all nations have passed, more or less, through the same stages in the up-growth of that military system which is as essential to the political security of the mass as the formation of a police force is necessary for the protection of the individual in civil life. from the outset, the history of human existence has been one of combat.
first, in the earliest of primeval days, archaic man had to contend with mammoth, cave bear, and all the host of extinct mammals primarily for food, and then for safety when the need for clearing them away became more and more apparent as population increased. with this increase in numbers grew also the instinctive hostility between man and man. the desire for conquest is one of his strongest attributes. the stronger has always tried to make the weaker subservient; and as time went on, that desire was accentuated by the wish to possess the women or slaves—the terms were then synonymous—of the weaker family.
it was no mere poetic statement, therefore, that the head of a patriarchal household felt safe with a body of stalwart sons, and was not afraid “to speak with his enemy in the gate.” that old-world text tells volumes, behind which lie sinister pages and details of family feud and rapine.
2 but families segregated together and became tribes; these in their turn formed clans under a general head, and this led to the further development of inter-tribal and clannish contest, of which the greater wars of the present time are the natural outcome.
still, throughout all this pre-historic or semi-historic time, there was no organisation of what is called an army. every able-bodied male was bound to join in the defence of his poor village or district, or, on the other hand, to acquiesce in the general desire of a more courageous or dominant group, and share in the attack on, and despoiling of, some other group weaker or richer than itself. a king of men, a stronger soul, a man with more ambition or more boundless energy than his compeers, carried his fellows, by the divine right of leadership, to war. except as a consequence of his greater bravery, he stood in no one place higher than those he led. the fighting was individual. there were no tactics; there was no systematic military organisation. all fought singly, with a view to the common end of success.
it was only when the character of arms themselves advanced, as civilisation and greater inter-dependence of peoples increased, as communication from point to point improved, rendering combined operations possible, that systematic war began. even then, there was much of the personal element in the matter. the known chief planted his standard, and round it gathered, at first, a mass of subordinate units, led by their chosen sub-chiefs. but even this was the beginning of greater things. organisation, on which the real art of war depends, had arisen. the chief now directed subordinate commanders, and command became subdivided. he no longer led only; he directed, in addition to infusing courage into his men by his personal bravery.
so it has been with the successive races that have fought in those early days on british soil. the first real military system worthy of the name was that which brought woad-clad britons in collision with the military might of rome. but wonderful as the roman organisation was, it seems to3 have left but little permanent trace on the people it had governed and civilised for four hundred years, from the time of c?sar’s first landing to that in which honorius recalled the last legion from the deserted province of britannia to assist the main trunk of the empire. there is little evidence that the saxons met with any more valuable opposition than mere courage, an attribute of little real permanent importance against a foe that had at the least a sort of military organisation. for that the saxons had such is clear. they had learned from the romans indirectly if not directly; and there is a distinct trace of roman influence in the way they arranged a battle. this applies still more to their fighting organisation after they had conquered and subdued the effete defenders of roman britain, before the danes came. though they, too, had succumbed to the enervating influence of peace, they had established a genuine system which had in it the elements of the army as it is, or at least some portion of it. for the army of saxon england was, in all essential respects, a militia; that is to say, a body closely resembling the tribal array, but better organised. against these came the danes, whose methods were those of the early saxons; that is to say, tribal leading under renowned chiefs. but the stronger and more correct principles that underlay the saxon organisation triumphed in the end; and the raids of danish hordes were beaten in detail, and became absorbed in the saxon stock, to revivify and strengthen it. the roman was an alien, and remained so; but both saxon and dane had the same racial origin, became, finally, part of the nation they had conquered, and were absorbed by it, to form the english, when the still stronger tone that norman soldiers gave—coming also, be it remembered, from the same group of peoples—had borne fruit.
the story of the saxon conquest and of the danish invasion contains few points of military interest, though that period was the cradle in which the future army was to be reared. still there is one battle of that time which should rank with the decisive battles of the english world,4 for it stemmed the tide of danish success, and led to the amalgamation of the hostile sides against the next new comer. this turning-point is the battle of ?scesdune, or ashdown, fought most probably on the berkshire hills.
the saxon had retained, somewhat, the roman fighting formation, as they had utilised roman villas in britain, and altered them to suit saxon tastes. a spearman—one of the hastati, say, of a roman legion—required for the free use of his weapons a space of three clear yards round the spot on which he stood;1 and it is more than probable that the later saxons had adopted some of the roman methods. the arms varied little from those in use during the roman invasion. the spear or javelin and arrow showed no change; the sword was broad and two-edged, with a heavy pommel; the favourite saxon weapon, the axe, was either double or single, like the gallic francisca.2 the body armour and head armour was of leather, strengthened in some cases with iron, and the chief defence, the shield, was of wood with bosses or umbos of iron. their skill with the latter, as tradition tells it, seems fabulous: it is even stated that harold, surrounded by ten archers, was able, his back being protected by a tree, to intercept every shaft aimed at him. until later, both antagonists fought mainly on foot.
