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When a Battle Changed Everything · Ebbs of History

• Jason: now. We ready? Yeah. Okay. Welcome back, history lovers, to the Ebbs of History, the show where we dig up the strangest, wildest, and creepiest true stories the past has to offer. From dancing plagues to pirate queens, you'll laugh, you'll gasp, and you'll love my impeccable dad jokes. But mostly you'll learn that history is way cooler than your textbook, let on. We are history loving hosts, Zoe. Gavin and I'm Jason. This is the Ebbs of History. Ninety five. Sorry. Zoe, Gavin, how was everyone's week? Good. It was good. I had something for my like competitive improv and we spent the whole day kind of like it was like an hour away, but it was super fun, but it was really, really hot because we're having a really bad heat wave right now. Yes, we are. So Thank goodness our air conditioning is working. imagine if it wasn't. Like that would have been ten times worse than it was. That's right. And I can't even imagine that. And then obviously I had like four hours of homework today because I missed out on a day yesterday 'cause we w I was do out there all day. So yeah. really not much. I got a hundred percent of my math test, which I was happy about. Very good. Things happened Just can't think. But like nothing happened. We stayed at grandma's house. Yep, we did we went dog watching. yeah. For the weekend. Glad to be home though. September twenty eighth, ten sixty six, Pevensey Bay on the south coast of England. The sun is rising, the beach is empty, and then slowly on the horizon, Ships start to appear. Then more. Then more. Then hundreds. A fleet of around 700 Norman ships, packed with about 7,000 fighting men and 2,000 horses. Are sailing into an undefended English beach. There is nobody there to stop them, because Harold's entire army is 250 miles north in York, celebrating the greatest military victory of his life. This is episode 5. This is the 18 days that changed English history forever. September 28th to October 14th, 1066. We're going to cover one of the most famous battles in the history of warfare, a king's brutal death, a body so mutilated his own wife had to identify it by secret marks, and a coronation that ends with Westminster Abbey on fire and the new king cowering alone at the altar. But first, William has to get off the boat. picture this. Duke William of Normandy has been waiting two months for the wind to shift. He's in his late thirties, balding and a little chunky. His mom was a tanner's daughter, which is gonna come up later when people want to insult him. He is sailing on his flagship called the Mora, which was a gift from his wife Matilda. And the figurehead on the prow is a brass statue of a child holding a drawn bow aimed straight at England. Subtle, right? Yeah, very. Yes. The ship hits the beach at Pevensey. William, who spent two months praying for this exact moment, this glorious dramatic landing, prepares to finally step onto English soil. He steps off the boat and he immediately trips and falls flat on his face, right in the wet sand. Oof. His men go dead silent. Because in the medieval world, this is an extremely bad omen. The Duke fell on his face on the day of the invasion, yikes. God is mad at you, bro. It's also just embarrassing. Yes. Like that's just like an aura loss. And William, sitting in the sand, soaking wet, having just face planted in front of 7,000 armed warriors, thinks fast. He grabs two giant handfuls of English sand. He stands up, he holds them over his head, and he shouts By the splendor of God, I have just seized England with my bare hands. The earth of England is in my fists. boy. His men, who have five seconds ago thought God had cursed the whole entire expedition, cheer wildly. The omen has been reversed. The conquest is on. William brilliantly pivoted from I just fell down to I just performed a magical land claiming ritual. He's a PR master. That's exactly right. Yeah. But Interestingly, this exact same story where the leader trips on the beach, his men panic, and he grabs sand and claims he is seizing the land was told about Julius Caesar a thousand years before when he landed in Africa. Interesting. It's interesting that those two draw parallels to each other. That's right. So either William knew the Caesar story and pulled the same move on purpose, or his propagandas later just copy pasted Caesar's quick thinking. onto William to make him look good. Probably the second one. Yeah. But it might be the first one. Mm-hmm. Either way, bonus history points for using a thousand year old recovery line and getting away with it. Yeah, I just think it's interesting, like those two using the same like tactic. Yeah. I don't know. There's there's gotta be a parallel there somewhere. I'm sure there is, yeah. Who like, you know, I just don't know enough about either side. Mm-hmm. So I can't fully draw that parallel but like I just see that there's one there. I just don't have the words to like actually William's army builds a fortified camp inside an old Roman fort at Pevensey. William had brought a flat pack fortified camps along with him on the boats. Kinda like IKEA furniture, where it comes in flat packages that you have to assemble when you get home. They're easier for transportation. When mom and I went to Pevensey and battled the site of Battle of Hastings, we started calling these packin' plays. Anyway. William marches east to Hastings, builds another pack in play, and starts raiding the countryside, burning villages, taking food. The strategy's simple. Hit Harold's personal lands in the south of England and make it personal. Force Harold to march south and fight before he is ready. Meanwhile, Harold has been at a victory feast in New York for three days. On the morning of october first or second, exhausted messengers ride into the city. The Normans