Battles of English History. George Hereford Brooke
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
Harold's tomb was shown at Waltham down to the date of the dissolution of the abbey. There is no positive information on the point, but there seems no reason for rejecting the explanation that William afterwards allowed the corpse of Harold to be removed to Waltham. It is at least much more probable than that a falsehood should have been allowed to pass unchallenged.
This word, which is of course French but was adopted in English with the same signification, definitely means a body of men, originally mailed horsemen, drawn up together; but it implies nothing as to their formation or strength. The usual practice was to form three; the vanguard, which became ordinarily the right when in line of battle; the rearguard, which similarly became the left; and the main battle or centre. In the Latin chroniclers the equivalent term is generally
It is suggested that this was a waggon, such as was habitually used in Italy at an earlier date, and occasionally at least in England (as at the battle of the Standard), to carry to battle the standard of the town. The earl's standard certainly floated over it, and attracted prince Edward's attention: and from the account given of the prisoners being shut up in it, it would seem to have been very substantially built. Montfort however would hardly have travelled in such a waggon, and certainly the royalists imagined he was in it. There is no reason except the silence of the chroniclers why there should not have been both a
As he had not been crowned at Rome he had no right to use the imperial title.