outline map of england & wales.
turn then again to the battle of ashdown, and let the saxon chronicler, bishop asher of sherborne, tell the story of the last great saxon fight, but one, on english soil. the next was to show the descendants of the combatants at ashdown united against yet another invader—and the last. “the pagans, dividing themselves into two bodies of equal strength, draw up their lines—for they had there two kings and several jarls—and they give the central part of the army to the two kings (baegsaeg and halfdene), and the rest to all the jarls (fraena, hareld, and the two sidrochs). when the christians perceive this, they, in the same manner, divide themselves into two bodies, and draw themselves up5 with equal diligence. but alfred comes more speedily and readily with his men, as we have heard from trustworthy reporters who saw it, and arrives at the place of battle; for his brother, ethelred the king, was still remaining in the tent in prayer, hearing the mass, and declaring that he would not depart thence alive before the priest should end the mass, nor would desert the divine service for the human. and he did as he had said, which faith of the christian king availed greatly with the lord, as in the sequel shall be fully shown. the christians, therefore, had decreed that ethelred the king with his own forces should fight against the two pagan kings; but alfred his brother with his companies would know how to try the chance of war against all the leaders of the pagans. thus strongly were they placed on either side when the king was lingering long in prayer, and the pagans were prepared and had hastened to the place of conflict. alfred then being second in command, when he could no longer endure the ranks of the foe, except he either retreated from the fight, or dashed forward against the hostile forces before his brother’s arrival, at last boldly, after the manner of a wild boar, guided the christian forces against the foe as had been determined, though still the king had not come. thus relying on the guidance of god, and supported by his help, with the lines drawn up closely, he moves forward the standard with speed against the enemy. but to those who know not the place it must be explained that the site of the battle was unequal for the belligerents, for the pagans had occupied beforehand a higher position; but the christians drew up their lines from a lower place. there was also, in the same place, a single thorn-tree of very small size, which we ourselves have seen with our own eyes. around this, therefore, the hostile armies, all with a great shout, meet together in conflict, the one acting most wickedly, the other to fight for life and friends and country. and when they fought for some time, fiercely and very cruelly on both sides, the pagans, by the divine judgment, could endure the attack of the christians no longer; and the chief part of their forces being slain, they6 took to flight disgracefully. and in this place one of the two pagan kings and five jarls were slain; and many thousands on the pagan side, both in that place and along the whole breadth of the plain of ?scesdune, where they had been everywhere scattered, were slain far and wide. for there fell their king baegsaeg and jarl sidroc the elder and jarl sidroc the younger, and jarl obsbern, and jarl fraena, and jarl hareld; and the whole army of the pagans was put to flight till the night, and even to the following day, until those who escaped arrived at the citadel, for the christians pursued them until night and overthrew them everywhere.” “never before or since,” says a saxon writer later on, “was ever such slaughter known, since the saxons first gained england by their armies.” all the next day the rout was followed up, until the shattered remnants gained the shelter of their fort. whether it was absolutely abandoned by the danes after their defeat is doubtful; but it is recorded that fourteen days later alfred and ethelred suffered a reverse at basing, which shows, at anyrate, that some portion of the enemy’s forces had retreated to the south.
to meet the last invasion of foreign blood, the anglo-saxons had, by that time, a military organisation which differed but little from the hosts that william of normandy brought against harold the king at senlac. there had been much intercommunication between the british isles and the mainland. both armies were armed and equipped in much the same way. their leaders wore the same kind of armour, and there was little to distinguish between them, save that the norman’s chief strength was in his cavalry, that of harold in his infantry. the bayeux tapestry shows both harold and william clad in the same attire.
the saxon fighting system at hastings differed little from that of the mercenaries of the most varied character that followed the banner of the conqueror, except that on harold’s side there was union of men, then of the same nationality to a great degree, against a mere collection of adventurers. as to the political situation there is little to7 be said. the true history of the eleventh century is still, and ever will be, unwritten; the most reliable account is after all largely, if not entirely, traditional. it is poetical rather than actual. it is based on “hearsay” rather than fact. yet, notwithstanding, before real recorded history was, tradition had to take its place, and this is what it and legend have to say of that great conflict which destroyed saxondom in britain, and which placed william the norman on the english throne as king.
battle of hastings. 14th. oct. 1066.