have landed, they're burning your village. the South is undefended. Harold had just done one of the most legendary force marches in all of history northward. A hundred and ninety miles in four days. Just to fight Harald Hardrata. His army is exhausted. They're wounded. They're still drunk on victory wine. Many of his housecarls, or his elite professional soldiers, are dead or wounded at Stamford Bridge. His brother, Gerth, the smart one, says, Harold, let me lead the army south. You stay here, rest and raise a fresh fjord. If I lose, you still have an army. If we both lose, England is over. What do you think Carol said? Let's do that. Cause that's the smart thing to do. Take like a little bit of your crew and like So you still have like a safety net of people? And then 'cause it's most likely they're gonna lose because they're not fully ready. So then they come in almost with a second wave, like, ooh, you're not ready for that, are you? Okay. I feel like knowing history, it's gonna be the exact opposite of what Zoe said. I'm going all in on the attack, you know. Well, you're right, Gavin. Harold says no. my god. Harold is going to fight this himself. He says it would be cowardly to let his brother fight for him. So Harold does it again. The English army marches south, two hundred and fifty miles this time. They cover it in roughly a week, picking up reinforcements as they go. By October thirteenth, they reach a place called Caldbeck Hill. It's about seven miles north of the actual city of Hastings. They've marched four hundred and forty miles in three weeks and fought a major battle in the middle. They are wrecked, but they have arrived. Harold takes position on a low ridge called Senlac Hill. It's good ground, it's steep. His shield wall, the famous English shield wall, where heavily armored housecarls stand shoulder to shoulder with overlapping shields and two handed battle axes, forms across the top of the ridge. 8,000 men. William marches up from the south on the morning of october fourteenth with roughly the same number of men, But William has cavalry. Do you guys know what cavalry is? People on horses? That's right. Armored knights on horses. But William also has archers. Harold has almost no archers because Harold had to leave most of them in York and the English fighting style at the time Does not really use him anyway. He doesn't have any cavalry either. Harold had men with spears and axes standing on a hill, and that's it. The two armies face each other across the field. It's about nine in the morning on October 14th, 1066, and the Battle of Hastings starts in the dumbest way possible. Wait, d didn't Harold have the high ground though? He did, yeah. Yeah. So he's up on top of the hill on Senlac Hill. And actually Senlac, I didn't have this in my notes, but Senlac is like old English, like really old English, like Anglo Saxon English for sand hill or sand lake, because it used to be a lake. So you think about a lake, you got the shore and then it goes down into the water, right? So William is down in the water part, what used to be a a lake. Interesting. And Harold's up on top at the shoreline, that used to be the shoreline. A guy named Talifer rides out from the Norman lines alone, all by himself, toward the entire English shield wall. And Tallafer is not a knight. He's William's jester, his court entertainer, a ganglière, which is the medieval French for a guy who juggles and sings funny songs. Now, medieval jesters were not just clowns. They were also professional soldiers. But Talifer is committing. He rides up towards a seven thousand angry Englishman, he pulls out his sword, and he starts juggling it. Tossing it up, catching it, tossing it up, catching it, singing at the top of his lungs the song of Roland, the s a famous French poem about a great hero dying in battle, while juggling a sword on horseback in front of an entire army. He's taunting them. He's doing medieval insult comedy at the English. And the English are watching this like, what is happening right now? Eventually, one English soldier loses his patience, breaks ranks, and charges. Califord drops the juggling act, kills him with one swing, and then, still alone, charges the English shield wall all by himself, still singing, and stabs at least four more Englishmen before he is finally cut to pieces. My god. Isn't that crazy? Like absolute legend. Right? my god. He knew he was going to die that day. Yeah. And he was going to be the first Norman to die. Yeah. He made sure of it. It's like the like in like a video game, like, you're like the most like toxic person ever. Leroy Jenkins. It it's not even that. It's like when like In Fortnite when you like emotes on someone when emotes on s when you kill them. And it's just like I hate it. The Battle of Hastings has officially been started by a juggling stand up comedian who died singing. The Normans watching their court gesture die heroically, cheer. The battle begins for real. Quick tangent to tell you something amazing because it's a really cool trivia nugget. Nine hundred years later, in nineteen forty-four, the Allied forces in World War II launched D-Day from a beach in Normandy. The same beach Talifer had sailed from. And the supreme commander of that invasion was a guy named Do you guys know? Who was the Supreme Cand commander of World War Two? Tollifer. No. In World War Two. Of what side? Well sorry. The Supreme Allied Commander. McCarthy? No, he was in the Pacific. Never mind. And the supreme allied commander of that invasion was a guy named Eisenhower? Dwight D. Eisenhower. I know he was a president. He was a president later on, yeah. So Talifer translates from French as hewer of iron. Basically, he you know, an iron an iron maker. Uh-huh. And Eisenhower in German translates as Ironmaker. Hewer of iron. Whoa. Same beach, same name, nine centuries apart. You cannot tell me the