When Harold Godwinson marched to Hastings on 14 October 1066 he brought with him thousands of men. Who were these warriors and why did they fight on behalf of their king?
By Richard Abels
For a battle as famous as Hastings, and one as well supported by contemporary and near-contemporary sources, it is surprising how little we can say with any certainty about the numbers and identities of the English who fought there, or the composition of Harold’s forces. No eleventh- or twelfth-century narrative provides reliable figures for troop strengths. Depending on the source, Harold either levied a great army from throughout the kingdom (so the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D text, under 1066, and William of Poitiers), or rushed into battle with too few troops (so John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury). The few accounts that provide actual figures are wildly exaggerated, which is par for the course for medieval sources. The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a poem that may have been written shortly after the battle, tells us that Duke William led an army of 150,000, and faced an English army of 1,200,000. Master Wace, writing in the 1170s, places the English forces at a mere 400,000. William of Poitiers, who served Duke William first as a soldier and later as a chaplain, is only slightly more credible. He praises William for providing supplies at his own expense for 50,000 men-at-arms during their month-long stay in camp at Dives. That number swells to 60,000 on the eve of battle.
Unsurprisingly, modern historians have also offered widely divergent estimates of numbers, although a scholarly consensus seems to have settled on 6,000-8,000 on each side. This figure, however, is merely a guess based upon the topography of the ridge on which the English deployed and the manner in which we believe they fought. Since the length of the English line of battle and the depth and density of their formation are matters of conjecture, one ought not to place too great a weight upon these ‘textbook’ battle strengths. Nonetheless, 6,000-8,000 strikes me as reasonable, given the military administrative machinery available to King Harold on the eve of the Conquest.
Fyrdmen and housecarls
English warriors defending a hill from Norman cavalry in the Bayeux Tapestry
Harold’s army at Hastings consisted of landowners, whose service derived either from tenurial or personal obligation, and the household retinues of the king, his earls, and other magnates. The sources of military obligation in the late Anglo-Saxon state were tenurial, territorial, and personal. The greatest men in the realm undoubtedly served out of ‘love and loyalty’ to their royal lord. The majority of the soldiers that made up a royal army (fyrd) in 1066 would have been raised through summonses to the owners of “bookland” – that is, hereditary estates that owed the “common burdens” of fyrd-service, bridge-work, and fortification-work – and to the possessors of royal “loanland,” dependent tenures held directly from the king. Those who held great estates, however, could not acquit their military obligation through personal service alone. The king required such men to bring to the host a contingent of warriors, the number of which was determined through assessments levied on the landowner’s property roughly approximating its value.
Conversely, Domesday Book shows us that landowners who held less than five hides of land might be required to join together to provide a soldier to the king.
The military obligation of the owners of bookland and royal loanland can perhaps best be thought of as a land tax. Domesday Book records that in Berkshire, “if the king sent an army anywhere, only one soldier (miles) went from five hides, and for his provision or pay (eius uictum uel stipendium), four shillings were given him for each hide for his two months of service.” Whether or not this was a “national” recruitment-rule or merely local custom in Berkshire, from this and other evidence from Domesday Book we can be fairly certain that military service was levied on the basis of land units that roughly reflected actual economic conditions. Wealthy thegns probably turned to their tenants or less wealthy neighbors to fill their quota of soldiers. The pay specified by Domesday Book amounted to the annual revenue produced by a one-hide estate. Although the leaders of the fyrd were earls, bishops, abbots, sheriffs, and thegns, most of the rank and file would have been “freemen” or “sokemen.” These were small landowners of the intermediate stratum of society between the thegnly aristocracy and the economically dependent peasantry.
Many, if not most, of the English who fought at Hastings did so to acquit the obligation that arose from their tenures, whether as bookholders or landed retainers. This was undoubtedly true of those named in Domesday Book and the monastic chronicles. Others, however, responded to a different obligation, one that arose more immediately from the lordship bond. These were the household men of the great Anglo-Saxon lords, the earls, bishops, local magnates, and, above all, the king. For lordship played as important a role in the organization and recruitment of fyrds in the eleventh century as did land tenure.
Every great English lord, beginning with the king, had a military household that served as his personal bodyguard and escort in peace and war. King Harold and his brothers undoubtedly rode to Hastings surrounded by their housecarls, who may be the fully armored soldiers that make up the shield wall in the Bayeux Tapestry’s representation of the battle. The size of these military retinues could be considerable. John of Worcester, for instance, relates that 200 of Earl Tostig’s household men were slain by Northumbrian rebels in 1065. One suspects that Harold’s retinue was considerably larger. According to William of Malmesbury, Harold marched south accompanied mainly by stipendiary troops, having alienated the fyrdmen by refusing to share with them the booty from the battle of Stamford Bridge. Whether accurate or not, William of Malmesbury, at least, thought it possible that the bulk of Harold’s troops at Hastings were household retainers.
