ambition that led up to this pivotal battle and describes the profound consequences that followed.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00It was the hand of God that decided the outcome of battles,
00:05the fate of nations and the life or death of kings.
00:10Everyone knew that.
00:15It was winter, the season of frost and death,
00:19and a king lay dying.
00:21His name was Edward the Confessor.
00:24He was dying childless.
00:26And it was far from obvious who would succeed him.
00:30Because there was no heir,
00:32there were many who thought they should be the next king,
00:35including some foreign princes like Duke William of Normandy.
00:40But among those gathered round the bed of the dying Saxon king
00:44was the next most powerful man in England, Harold Godwinson,
00:49and he thought the crown would look well on his head.
00:53He was hoping for some sign that King Edward felt the same way.
00:59And then Edward stretched out his hand and touched Harold.
01:04But was he giving him a blessing or a curse?
01:07Was this the hand of God, making Harold king?
01:10Nobody knew for sure, but Harold had no qualms.
01:14Harold seized the crown.
01:16The question now was for how long would he keep it?
01:20And then, in the April sky,
01:23the hand of God showed itself as a comet, the hairy star,
01:28and everyone knew this was no blessing but an evil omen.
01:33The year was 1066.
01:36The year was 1066.
02:06The year was 1066.
02:24Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it.
02:28For the most part, history moves at a glacial pace,
02:31working its changes subtly.
02:34Especially, we like to think, there's something about our history,
02:37like our climate and our landscape, that's naturally moderate,
02:41not much given to earthquakes and revolutions.
02:46But there are times and places when history, British history,
02:50comes at you with a rush, violent, decisive, bloody,
02:54a truckload of trouble knocking you down,
02:57wiping out everything that gives you your bearings in the world,
03:00war, custom, loyalty and language.
03:04And this is one of those places.
03:10I know it doesn't look like the site of a national trauma, does it?
03:14Especially these days, when it looks more suitable for a county fair
03:18than a mass slaughter.
03:20But this is the battlefield of Hastings.
03:23And here, one kind of England was annihilated,
03:26and another kind of England was set up in its place.
03:31SHOUTING
03:36Some historians will tell you that for most of the people of England,
03:39Hastings didn't matter that much.
03:42That 1066 was mostly a matter of replacing Saxon lords
03:47with Norman knights.
03:48The peasants still ploughed their fields, paid taxes to the king,
03:52prayed to avoid poverty and pestilence,
03:55and watched the seasons roll round.
04:01But the everyday can-rub shoulders were the genuinely catastrophic.
04:06Yes, the grass grew green here again,
04:09but now there were bones beneath the buttercups,
04:11and an entire governing class of the English had been dispossessed,
04:16their men, land and animals taken from them,
04:19and given as spoils to the victorious foreigners.
04:24You could survive and still be English,
04:27but now you belong to an inferior race,
04:30the Conquered.
04:32You lived in England, but it was no longer your country.
04:47Anglo-Saxon England was no stranger to invasions.
04:51Viking raids had been part of life for a century,
04:54but since the days of Alfred the Great,
04:56the country was unstable enough to be able to soak them up.
05:00The longboats came and went,
05:02but still the king's law ran the shires.
05:05His churches and abbeys were built more beautifully than ever,
05:08and a town that would one day be called London
05:11was beginning to grow and prosper on the banks of the Thames.
05:17And then one invasion succeeded where the others had failed,
05:21and there was a Viking on the throne.
05:23His name was Cnut,
05:25the man we remember for trying to hold back the tides.
05:28And while he turned Anglo-Saxon England
05:30into part of his vast maritime empire,
05:33he went out of his way to change nothing.
05:36He even chose as his closest adviser
05:39one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon nobles,
05:42Godwin, Earl of Wessex.
05:44A scheming, ruthless man,
05:46Godwin became virtual co-ruler with Cnut
05:49over what was still recognisably Anglo-Saxon England.
05:56But with Cnut's death in 1035 began a chain of events
06:00that would culminate in the one invasion
06:02that Anglo-Saxon England would be unable to swallow.
06:07And what a saga it was.
06:10It started with a bloody and unsparing fight for Cnut's throne
06:15amongst the surviving elite.
06:17Treachery, murder and mutilation were par for the course.
06:25The last man standing with any kind of claim to the throne
06:28was a descendant of Alfred the Great,
06:31a prince of the Saxon royal house.
06:34He was called Edward
06:35and would become forever known as the Confessor.
06:38He was crowned on Easter Day, 1043.
06:44But he inherited more than just the crown.
06:47He also got Earl Godwin in no mood to lose power
06:50just because there was a new king.
06:53But unlike Cnut, Edward had good reason to hate
06:56the right-hand man forced on him,
06:58for Godwin had arranged his older brother's murder.
07:05But there was nothing he could do about his blood-stained rival.
07:08Not yet, anyway.
07:10King Edward knew that Godwin held the keys to the kingdom.
07:14And when Godwin offered Edward his daughter in marriage,
07:17what could he do but take her?
07:23Godwin was not Edward's only problem.
07:26He'd also got to learn how to govern a country he knew little about,
07:29for he'd grown up in exile, in a very different world,
07:33across the English Channel, in Normandy.
07:43We tend to think of Edward the Confessor
07:45as the quintessential Anglo-Saxon king.
