63 With that brutal home truth ringing in their ears, William ordered his men to take the road from Hastings, to advance along the ridge that would bring them face to face with their approaching foes. There were still several hours to dawn when the Normans left camp. On they marched, three, four, five miles. Steadily, to their right, beyond dense woods, the sky was lightening. Still, though, no sign of the enemy. The sun began to rise. Then, at around eight o’clock, breasting a hill some six miles out of Hastings, the Normans saw a valley ahead of them, and the slope of a second hill, and there, emerging on to its crest, brilliant with gilded banners, the English vanguard. Did William, at such a sight, permit himself the very thinnest of smiles? No doubt – for it was all as he had hoped. Harald’s men were still assembling – rendezvousing for an intended final march on Hastings. Their ranks were unformed. “The woods all around glittered full of their spears.”64 The surprisers had been surprised.65Yet still, in the Norman ranks, the awful inevitability of what now faced them would have caught at many a stomach. Pitched battle, though rare, ranked as the ultimate index of a man. Scarcely less to be dreaded than death or injury were shame and disgrace. It was not unknown for warriors, confronted by an enemy, to start vomiting – or else “to fake being sick.”66 William and his fellow war leaders, whose entire lives had been preparation for such a moment, were hardly the men to turn tail now; even so, gazing at the brow of the hill ahead of them, at the solid wall of shields that was blocking their way, at the bejewelled battle standard emblazoned with a warrior that marked the presence of Harald, they would have known better than to scorn their foe. No matter that the English way of war – “disdaining the solace of horses and trusting in their strength to stand fast on foot”67 – appeared to anyone raised in France quite hilariously primitive: the truth was that Harald had in his ranks fighters no less trained or deadly than the most seasoned Norman horseman. He too, like the lords of Constantinople and Kiev, commanded a bodyguard of Varangians: axe-wielding professionals, skilled in all the arts of evisceration, known by the English as “housecarls.”68 These ranked as perhaps the most formidable foot-soldiers in all Christendom, and they would have to be cut down if the invasion was not to fail – for only with Harald dead would any victory count as decisive. As the first Norman arrow showers rattled down upon the round shields of the English, and William’s infantry began climbing the hill ahead of them, to test the swing of the housecarls’ axes, he knew that his fate was no longer his own to control. It had passed into the hands of God.Not that anyone would have expected the divine judgement to be delayed for long. Rare was the battle that lasted for more than an hour or so. The moment of crisis, when all would be decided upon a rumour or a sudden flight, was bound to sweep the field soon. And so it almost proved. Most shields were still unriven, most helmets without dents, most blades barely notched, when all of a sudden word began to pass through the Norman ranks that William had fallen. His men were thrown into panic. As they turned and started stumbling and slipping back down the hill, it seemed as though the retreat was on the verge of becoming a rout: for pockets of the English were leaving the shield wall to pursue them. All hung in the balance.But William, though his horse had been brought down and he himself flung on to the ground, was not dead. Raising both his helmet and his voice, rallying his dispirited men, reminding them that they were warriors still, he succeeded in steeling his buckling line. And now it was the turn of the English to face a seeming breaking point. Those who had been pursuing their retreating adversaries down the hill found themselves suddenly turned upon. Surrounded, they proved easy meat. Hoofs and trampling feet pulped their bodies into the mud. The slope of the hill turned slippery, a shambles of viscera and broken limbs. For a second time, it seemed as though the battle was decided. But just as the Normans had been rallied, so now did the English refuse to flee. Harald’s great banner still fluttered defiantly in the breeze. The shield wall, though sorely depleted, held. The day remained unresolved.And even as the hours continued to pass, and the sun slowly to set, and the shadows to lengthen over the increasingly corpse-strewn slope of the battlefield, the confusion did not cease. “It was,” as one Norman would express it later in stupefied terms, “an unheard-of kind of combat, with one side launching ceaseless attacks and manoeuvres, the other standing firmly as though rooted to the ground.”69 Not all the exhaustion of men weighed down by the great weight of their shields and helmets and coats of iron could serve to