this, then, is what the fighting seems to have been. curiously enough, harold selected the defensive, as did wellington, as a rule, seven hundred and fifty years after, and fought on foot while fortifying his front with palisades; while the normans attacked in a series of lines, much as was done by british troops before the introduction of the breech-loader led to the abandonment of “linear” tactics. the last of the saxon kings had chosen for his stand for crown and kingdom the hill where battle is now built; but there was one vast difference between the opposing leaders. on the one side the saxons feasted and made merry, though there is little evidence that harold made any effort to rouse the enthusiasm of his men as his adversary did. in the saxon camp there was wine and wassail, and in that of william penitence and prayer. william knew the guiding spirit of the art of war of the time, the infusing into his host that religious fervour which later on made cromwell defeat royalists as physically brave as his own ironsides, and the instilling in their minds confidence in their own powers, which has been at the base of every english victory since then. the saxons were “slow to find out they were beaten”;3 but the norman enthusiasm was raised by the duke’s address on the morning of the fight, in which he recalled to their minds that the normans “had won their land in gaul with their own swords; how they had given lands to the kings of the franks and conquered all their enemies everywhere; while the english had never been famed in war, the danes having8 conquered them and taken their land whenever they would.”
all this may be fable, and probably is, but what we know of william tends to show it was likely. even omens he turned to advantage. he fell on landing, but, rising with his hands full of english soil, he exclaimed, “what is the matter? i have thus taken seisin of this land, and so far as it reaches, by the splendour of god, it is yours and mine.” he put on his mailed shirt back in front, only to laughingly exclaim, as he reversed it, “a good sign and a lucky one: a duke shall this day be turned into a king.”
all this evidences genius for war such as harold never had. his bravery is undoubted, but mere bravery counts little against bravery plus skill. so it was that, armed with sword and priest-blessed relics, protected by the “consecrated” banner of pope alexander, and bearing on his finger a ring set “with one of st. peter’s hairs,” william went into battle with not merely an army of sixty thousand men, to whom success meant profit, but to whom death meant falling in a holy cause, and to whom the very battle itself was a crusade. everything was in his favour, when, singing the battle hymn of roland, he moved his three lines against the hill on which harold’s royal standard was planted.
the details of the battle are of little interest. it was one of hand-to-hand fighting. “the english axe, in the hand of king harold, or any other strong man, cut down the horse and his rider by a single blow.”
the personal element entered largely, as it did later, into the contest. the fall of the leader led to the fall of the army. where harold was, where his standard flew, there was the “tactical key” of the field of battle. true tactics do not depend on the death of the king, or the capture of so many yards of silk embroidery. but true tactics, rightly understood, were not in these days.
the duke formed his army in two wings and a centre, each of which seems to have advanced covered by archers, supported by heavy infantry, and strengthened by the main arm of battle, then the mailed cavalry. the left wing,9 composed of men from ponthieu, maine, and brittany, was led by alan; the right, adventurers from picardy and france, was directed by roger de montgomery; and the centre, comprising the flower of the norman host, was commanded by william himself.
the bowmen covered the advance by arrow fire, and seemed to have produced little effect; but towards the end of the day they, possibly and apparently from the flanks,4 poured in a vertical fire, and so covered, without interfering with, the attack of the main bodies, and it was from this, in a sense, long-ranged fire that harold received the wound that disabled him, caused his death and the ruin of the saxon cause.
whether the statement that william, by a feigned retreat, drew the saxons from their entrenchments in pursuit and then turned on them with success, is true or not, may be open to doubt. harold’s tactics and his method of entrenchment all point rather to passive than active defence. his best armed and best equipped men were in the centre, round his royal standard, armed with javelin, axe, and sword, and covered close by the large saxon shield; on his flanks were the less reliable and poorly armed “ceorls,” who could not be trusted to meet the main brunt of battle. it is quite possible, however, that these less disciplined troops may have been decoyed into a pursuit which was counter attacked by the cavalry, and thus the flank was turned, and with it the line of obstacles along the front, whatever they might have been.
be that as it may, it is most likely that the traditional termination of the battle is in the main correct, and that william, by his “high angle” fire of arrows, was able to “search” the ground behind the stockade, and that the last saxon king received his death-wound in the eye from one of these missiles. it would have been better strategy on his part to have fought a merely rearguard action at hastings, and, falling back, have both weakened his adversary by the guards he must have left on the coast, and increased10 his own power of resistance by the aid of the reinforcements that were coming up. so night went down on the bloody field of senlac, where harold lay dead with fifteen thousand normans and “threescore thousand englishmen,” though the latter statement is, on the face of it, exaggeration. but the fight had broken the saxon power, and the conqueror—as william of poictiers says—refused his royal brother burial, swearing “that he guarded the coast while he was alive, let him thus continue to guard it after death.” none the less, it is believed he was buried eventually at waltham, and william the duke passed on to cross the thames at wallingford, seized london, and become william the king.