history does not repeat itself. That's so cool. Cool little tidbit, right? That is that makes my like history heart so happy. I'm like, my gosh. That is very interesting. Yes. All right, back to the battle. William's strategies is straightforward. Archer shoot the English shield wall full of arrows, then infantry attack uphill, then cavalry charges. Rinse and repeat. It doesn't work. Okay, let's talk about the shield wall because shield wall sounds like something out of a video game and it's really not. And it was it's something that if you guys study history and it seems like you're going to, Zoe, for at least Zoe, for a very long time, Shield Wall is going to come up an entire lot. So much. So here's how you build one. You take a few thousand men, you line them up shoulder to shoulder, so tight that you cannot stick your elbows out. Every man is carrying a round wooden shield and he holds it so that it overlaps the shield of the man beside him. Your shield covers your left side, your neighbor's shield covers your right side. Which means, and this is the entire idea, you are not protecting yourself. You're protecting the guy next to you, and he is protecting you. Nobody in a shield wall survives alone. Now stack that eight or ten men deep. And run it for several hundred yards across the top of a ridge. What the Normans are looking at from the bottom of that hill is not really an army. It's it's a really it's a wall. A solid line of painted wood and iron, bristling with spear points, standing on high ground. And this wall is screaming at them. It seems like a very like a viable strategy, like is like at least in this like time period. It was used for hundreds and hundreds thousands of years. Thousands of years. Because that's how until the gun came. Yeah. Pretty much. Like my shield wall drawing. Yeah. That's right. That's exactly right. All right, Gavin. What do you think an army in 1066 yells? Because we actually know what they yell. What do you think they yell? okay. Any anything that's not just noises? Long live the king. Okay. Zoe, any Tan huh. This is like some sort of like thing to get the troops like on the same page. You're actually pretty close. Zoe. It's pretty close. A Norman poet named Wace wrote it down. The English are roaring ut. Ut ut which means out out and Oli Cross, which means holy cross. The Normans are shouting back Dexai God help us. Which given what is about to happen to them is a very reasonable thing to be shouting. The first three ranks in the shield wall are the professionals, the housecarls and the Danes. Behind them, spears. And the men in the back rows are not just standing around waiting their turn. They are stabbing out over and around the shoulders of the men in front of them, jabbing left and right at anything that gets close. So a Norman at the front of that wall is fighting three or four weapons at once, held by people he cannot even see. And then that is so scary. Right? Imagine that. Like the bravery of warfare before guns. Yeah. Is just 'cause you're just having to take it. Unmatched today. Yeah. Yeah. It it Yeah. It yeah. And then there's the axes. The Danish axe. The House Karl's signature weapon. About four feet of wooden handle with a curved iron blade on the end, almost a foot wide. And here's the part everybody gets wrong about it. Would you think that that Four foot long battle axe is heavy. yeah. Yeah. Like you would need to be big and muscular to wield the battle axe. Yeah, like yeah, I'd say so. That's a gavin. Like that's one gavin. Imagine that as a battle axe. Not too much. You're a battle axe, dude. See, just being short has its advantages. You're a battle axe. What? How is that an advantage? Someone just gonna like wield me like a battle axe? Yeah, that's like cool. anyway, it is not heavy. The blade is forged down to about two millimeters thick, and the whole thing weighs somewhere between two and four pounds. Two and four pounds for that big thing. I'm like at a loss for words. Two and one fourth pound? No, no. Two two between between two and four pounds. That's less than a gallon of milk. Yeah. That's weird. All that length is leverage, which means that a housecarl can bring that blade around so fast in a long arc with his entire body behind it. Imagine like you just see someone charging at you and then like they're just spinning and then they are holding like a four foot axe out and they're just like, I don't know, like that sounds like an overwatch bolt, like and they're just spinning and then they're like So what does that actually do to somebody? The Bayou Tapestry answers that question for us. There is a scene on it of a house carl taking a Norman horse's head clean off. One swing. Not the rider, the horse. So that two to four pound axe, when swung properly, could take the head off a horse. The Norman cavalry charges up the hill and gets smashed, and they roll back down. Norman archers shoot uphill into shields. Now here's some personal historiography. When I was on the daylong tour at Pevensey and the and the battlefield, the expert told us that the Normans ran out of arrows. William couldn't use them anymore Because the English didn't have archers, there were no arrows going back to the Norman side. So once the Normans were out of arrows that they had brought with them, that was it. They were done. The only place I have heard this anecdote is from the expert that we hired to give us that tour, and I have not read it anywhere else. That's interesting. Uh-huh. But what lends itself to truth is that it seems that William may have been aware of this because and this is historical fact, he used his archers very sparingly. Way less than he would have and had in other battles that he had fought in his lifetime. And let me tell you, he fought a lot of battles before this. Anyway, the shield wall holds, hours pass, and the Normans are losing. The Normans