Given Harold’s rush to meet William and the comment in the E manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Harold engaged in battle before all his army had come, it is likely that the king’s household troops, and those of his brothers and other magnates, may well have assumed an increased importance in this particular battle. The Bayeux Tapestry gives a prominent place to mailed English warriors wielding fierce two-handed battle-axes, the weapon associated with housecarls. William of Poitiers leaves little doubt that these axe-wielding English soldiers impressed the Normans with their bravery, skill, and ferocity. Whatever their percentage, household troops formed the professional core of Harold’s army at Hastings.
Historians have traditionally viewed the royal housecarls as “a unique, closely-knit organization of professional warriors who served the kings of England from Cnut to Harold Godwineson and became the spearhead of the English army.” Much of what we ‘know’ about them, however, is based on late and untrustworthy evidence. Housecarls served Cnut and his successors in both administrative and military capacities. In 1041, for example, King Harthacnut used his housecarls to collect taxes, undoubtedly because he knew that the levy would be unpopular and expected difficulties in its collection. If so, he was correct; two housecarls were murdered by the townspeople of Worcester when they attempted to collect the tax in the borough. Harthacnut responded by sending his earls and the royal housecarls at the head of a large expeditionary force to burn Worcester and ravage the countryside.
In 1054 Edward the Confessor entrusted Earl Siward of Northumbria with a large fleet and a contingent of his housecarls for a full-scale expedition to replace Macbeth as king of the Scots with the exiled prince Malcolm. Siward won a hotly-disputed engagement. Among the dead that the Anglo-Saxon chronicler thought worthy of mention were Siward’s son and nephew, and the fallen royal and comital housecarls. One might infer from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that royal housecarls formed a small military elite, whose participation in a fyrd was not conditional upon the king’s presence. In other words, royal housecarls fought as a tactical unit in addition to serving as the king’s personal bodyguard.
The Anglo-Saxon military recruitment system can perhaps allow us to estimate an order of magnitude for Harold’s forces at Hastings. The total hidage of England recorded in Domesday Book is about 70,000 hides. If Harold called upon all those who owed military service to the Crown, he could, at least in theory, have raised an army of around 14,000 fyrdmen from England’s 70,000 hides. The total hidage of the shires that probably received his summons – East Anglia, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, and the ‘home counties’ – comes to about 29,000 hides, which would translate into 5,900 fyrdmen. To this we might add perhaps another two thousand or so to account for Harold’s housecarls, the household men of his earls and nobles, and the Northumbrian and Mercian fyrdmen who had survived the defeat of Earl Morcar and Earl Edwin at Fulford Gate and were in condition to march south.
The total is in line with most estimates based upon the topography of the battlefield and Harold’s assumed disposition of troops. Of course, the speed with which Harold marched north to York to confront Harald Hardrada, and then south to London to engage with William, gave only limited time for his messengers to contact sheriffs and individual bookholders, and for these fyrdmen to muster and join up with Harold’s forces. The bottom line, I’m afraid, is that the number of troops Harold had with him at Hastings can be no more than supposition.
Arms and Armor
Reconstruction of the Battle of Hastings – photo by Antonio Borrillo / Wikimedia Commons
The best source for the weapons and armor of the English troops at Hastings is the Bayeux Tapestry. As valuable a source as it is, the Bayeux Tapestry is a shaped narrative. (More ink has been spilled on how that narrative is shaped than blood in the battle itself.) Although the Bayeux Tapestry depicts twenty-five Norman archers (five in the main body of the Tapestry and the remainder in the lower margin) and one English archer, the artist’s focus is on the elite troops.
In four scenes, Norman knights on horseback are shown attacking the English shield-wall, with the knights and the English defenders outfitted with the same conical iron helmets with nasal guards, knee-length hauberks, and narrow, tapering “kite” shields. In the early scenes of the battle, the English are shown defending against the French horsemen with spears and shields. In later scenes, as the action becomes increasingly violent, the English are depicted wielding battle-axes and swords. In only three scenes do we see English soldiers without armor or helmets. One of these depicts a single English archer standing behind the shield-wall. This, of course, does not mean that Harold had only one archer or even only a handful. Archers, however, seem to have played a minor role in Anglo-Saxon warfare, and none of the chronicle sources talk about English archers in the battle.
