Battles of English History

It was about nine a.m.,5 according to the chroniclers who note the hour, that the battle began. About the centre of the English line were planted the twin royal standards. The red dragon of Wessex, which had waved over many a battle-field and had but rarely seen defeat, appeared now for the last time. Beside it Harold's own personal device, the Fighting-man, the figure of an armed warrior embroidered in gold, marked on its first and last field the spot where the king and his brothers fought. Harold's housecarls, and the men of London and Kent armed in like fashion, formed the centre of the line. On their left were seemingly men less heavily armed, but quite able to hold their own against their opponents. On this part of the line the fighting throughout the battle seems to have been obstinate, equal, and uneventful; the great oscillations of fortune, the murderous repulses, the ultimate success of the Normans, are at the centre and on the right. From the present appearance of the ground there can be no doubt that the access to the English right was by a much gentler slope than elsewhere. Nevertheless the ill-armed portion of the English host, peasants with no defensive armour, carrying javelins or clubs, a few possibly with bows, were there placed. A modern general would certainly have guarded with special care the flank that was most easily assailable. Harold doubtless took for granted, and quite correctly, that wherever he planted his standard, thither the principal attack would be directed.

While the archers covered the general advance with a flight of arrows, a minstrel named Taillefer rode forward singing "of Charlemagne and Roland, and those who died at Roncesvalles." Throwing his sword into the air and catching it again, he made straight for the English, and killed two, one with his lance and one with his sword, before he himself fell. Behind him the Norman foot-soldiers charged up the hill, met by darts and stones, and as they reached the line by the deadlier hand weapons. Finding that they made no impression, William led in person the charge of the mailed knights, to be equally repulsed. Horse and man went down under the blows of the terrible axe. The Bretons and others on the Norman left fled in confusion, pursued by some of the English right, who contrary to orders broke their ranks to follow up the flying enemy. Panic and disorder spread more or less to the centre: there was a cry that the duke was slain: the battle was almost lost. Baring his head, William in person stemmed the tide and drove the fugitives back: they rallied and cut down such of the English as had ventured far in pursuit.

The duke, as soon as order was restored, led a fresh attack on the English standard. This time his horse was killed under him, but he himself escaped unhurt, to deal with his own hand, if one is to follow Professor Freeman's account, a very serious blow to the English cause, by slaying Gyrth, Harold's brother and most trusted counsellor. Harold's other brother Leofwine fell, according to the picture in the Tapestry, about the same time with Gyrth. Still the English line remained unbroken; though the defences must have been by this time more or less broken down, the men behind were as firm as ever. Had not William possessed a ready insight, prompter than anything we find elsewhere in mediæval warfare, the Norman chivalry would have exhausted itself finally in vain charges, and Hastings had been as Crecy. The Norman duke however had noted that the only thing which hitherto had disturbed the impregnable line of the English was the rush from the right in pursuit of the flying Bretons. He ventured on the bold experiment of bidding his left make a fresh assault, take again to flight, and if the English rushed forward, turn suddenly on the pursuers. The stratagem succeeded; again the English, out of reach of their king's direct authority, broke their line entirely. When the feigned flight was converted into a fresh charge they were taken utterly at a disadvantage, and though they filled the hollow round the right of the position with French dead, they none the less were routed. The Norman horsemen could now easily reach the level of the hill top, and charge along it towards the standard, instead of toiling up the slope in front. Even yet the battle was in doubt; the Normans could bring the weight of horses and men to bear more effectually, and the English had lost the protection such as it was of their palisade, but the horsemen could charge only on a narrow front, the width of the ridge, instead of up its whole face. Once more William's ready skill suggested a combination against which mere courage and strength must ultimately fail. His archers had obviously been useless while the direct charges up the slope were going on, and of little avail in the intervals, when the English could protect themselves with their shields. He could now use both archers and horsemen together, for the ground to the south was free6 for the archers, when the knights had reached the hill top on their left. Bidding his archers shoot into the air, so that their arrows fell like rain about the standard, he led the horsemen on once more. The device was fatal. The English could not ward off the arrows, while engaged in hand-to-hand conflict: they must perish or give way, unless darkness came to their rescue. Just before sunset the final blow was struck: an arrow pierced Harold's eye, and as he lay in agony at the foot of the standard he was despatched by four knights. If we could believe the exulting French poet they mangled his body brutally; but this is happily inconsistent with the certain fact that his corpse was found and buried. The standards were trampled down, the position was at every part seized by the Normans; still the desperate English fought on, and hardly a man of Harold's personal following, or of the nobility of southern England, survived the day, except those already too badly wounded to move. Under cover of the darkness the light armed English fled, again inflicting serious loss on their pursuers, who rolled headlong into the hollow that afterwards bore the significant name of Malfosse.