07:48In fact, he was almost as Norman as William the Conqueror.
07:53After all, his mother, Emma, was a Norman,
07:56and he'd lived here in Normandy for 30 years,
07:59ever since she'd brought him as a child refugee
08:02from the wars between the Saxons and the Danes.
08:06But Normandy was not just an asylum for Edward.
08:09It was the place which formed him politically and culturally.
08:14His mother tongue was Norman French,
08:16and his virtual godfathers were the formidable dukes of Normandy.
08:22The Normans were descendants of Viking raiders,
08:25but had long since traded in their longboats for powerful warhorses.
08:30And the Duchy of Normandy was in no sense just a piece of France.
08:35Though the dukes did formal homage to the kings of France,
08:38in every other way, they were fiercely independent,
08:41possessed of castles, patrons of churches.
08:45These warlords were constantly in the saddle,
08:48imposing their will on vassals,
08:50fighting off revolts and forging shaky coalitions.
08:54But the duchy was also humming with energetic piety.
08:57In the 11th century, handsome stone monasteries and churches
09:01with Romanesque arches began to appear.
09:04And the first grandiose stone castles as duchies
09:08were built in the 11th century.
09:10The first castles were built in the 11th century.
09:13And the first grandiose stone castles,
09:16as tough as the Norman lords who had built them,
09:19became part of the landscape.
09:28So, until the throne of England tempted him back across the Channel
09:32at the age of 36, this was Edward's home.
09:36And while he was here, a child was growing up
09:38in English history.
09:42It was on the site of this castle at Falaise, in 1027,
09:46that William, known to all his contemporaries,
09:49although not in front of his face, as William the Bastard, was born.
09:53He was indeed the illegitimate son of Duke Robert of Normandy
09:56and the daughter of a tanner called Herleve.
10:00And in the cutthroat world of feudal Normandy,
10:02it was important that he learn, and learn quickly, how to survive.
10:07He was a child when his father died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land,
10:11leaving William just eight years old as his heir,
10:15a lamb thrown to the wolves.
10:23Certainly, Edward would have known the young William.
10:26There are even suggestions that he was one of the hand-picked companions
10:30entrusted by William's father, Duke Robert,
10:33with keeping an eye on the vulnerable young boy.
10:38Edward would have seen how William survived the traumas of his childhood,
10:42narrowly escaping assassination attempts,
10:45how William was forced, aged just ten,
10:48to witness the brutal murder of his beloved steward in his bedchamber,
10:52before his very eyes.
10:55And Edward must have marvelled at the way the stripling boy
10:58grew into a steely and ruthless young man,
11:01eventually triumphing in battle over a formidable league of rebel nobles.
11:08While William was securing absolute power in Normandy,
11:11Edward was by now in the middle of a nervous reign,
11:15continually having to look over his shoulder at his biggest threat,
11:19Earl Godwin.
11:20But in 1051, Edward seized his chance to rid himself of his rival.
11:27Edward had brought over Norman allies, established them in castles,
11:32made one Archbishop of Canterbury,
11:35feeling his moment had now come,
11:37he confronted Godwin with the crime of his brother's murder
11:40and threw him out of the country.
11:43But Edward's bid to rid himself of his sworn enemy failed miserably.
11:48In exile, the Earl of Wessex was just as dangerous as at home
11:52and sailed back with a fleet to humiliate the king.
11:59Out went Edward's Norman cronies, back came the English.
12:05Back came the Godwins, stronger than ever.
12:12And Edward was now little more than a puppet king.
12:17He turned to the religious life, spending days in meditation and prayer,
12:22becoming at last the Confessor,
12:24devoting himself to the foundation of his Benedictine abbey
12:28upstream of London, his West Minster.
12:32Impotence, though, has its uses.
12:35Godwin clearly had ambitions for the future.
12:38He'd foisted his daughter Edith on Edward to get a young Godwin
12:42as the next King of England.
12:45But Edward had his own ideas.
12:47Yes, he'd married Edith, but he would never sleep with her.
12:51His revenge would be her childlessness.
12:55Now Edward had an even more mischievous thought.
12:58All right, if Godwin wants an heir to the throne of England so badly,
13:02I'll give him one, but one more to my liking.
13:06And it's at this point, so Norman chroniclers claimed,
13:09that Edward apparently promised the succession
13:12to the Duke of Normandy, William the Bastard.
13:17Of course, nobody knew anything about this in England.
13:21Least of all Godwin, who in 1053 died suddenly of a stroke
13:26while at dinner with the King.
13:28But there were plenty of other Godwins
13:30ready to step into the Godfather's place.
13:33His sons now took over where he had left off,
13:36controlling England virtually unchallenged.
13:39And presiding over the family empire was the eldest son, Harold.
13:44Harold Godwinson seemed to have everything.
13:47Land, power, riches, charisma, an aristocratic wife
13:51and a supporting troop of loyal and clever brothers.
13:55He even managed to make himself patron of churches,
13:58like this one at Bosham in Sussex.
14:01And though he didn't dare to make too brazen a move,
14:05any dispassionate observer arriving in England in the early 1060s
14:09would have had to conclude that once Edward was gone,
14:12the throne was Harold's for the taking.
14:15And then, all at once,
14:17an ill wind blew away this fair-weather vision.
