King Harold's Fleet - Another Major Problem

A quick update about Harold Godwineson allegedly sailing his army to the Battle of Hastings.

To recap: Professor Tom Licence of the University of East Anglia has argued that in mid-September 1066 Harold sent a fleet of ships from London to Yorkshire to combat a Norwegian invasion. After his victory against the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, the king then used these ships to transport his troops back to London, enabling them to oppose the Norman invasion a fortnight later.

As I pointed out in a previous post, this argument depends upon the interpretation of a single word in the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle, our main source for events in England in 1066, tells us that, when Harold heard that the Norwegians had landed in Yorkshire, he ‘went northwards day and night as quickly as he could assemble his force.’ A few lines later it adds that on Sunday 24 September the king came ‘with all his force to Tadcaster and there arrayed his lið’.

‘Lið’ is the crucial word, because usually one would understand it to mean ‘fleet’. In this case, because of the context suggested by the rest of the text, we might more obviously translate it as ‘troops’ (as has been done in the past). Licence prefers the more literal reading, and contends that this lið must have been the same fleet that Harold had assembled earlier in the year and sent to London on 8 September.

The factor I had failed to take into account in my previous post was the location of the Norwegian fleet. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the Norwegians sailed their ships ‘up the Ouse towards York’. A later source, however, says more specifically that they landed on the Ouse at a place called Riccall. The source, John of Worcester, wrote in the 1140s, but based his account on a lost version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

This is fairly crucial. As was pointed out to me by the historian Ste Lingard, it means that, if Harold really did send a fleet to Tadcaster, it would have had to sail past the Norwegian camp. Take a look at the map below, which I have borrowed and adapted from Richard Fletcher’s book Bloodfeud.

Even if the English fleet was somehow able to get past the Norwegian one, it beggars belief to suppose that they could have done so undetected. The Norwegian army had already taken themselves off to York in the days after their arrival, but they would not have left their 300 ships unguarded. Those men left to watch the ships would have noticed an English fleet sailing past their camp and proceeding further upriver to Tadcaster.

This causes serious problems for Licence’s argument, because the one thing that is abundantly clear from all the sources is that Harold took the Norwegians by surprise. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains, on Monday 25 September, the English king learned that his enemies had gone from York to Stamford Bridge and rapidly advanced against them. ‘Then Harold, king of the English, came against them unawares.’ (Ða com Harold Engla cyning heom ongean on unwaran.)

Harold’s victory at Stamford Bridge depended upon stealth. If he came to Tadcaster by land, as historians have long believed, he would have avoided the Norwegian camp at Riccall by several miles and remained undetected. By contrast, had he sailed a fleet up the River Ouse it would have alerted his enemies to his arrival, robbing him of the element of surprise.

Harold bringing his fleet to Tadcaster is the hinge on which Prof Licence’s arguments depend. Apart from the Chronicle’s use of the word lið at this point, there is no other evidence to support the notion that the king brought his fleet north from London, and plenty of reasons (discussed in the previous post) to suppose he did not. If the fleet did not come to Tadcaster, the hypothesis that the king transported his army back to London by ship also falls apart.

Did King Harold Really Sail to the Battle of Hastings?

Headline news in all the papers this weekend: historians have got 1066 all wrong! Previously they had thought that King Harold, who was famously defeated at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by William the Conqueror, had marched his troops all the way from Yorkshire to Sussex in the days leading up to the battle. But new research by Tom Licence, a professor of history and literature at the University of East Anglia, has shown that the king in fact sailed south with his men. Clearly the history books will have to be rewritten.

A few journalists asked for my reaction and I declined to comment: I’ll wait, I said, until I’ve read the professor’s arguments in an academic paper rather than in a press release. But on further reflection I realized that this might involve waiting quite a long time. According to the press release, Licence is going to present his findings at a conference in the coming days, but it can take years for conference proceedings to make their way into print. I think we can reasonably suppose that the same arguments will feature in the professor’s forthcoming biography of King Harold, but that isn’t due until August, and this also seemed rather too long to wait to see the detail behind such sensational claims. By yesterday afternoon, however, my attention had been drawn to an article written by Licence himself for The Conversation, in which he discusses the evidence on which his theory rests.

As far as I can see, it amounts to a single word in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

But first, the background. In the spring of 1066 Harold Godwineson, crowned as England’s new king at the start of the year, assembled a massive military force to resist the anticipated invasion of William the Conqueror. It consisted of a land army, which he stationed at various points along the south coast, and a fleet of ships, which was based on the Isle of Wight, where the king himself waited throughout the summer.

This is all fairly indisputable stuff, because it is described in detail by the aforementioned Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or Chronicles, a set of related accounts written very soon after the event by monks at different monasteries. Three variant versions exist for 1066, referred to by historians as C, D and E. The most detailed version, and the most important for our purposes, is version C.

On 8 September, the C Chronicle tells us, Harold was forced to stand down his massive military force:

‘When it was the feast of the Nativity of St Mary [8 September], the provisions of the people were gone, and nobody could stay there any longer. Then they were allowed to go home and the king rode inland, and the ships were brought up to London and many perished before they reached there.’