are losing with their shield wall? No. The Normans are losing the shield wall. Only the English have a shield wall. The the Normans are just losing. The Normans are just losing. They can't get through the shield wall. It's just it's they can't get through the wall. The wall will not break. What I understand. And then in the middle of the afternoon, while the Normans are losing, a rumor sweeps through the Norman army. William is dead. Where this rumor comes from, we do not know. Maybe his horse got hit, maybe someone in his bodyguard fell and got mistaken for him. We don't know for sure. But suddenly the Normans on the left flank hear William is dead and they break. They turn and run downhill away from the English shield wall. William's army is starting to collapse. But here is William's defining moment. The moment that more than anything else is why he gets called the Conqueror. He sees his army breaking. He spurs his horse. He rides into the middle of the fleeing army. He takes off his helmet, holds it up, and shouts, Look at me, I am alive, and with God's help, I will conquer. And his men, seeing that he is still alive, that he is still in the fight, that he just charged into the chaos without a helmet on in the middle of an active battle, they rally. They turn. They reform and the battle continues. Now William starts to outthink Harold. He gets this idea that the only way to break the English shield wall is to get the English off the hill. So he tries a trick. He has his cavalry fake a retreat. They charge uphill, then suddenly they turn and gallop back down, pretending to flee in panic. The English see this, and some of them, including Harold's own brother, Gerth and Leofwin, Assume the Normans are really retreating. They break ranks, they break their part of the shield wall and charge down the hill in pursuit. And as soon as the English are off the hill and out of their shield wall formation, the Norman cavalry wheels around and slaughters them in the open field. This is called the feigned retreat. It's a military tactic. It's a real military maneuver, but one most armies don't have the discipline of pull off. It works perfectly. He actually William was a military genius. So he created that feigned retreat. That was the first time that it was used. Interesting. And there's other military maneuvers that are literally used today, even in modern combat. wow. That William the Conqueror created in the early ten hundreds. That is so I mean, like that's crazy. Isn't it how it's been almost a thousand years and people are still using that military tack. In modern times. Yes. With guns and drones and radar and like and nukes, they're still using the it one specifically that I'm thinking about is the pincer move. He created the pincer move. They still use it today. Just nuts. That's just crazy. It's like what's i if it's not provoked, don't fix it. Right. You know. That's why I said I wanna do an episode on just William because it I could totally do it and it's little facts like that that are just Yeah, he was a genius, a military genius. This is making my history heart so happy. William does the feigned retreat and again an hour later. The shield wall is starting to break apart. Harold's brothers, Gerth and Leoflin, are dead, and the English start dying in real numbers. All right. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon now. They've been fighting since nine in the morning. William is starting to run out of time. The part that nobody tells you about the Battle of Hastings is that it had been going on for six hours at this time at this point. Six hours. how long do you think most medieval battles were? Maybe like thirty minutes to an hour. Okay. Yeah, I would kind of agree, maybe. About an hour. Normally a medieval battle lasts about an hour. This was already an hour six. This one had been grinding since nine that morning and the English were still standing on that hill. and on October fourteenth, ten sixty six, the sun sets at four fifty four PM. So he's got about two hours left before daylight ends. So here's the thing you have to understand. When the sun goes down. The moon comes up. Sorry. When the sun goes down, William does not just lose the light. He loses the war. Why? Why can't he pull back, get a good night's sleep, and try again tomorrow? What do you think? 'Cause if if he pulls back, they'll just like attack him. Not at night, no, not really. And he'll kinda like lose his positioning. Okay. Could it be something about his ego? Like he just does he just can't like actually like physically can't do it because of like, I'm just like i if if I retreat now, they're gonna think I'm less than just like something like that. yeah, I'm sure that has something to do with it. Cause he was very egotistical. Cause William seems like a total drama king. Yes, he is. Why can't he try again tomorrow? Because there is no tomorrow. Not for William. The world will end tomorrow. I've got five reasons why I'm gonna give you guys right now. And the reason I'm going so deep into this part was because this is the one thing that I I when I was learning about all this stuff and reading and deeply, you know, getting into it, always kind of scratched the back of my head like, wait a minute. Why couldn't he just fight the next day? Like wait exactly, like wait till the next day and continue the battle. Rest up challenge. Let everyone rest up, like back fresh. All right. So Yeah, but that's also giving hail done me that opportunity. That's one of the reasons. Let me go through Medieval battles stopped at dark. There were no uniforms in ten sixty six. Normans and Englishmen wore the same chainmail, carried the same kite shield, swung the same swords. You know how the biotapestry tells the two sides apart? Haircuts. Wow. The Normans shaved the back of their heads. The English wore big droopy mustaches. So on a dark