Had Harold, or even Gyrth, survived the battle, the conquest of England, it is said, need not have ensued. The remark is a futile one; under the peculiar conditions there was no third alternative. Harold, we may safely say, never dreamed of the possibility of surviving defeat: and his brothers, once in the field, would share his fate, whether victory or death. The Norman duke, we are told, to taste the full flavour of his triumph, had his tent pitched where the English standard had stood, and passed the night there, surrounded by the piled-up dead. Next day William superintended the burial of his own dead; the corpses of the English he left to the dogs and birds, except such as their kindred carried away. Two monks from Harold's own abbey of Waltham came offering large sums, in their own name and in the name of his aged mother, for leave to inter the fallen king within the walls he had built. But the conqueror was inexorable: he bade one of his knights bury the body of the accursed of the Church beneath a cairn of stones on the Sussex shore.7 Little as William meant it, he was giving the noblest of sepulchres to the fallen hero, the one English king who has died fighting for his fatherland.

Our sympathies are naturally with Harold and the English, defending their homes and their independence against unprovoked foreign aggression. William's claim was based on falsehood, supported by fraud, established by violence. Nevertheless when once king he ruled well and wisely. If he rewarded his followers with English lands, he prevented the intrusive nobles from obtaining the position and privileges which would render them a mere curse to England. In the fifth generation their descendants had become the leaders of a fairly united nation, winning for all ranks and classes the Great Charter of liberty. Without the Norman Conquest, without the new blood mingled with the English race, without the new ideas introduced into church and state through closer intercourse with the continent, the subsequent history must have been totally different, and so far as conjecture is admissible, far less eminent than it in fact has been, alike in arts and arms, in commerce and in government.

From the point of view of the art of war, the battle of Hastings is also important, marking an epoch there too very decidedly. For more than two centuries after Hastings infantry are of no account in western Europe. The battle had indeed been won by the skilful combination of archery with the charge of mailed horsemen. It is at least doubtful whether the latter would finally have prevailed without the rain of arrows to smite and perplex those whom they were attacking in front. The horsemen however did in fact trample under foot the last relics of Harold's heavy armed foot-soldiers, and feudal pride did the rest. It was taken for granted on all hands that mailed knights, and they alone, constituted strength in war, and this fell in with the political ideas of the age only too well. Seven generations were destined to elapse before the tables began to be turned on the knights.