Licence contends that scholars have misunderstood the Chronicle at this point, and assumed that Harold broke up his fleet. This is surprising, because the text of the Chronicle seems pretty unambiguous: the king allowed his army to disband, and sent his ships back to London. That is the way I wrote it up in my book on the Norman Conquest in 2012, and I had no sense that what I was saying was in any way revolutionary. Earlier scholars had said exactly the same. Prof David Douglas, for example, in his biography of William the Conqueror published in 1964, says ‘The Wessex militia was dismissed, and the king and his housecarls retired to London. The ships were also ordered to repair to the capital, and on the way thither many of them were lost.’ The nineteenth-century scholars that Licence cites may have erred in saying that the fleet was subsequently broken up, but it doesn’t seem to be an error that any sensible author has replicated in the past sixty years.

On arrival in London, says the Chronicle, Harold learned that northern England had been invaded from an unexpected direction. An army had landed in Yorkshire led by the king of Norway, Harold Hardrada [hereafter called Hardrada, to avoid confusion], aided by Harold Godwineson’s younger brother, Tostig. This prompted the English king to set out immediately for the north. ‘He went northwards day and night,’ says the Chronicle, ‘as quickly as he could assemble his force.’

The crucial question for our purposes is: how did Harold travel northwards? From the reports in some of the newspapers, you’d think that Licence was claiming the king had gone by ship. (e.g. The Guardian: ‘His interpretation? Harold simply sailed his armies to Yorkshire and back.’)

I’m not sure this is what Licence is claiming (or will claim when he delivers his paper). While the verb the Chronicle uses to describe Harold’s journey north is ambiguous [faran – equivalent to the German ‘fahren’ – to go, to travel], the rest of the sentence seems to imply the king was travelling hurriedly by land, rounding up new recruits as he did so.

There is also a cautious argument to be made from silence. When the Chronicle describes the movements of the other actors in 1066, it makes it amply clear when ships are involved. In the spring, for example, ‘Earl Tostig came from overseas into the Isle of Wight with as large a fleet as he could muster’. Harold, in response, ‘came to Sandwich and waited for his fleet there’. In September, Hardrada ‘came by surprise into the Tyne with a very large naval force’. After the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Hardrada’s son was allowed to ‘go home to Norway with all the ships’. Yet when it comes to Harold’s journey to Yorkshire in mid-September, there is no mention of ships at all – a fairly resounding silence. We might therefore more reasonably conclude that ‘went northwards’ meant he went by land.

Whether or not Licence thinks Harold personally went to Yorkshire by ship – again, we must wait for a more detailed exposition of his ideas – he clearly does believe that Harold sent his fleet north to combat the Norwegian threat. On what basis?

The only evidence to support this idea is a subsequent line in the Chronicle which says that, when the king reached Tadcaster [12 miles southwest of York] on Sunday 24 September, he assembled his ‘lið’ (þær his lið fylcade).

Now the Old English word lið, it is true, is usually taken to mean a naval force rather than a land army. Some scholars in the past argued that the mention of a lið at Tadcaster must be a reference to local ships. Others have assumed that the Chronicler simply used lið to mean ‘forces’.  The translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle published by Dorothy Whitelock in the 1950s, for example, rendered the phrase þær his lið fylcade as ‘there marshalled his troops’.

But Licence is certain that the Chronicle’s use of the word lið to describe Harold’s forces at Tadcaster indicates it was a naval force, and that furthermore ‘this was the same fleet that Harold had sent up from London’. He describes this in his Conversation article as ‘joining the dots’.

Let’s assume he is right, and that the king did indeed send his fleet from London up the east coast of England, into the River Humber, up the River Ouse, and then finally up the River Wharfe to Tadcaster. Does it follow that he is correct in assuming, as he says in his article, that it was used ‘to transport troops’?

In the first place, we might well ask: which troops? The Chronicle is pretty clear that on 8 September Harold had dismissed all his land levies and allowed them to go home.

Secondly, we might ask whether it would have been normal behaviour for a king to send infantry northwards by ship. In 934, for example, the mighty King Æthelstan mounted an invasion of Scotland. We know from the Chronicle that he sent a fleet to ravage Caithness, but it is clear that king himself marched the main part of his army northwards, because along the way he issued charters at Winchester, Nottingham and Chester-le-Street. When William the Conqueror attacked Scotland in 1072 he likewise sent a fleet to blockade the coast but marched his army northwards in person. Fleets were typically used in a supporting role to bring supplies to troops marching overland. When William Rufus advanced against the king of Scots in the autumn of 1091, his army was shadowed by a fleet of fifty ships that kept them supplied with grain. It was therefore a double disaster when these ships were wrecked off the Northumbrian coast, because as well as losing the sailors the army began to starve.

It is not impossible therefore, that Harold sent his fleet north in mid-September 1066, perhaps to serve in some similar logistical capacity. It is, however, a notion based on one word in the Chronicle – a word that could easily be interpreted in a different way, in a source that, on every other occasion that it describes the deployment of ships, does so in clear and unambiguous terms. If the fleet was sent north, it was highly unlikely that Harold went with it, based on the Chronicle’s failure to say so, and a comparison with the way other kings of England operated both before and after the Conquest.