muddy hillside, your only way to identify an enemy is to get close enough to check his mustache. Not a great plan. Archers can't aim at what they can't see. Cavalry charging downhill in the dark is just an expensive way to break your horse's legs. Every advantage that William has, the arrows, the knights, the cavalry, switches off at sunset. The second reason is Harold does not have to win. He just has to still be standing. If that shield wall holds until dark, Harold walks off into the woods with his army intact, and he is still the king of England, and William is just a guy camping on the beach. Three, and this is the big one. William cannot be reinforced. Harold can. That's that's that that's the answer right there. If you're gonna pick one, that's the answer. Harold had marched so fast that he fought this battle before his whole army even showed up. Men from the southern shires were still walking toward that hill that very afternoon. The northern Earls, Edwin and Morcar, were raising fresh troops up north. Tomorrow there will be more Englishmen. There will never be no more Normans. Normandy is across the channel, and it took William two months of sitting on a beach waiting for the right wind just to get across at once. Nobody's coming to help him. Four, he already ate the neighborhood. For two and a half weeks the Normans had been burning and looting the south of England, partly to drag Harold south, but also partly to feed seven thousand men and two thousand horses. Twenty years later, when William's clerk writes up the doomsday book, which we'll go over in the next episode, those South Coast villages are still recorded as worth less than they were in ten sixty six. Twenty years later. Wow. He wrecked his own pantry. There's nothing left out there to eat, so he cannot feed his army anymore. So basically he had no supplies. Yeah. Well, because it took him it took two and a half weeks from the time he landed to the battle. Feeding 7,000 people and 2,000 horses takes a lot. And the last one, and this is barely even an army. It's a coalition for William. Normans, Bretons, Flemings. French adventurers, a whole lot of second sons with no inheritance, who signed up because William promised them English land. Men like that follow a winner. And they had already broken once that day on nothing but a rumor. An army like that backing down a hill at nightfall, an enemy country with winter coming and nothing to eat. That army does not regroup. It falls apart on the walk home. So there we are, three o'clock in the afternoon, the light is going, and William has about ninety minutes to conquer England or lose absolutely everything permanently, probably including his head. So what do you think he he does here? Faced with either losing the battle and pretty much dying, or fighting on. What what do you think he does? Well, obviously fighting on. Well, yeah, but like how? Like Be a be a military strategist right now and think about it. You've got nothing else to lose. What do you do? Flank him. Or it's either he flanks them or he just charges. He just goes. I feel like he like Voices, but in kind of like a strategic way. Like I know that sounds like two opposites. Okay. But like here's what he does. Gorilla warfares it, just gets all in. Here's what he does. He goes all in. Yeah. Every night, every foot soldier, every archer that he has left. Remember, arrows are the one thing that he cannot resupply. He tells them to change the angle of their shots. All day they've been shooting flat. straight uphill into the shield wall shields. And all day their arrows had dunked harmlessly into oak. So now point the bows at the sky, shoot high, arc them up over the shield wall, and let them fall out of the clouds onto the Englishmen that are behind the shield wall. And this is clever and it's awful. Because think about what it does to the men on that hill. A shield protects what is in front of you It cannot protect what is above you. So an English soldier now has an impossible choice. Hold your shield forward and the arrows come down on your head. Lift your shield overhead and your body is wide open to a knight riding at you with a lance. So William's doing all this at one time for one last ditch effort. He just throws everything that he has at the shield wall. with the extra tactic of having the arrows come in from the top so that the shield wall has to defend up or down. And if they go up, they get stabbed by a horseman. If they go down they get punctured by arrows. It's like pick your poison. Pick your poison, exactly. Great strategy, right? Yeah. Like you can't defend against that unless you have two different shields. That's right. Which they didn't. They weren't even covering themselves. So it was another person that could have just moved the shield out of the way and just like Yes. Just left them hang. And the men in the back ranks who had stood there all day feeling perfectly safe because they had done nothing all day long are suddenly not safe at all because arrows are dropping on them out of the empty sky. And worst of all, you have to look up. You can't help it. When something is falling on you, your head comes up, your chin lifts, and for one second, your face is turned toward the sky and into the setting sun. That's another part of the strategy. Into the setting sun. They're looking in they're looking west. So they're facing west and it's blinding them. So those were two main tactics that William used to finally break this shield wall. And looking up into the sun is one of them. And that brings us to Harold. First of all, before we start this, I don't have this written down, but do you guys know how Harold dies? No. Yes. Well, I sort of remember. It was by arrow into his like h head or eye. Like have we talked about this before? What happens next is one of the most famous death scenes in all of history. And we genuinely don't