In the second of these scenes, eight Englishmen defend a hill against an attack by Normans on horseback. The inscription leading into this scene reads, “Hic ceciderunt simul Angli et Franci in proelio” (“Here English and French fell together in battle”). Six Englishmen are on the summit, two of whom are shown falling, presumably struck down; two others are at the base of the hill. Three English defenders on the hill are armed with spears and kite shields; the fourth, who is being impaled by a knight, has only a spear, as does one of the two figures standing at the base. The other, however, swings a battle-axe, with a sword strapped to his side. In the final surviving scene of the Bayeux Tapestry, five Englishmen, four on foot and one on horseback, flee the battlefield, pursued by Normans on horseback. Three of the Englishmen hold clubs or cudgels; the other two are unarmed.
It is tempting to see the English soldiers making up the shield-wall as housecarls and king’s thegns, and the unarmored Englishmen in the Bayeux Tapestry as sokemen and freemen. Only men of substance would have been able to afford mail shirts in the eleventh century. Cnut’s Winchester code, written by Archbishop Wulfstan and issued in either 1020 or 1021, provides a tariff of heriots (death duties) owed by different social ranks. Earls and king’s thegns were expected to leave the king multiples of saddled and unsaddled horses, swords, spears, shields, helmets, and mailcoats, as well as cash. “Ordinary” thegns owed a horse, its trappings, and cash, while the heriot of king’s thegns in the Danelaw included horses, a sword, spears, and shields, but no helmet or mailcoat.
The appearance of horses in these heriots ought not to mislead one into believing that the Anglo-Saxons fought on horseback. Horses were important in Anglo-Saxon warfare. They provided mobility and were a sign of status, as attested by heriots. They were also valuable for reconnaissance and for ravaging. However, the evidence suggests that Anglo-Saxon thegns rode to battle but dismounted to fight. Certainly, that was the case at Hastings. Many fyrdmen probably lacked mounts. Harold’s inability to assemble his entire army in time to engage William may have been due to troops on foot lagging behind the mounted fyrd as Harold rushed south to take William by surprise. Only a small minority of fyrdmen would have had helmets, hauberks, and swords. Most would have been armed only with a spear and a shield. The predominance of English soldiers in mailcoats in the Bayeux Tapestry reflects the interest of the designer and his audience and not the reality of the English army at Hastings in 1066.
When Harold Godwinson marched to Hastings on 14 October 1066 he brought with him thousands of men. Who were these warriors and why did they fight on behalf of their king?
By Richard Abels
For a battle as famous as Hastings, and one as well supported by contemporary and near-contemporary sources, it is surprising how little we can say with any certainty about the numbers and identities of the English who fought there, or the composition of Harold’s forces. No eleventh- or twelfth-century narrative provides reliable figures for troop strengths. Depending on the source, Harold either levied a great army from throughout the kingdom (so the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D text, under 1066, and William of Poitiers), or rushed into battle with too few troops (so John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury). The few accounts that provide actual figures are wildly exaggerated, which is par for the course for medieval sources. The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a poem that may have been written shortly after the battle, tells us that Duke William led an army of 150,000, and faced an English army of 1,200,000. Master Wace, writing in the 1170s, places the English forces at a mere 400,000. William of Poitiers, who served Duke William first as a soldier and later as a chaplain, is only slightly more credible. He praises William for providing supplies at his own expense for 50,000 men-at-arms during their month-long stay in camp at Dives. That number swells to 60,000 on the eve of battle.
Unsurprisingly, modern historians have also offered widely divergent estimates of numbers, although a scholarly consensus seems to have settled on 6,000-8,000 on each side. This figure, however, is merely a guess based upon the topography of the ridge on which the English deployed and the manner in which we believe they fought. Since the length of the English line of battle and the depth and density of their formation are matters of conjecture, one ought not to place too great a weight upon these ‘textbook’ battle strengths. Nonetheless, 6,000-8,000 strikes me as reasonable, given the military administrative machinery available to King Harold on the eve of the Conquest.
Fyrdmen and housecarls
Harold’s army at Hastings consisted of landowners, whose service derived either from tenurial or personal obligation, and the household retinues of the king, his earls, and other magnates. The sources of military obligation in the late Anglo-Saxon state were tenurial, territorial, and personal. The greatest men in the realm undoubtedly served out of ‘love and loyalty’ to their royal lord. The majority of the soldiers that made up a royal army (fyrd) in 1066 would have been raised through summonses to the owners of “bookland” – that is, hereditary estates that owed the “common burdens” of fyrd-service, bridge-work, and fortification-work – and to the possessors of royal “loanland,” dependent tenures held directly from the king. Those who held great estates, however, could not acquit their military obligation through personal service alone. The king required such men to bring to the host a contingent of warriors, the number of which was determined through assessments levied on the landowner’s property roughly approximating its value.