CHAPTER III

THE BARONS' WAR

The Norman Conquest was, to the English body politic, like one of those powerful drugs which seriously disorder the constitution for the time, but if the patient has strength to bear the treatment do him permanent good. The Barons' War was, as it were, the last feverish fit resulting from the Conquest. The Normans, though they had adopted French ideas and speech, were in race closely akin to the Anglo-Danes; and the fusion between them was hastened by the accession of the house of Anjou to the throne. The Conqueror and his sons had to a certain extent identified themselves with England, leaning for support against the turbulent Norman barons upon their English subjects. Henry II., though he did great things for England as a wise legislator and strong administrator, was distinctly a foreigner. His father was French, his wife was French, his ambition was to dominate France. Henry III., without his grandfather's strong qualities for both good and evil, was still more completely un-English. His confidence was given only to foreigners, to the Poitevin kindred of his mother, to the Provençal and Savoyard kindred of his wife, never to Englishmen. He fleeced the nation and the church beyond endurance to enrich foreign favourites, to satisfy the Pope, to further schemes of vague ambition alien, if not hostile, to English interests. Naturally strong opposition was roused, which pervaded the nation generally, and was headed by the greatest of the nobles and the most conspicuous prelates who were not foreign intruders. Their chief, Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, though French by birth, had inherited a great station from his English mother, and was as thorough an English patriot as was in that age possible. The barons at length forced upon the king changes in his government, which amounted to a temporary superseding of the royal authority. The king of course strove to free himself from restraint: and desultory hostilities followed, which led to an agreement to refer the matters in dispute to the arbitration of the king of France. The high reputation of Saint Louis seems to have blinded the barons to the fact that he was on principle a steady upholder of royal power. His award was completely in Henry's favour, and the appeal was most injurious to the barons' cause. They must either abandon all that they had been contending for, or repudiate the judgment they had themselves accepted beforehand. The former evil was the worse of the two: they chose war.

The decisive struggle took place at Lewes in Sussex, which the king had made his headquarters, as being the seat of earl Warrenne, his brother-in-law and most powerful supporter. Montfort marched to Fletching, some nine miles from Lewes, whence he despatched the bishops of London and Worcester to attempt to come to terms with the king. The royalist party were far too confident to listen to any compromise; probably they were ignorant of Montfort's strength, for they did not even send out scouts to watch his movements. On receiving the contemptuous defiance of the king the barons resolved to march before daylight next morning (May 14, 1264). Religious feeling ran high in their camp: earl Simon exhorted all his followers to confess their sins before the battle, and the bishop of Worcester solemnly absolved and blessed the kneeling host, after which all put a white cross on breast and back, as a token that they were going to war for the right. The army advanced unopposed and unobserved, till they came up on the great ridge of the South Downs, whence they could see Lewes, about two miles off. Here a halt was made, to form order of battle, before beginning the descent. The Londoners, a numerous body and zealous in the cause, but little trained to war, were on the left. Montfort's sons commanded the right, the earl of Gloucester the centre. Montfort himself was at the head of a fourth division, which was either in reserve, or on the right centre. Modern writers seem agreed that it was in reserve, though the contemporary authorities do not say so expressly: apparently they assume it, because the regular mediæval practice was to divide into three "battles."8 If Montfort really did so organise his line of battle, he was in advance of his contemporaries, and most thoroughly deserved his victory. The earl is credited with a rather puerile device by way of deceiving the enemy. He had injured his leg some time before, and had been obliged to travel in some kind of carriage,9 or horse litter. This had accompanied him so far: he now left it behind on the ridge of the downs, with the baggage of the army, under a guard; and it is suggested that he did this in order to make the royalists think he had stayed there in person, unable to ride.

The barons' army was approaching Lewes from the north-west. The tidal river Ouse half encircles the town; coming from the north it bends round the east side, where the bridge was and is, and then flows southwards to the sea, but at that date the ground to the south of the town was more or less flooded every tide. On the north edge of the town is the castle, on the south the large priory of St. Pancras, which was the king's headquarters. From the height where Montfort left his baggage a well-marked ridge runs southwards, falling almost to the level of the plain two miles due west of Lewes. South of this the ground again rises in a sort of hog's back on which stand two wind-mills, bearing the name of Kingstone mills: the present Brighton road runs through the gap. East of the ridge is a hollow, large enough to hold the present race-course, and beyond this is a gentler slope, straight down to Lewes, which is hollowed out in its lower part, so as to divide it into two, the easternmost portion leading straight to the castle.