know exactly what happened. The legend, the Bayou Tapestry legend The version every English schoolchild knows is that Harold looks up at the sky to see where the arrows are coming from, and an arrow comes down and it hits him right in the eye. Right through the eye into his brain, King Harold dies on his feet clutching the shaft of the arrow. But modern historians are very skeptical, and here's why. The earliest written account of Harold's death within just a few years of the battle do not mention an arrow at all. They say that Harold was killed in close combat, hacked down by a group of Norman knights, four of them specifically, including William himself by some accounts. They cut him to pieces, like literally dismembered him. His thigh and the medieval sources use the word thy very politely, the historical implication being a very different body part, was cut off and thrown some distance from the body. He was frustrated. His head was severed, his arms were chopped off, by the time the battle was over, what was left of Harold was barely a body. After the battle, William refused to let Harold's mother and family have the corpse for burial. So Harold's common law wife, a famous beauty named Edith Swanneck, was brought to the battlefield to identify the body. And the chronicles say that she identified him by marks known only to her, quote unquote. Tattoos? Deduce Take that how you want. Some historians think it was a birthmark on his butt. Some think it was scars from old wounds. The point is, his face was so destroyed that she could not identify him. So why does the Bayou tapestry, which is the famous version everyone knows, show Harold being shot in the eye with an arrow? It probably thoughts? It probably makes the Normans look a lot better. Yeah. One good reason. Just about to say propaganda. Propaganda. Yeah. The Bayou Tapestry is one hundred percent propaganda. Here's the wild theory, and it's supported by detailed copies of the tapestry made back in the 1700s. The arrow may have been added later on. The earliest careful drawings of the tapestry made before some restoration work do not show the arrow at all. Just Harold standing next to the words King Harold is killed. In Latin, of course. Someone added the arrow to the tapestry maybe a century after it was made. And here's why they may have added it. In medieval law, the punishment for breaking an oath was being blinded. The penalty for a liar was losing an eye. I remember. Because didn't he make that thing on relics to whipp to William? So he actually to according to the Normans, he broke the he broke the oath. So they added that to his eye. There you go. So it's kind of more of like a symbolic death. Yeah. In Yes. Absolutely. For the tapestry. It's a metaphor. Yeah, that metaphor became history for hundreds of years. People thought that he was shot in the eye with an arrow. Probably didn't happen. Harold in Norman propaganda was the ultimate oathbreaker. He had sworn on holy relics that he would help William become king, and instead he stole the crown. So the arrow in the eye was a Norman moral lesson. This is what happens to oathbreakers. God himself shoots them in the eye. boy. As Zoe oft repeats, history is written by the winners. And sometimes literally sown by the winners. Ooh, I like that. History is sown by I wrote that one for you. Aww, thanks. By nightfall, October 14th, 1066, Harold is dead. His two brothers are dead, and the English shield wall finally collapses. The remaining English soldiers flee into the woods. The English aristocracy has been decimated. and Duke William of Normandy is the master of the battlefield. He has won the Battle of Hastings. But he has not yet won England. And now he has new title. After the battle, William rests his army for five days. He is in shock at how close it actually was. He's waiting for the English to surrender, but they don't. So he starts marching, but not directly to London. He goes the long way around. He marches first east along the south coast, then loops north, burning every village that he passes through. He's trying to terrorize southern England into surrender. By the time he reaches the Thames, the English nobles have figured out what is happening. He's gonna do this no matter what, and so some of them surrender, but most of them flee. The remaining English elites, including Edgar the Eighthling, a teenage member of the old royal family who was technically supposed to be the next heir after Harold. They meet William at a place called Berkhamstead and submit. They formally invite him to be king. After three months of resistance, they have given up. What was his name? Edward the Eighthling. Edgar. Edgar the Aethling. So Aethling is Saxon for throneworthy. It means throneworthy. Like he's the next Aethling is the name last name given to those who are going to be king eventually. So right now it's King Charles the Third, and his son is William. The Aethling. If we were in Anglo Saxon times, he would be William Aethling. William's coronation is set for Christmas Day, ten sixty six, Westminster Abbey. The same building where, eleven months ago, Harold had been crowned. The same building, in fact, where Eddie the Confessor was buried that exact morning, and then Harold was crowned in that afternoon. Westminster Abbey is having an insane year. And William's coronation goes catastrophically wrong. He had built a wooden fortress next to the abbey because he did not trust the English. He had hundreds of Norman knights stationed outside, mounted, armed, ready to attack if there is any sign of trouble. And inside the abbey, the ceremony begins. The Archbishop of York, a guy named Eldred, performs the coronation in two languages. He shouts the question in English to the English nobles: Do you accept William as your king? The English nobles roar back, Yes. then the Bishop of Countenance, a cathedral city in