Conversely, Domesday Book shows us that landowners who held less than five hides of land might be required to join together to provide a soldier to the king.
The military obligation of the owners of bookland and royal loanland can perhaps best be thought of as a land tax. Domesday Book records that in Berkshire, “if the king sent an army anywhere, only one soldier (miles) went from five hides, and for his provision or pay (eius uictum uel stipendium), four shillings were given him for each hide for his two months of service.” Whether or not this was a “national” recruitment-rule or merely local custom in Berkshire, from this and other evidence from Domesday Book we can be fairly certain that military service was levied on the basis of land units that roughly reflected actual economic conditions. Wealthy thegns probably turned to their tenants or less wealthy neighbors to fill their quota of soldiers. The pay specified by Domesday Book amounted to the annual revenue produced by a one-hide estate. Although the leaders of the fyrd were earls, bishops, abbots, sheriffs, and thegns, most of the rank and file would have been “freemen” or “sokemen.” These were small landowners of the intermediate stratum of society between the thegnly aristocracy and the economically dependent peasantry.
Many, if not most, of the English who fought at Hastings did so to acquit the obligation that arose from their tenures, whether as bookholders or landed retainers. This was undoubtedly true of those named in Domesday Book and the monastic chronicles. Others, however, responded to a different obligation, one that arose more immediately from the lordship bond. These were the household men of the great Anglo-Saxon lords, the earls, bishops, local magnates, and, above all, the king. For lordship played as important a role in the organization and recruitment of fyrds in the eleventh century as did land tenure.
Every great English lord, beginning with the king, had a military household that served as his personal bodyguard and escort in peace and war. King Harold and his brothers undoubtedly rode to Hastings surrounded by their housecarls, who may be the fully armored soldiers that make up the shield wall in the Bayeux Tapestry’s representation of the battle. The size of these military retinues could be considerable. John of Worcester, for instance, relates that 200 of Earl Tostig’s household men were slain by Northumbrian rebels in 1065. One suspects that Harold’s retinue was considerably larger. According to William of Malmesbury, Harold marched south accompanied mainly by stipendiary troops, having alienated the fyrdmen by refusing to share with them the booty from the battle of Stamford Bridge. Whether accurate or not, William of Malmesbury, at least, thought it possible that the bulk of Harold’s troops at Hastings were household retainers.
Given Harold’s rush to meet William and the comment in the E manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Harold engaged in battle before all his army had come, it is likely that the king’s household troops, and those of his brothers and other magnates, may well have assumed an increased importance in this particular battle. The Bayeux Tapestry gives a prominent place to mailed English warriors wielding fierce two-handed battle-axes, the weapon associated with housecarls. William of Poitiers leaves little doubt that these axe-wielding English soldiers impressed the Normans with their bravery, skill, and ferocity. Whatever their percentage, household troops formed the professional core of Harold’s army at Hastings.
Historians have traditionally viewed the royal housecarls as “a unique, closely-knit organization of professional warriors who served the kings of England from Cnut to Harold Godwineson and became the spearhead of the English army.” Much of what we ‘know’ about them, however, is based on late and untrustworthy evidence. Housecarls served Cnut and his successors in both administrative and military capacities. In 1041, for example, King Harthacnut used his housecarls to collect taxes, undoubtedly because he knew that the levy would be unpopular and expected difficulties in its collection. If so, he was correct; two housecarls were murdered by the townspeople of Worcester when they attempted to collect the tax in the borough. Harthacnut responded by sending his earls and the royal housecarls at the head of a large expeditionary force to burn Worcester and ravage the countryside.
In 1054 Edward the Confessor entrusted Earl Siward of Northumbria with a large fleet and a contingent of his housecarls for a full-scale expedition to replace Macbeth as king of the Scots with the exiled prince Malcolm. Siward won a hotly-disputed engagement. Among the dead that the Anglo-Saxon chronicler thought worthy of mention were Siward’s son and nephew, and the fallen royal and comital housecarls. One might infer from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that royal housecarls formed a small military elite, whose participation in a fyrd was not conditional upon the king’s presence. In other words, royal housecarls fought as a tactical unit in addition to serving as the king’s personal bodyguard.