14:27It all started with a voyage
14:29that no-one can fully explain, even to this day.
14:33In 1064, Harold Godwinson died.
14:37In 1064, Harold and a group of men
14:40set sail across the Channel for Normandy.
14:43Maybe it was to rescue his younger brother, Wolfstan,
14:46who had been taken hostage by William.
14:49But for the Norman chroniclers,
14:51the journey could only have had one purpose.
14:54Harold was confirming Edward's offer of the crown.
14:59Why would Harold do something so against his own best interests?
15:05Perhaps that's why it makes up the first bit of the story
15:09of the most grandiose piece of Norman propaganda,
15:12the 70-metre-long Bayeux Tapestry.
15:16The tapestry was commissioned by William's half-brother,
15:20Bishop Odo of Bayeux, a few years after the conquest,
15:25but it may well have been made
15:27by English women embroiderers in Canterbury,
15:30who were generally regarded as the most skilled stitchers in Europe.
15:34Who else would have made such a glamorous hero?
15:47Something seems to have gone wrong in the Channel, perhaps a storm.
15:51Landing in the territory of Guy of Ponthieu,
15:54they were arrested and handed over to Guy's liege lord,
15:57William of Normandy.
16:03The embroiderers make it dramatically clear
16:06that Harold and his men now find themselves in an alien world.
16:10The Saxons, a mustachioed at this stage in the story,
16:14rather fine-looking, with a certain air about them,
16:17despite their predicament.
16:20The Normans, by contrast, shave the backs of their heads.
16:24They are the scary half-skinheads of the early feudal world.
16:31Realising that his lucky number has come up,
16:34William can afford to be all charm and generosity to his prisoner,
16:39cleverly bringing him into his military entourage.
16:45William took Harold on campaign with him in Brittany,
16:48and Harold returns the favour by rescuing two of William's soldiers
16:52from the quicksands of Mont Saint-Michel.
16:55One on his left arm, one on his back.
17:05But William's hospitality is steel-tipped.
17:08He makes Harold one of his knights, a solemn, ceremonious business,
17:12but one that involved a two-way obligation.
17:16William, now his liege lord,
17:18would be obliged to protect Harold, his new knight,
17:21but Harold would have had to make his own promises,
17:24and there seems no doubt that he did swear some sort of oath to the duke.
17:30To the medieval mind, there was nothing more serious than an oath,
17:35and the tapestry maker makes it clear that this was a religious act
17:39by having a witness point to the word sacramentum.
17:44Harold's oath was indeed a kind of sacrament
17:47since it went right to the heart of the matter,
17:50what would happen to England after Edward died.
17:55Now, the English said that Harold agreed to be William's man only in Normandy,
18:00and that this had no bearing on the English succession.
18:05The Norman chroniclers, though,
18:07said Harold had sworn to help William take the throne of England.
18:14The oath became even more binding when, in a cheap theatrical trick,
18:19the cloth was whipped from the table over which Harold had sworn.
18:23Underneath was revealed a reliquary containing the bones of a saint.
18:36Well, how much trouble was he in now?
18:39Had Harold promised something he couldn't deliver?
18:42Would he have made no promises at all about the English crown?
18:45Norman chroniclers like to imagine the returning Harold haunted by guilt,
18:50saying one thing and doing another.
19:00But in England, at any rate, there were no signs of a queasy conscience at all.
19:04In fact, to get his hands on the crown,
19:07Harold now did something inconceivable for a godwin,
19:11something which one day would have disastrous consequences.
19:16He sold his own brother, Tostig, down the river.
19:25Tostig was the Earl of Northumbria.
19:27He was also the family hothead
19:29who had managed to provoke a northern rebellion against him.
19:33He'd been fleecing abbeys and monasteries,
19:35creating his own private army
19:37and generally acting like a greedy, tyrannical brat.
19:42Inevitably, the local nobles rose against him,
19:45declared him outlaw and put in their own man to be the new Earl.
19:51Harold was sent by King Edward to sort out the mess
19:54and was immediately faced with two tough choices.
19:58He could back his younger brother Tostig against the rebels,
20:01but that might create a civil war.
20:05Or he could forget all about blood ties and support Tostig's enemies.
20:09In return, they might just feel grateful enough
20:12to offer him their crucial support
20:15when the time came for him to make his bid for the English throne.
20:21In the end, Harold put ambition before brotherly love.
20:25He threw out Tostig and replaced him with the Earl Mawcar.
20:29Harold had broken godwin clan solidarity
20:33and turned his own brother into a mortal enemy.
20:39It was this merciless war of brothers
20:42which in the end cost Harold his throne and his life.
20:46More than anything else,
20:48it was the cause of the death of Anglo-Saxon England.
20:55The winter of 1065 was marked by tremendous gales,
20:59which destroyed churches and uprooted great trees.
21:04As King Edward the Confessor lay on his deathbed,
21:07he was visited by a strange and terrible dream,
21:10which he insisted on relating to all those who had gathered around him.
21:17Two monks came to my deathbed and told me
21:20that because of the sins of its people,
21:22God had given England to evil spirits.
21:25I said to them,
21:27will God not have mercy?
21:29And they replied, not until a growing tree,
21:32cleft in two by a lightning storm,
21:35should come together of its own accord and grow green again.