Normandy, shouts the question in French to the Norman knights inside the abbey. Do you accept William as your king? The Normans roar back in French, Hui. The Norman knights outside the Abbey, who do not speak English, who do not speak French quite well enough either, and who are extremely paranoid, hear loud shouting from inside the church. Very loud shouting. In two languages, they cannot tell what is being said, and these guys are sitting on horses armed in a recently conquered enemy capital. So they assume the obvious rebellion. The English are killing the king inside the abbey. That's what they thought. They do the standard Norman response. They set fire to every building near the Abbey. The fire spreads, smoke pours into Westminster Abbey through the windows. The English congregation, hearing screaming and seeing smoke, panics. They think it's an ambush that the Normans are massacring them. They start running for the exits. Half the nobility of England stampedes out of the Abbey, trying to find their families, save their houses, just to escape. Inside the Abbey, William's left standing at the altar. Alone. With Archbishop Eldred, the Archbishop, terrified, who has just had the worst day of his career, is shaking so hard he can barely hold the crown. But he finishes the ceremony. He places the crown on William's head while the city of London burns outside. It's kind of symbolic, isn't it? And the moon's creditful. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis, writing some decades later, says William himself was visibly trembling. He had just won England in three brutal months, and his coronation, the moment that was supposed to confirm his glory, was a complete disaster. But this isn't the end. Historiography. The Battle of Hastings is one of the most documented battles of the entire medieval period, but every single one of the major sources is Norman and has obvious propaganda goals. The main written sources are William of Poitiers' Deeds of Duke William, William of Jumiege's Deeds of the Norman Dukes, and the Carmen de Hastinga Priolo, or The Song of Battle of Hastings, possibly written by Bishop Guy of Amiens within a year or two of the events. So To your point before, there's a little bit more now. Mm-hmm. But this was all written after. Yeah. All written after by one side. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just the, you know, Anglo Saxon Chronicle anymore. Yeah. Or just the bio tapestry. All three are Norman, all three are trying to make William look good, and they often disagree about the specifics. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which is the main English source, treats the battle in less than a paragraph. Probably because writing about it in detail was politically dangerous in a country newly ruled by William. And here's the fun part, Zoe, since he asked that question, I'm gonna give you the entire entry in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. It's that short, you can just give it to us right now. Here it is. Let's go. Meantime, Earl William came up from Normandy into Pebancy on the eve of Saint Michael's Mass, and soon after his landing was effected, they constructed a castle at the port of Hastings. This was then told to King Harold, and he gathered a large force and came to meet him at the estuary of Appledore. William, however, came against him unawares, Air his army was collected, but the king nevertheless very hardly encountered him with the men that would support him. And there was a great slaughter made on either side. There was slain King Harald and Leofwin his brother, and Earl Gerth his brother, with many good men, and the Frenchmen gained the field of battle, as God granted them for the sins of the nation. The entire Anglo Cro Anglo Saxon Chronicle, that's all it says, about the most momentous battle. in medieval history. Because it makes them look bad. Like that's crazy. The Bayou Tapestry, commissioned around 1070, probably by William's half brother, Bishop Odo, is the most famous source, but it's also just Norman propaganda. And as we discussed, some of its most famous details, including the air arrow and Harold's eye, may have been added or modified during later restoration work. The coronation chaos at Westminster is recorded most fully by Orderic Vitalis. Who was writing decades later but had good sources at the Abbey. The story that Harold got that Harold's body was dismembered and identified only by Edith Swannneck, by marks known only to her, comes from Norman chronicler William of Malmesbury and from the Waltham Chronicle, an English source written at the Abbey, where Harold's body was eventually said to be buried. Now, there's a theory that Harold survived Hastings and lived another forty years as a hermit. This c yeah. That's debatable. That sounds new. That sounds like new stuff that they decide to make up. This comes from the twelfth century source called the Vita Haroldi. The life of Harold. And is almost certainly a legend with no actual real sources. That's just propaganda too. It sounds like the author at the end of the book was just like it Yeah. Why why did it why did Harold have to be given a Batman ending? Like Just by one guy. Yeah. Lessons we've learned today. Today's lesson is how thin the margins of history really are. Harold lost the Battle of Hastings, but he lost it in a matter of minutes. If the sun had set thirty minutes earlier, if Harold had survived the day and disappeared into the woods with the remnants of his army, the English nobles would not have submitted. William would have spent another decade fighting a guerrilla war he probably could not win. Everything that came after the Norman aristocracy, half the words in modern English, the entire shape of British history depended on whether one specific king Lived for another thirty minutes or died on one specific hillside on one specific