The Anglo-Saxon military recruitment system can perhaps allow us to estimate an order of magnitude for Harold’s forces at Hastings. The total hidage of England recorded in Domesday Book is about 70,000 hides. If Harold called upon all those who owed military service to the Crown, he could, at least in theory, have raised an army of around 14,000 fyrdmen from England’s 70,000 hides. The total hidage of the shires that probably received his summons – East Anglia, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, and the ‘home counties’ – comes to about 29,000 hides, which would translate into 5,900 fyrdmen. To this we might add perhaps another two thousand or so to account for Harold’s housecarls, the household men of his earls and nobles, and the Northumbrian and Mercian fyrdmen who had survived the defeat of Earl Morcar and Earl Edwin at Fulford Gate and were in condition to march south.
The total is in line with most estimates based upon the topography of the battlefield and Harold’s assumed disposition of troops. Of course, the speed with which Harold marched north to York to confront Harald Hardrada, and then south to London to engage with William, gave only limited time for his messengers to contact sheriffs and individual bookholders, and for these fyrdmen to muster and join up with Harold’s forces. The bottom line, I’m afraid, is that the number of troops Harold had with him at Hastings can be no more than supposition.
Arms and Armor
The best source for the weapons and armor of the English troops at Hastings is the Bayeux Tapestry. As valuable a source as it is, the Bayeux Tapestry is a shaped narrative. (More ink has been spilled on how that narrative is shaped than blood in the battle itself.) Although the Bayeux Tapestry depicts twenty-five Norman archers (five in the main body of the Tapestry and the remainder in the lower margin) and one English archer, the artist’s focus is on the elite troops.
In four scenes, Norman knights on horseback are shown attacking the English shield-wall, with the knights and the English defenders outfitted with the same conical iron helmets with nasal guards, knee-length hauberks, and narrow, tapering “kite” shields. In the early scenes of the battle, the English are shown defending against the French horsemen with spears and shields. In later scenes, as the action becomes increasingly violent, the English are depicted wielding battle-axes and swords. In only three scenes do we see English soldiers without armor or helmets. One of these depicts a single English archer standing behind the shield-wall. This, of course, does not mean that Harold had only one archer or even only a handful. Archers, however, seem to have played a minor role in Anglo-Saxon warfare, and none of the chronicle sources talk about English archers in the battle.
In the second of these scenes, eight Englishmen defend a hill against an attack by Normans on horseback. The inscription leading into this scene reads, “Hic ceciderunt simul Angli et Franci in proelio” (“Here English and French fell together in battle”). Six Englishmen are on the summit, two of whom are shown falling, presumably struck down; two others are at the base of the hill. Three English defenders on the hill are armed with spears and kite shields; the fourth, who is being impaled by a knight, has only a spear, as does one of the two figures standing at the base. The other, however, swings a battle-axe, with a sword strapped to his side. In the final surviving scene of the Bayeux Tapestry, five Englishmen, four on foot and one on horseback, flee the battlefield, pursued by Normans on horseback. Three of the Englishmen hold clubs or cudgels; the other two are unarmed.
It is tempting to see the English soldiers making up the shield-wall as housecarls and king’s thegns, and the unarmored Englishmen in the Bayeux Tapestry as sokemen and freemen. Only men of substance would have been able to afford mail shirts in the eleventh century. Cnut’s Winchester code, written by Archbishop Wulfstan and issued in either 1020 or 1021, provides a tariff of heriots (death duties) owed by different social ranks. Earls and king’s thegns were expected to leave the king multiples of saddled and unsaddled horses, swords, spears, shields, helmets, and mailcoats, as well as cash. “Ordinary” thegns owed a horse, its trappings, and cash, while the heriot of king’s thegns in the Danelaw included horses, a sword, spears, and shields, but no helmet or mailcoat.
The appearance of horses in these heriots ought not to mislead one into believing that the Anglo-Saxons fought on horseback. Horses were important in Anglo-Saxon warfare. They provided mobility and were a sign of status, as attested by heriots. They were also valuable for reconnaissance and for ravaging. However, the evidence suggests that Anglo-Saxon thegns rode to battle but dismounted to fight. Certainly, that was the case at Hastings. Many fyrdmen probably lacked mounts. Harold’s inability to assemble his entire army in time to engage William may have been due to troops on foot lagging behind the mounted fyrd as Harold rushed south to take William by surprise. Only a small minority of fyrdmen would have had helmets, hauberks, and swords. Most would have been armed only with a spear and a shield. The predominance of English soldiers in mailcoats in the Bayeux Tapestry reflects the interest of the designer and his audience and not the reality of the English army at Hastings in 1066.
Richard Abels is professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy and a medieval historian. He now hosts the podcast ’tis but a scratch: Fact and Fiction about the Middle Ages.
This article was first published in Medieval Warfare magazine. We thank Professor Abels for his permission to republish it.
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