Blog

Have you ever stood on a hill and looked down at a battlefield? Not a modern battlefield with trenches and barbed wire, but an ancient one—where men fought hand to hand, shield to shield, with nothing but cold steel between them and eternity?

On October 14, 1066, a hill in Sussex, England, became exactly such a place. The Normans called it Senlac—”blood-lake”—and the name was no exaggeration.

For nearly nine hours, the English army held a defensive line that seemed unbreakable. Shield wall. Interlocked shields. A solid wall of wood and iron that had never been breached. The Normans charged. The Normans retreated. They tried arrows, infantry, cavalry, and feigned flight. Nothing worked.

Until, late in the afternoon, something broke.

The arrow that may or may not have hit King Harold in the eye. The knights who hacked him to pieces on the ground. The shield wall that finally crumbled.

This is the story of that day. The real story—not the Victorian myths, not the romantic paintings, but the gritty, bloody, close-run contest that changed English history forever.

---

Part 1: The Road to Hastings – Three Kings and Two Invasions

The year 1066 did not begin at Hastings. It began with a death.

On January 5, 1066, Edward the Confessor, the aging king of England, died. He left no direct heir . The crown passed to Harold Godwinson, the Earl of Wessex and the most powerful noble in the land. He was crowned the same day .

Two other men believed the crown belonged to them.

One was Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway—a legendary Viking warrior who had fought across Europe and the Middle East. He wanted England back under Scandinavian rule.

The other was William, Duke of Normandy. William claimed that Edward had promised him the throne years earlier, and that Harold had sworn an oath to support his claim . Whether that oath actually happened is disputed—history is written by the victors, after all—but William believed it. Or at least, he used it as his justification.

Harold spent the summer waiting for William to invade. He raised the largest army and fleet England had ever seen and stationed them along the southern coast. But the invasion never came. By September, provisions had run out. The fyrd—the national militia—was sent home. The fleet was sent to London .

Then came the news.

Harald Hardrada had landed in the north. He burned Scarborough to the ground and advanced on York. Harold turned his exhausted army around and marched north—nearly 200 miles, in record time. At Stamford Bridge, on September 25, his men caught the Vikings completely by surprise. The battle was a slaughter. Hardrada was killed. The Viking invasion was over .

Three days later, William landed at Pevensey Bay on the Sussex coast. His landing was unopposed . The English army was still in the north.

Harold turned around again and marched south.

---

Part 2: The Armies – A Clash of Two Worlds

This was not a battle between equals. It was a clash of two completely different military cultures.

The English: Defenders on the Hill

The English army was built around the shield wall—a formation centuries old. Men stood shoulder to shoulder, their shields interlocked to form a solid barrier of wood and iron . Behind that wall stood the housecarls, the elite professional warriors of the king’s court, armed with two-handed Danish axes that could cleave through a horse’s neck and a rider’s helmet in a single blow.

Behind them were the fyrd—the national militia. These were not professional soldiers. They were farmers, craftsmen, villagers who had been conscripted in a time of danger. Many were bare-headed, without mail. They carried spears, axes, and what weapons they could find .

The English fought on foot. They rode to battle, but they dismounted to fight . The horse was transport, not a weapon.

The Normans: Masters of Combined Arms

William’s army was something England had never seen. It was a professional fighting force, built around the heavy cavalry charge—half a ton of horse and armoured rider thundering toward the enemy at speed . The Normans had learned the power of the couched lance: holding a long spear under the arm, using the weight of the horse to drive the point home.

But William’s genius was not just cavalry. He used archers, infantry, and cavalry in combination—wearing down the shield wall from a distance with arrows, then sending in infantry to probe for weaknesses, then unleashing the knights .

William’s army was also international. It included Normans, but also Bretons, Flemings, and Frenchmen—adventurers who had joined the expedition for plunder, land, and Papal blessing. The Pope had blessed William’s invasion, sending him a banner under which to march .

The numbers are uncertain, but estimates suggest William had 10,000 to 14,000 men. Harold, after two exhausting marches and two battles, had perhaps 7,000, and many of those were inexperienced fyrdmen who had never faced a cavalry charge before .

---

Part 3: The Morning – The Shield Wall Holds

The battle began at 9:00 AM.

William’s archers advanced first, firing uphill at the English line. But arrows shot uphill tend to stick in shields or fly overhead. They did little damage . The shield wall held.

Then the infantry attacked. They charged up the hill, hacking and stabbing at the wall of shields. The English housecarls, with their great two-handed axes, cut them down. One Norman knight, charging toward the line, was met by a housecarl who, in the words of the chronicler Robert Wace:

“Rushed straight upon a Norman knight who was armed and riding on a warhorse, and tried with his hatchet of steel to cleave his helmet; but the blow miscarried, and the sharp blade glanced down before the saddle-bow, driving through the horse’s neck to the ground, so that both horse and master fell together to earth” .

Once a knight was down at the edge of the shield wall, he was finished.

Finally, William committed his cavalry. Norman war horses were specially bred stallions, trained to head-butt, kick, and bite. They charged uphill, and the ground shook. But horses shy away from solid objects. They would not simply crash into a wall of shields .

The knights rode along the line, jabbing their lances over the top of the shields, trying to find an opening. They found none.