October evening. History is very fragile. The world we live in is the version that survived. But there are millions of other versions that almost happened. Do you either of you have any lessons learned? creativity in battle wins. good one. That's a good one. Like he was down to his last arrows. Mm-hmm. And he goes with a completely new strategy and he wins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anything? Yeah, that was kind of it. We haven't been doing lessons like this, so like I've almost like lost them less than finding muscle in my brain. Yeah, I've I've cut them down because these episodes are so long as is. Time for the Fun Fact Challenge! Gavin, you wanna give us an update? Okay, so last game it was two to one me. Overall per game, it's three to one me. And then overall the score is seven to five me. Okay. You guys know the new rules. Right, remember? Yes. No. I'm gonna read. You can lock in at any time, but you can't go looking through your notes. Mm-hmm. You have to answer right away. If I see you looking at your notes, it automatically goes to the other person. Okay? And you can still you can stop me at any time during the question if you know the answer. This is a quick one, you guys ready? Ready to look for your look through your notes? Yeah, let's go. What was the name of William's ship? Lock locked in. that was Gavin. I locked in too fast. Yeah. I haven't. Okay, Zoe, go ahead. Mora. Mora. O R A. I wrote it down on how to spell it. It was a gift from his wife Matilda. Bonus point. What was the prow's figurehead? It was an arrow pointing straight towards England. Did you get bonus points to that? Okay. There's a brass statue of a child drawing a bow. Question two. Which archbishop actually placed the crown on William's head on Christmas Day too? Locked in. Aldred? Correct. Eldred, what was he the archbishop of? Is this do I have to say this to get the point or no? okay. was he the archbishop Of Canterbury? York. York, I didn't like that. All right. Question three. At what location did the surviving English nobles, including the teenage heir Edgar the Eighthling, formally submit and invite William to be king? Locked in? York? No. I just have the Edgar the Eighthling, the actual heir submitted to Normans. I don't have where they did it. So you both got that wrong. Berkhamstead. yeah, I w I would not have pulled that either. Wait, so what do we do now? Well I already won't. Already won. Yeah. She gets two points, you get none. And we're all tied up for now. And we're all tied up. Until the final episode. For scores. Well, that worked out pretty well, huh? Ooh, the suspense. This day in History! ⁓ Today is October 8th. And there's two really cool ones that are just listen. Okay. 1871. The great Chicago fire begins. That evening a fire starts in or near Patrick and Catherine O'Leary's barn on Decovin Street. Over two days, it destroyed 3.3 square miles of Chicago, kills about 300 people, and leaves a hundred thousand homeless. And no. Mrs. O'Leary's cow probably didn't kick over the lantern. That story was invented by a newspaper reporter who later confessed that he made it up. And when I was growing up, our field trip, we would go field trips to Chicago, downtown Chicago, and we went to the water tower, which is the only building that survived the fire, and they had a whole diorama thing in a in a room where they showed a cow kicking over a lantern and it was just it's It was lies and but it was the accepted truth. And we're teaching that to school children. Anyway, on the exact same day, in the exact same year, in Pashtigo, Wisconsin, a firestorm sweeps through Pashtigo, killing an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 people. More. Way more. Why isn't that the headline? It's the deadliest wildfire in American history. It was so hot that it created fire tornadoes. Fire tornado. That sounds sick. So whoa, look at that thing. But it happened on the same night as Chicago. And so almost nobody remembers it. Chicago's the bigger city. Isn't that c crazy? Yeah. See, that's like the equivalent of giving like a nobleman from like ten sixty six a duly is Locostaco. Like a fire tornado. Like that's gonna give you a heart attack. And then finally in two thousand four, American domestic lifestyle in innovator Martha Stewart reported to federal prison in West Virginia to begin her five month sentence for insider trading. I love those I love those pictures where it's her in her bestie Snoop and they're like, Guess which one is a convicted villain? Yeah, exactly that was funny. And it's not the one you think. All right. William has the crown. He does not have the country. Not yet. There are rebellions coming. There's a whole north that has not given up, And there is a brutal twenty year project ahead to make England Norman. By the time he dies, William will have replaced the entire English ruling class, covered the country in stone castles, counted every cow in England in a book, and rewritten the language you are speaking right now. Make England Norman again. That's all I could think of. Yep. Or if if we burn you, burn with us, because all he does is burn down towns. That's right. But all that comes on the next episode. The last of our six part series. For now, december twenty fifth, ten sixty six, William the Conqueror is the King of England, sitting on a half empty throne in a smoke-filled abbey, while his new capital city burns around him. Welcome to Norman England. Bum bum bum. That's it for this episode. Thanks for traveling through time with us. If you like today's story, share it with a friend, a teacher, or your family. Then come find us on Instagram at Ebbs of History with your show ideas, corrections, and questions. Signing off, this has been your co-host, Gavin, Zoe, and me, Jason. Until next time. Keep wondering. Keep laughing. And keep learning through the Ebbs of History.