21:39Only then will there be pardon.
21:52But no-one paid much attention to the ravings of an old man.
21:56What was much more important was that Edward had touched Harold's hand.
22:06Maddeningly, the king had fallen short of actually declaring him his heir,
22:11but it was enough of a sign for Harold
22:13and for the northern earls who supported him.
22:18On January 6th, 1066,
22:20Westminster saw the funeral of one king in the morning
22:24and the coronation of another in the afternoon.
22:29There are two Harold's depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry,
22:32but which was the real one?
22:34The confident king who now issued coins
22:37bearing the optimistic slogan Pax, the Latin for peace,
22:41or the guilty, twisted usurper, stricken by omens,
22:45haunted by vision of ships?
22:48The phantom fleet which the embroiderer has set
22:51in the border of the tapestry suggests
22:53Harold could all too well imagine the reaction
22:56across the channel to his coronation.
23:02A Norman historian has William hearing the news while out hunting.
23:07When the duke heard the news, he became, as a man, outraged.
23:12Oft he tied his mantle, oft he untied it again and spoke to no man.
23:17Neither dared any man speak to him.
23:28For ten years, William had confidently let it be known throughout Europe
23:33that he'd soon add England to his territories.
23:36He was now in a lethally dangerous position of looking ridiculous.
23:41He consulted with his feudal magnates in a series of assemblies
23:45and by no means all of them were particularly thrilled
23:48with the idea of an invasion of England.
23:51The risks seemed a lot more daunting
23:53than the enticement of new lands and wealth.
23:57So the duke went to strategy number two,
24:00turning the matter into an international crusade.
24:04Couldn't the pope see that he was going to have to
24:08Couldn't the pope see that his cause was just,
24:11that Harold was an infamous oath-breaker, a despoiler of churches?
24:15William, on the other hand, was a builder of abbeys,
24:18a protector of bishops against bullying barons.
24:21It was completely absurd and it worked like a dream.
24:25The pope was won over, gave William his papal blessing
24:29and invested him with his ring and his banner.
24:38It was now much more than a dynastic feud.
24:42William used the consecration of his wife's abbey
24:45here at La Trinité in Caen
24:47to proclaim a crusade against the infidel Harold.
24:52And the barons who'd fought shy of risking their necks
24:55on the duke's personal vendetta
24:58now flocked to join the legions of the blessed.
25:02The bio-tapestry show's work immediately got under way
25:06to build an awe-inspiring expeditionary force.
25:09Rows of Normandy trees went down to the axe
25:12to emerge as 400 dragon-headed ships.
25:21Loaded onto the ships were coats of mail, bows, arrows, spears
25:26and the most indispensable item of all,
25:29vast casks of wine.
25:31And packed so tightly into the boats that they supported each other
25:35were perhaps 6,000 horses, three for each night.
25:49Across the Channel,
25:51Harold responded by proving that he too was a phenomenal military man.
25:56As the crack troops of his army,
25:58Harold could call on the elite of perhaps 3,000 housecarls,
26:02professional soldiers trained to handle a two-handed axe
26:06that, if swung right, could slice right through a horse and its rider
26:10at one blow.
26:12The core of the army was provided by the 5,000 thanes,
26:16or noblemen of England,
26:18and in addition there were the 13,000 part-time soldiers
26:22known as the feared, and mobilised by their lords,
26:25obliged to give the king two-month service each year.
26:31With amazing speed, this army was stationed along the south coast.
26:36By August 10th,
26:38William had his army in place along the Normandy coast.
26:42Two great fighting forces bent on each other's annihilation
26:47faced each other across a little strip of water
26:50to determine the destiny of England.
26:57And there they sat,
26:59William waiting for a southerly wind that never came
27:03and Harold waiting for William, who never came.
27:11This waiting was followed by a battle.
27:15This waiting was particularly serious for Harold.
27:19By the first week of September, he kept the feared in battle position
27:23for at least two weeks longer than their two-month obligation.
27:31What's more, it was now harvest time.
27:34So, with who knows what misgivings and uneasiness,
27:37on September 8th,
27:39Harold demobilised the feared and sent the soldiers home.
27:47He was right to feel uneasy.
27:50Just 11 days later, Harold had a very nasty shock.
27:54His younger brother was back.
27:57Tostig, together with the Norwegian king, Harold Hardrada,
28:01had landed in Northumbria with as many as 12,000 men.
28:06Tostig had spent his time in exile looking for allies
28:09to pursue his vendetta against Harold,
28:12and it was a real coup for him that he'd finally enlisted
28:15the support of the awesome king of Norway.
28:18Hardrada was quite simply the most feared warrior of the age.
28:23Built like a Norwegian cliff face,
28:26he had a reputation for superhuman strength
28:29and elaborately creative cruelty.
28:32Hardrada also had a flimsy claim to the English throne
28:36that went back to Canute,
28:38and he wasn't one to flinch at a military challenge
28:41that could win him the disputed crown.
28:48Harold Hardrada sailed south-west from Norway on August 12th.
28:53En route to England, he stopped here in the Viking earldom of the Orkneys
28:57to pick up yet more men and yet more ships
29:00to add to his already formidable fleet.
29:03Expectations must have been high.
29:06The Norsemen could almost smell triumph in the summer winds.