with senlac perished the militia system of the saxon rulers of england. the new-comers had brought with them the elements, though not the completion, of the feudal system that was to follow and be the outcome of the norman conquest. as a matter of fact, the invading army that william led was only after all a gathering of armed men under leaders of sorts. its very origin prevented the full organisation which means a real or regular army. mercenaries, men who had never before the war met the chiefs who were to lead them, in rare cases religious enthusiasts, who believed that the cause of the pope and the normans was the cause of god, mere soldiers of fortune, who thought from the fair english land they might obtain fortune even more than fame;—these were the men who were to break up the saxon kingdom, still existent more or less, and were to weld into one homogeneous whole the english race. never has the end better justified the means. never have the means themselves in 1066 been more ignoble. the norman host as men had scarcely a redeeming feature. to count descent from them, is to count often enough from the meanest social ancestry, though age has made it venerable and respected. some of the noblest of english families trace, or rather claim, descent from men of the lowest origin, who rose from such a place as that of “hugo the dapifer,” to be the rulers of england and replace saxon jarls whose descent was more distinct, and on whom the norman parvenu11 looked down. it cannot be too definitely expressed that to “have come in with the conquest” is only a confession that those who use the expression are ignoring the fact that many a saxon thane could show a family title far deeper set in the history of england than any of the men who usurped and trampled on those whose pedigree went back to the days of ?scesdune, before the soldiers of fortune of the duke of normandy had emerged from their original obscurity.
battle of hastings (from bayeux tapestry).
none the less the new invaders were “men,” and had a “man” to govern them, while william, the king by right of everything that in those days made kingcraft, ruled.
“stark was he,” says the english chronicler, “to men that withstood him; none dared resist his will. earls that did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds; bishops he stripped of their bishopricks and abbots of their abbacies. but stern as his rule was, it gave peace unto the land.”
this was william. “out of the strong cometh forth sweetness,” out of the horrors that followed the norman conquest came the english people, and, as time went on, that army which has mostly conquered, often suffered, and generally met disaster with a bold front. and so the new, or rather the last successful invaders seized the fair isle of britain, added their names to old place-names of celtic or saxon origin as an affix, converting, for example, the “town by the water” of ashton into “ashton tyrrold,” and, holding the richest lands as their own appanage, raised the massive frowning towers of norman castles at all important strategic points throughout the country, marking their conquest as by a sign-manual that they held the land, as they had gained it, by the sword.
notwithstanding that the norman had many friends in england, it was long before the whole country was subdued. there was fighting in the north of england and on the marches of wales; there was prolonged resistance by hereward in the fenland and central forests, until, in 1071, the “wake” surrendered, and became the “king’s man.” there was much still to settle, and william settled them in his own stern way. so much so that his own often parvenu barons12 revolted, and for many a century rebelled against the royal authority, which, backed by the clergy and english, won in the end. ralf guader was quieted in 1074, and robert of bellème, with robert mowbray and prince robert, were beaten in 1078. similarly, when rufus reigned, the same robert mowbray, with odo of bayeux and others, held their castles as rebels until they were stormed in 1095.
the celts of both wales and scotland proved troublesome, so to hold the latter frowning norman castles were erected at each end of the neck between north britain and england at carlisle and newcastle, while the former were shut in by a chain of similar fortresses from cheshire to the severn valley, along which hostilities continued for many a year, to the territorial aggrandisement of the defenders of the “marches.”
henry i.’s marriage, uniting the old royal race with the new, much pacified matters, or at anyrate gave the king still more aid from the english people as distinct from the norman barons. again robert of bellème on the welsh border revolted, but was driven into exile by the sovereign: in the claim of robert to the throne, englishmen sided with henry, and for the first time served abroad to defeat the pretender at tenchebrai. but henry left no male successor, and matilda his daughter was distasteful to the barons, who chose stephen, grandson of the conqueror, as king. this created two factions—that of stephen and that of matilda, the first of the great civil wars (for now the “english” counted for much more than heretofore), and the king, unlike his predecessors, unwisely allowing the barons to build castles on their own lands, paid for his over-confidence. for matilda’s party, led first by the earl of gloucester, formed in the west of england, assisted by david king of scots in the north. stephen advanced against the latter, defeating the former at northallerton, and after many vicissitudes on both sides, the war ceased by the retirement of matilda to normandy.
so in anarchy and suffering—suffering so great that it was said “that god and his saints were asleep,” so terrible were13 the wrongs done in the land—the norman power as such ceased to be, and plantagenet kings (no longer norman but english) reigned over the realm for more than three hundred years.
out of that time grew up the system of feudal levies, that is, of men who served as the personal retainers of some baron or overlord, and who fought therefore no longer as freemen, fighting freely in their country’s wars. military service long remained personal rather than national.