diminish the desperate savagery of the battle. An hour before sunset, and still William’s men were hurling themselves against the English, their spears splintered, as William’s own was, their swords no less “dyed with brains and blood”70 than their duke’s. Yet still the housecarls stood firm, swinging with their double-headed axes, bludgeoning their assailants, hacking through metal and flesh and bone. Certainly, planted as they were upon their hill, they could not hope to win – but then again, merely to hold their position, to win through to the night, to force a draw, would rank almost as a victory. William, isolated as he was in a hostile county, and with the sea at his back, could not afford a stalemate. Only succeed in standing firm until the coming of dusk, then, and Harald would most likely win the war.But he did not last the hour. Many stories would later be told about his end; one, the most repeated, had him being hit in the eye by an arrow.71 Whether true or not, it is certain that Norman horsemen, trampling Harald down, left him as just one among a heap of corpses piled around the toppled royal banner, just one among the fallen on a day of slaughter fit to put even Stamford Bridge into the shade. As darkness fell, and what was left of the English turned at last and fled into the gathering darkness, to be hunted throughout the night by William’s exultant cavalry, it was the reek of blood and emptied bowels, together with the moans and sobs of the wounded, that bore prime witness to the butchery. Come the morning, however, and daylight unveiled a spectacle of carnage so appalling that even the victors were moved to pity. “Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in gore.”72 So hacked about was Harald’s own body, and so disfigured the face, that it could barely be recognised.Fit image of the mutilation with which the kingdom itself had been served. True, not all the lords of England had fallen at Hastings; nor had their fight been brought wholly to an end by the slaughter. Yet with Harald dead, and his brothers fallen beside him, and his most loyal followers too, there was no one left to coordinate the resistance. The Normans, with their predators’ nostrils ever sensitive to the scents of weakness and despair, were hardly the people to let a wounded foe slip free. By Christmas Day, William was sitting in the same abbey where Harald had been crowned at the beginning of the year, to receive a crown of his own. Within the church itself, the moment of his coronation was greeted, as was the English custom, with a great cry of acclamation, a thunderous acknowledgement that the Norman duke now ruled as the anointed heir to Alfred and Edgar and Edward; but outside, in the streets, William’s guards mistook the shouting for a riot, and set about assaulting the locals and torching their houses. It was a brute reminder to the conquered English of the true source of their new king’s legitimacy.To foreign observers as well, William appeared merely one more in a long line of northern predators, and his winning of a crown a feat of robbery such as any Viking chieftain might have revelled in. “The Duke crossed the cold channel,” as one Dane put it, “and reddened the bright swords.”73 Yet that was not how William himself saw his great exploit. At the most awe-inspiring moment of his life, as he was crowned on the very anniversary of the birth of Christ, the new king had begun to tremble uncontrollably, betraying for the first and only time in his life, perhaps, a sense of fear and self-doubt. Hearing screams rise from outside the abbey, even as he could feel the chrism impregnating him with its sacral charge, William would surely have dreaded with a sudden certitude that his offences were rank, that God had not blessed him with His favour at all, and that the blood through which he had waded, the filth and horror and stench of it, was charged eternally to his soul. The moment had passed – and William had been left William still. Yet he did not forget the experience. Years later, when a jester saw the king sitting “resplendent in gold and jewels,” and shouted out, “Behold, I see God! behold, I see God!,”74 he had been whipped for his joke. It was not the blasphemy that had caused such grievous offence, but rather the implied mockery of William’s most profoundly held conceit: that he had been raised to the throne of England by the hand of Providence.If the Normans, who knew that in truth it was their own sword arms which had won their bastard duke the crown, sometimes found this hard to take, then so did the English. William’s coronation oath, that he would uphold the laws and customs of his new subjects, had been sworn with all due solemnity – and sure enough, for the first few years of his reign, he did indeed attempt to include them as partners within his new regime. But the English earls could never quite forgo a taste for revolt – with the result