29:11There would have been feasting and singing and the reading of poems,
29:15some of them doubtless written by Hardrada himself.
29:18But it may be here that Tostig joined the Viking fleet.
29:23If he did, and if he looked out at the water and saw the 300 ships,
29:28his little heart must have skipped a beat
29:31to think of the catastrophe awaiting his brother.
29:34Together, Tostig and Hardrada would be unstoppable, invincible.
29:40Or would they?
29:49Having landed on the Northumbrian coast,
29:52the Viking army headed for York,
29:54setting off the Northern Earls to take control of the city.
29:59Complacent with victory, Hardrada and Tostig travelled
30:02with just one-third of their army,
30:04eight miles east of York to Stamford Bridge,
30:07where they'd arranged to collect 500 hostages.
30:14But what they saw on the banks of the River Derwent
30:17was not a forlorn group of hostages, but a massive army,
30:21glittering like sheets of ice, as the Viking bard put it.
30:25Tostig knew it meant trouble.
30:28It was his big brother.
30:32Getting his army in position to surprise the Norsemen
30:35was an epic feat by any standards.
30:37Harold had travelled from London, picking up his army on the way,
30:41covering 187 miles in four days.
30:4537 to 45 miles a day.
30:48Imagine, then, thousands of men going as fast as their horses,
30:52or, in many cases, as fast as their legs, could carry them.
30:56Up the Great North Road to Peterborough, Lincoln, Tadcaster,
31:00the ultimate high-impact hike with the heaviest backpacks imaginable.
31:06And at the end of it,
31:08Harold fought one of the bloodiest battles in English history.
31:18SHOUTING
31:36It was the English who broke the Viking line,
31:39and the remaining Norse warriors cowered around their chiefs.
31:43We must imagine the great Hardrada
31:45swinging his axe beneath the land waster flag
31:48before finally sinking down with an arrow in the throat.
31:53Tostig picking up the raven flag and, in his turn, being cut down.
32:07The carnage was so complete
32:10that it took just 24 of the 300 ships that had sailed to England
32:15to return the pitiful remnant of the Norse army back to Norway.
32:24In a final act of respect, Harold found his dead brother
32:28and took what was left of him to be buried at York Minster.
32:33But he had no time to grieve or exult over the death of Tostig,
32:38for the day after the Battle of Stamford Bridge,
32:41the Norman fleet at last felt the wind change direction.
32:49So, with great haste, the Duke went to sea
32:52with his fleet sailing swiftly to the coast of England.
33:03Their first sight of land would have been the great cliffs at Beachy Head,
33:08and they landed in the nearby sheltering harbours of Pevensey.
33:13An old Roman fort guarded the beach.
33:16Within its now-empty shell,
33:18William's men erected a prefabricated timber castle
33:22that would later be rebuilt in stone,
33:24as if declaring that they were now the heirs to the Romans.
33:29Expeditions for food and forage from the base camp took the usual form,
33:34burning everything that couldn't be seized,
33:36striking terror into the hearts of the locals.
33:43One of the most unforgettable details in the entire Bayeux tapestry
33:48is this seemingly incidental detail
33:52of a man who had been killed by a ship
33:55and this seemingly incidental detail
33:58of a mother and child turned refugee
34:01fleeing from their burning house, maybe even Hastings.
34:06Resigned to their fate, not looking back.
34:09This is the first of the images that were echoed through European art,
34:14through Rubens, Goya and Picasso's Guernica,
34:17of the victims of war, of civilians, of innocents.
34:25William soon discovered there was no easy route
34:28to get from Pevensey to London.
34:30The country behind the town was waterlogged,
34:32crossed by little river valleys that fed into the sea.
34:36But there was one old Anglo-Saxon trail
34:39that could take him to the Roman road going north through Kent,
34:43and it was for mastery of this ancient, muddy, rutted track
34:47that the most gruelling battle in early British history would be fought.
34:52Having beaten back the threat of the Vikings and his own brother,
34:56it must have seemed inconceivable to Harold
34:59that he was going to have to do it all over again within a week or two.
35:03It would not be easy.
35:05Who could he call on, the bruised and battered remains of his army?
35:09It would be a long shot.
35:11But after Stamford Bridge, perhaps Harold felt
35:14that he could actually trust his gambler's luck.
35:18Besides, William's public name-calling,
35:21Harold the Perjured, Harold the Oathbreaker, Harold the Perfidious,
35:25had made it personal now, a mortal duel.
35:29So let the hand of God decide who was the righteous party,
35:33who would prevail.
35:40Harold left London at full speed.
35:43He gathered what he could of a new army by an old grey apple tree,
35:48an ancient blasted tree that stood on a hill
35:51at the crossing of the tracks leading out of Hastings.
35:54There, Harold planted his banner, the Dragon of Wessex.
35:59The Normans called this place Sanlac, which means Lake of Blood.
36:14Imagine yourself then on the morning of Saturday, 14th October 1066.
36:21You're a Saxon warrior, a housecarl as it happens,
36:24and you've survived Stamford Bridge.
36:27You know your position here couldn't be better.
36:30You stand on the brow of the hill
36:32and look down hundreds of yards away at the opposition.
36:36All you have to do is to prevent the Normans
36:39from breaking through to the London Road.
36:43They have the horses, but then they have to ride them uphill.