On the alarm being given the royalist army assembled in all haste, in the usual three divisions, of which prince Edward, the king's eldest son, commanded the right; the king in person was in the centre; the left was under his brother Richard, earl of Cornwall, the titular king of the Romans.10 The prince, issuing from the castle, found himself opposed to the Londoners who formed Montfort's left wing, and who seem to have been somewhat in advance. With youthful zeal he charged them at once, and put them to flight. Some writers say that he selected the Londoners for attack, because of his eagerness to avenge the insults offered to his mother in passing through London a little while before: and it is perfectly possible that this animosity led him to pursue them, as in fact he did, several miles, thereby losing the battle: but it is obvious that he had no time to select his opponents, even if the arrangement which committed the right wing to his leadership had allowed it. Gloucester with the centre came down the other part of the slope leading straight to the town, and thus encountered the king: of this there can be no reasonable doubt, or that the king after an obstinate conflict was driven into the priory. But it seems to be generally assumed that Henry and Guy de Montfort led their wing down the ridge which runs southwards, and that Richard of Cornwall met them at the bottom. The slope is extremely steep for a mediæval force of mounted horsemen in order of battle; moreover to do this would have left a very dangerous gap between the right and centre. It seems more probable that Montfort's right descended straight on Lewes in close proximity to the centre. However this may be, the right wing encountered the earl of Cornwall's troops, and could make no impression on them, until Montfort supported his sons with his own division. Then the king of the Romans was routed, and himself took refuge in a wind-mill, doubtless on the spot now known as Kingstone,11 where he eventually surrendered. By this time the king's own division had also been broken, and though part escaped into the priory, most part of them were cut off from both it and the castle, and were slaughtered in the streets of the town. The only hope of retrieving even partially the fortunes of the day lay in the prince, who after pursuing the Londoners to his heart's content, had caught sight on his return of Montfort's carriage, and assuming that the earl was lying helpless in it, made a dash to seize him and the baggage. The carriage however contained three citizens of London who had entered into some plot against Montfort, and had been carried off as prisoners and left there for safety; but in the confusion of the sudden onslaught the poor citizens were killed by their own friends. By the time prince Edward had got back to Lewes it was growing dark; many of his companions, including earl Warrenne himself, seeing that all was lost, fled over the bridge, which soon became a scene of frightful confusion, hundreds being drowned in the river, or forced into the tidal mud and there suffocated.

The foregoing account of the battle of Lewes is partly conjectural: the chroniclers are as usual wanting in precision of language, and not altogether in accord; and there is always room for doubt as to the identification of localities vaguely described. It agrees with the conformation of the ground, and with the ascertained facts: particularly it explains the king being driven into the priory, and the earl of Cornwall into a wind-mill. With the royal right wing gone, after the prince had dashed on the Londoners, Gloucester would have had no real difficulty in pressing the king's right, so as to cut him off from the castle, which would be an obvious advantage. Again Montfort's own troops, whether in the right centre or in the second line, would naturally have come down on Richard of Cornwall's right, and separated him from the king, and unless the story of Richard's barricading himself in a wind-mill is altogether an invention, which there is not the slightest reason to imagine, it could only have been the Kingstone mill. Wind-mills, beyond most things, remain for centuries on the same spot.

The Barons' War is the only occasion in English history, except the great civil war of the seventeenth century, in which a national party in arms against the crown won a great victory in the field, and became dominant in consequence, at least temporarily. It is an interesting coincidence that the blunder which lost Lewes, the eagerness of a youthful prince to pursue his routed opponents, regardless of the general fate of the battle, should have been repeated, not once only, by his descendant four centuries later. The hastiness of Rupert prevented Edgehill from being a victory, and definitely lost Naseby, the final battle of the war. Otherwise Lewes has no great military interest. It exhibits the disastrous results to a defeated army of having a river in its rear, and (possibly) the value of a reserve. But the two armies were alike in equipment, in straightforward hard fighting all along the line, in the preponderance of mailed horsemen. Of missile weapons we hear nothing, except that balistarii assisted in defeating Richard of Cornwall: the word is often used to denote cross-bowmen, and probably has that meaning here. The strange thing is that there should be no trace of the archers, who only thirty years later played an important part at Falkirk.