that, soon enough, an infuriated William was brought to abandon the whole experiment. In its place, he instituted a far more primal and brutal policy. Just as his ancestors had cleansed what would become Normandy of its Frankish aristocracy, so now did William set about the systematic elimination from England of its entire ruling class. The lands of the kingdom – its “folc and foldan” – were henceforward to be in the charge of Normans, and no one else. This, however, as a feat of dispossession, owed less to the example of Rollo than to William’s well-honed mastery of the cutting edge. No longer was England to remain isolated from the revolution that had so transformed the princedoms of France. Pevensey and Hastings were destined to prove only the first of the castles raised by the conquerors. The proficiency of William fitz Osbern, in particular, was noted by the English as a grim and fearsome thing: “for he built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse.”75 Which was putting it mildly: for the task of the Norman lords, set as they were amid a sullen and fractious people, was no different in kind to that of the most upstart castellan in France.In England, however, it was not just scattered hamlets and villages that needed to be broken, but a whole kingdom. In the winter of 1069, when the inveterately rebellious Northumbrians sought to throw off their new king’s rule, William’s response was to harry the entire earldom. Methods of devastation familiar to the peasantry of France were unleashed across the north of England: granaries were burned, oxen slaughtered, ploughs destroyed. Rotting corpses were left to litter the road. The scattered survivors were reduced to selling themselves into slavery, or else, if reports are to be believed, to cannibalism. Even enthusiasts for William’s rule confessed themselves appalled. “On many occasions,” wrote one of them, “I have been able to extol him according to his merits, but this – this I dare not praise.”76And yet, as William might legitimately have pointed out, the practice of ravaging was an ancient one in England. Edgar had done the same – and he was remembered as “the Peaceable.” Hard and ruthless “the Conqueror” might be, but for all that, he was no Harald, given to breaking his promises lightly. The oath he had sworn at his coronation, to uphold the laws of England, was one that he would labour all his life to keep. In his determination to keep together his new realm, its unity, its public order and its peerless administration, William was indeed a king in the most formidable tradition of the Cerdicingas. Duke of Normandy too, and favourite of the reformers in the Lateran; he was a ruler of many parts. No statesman of his age was less the prisoner of the past – or more adept at turning it to his own ends. Tradition and innovation: would both continue to be exploited by William with a trail-blazing facility. That his reign was destined to prove one perpetual experiment, an attempt to weave a tapestry from a multiplicity of different strands, whether drawn from England, or Normandy, or Rome, would ultimately serve to render his achievements only the more lasting. He might have been the bastard descendant of pirates – but he would end up master of the most formidable instrument of royal power in the whole of Christendom. He had dared – and he had won.True, doubts as to the price paid for this victory were never altogether dispelled. “For what has a man profited,” as Abbot Hugh of Cluny wrote pointedly to William, “if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”77 Even Hildebrand himself, the very man who had pushed for the Conqueror to be granted a papal banner, appears to have felt a slight measure of queasiness at the sheer scale of the bloodletting that he had helped to sponsor. In 1070, only a few months after the harrying of Northumbria, a papal legate imposed a public penance on all who had fought at Hastings. Shortly afterwards, in a further show of expiation, the foundations of a new abbey began to be dug on the very site of the fateful battle. The altar, so William had decreed, was to stand precisely where Harald had fallen: a command that required the entire top of the hill to be levelled. Religiosity, arrogance, and a quite awe-inspiring monumentalism: the new monastery combined them all. If it was intended to express contrition, then so too was it designed to overawe. “Even a Greek or Saracen,” claimed one Norman, describing the Conqueror’s prodigious sponsorship of churches, “might find himself impressed.”78 As well he might. The great buildings that William could afford to build, unprecedented engineering experiments raised in stone, were indeed on a scale to compare with anything to be found in Constantinople or Córdoba. So too was the state that he ruled. No matter that he had founded it, like Battle Abbey, upon a field of blood – its foundations were destined to last.