36:47You look along the hillside
36:49and you see a densely packed crowd of Englishmen.
36:52At the front are the housecarls, a wall of solid shields,
36:56and with them, the axemen.
36:58But behind them are the part-timers, the fighting farmers,
37:02who must have time to find their courage.
37:07Down at the foot of the hill, you can hear the whinnying of Norman horses.
37:13And what sounds like the chanting of psalms.
37:20You're a Norman foot soldier
37:22and you hope to God the gentlemen on horses know what they're doing.
37:26All around you, you can hear the scraping of metal,
37:29the sharpening of blades, the mounting of horses.
37:32You look up to the brow of the hill
37:34and you see a thin, glittering line of men,
37:37and you cross yourself and you finger the rings on your coat of mail,
37:41and you wonder just how solid they are.
37:43You wonder what use they're going to be against an axe.
37:47You've never seen axes in battle before.
37:50But then you catch sight of the papal banner and take heart.
37:54Surely God is on your side.
38:01The real beginning must be imagined
38:03as the cavalry raced up the hill, one by one, getting into range,
38:07the rhythmic chant of ut, ut, out, out from the Saxons,
38:12and then hurling their javelins at the front line.
38:18Then came the slow advance of the archers,
38:21unloosing their first arrows under a hail of enemy spears.
38:31And finally, the foot soldiers breaking into a run behind them.
38:38And then there was just the murderous smashing and crashing of horses,
38:42the slicing and thrusting of weapons,
38:45screams, cries of the wounded and dying.
38:53If the axeman stood firm against the oncoming horse,
38:56he'd still only get one good swing.
38:59If he missed, he was left open to the slash of the sword from the rider above.
39:05Argh!
39:12It was the initial success of the English
39:14that also threatened their downfall.
39:16On the left flank of William's army, horses stumbled and retreated.
39:20The right flank of Harold's army, many of them inexperienced fieldsmen,
39:24decided to chase them down the hill.
39:28But Harold, always conservative in his tactics,
39:32refused to allow others to follow.
39:34So at this point, he seems to have lost momentary control of his own troops,
39:38who couldn't resist following the horsemen,
39:41elated by the thought that the Duke of Normandy was lost.
39:45But William threw back his helmet to prove he was very much alive.
39:50He rallied the ranks of the Norman centre
39:52round the rear of the pursuing Saxons
39:55and set about slicing them to pieces.
40:02The battle wasn't over yet.
40:04It was going to take at least six hours to decide.
40:13The Bayeux Tapestry is shockingly explicit
40:16in exposing the extent of the carnage, the mutilation.
40:25But it was the English army that was eventually
40:28and very, very slowly ground down.
40:31William began exploiting weak points,
40:33settling into an alternating rhythm of archers and cavalry.
40:38The arrows now shot high into the air
40:41and fell not onto the front line
40:43but the heads of the unprotected men behind them.
40:50How did Harold himself die?
40:52Lately, there's been an attempt to read the death scene in the tapestry.
40:56as though he was the figure cut down by the horsemen.
41:00Not the warrior pulling the arrow out of his eye,
41:03the story you and I grew up with.
41:05But it seems to me perfectly clear
41:07that the words Harold Rex occur directly
41:10and significantly above the arrow-struck figure.
41:17Then, certainly, the knights would have been on him,
41:20cutting him down, leaving him disembowelled,
41:23The Thanes bravely mounted a last stand,
41:26defending the body of their king.
41:28But for many, it was now a lost cause.
41:31It was time to save one's neck, to get out of the way.
41:38There are such sad stories of what follows,
41:40and perhaps some of them are true.
41:42One of them has Harold's lover, Edith Swanneck,
41:45walking through the heaps of gory corpses.
41:49What we do know is that around half the nobility of England
41:53perished on that battlefield.
42:19William had sworn that, should God give him the victory,
42:23he would build a great abbey of thanksgiving
42:26at the exact spot where Harold had planted his flag.
42:30And here it is, a statement, if ever there was one,
42:34of pious jubilation.
42:39But William had to make sure he'd win the battle.
42:42This was done in the time-honoured way,
42:44cutting a swathe of fire, rape and plunder
42:47through the countryside of south-east England.
42:50One by one, the Anglo-Saxon cities folded.
42:56William was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066.
43:01But the events of that day were far from over.
43:04He was crowned king of England.
43:07William was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066.
43:12But the event was more like a shambles than a triumph.
43:18At the shout of acclamation,
43:20the Norman soldiers stationed outside thought a riot had started,
43:24to which their response was to burn down every house in sight.
43:29As fighting broke out, many of those inside the abbey,
43:32smelling smoke, rushed outside.
43:36And the ceremony was completed in a half-empty interior,
43:40with William, for the first time in his life,
43:43seen to be shaking like a leaf.
43:49When he emerged from the smoke and chaos of the coronation,
43:53just what kind of king did the surviving remnant
43:56of the old governing class imagine they had?
43:59Did they fondly suppose he was going to be another Canute,
44:03and that anyone who had won his realm
44:05would disband his army and send them home?
44:08If they did, they were in for a very nasty shock,
44:12because even if William had wanted to do this,
44:15it was quite impossible.
44:17His whole campaign had been based on the promise of the lure of land,
44:22the pledge to hand over Saxon land on a golden plate of conquest.