The battle of Lewes made Montfort master of England, and gave him the opportunity of summoning the famous assembly, to which for the first time the towns sent representatives. His rule was not very successful: hampered as he was by the natural hostility of the king and his adherents, and by the selfish jealousy of some of his own party, he would have been more than human if he had overcome all his difficulties, and laid himself open to no imputations of personal love of power. The fact that he had the king in his hands, virtually a prisoner, made his position especially difficult. So long as the king was in his power, he could not expect the royalists to acquiesce in his new policy: to let him go was to give up his one safeguard. The earl of Gloucester, the most powerful of his supporters, broke away from him, chiefly out of personal jealousy. Earl Warrenne and others of the fugitives from Lewes landed in South Wales with a strong force in the spring of 1265. Montfort was at Hereford, trying to quiet the disordered marches of Wales, the king and prince Edward with him. From Hereford the prince made his escape on May 28, and became naturally the head of the royalist party. Bristol, Gloucester, Worcester fell into the hands of prince Edward; the earl was unable to cross the Severn, and was obliged to wait until his second son Simon could bring an army to his assistance. Simon had been besieging Pevensey, and was a long time in reaching Kenilworth, his father's principal stronghold. The castle was too small to contain his troops, and Simon with incredible carelessness allowed them to remain outside without keeping any guard, apparently for two or three days at least, since Edward at Worcester had time to hear of it, it is said through a female spy. On the night of July 31, Edward marched rapidly from Worcester, and completely surprised young Simon's forces, capturing several important prisoners and all the baggage. Simon himself escaped into the castle, but he and his army were utterly lost to his father's cause.

On the same day the earl of Leicester left Hereford, and crossing the Severn in boats camped some miles to the south of Worcester. He probably had heard that his son had reached Kenilworth, and may either have purposed to attack prince Edward, while, as he might expect, his son was approaching the prince from another quarter, or simply to effect a junction with his son. Edward had taken great pains, apparently with success, to let no fugitives escape from Kenilworth: for the earl never heard of his son's overthrow. The exact times are somewhat differently given by the various authorities, but it is quite certain that Montfort was in Evesham early on August 4, and that Edward knew of his movements and had time to anticipate him. One story is that the king, who was still with him, insisted on stopping at Evesham on the evening of the 3rd, that he might sup in the abbey and hear mass there next morning, a request with which the earl could not decently refuse to comply without a strong motive, which, ignorant as he was of the disaster at Kenilworth, he could not have. The king's love of ease, and of devotion, would account for this well enough: that he did it in concert with his son, in order to delay Montfort, is not credible, for in that case Edward might have saved some miles of a hard march. The prince, on ascertaining that the earl had moved from his camp at Kempsey south of Worcester, in the direction of Kenilworth, formed a plan for cutting him off.

Evesham stands on the north bank of the Avon, at the bottom of a loop some two miles deep and one wide. In the thirteenth century the banks were marshy, and there was no bridge for a long distance, except one at Evesham leading to the hamlet of Bengeworth on the east of the loop. Over the high ground known as Green Hill, rising above the town and filling the north part of the loop, ran the direct road from Worcester, crossing the Avon by a ford12 at Offenham, two miles above Evesham. By this road prince Edward set part of his forces, including probably all his foot-soldiers, to march in the night of August 3, in pursuit of Leicester, entrusting the command to his new supporter the earl of Gloucester. He himself started with a large body of horsemen on the north road, so that his purpose might not be detected, then cutting across country to the eastward reached the ford on the Avon at Prior's Cleeve, some miles above Evesham, early on the 4th. As the road from Evesham to Kenilworth passes near Prior's Cleeve on the left bank, he hoped thus to intercept the earl in front, while Gloucester pressed on his rear. Finding that there was no sign of Montfort's approach, he descended the left bank as far as Offenham: thence he despatched Roger Mortimer with a detachment to hold the bridge at Bengeworth and prevent the earl escaping that way, and himself recrossed the Avon and occupied Green Hill.13