---

Part 4: The Feigned Flight – The Trick That Brought the Wall Down

There is a moment in the battle that historians still debate. Did the Norman cavalry genuinely break, or did they pretend?

According to Norman accounts, William’s left flank—the Bretons—broke under English pressure and fled. But William rallied them. And then, he used the confusion as a tactic.

The Normans began to feign retreat. They would charge the shield wall, then turn and flee, as if in panic. Some of the English—the less disciplined fyrdmen—broke formation to pursue. They ran down the hill, thinking they were about to slaughter retreating enemies.

Then the Norman cavalry turned around.

Out in the open, away from the protection of the shield wall, the English fyrdmen were slaughtered. The Normans cut them down with lances and swords .

And each time Englishmen ran down the hill, the shield wall grew a little thinner. A little weaker.

---

Part 5: The Death of the King – Arrow or Axe?

This is the most famous part of the story. And it may not be true.

The Bayeux Tapestry—the 230-foot embroidered chronicle of the Norman Conquest—shows a scene that has become iconic: a man standing beneath the words “Here King Harold is killed,” pulling an arrow from his eye .

For centuries, this was the accepted truth. King Harold was shot through the eye by a Norman arrow. It was a dramatic, almost poetic end—the last Anglo-Saxon king, brought down by a lucky shot.

But the tapestry is not a photograph. It is propaganda, commissioned by Normans, embroidered by English women (most scholars believe) . And the arrow may be a later addition.

Examination of the tapestry’s history reveals that the arrow in Harold’s eye was not original to the textile. It was added during 19th-century French repairs. Eighteenth-century reproductions show the figure holding a spear, not an arrow . Conservators may have altered the embroidery to fit the later literary tradition.

What do the earliest sources say?

An early Norman history, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, gives a very different account. It reports that William and four knights broke through the English defences and literally took Harold apart:

“The first of the four, piercing the king’s shield and chest with his lance, drenched the ground with a gushing stream of blood. The second with his sword cut off his head below the protection of his helm. The third liquefied his entrails with his spear. And the fourth cut off his thigh and carried it some distance away” .

This is the account supported by most early sources. Harold was not shot by an arrow. He was hacked to pieces on the ground.

The arrow story appears only later—in the 12th century, more than 50 years after the battle—in the writings of historians like Henry of Huntingdon and Wace. They may have misinterpreted the tapestry, or they may have simply invented a more dramatic death .

We will never know for certain. But the evidence is compelling: the arrow in the eye is probably a myth.

---

Part 6: The Collapse – What Broke the Shield Wall

Whether by arrow or by sword, Harold was dead by late afternoon.

His brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, died beside him . The English army, leaderless and exhausted, finally broke. The shield wall—which had held for nearly nine hours—dissolved into a rout.

The Normans pursued. They cut down the fleeing Englishmen until the sun set.

Contemporary sources suggest the battle was incredibly close. Had Harold survived until nightfall—had the shield wall still stood as darkness gathered—William’s invasion would have failed. He had no reinforcements. His supplies were limited. He would have been trapped on the Sussex coast .

But Harold did not survive.

William ordered his army to rest and prepare for the next day. But the battle was over. England had been conquered.

---

Part 7: The Aftermath – A Kingdom Transformed

William marched to London. The English nobility submitted. On Christmas Day, 1066, William the Conqueror was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.

The Conquest transformed England.

The old Anglo-Saxon nobility was dispossessed. Their lands were given to Norman barons. French became the language of the court, of law, of power. English—the language of the conquered—survived only among the common people.

The Domesday Book, commissioned in 1085, recorded the extent of the Norman land grab. Every manor, every field, every cow was catalogued for taxation.

Castles—stone fortresses—sprouted across the English landscape. The Normans built to dominate. And they did.

But the memory of the shield wall, of the English resistance, of the close-run battle on Senlac Hill, did not die.

---

Conclusion: The Hill That Changed a Nation

Here is what I want you to take away from this story.

The Battle of Hastings was not won by superior technology. It was not won by divine intervention. It was won by a combination of discipline, deception, and the death of a king.

The English shield wall was an extraordinary defensive formation. For nearly nine hours, it absorbed everything the Normans could throw at it. But it had one weakness: it required the men in the wall to stay in place.

The feigned flight exploited that weakness. The Normans tricked the English into breaking their own formation. And once the wall was breached, the cavalry could do its work.

Harold may or may not have been shot in the eye. The arrow is probably a myth—a later addition to the story, made more dramatic by embroidery and embellishment. The truth is uglier. He was hacked down by four knights, his body dismembered on the battlefield.

But whether the death was clean or brutal, the result was the same. The shield wall collapsed. The English resistance ended. William of Normandy became William the Conqueror.

The hill where all this happened is still there. Today, you can visit Battle Abbey, built by William’s order on the site of the battle—on the very spot where Harold fell. You can walk the battlefield, stand on the ridge, look down at the slope where the Normans charged.

And you can think about how close history came to being different.

As Professor Tom Licence put it: “It was a coin toss, really. It could have been William that day. It could have been Harold” .

History turns on small things. A feigned retreat. A broken formation. A king who fell at dusk.

And a shield wall that finally, after nine hours, broke.

---

Battle of Hastings: Key Facts

---

Timeline: 1066 – The Year of Three Battles