44:28So there was never the remotest chance
44:30that William was going to be another Canute
44:32and assimilate himself into the world of Anglo-Saxon England.
44:36His conquest turned the country around.
44:39England's orientation now was south,
44:42away from Scandinavia and towards continental Europe.
44:50The part of the country offering most resistance
44:53was the north of England,
44:55which still retained strong Viking sympathies.
44:58Just three years into William's reign,
45:00York opened its gates to King Sweyn of Denmark,
45:03hailing him as a liberator from the new King of England.
45:11William's response was to mount a campaign of oppression in the north
45:15that was not just punitive, but an exercise in mass murder.
45:19Thousands upon thousands of men and boys gruesomely butchered,
45:23their bodies left to rot and fester in the highways.
45:32Every town and village burnt without pity,
45:35fields and livestock destroyed so completely
45:38that any survivors were doomed to die in a great famine.
45:46Hard on the heels of massacre and starvation came plague.
45:51And all across England, William built at least 90 castles
45:55dominating areas of potential revolt,
45:58engines of terror that helped William control
46:01over two million Saxons with just 25,000 Normans.
46:07Most of the voices that have come down to us
46:10describing the events after 1066
46:13are written from the victor's perspective,
46:16unapologetic and crowing,
46:18sketching the starkest possible contrasts
46:21between the Machiavellian perjurer Harold
46:24and the noble, betrayed William.
46:27William was a man of honour,
46:29a man of honour,
46:31a man of honour,
46:33a man of honour,
46:35a man of honour,
46:37a man of honour,
46:39a man of honour.
46:49The voices all the more credible
46:51because it belongs to someone who by rights
46:54should have found nothing to fault in the Norman conquest.
46:57The monk, Alderic Vitalis,
46:59whose family came over with William
47:02Alderic Vitalis, whose family came over with William
47:05and belonged, therefore, to the conquering class.
47:09In the early 12th century, he began to pen his account
47:12of the conquest and its aftermath.
47:14And in complete contrast to the others,
47:17Alderic never minces his words
47:19about what he thought of as a colonisation.
47:23Foreigners grew wealthy with the spoils of England
47:26while her own sons were either shamefully slain
47:29or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly
47:32through foreign kingdoms.
47:36His account conveys the traumatic magnitude
47:39of what happened in England in the years following 1066.
47:44Pre-conquest England was an old country,
47:47as Alderic describes it.
47:48Afterwards, it was a completely new one.
47:52Of course, not everything changed.
47:54And to look at a list of governing institutions,
47:57you might suppose that nothing had changed,
48:00that one class of governors had kicked out
48:03another class of governors.
48:04Big deal.
48:06But I rather think it was a big deal.
48:09Imagine the county gentry of England,
48:11priests, squires, judges, all wiped out overnight,
48:17half of them dead, the rest humiliated, broken,
48:21replaced by an alien class.
48:24They speak differently, they look different,
48:28they take what they want, when they want,
48:30and then rubber stamp the decision in your courts.
48:37They also build differently.
48:39Ely Cathedral is one of those places
48:42where the intimate scale of Saxon churches
48:45was replaced by a statement of massive triumphalism.
48:50These columns speak of authority and raw power,
48:53they command obedience and reverence.
48:57In the most literal sense, awesome.
49:10It was the difference between the immense Romanesque bulk
49:13of the great Norman cathedrals
49:15and the small spaces of the Saxon chapel.
49:20There was another telling difference
49:21between the old and the new rulers of England.
49:24Anglo-Saxons didn't use surnames.
49:27They were Cedric or Edgar of some way or other,
49:30but the Normans incorporated places into their own names,
49:33like an act of possession.
49:36They were Roger of the beautiful hill, Roger Beaumont,
49:39because the place was theirs
49:41and they owned it, lock, stock, and barrel.
49:45In fact, preserving the estate intact
49:47was what the Norman nobility was all about.
49:50It was they who introduced the practice
49:52of passing on whole estates intact to one heir,
49:55to the elder son.
49:59The unsentimental, decisive way with things
50:02was the Norman way, giving a hard-nosed edge
50:05to the fuzzy tangles of contracts and customs
50:08that had been used by the Anglo-Saxons.
50:13And it was in this spirit that William, in 1085,
50:16held court in Gloucester and launched, arguably,
50:20the most extraordinary campaign of his entire reign,
50:23a campaign for information.
50:26We tend to think of William as more or less
50:29permanently in the saddle.
50:30He grew up in a world, after all,
50:33where authority was usually delivered
50:35on the blade of a sword.
50:36So it's all the more impressive
50:38that he seems to have understood instinctively
50:41that information could also be power.
50:44William the Conqueror was the first database king.
50:50His immediate need was to raise a tax,
50:54but the compilation of the Doomsday Book
50:56was more than just a glorified audit.
50:58It was complete infantry of everything in the kingdom,
51:02shire by shire...
51:05..pig by pig.
51:07Who would own what before the coming of the Normans
51:09and who owned what now?
51:11How much it had been worth then and how much now.
51:18The king sent his men all over England into every shire
51:21to find out how many hundred hides there were in each shire,
51:26what land and cattle the king himself had in the county.
51:29So very narrowly did he have it investigated.