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Licence is right, and that Harold did send some ships north. What role did they play in the events that followed? Licence contends that, after the battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold used his fleet to sail his troops back south, rather than marching them south as is generally believed. There is no ambiguity about his argument here. His article for The Conversation begins ‘Is the biggest march in English history a myth? My research shows King Harold sailed down to the Battle of Hastings’.

Given the confidence of this statement, it may surprise readers to know that there is nothing in the way of evidence to support it. Sadly, the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle stops after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. In disappointment we turn to the shorter accounts in the D and E versions, which are anything but clear. The D version doesn’t mention Harold’s journey south at all – it says only that the king was told William had landed in Sussex and so assembled a large army and came to oppose him. The E Version is hardly any more helpful, saying simply ‘Harold came from the north’.

Any explanation as to how Harold returned from Yorkshire to London is, therefore, based entirely on assumption. So why does Licence think the king must have sailed his army south?

It boils down to simple maths. Harold won the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later, on 28 September, William the Conqueror and the Normans landed on the Sussex coast at Pevensey. From Pevensey to York is about 270 miles. Assuming Harold was still somewhere in the vicinity of York, and not already advancing southwards, we might suppose that he learned about the Norman landing three or four days later. News could travel fast in the Middle Ages, especially if it was urgent. If the messengers did not spare the horses, Harold could have known about the Norman invasion by 1 or 2 October.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October. If Harold set out immediately, that would have given him a maximum of about twelve days. But several chronicle accounts state that, before advancing to Hastings, the king spent some time in London – six days, according to the early twelfth-century chronicler Orderic Vitalis. If Orderic is correct, then Harold must have covered the 200 miles between York and London in just four or five days.

It would have been impossible to march infantry at a rate of 40 or 50 miles a day. The notion that Harold achieved this feat by ‘forced marches’ is an idea dreamed up by Victorian scholars and often repeated in more recent books on the Norman Conquest. Licence is therefore quite right to reject it.

He is not, however, as original as he suggests. In my book on the Conquest I made exactly this point – again, without feeling that I was saying anything particularly novel.

Where Prof Licence and I differ is in our opinion of how Harold managed to travel south so quickly. He thinks that the king must have sailed his army from Yorkshire to London, using the fleet which he believes had sailed to Yorkshire a fortnight earlier.

My contention is that we do not need to invoke this particular plot device, because it is highly unlikely that Harold still had an army by early October.

Having defeated the Norwegians on 25 September, the king had no need of an army. The dragon had been slain. Why would he keep several thousand men with him, all of whom needed to be fed and sheltered from one day to the next? No doubt we can imagine some sort of victory feast on the evening of 25 September but, since we are dealing only with assumptions, the most reasonable one is that Harold dismissed his infantry a day or so later, just as he had done on 8 September when he was unable to keep them together for lack of provisions. This is exactly what we see kings doing in later medieval centuries when we have day-to-day financial records. As soon as the campaign is over, the army is dismissed.

When Harold was informed about the Norman landing at the start of October, therefore, his conscript soldiers had probably already been dispersed several days earlier. The men who remained with him would have been his household troops, or housecarls – professional soldiers, with mail-shirts, expensive weapons – and horses. The simplest explanation for the how these men travelled to London in a matter of days is that they rode there. As the itineraries of later medieval kings show, it was perfectly possible for a mounted household to cover 30 or 40 miles a day, especially if the fate of a kingdom hung in the balance.

Once Harold arrived in London, he would have needed to call up more infantry from the southern counties. They would have taken time to arrive, but Harold, all the chroniclers agree, was too impatient to wait, and felt that a surprise attack on the Norman camp at Hastings was his best strategy. After all, a surprise attack on the Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge had just won him a great victory. On this occasion, however, he was outgeneralled. By sending scouts out into the countryside, William learned of the English king’s approach and set out from Hastings the next morning to confront him. The two armies met on a hill seven miles northwest of Hastings, known forever after as Battle.

 

Conclusions:

1. Prof Licence is quite right that Harold did not disband his fleet on 8 September and sent it to London. But it seems to me this is a common position amongst modern historians, if not Victorian ones.

2. He may be right in believing that Harold sent this fleet from London to Tadcaster, but his belief rests on a single word in the Chronicle, and other interpretations are possible. It is extremely unlikely, based on the Chronicle’s testimony, and a comparison with the behaviour of other kings, that Harold himself sailed to Yorkshire.

3. Licence is also correct to observe that Harold cannot have marched infantry from Yorkshire to Sussex in the short space of time between Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Again, however, this is by no means an original insight.

4. His belief that Harold must have sailed his army from Yorkshire to London is simply a theory, and not one that seems very compelling. Had the king pulled off such an audacious feat, transporting thousands of men by sea in a matter of days, it seems likely that at least one chronicler, Norman or English, would have mentioned it. The likelier and more mundane solution is that the army that beat the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge had already been disbanded, and Harold and his housecarls rode south in a rapid but otherwise unremarkable manner.