51:32There was no single hide, nor, shame to relate it,
51:35but it seemed no shame to him,
51:37was there one ox or one cow left out
51:41and not put down in record?
51:44While some of the information was taken verbally
51:47by William's scribes,
51:48some must have owed its existence to Saxon records.
51:52In fact, the most extraordinary paradox about the Doomsday Book
51:56is that what we think of as a monument to the power and strength
51:59of the Normans owed itself to the advanced machinery of government
52:03left in place by the old Anglo-Saxon monarchy.
52:07And it was thanks to this that the data was collected
52:10at such lightning speed, less than six months.
52:14The results were presented to William here at Old Sarum,
52:18an ancient Iron Age fort inside which he'd built
52:21a spectacular royal palace.
52:24When he took hold of the Doomsday Book,
52:26it was as though William had been handed the keys to the kingdom
52:29all over again, as if he'd reconquered England,
52:32but this time statistically,
52:34because its information was more impregnable than any castle.
52:39It was called the Doomsday Book, after all,
52:41because it was said that its decisions were as final
52:44as the Last Judgement.
52:49The church itself holds Wenlock.
52:51There are 20 hides, four of which are exempt from tax under King Canute.
52:56There are 15 slaves.
52:58Two mills serve the monks, plus one fishery.
53:02Enough woodland to fatten 300 pigs and two hedged enclosures.
53:07Value now, £12.
53:11Two ceremonies took place on Lammas Day 1087 at Old Sarum.
53:17First, every noble in England gathered here
53:20to take an oath of loyalty to the king,
53:23but then came the handing over of the book,
53:26the ultimate weapon to keep them in line.
53:29Now, nobody could hold back anything,
53:32and it was this book, the Doomsday Book,
53:35that made the gathering at Old Sarum unique in the history of England.
53:39Unique in the history of feudal monarchy in Europe.
53:43For the book, ultimately, was England.
53:49For centuries after, this was the secret of English government,
53:53a partnership between the power of the landed classes
53:56and the authority of the state,
53:58between the guardians of the green acres
54:01and the keepers of the knowledge.
54:03In the right-hand corner, the gentry.
54:05In the left-hand corner, the civil service.
54:08And between them, the eternal umpire, the king.
54:13But the umpire was finally feeling the strain of it all.
54:17Not surprising when, aged 60,
54:20William still couldn't resist playing the warlord.
54:23In 1087, he subdued a border dispute in France
54:27by, well, of course, totally destroying the town of Mantes.
54:31But perhaps this last devastation was one too many.
54:35Steaming timber from one of the houses, burned by William's soldiers,
54:39fell right in front of the king.
54:41William's horse suddenly barked,
54:44throwing the now overweight king violently against his saddle,
54:48his gut taking the force of the blow.
54:51Mortally wounded, William was taken to a priory at Rouen.
55:00At the very end,
55:01Roderick Vitalis puts into William's mouth
55:04an extraordinary deathbed confession,
55:06so penitential, so utterly out of character,
55:10that it seems, on the face of it, completely incredible.
55:14But whether William actually spoke those words or not,
55:17they clearly reflected what some, perhaps many people,
55:20felt about William the Conqueror.
55:23That when all the battles were won,
55:25when the laws had all been laid down,
55:27he was what he had always been, a brutal adventurer.
55:31And the conquest of England, not a righteous crusade,
55:35but just a grand throw of history's dice.
55:40I appoint no one my heir to the crown of England,
55:43for I did not attain that high honour by hereditary right,
55:46but wrestled it from the perjured King Harold
55:49in a desperate battle with much effusion of human blood.
55:54I have persecuted its native inhabitants beyond all reason.
55:58Whether gentle or simple, I cruelly oppressed them.
56:01Many I unjustly disinherited.
56:03Innumerable multitudes, especially in the county of York,
56:06perished through me by famine or the sword.
56:10Having therefore made my way to the throne of that kingdom
56:13by so many crimes,
56:15I dare not leave it to anyone but God alone,
56:18lest, after my death, worse should happen by my means.
56:24Once he had gone, in the early hours of the morning
56:27of the 9th of September, 1087, a shocking scene took place.
56:33His closest followers now paid their last respects to William,
56:37by all deserting him,
56:39racing off to the four corners of the kingdom
56:41to secure their land and property,
56:44leaving the corpse to be looted by the servants,
56:48naked, bloated and beginning to putrefy on the monastery floor.
56:56So the man who'd spent his life taking whatever he could,
57:00by whatever means possible,
57:02was finally robbed of everything, even his dignity.
57:06Perhaps the hand of God had decided that this was a fitting end.
57:18According to old antagonist Harold,
57:20he certainly didn't stay buried on the shore facing the Channel,
57:24as some Norman historians suggested.
57:27Rumours had it that he had escaped and was living as a hermit.
57:31But another story is much more likely to be the truth.
57:35That once it was safe, the female survivors of the family
57:38took Harold's remains and had them interred here at Waltham Abbey.
57:44According to William and the Pope,
57:46Harold had been a despoiler of the church, deserving of destruction.
57:51But the monks at Waltham didn't seem to agree,
57:54for they secretly buried him and prayed for his soul.
57:59Somewhere then, beneath the columns and arches of this Romanesque church,
58:04is the last Anglo-Saxon king,
58:07literally part of the foundations of Norman England.