The year 1066

Halley's comet over England, a summer of waiting on the coast, the race north to Stamford Bridge, and one long October day on a ridge near Hastings, told quietly from a distance. Read by a synthetic voice. Script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

Embers of History. Episode two... the year 1066.

This story is read by a synthetic voice.

In the spring of the year 1066, a light appears in the sky over England.

It hangs low in the evening, after the sun has gone, with a long pale tail stretched out behind it. Night after night it returns, a little higher, a little fainter. In the monasteries, the monks watch it from their cloisters and write it down in their chronicles. In the villages, people stand in their doorways and look up.

It is a comet. The same one that returns, again and again, every seventy-five years or so... the one that, centuries later, will be given the name of an English astronomer, Edmond Halley.

But in this spring, no one knows that. They only know that something is hanging in the sky, and that it is a strange year already.

In January, the old king died.

Edward, called the Confessor, a quiet and pious man, had ruled England for more than twenty years. He had no children. On the morning after he died, the great men of the kingdom chose a new king... Harold, Earl of Wessex. The richest and most powerful man in England, after the king himself.

He was crowned in the new abbey church at Westminster, on the very same day that Edward was buried there.

Across the sea, two other men hear the news, and both of them believe the crown should have been theirs.

The first is Harald, King of Norway. People call him Hardrada... the hard ruler. He is a tall man, a soldier since boyhood, who has fought in Russia and in the far south, in the service of the emperor at Constantinople. He believes that an old agreement between kings gives him a claim to England.

The second is William, Duke of Normandy, on the far side of the Channel. He is Edward's cousin, once removed. He says that Edward promised him the crown, years ago... and that Harold himself once swore an oath to support him.

Both men begin to gather ships.

Through the summer, Harold waits on the south coast of England, with his army and his ships, watching the sea.

The English army is built around the housecarls... the king's own household warriors, trained and paid, with long coats of mail and great axes held in both hands. Around them stand the men of the fyrd... farmers and landholders, called up from the shires to serve for a few months of the year.

They wait through June. Through July. Through August.

The wind does not change. No ships come.

By early September, the harvest is waiting in the fields, the men have served their time, and the food is running out. Harold lets the army go home.

Then, in the north, the ships arrive.

Hardrada sails up the coast with a great fleet, joined by Harold's own brother, Tostig, who has been exiled and wants his revenge. They come up the river toward York. At a place called Fulford, just outside the city, they meet the northern earls in battle... and win.

The news travels south, fast, along the old roads.

And Harold moves.

He gathers the men he can, and marches north. Day after day, along the old Roman road, on foot and on horseback, two hundred miles in less than a week.

On the twenty-fifth of September, he reaches a place called Stamford Bridge, east of York, where the Norwegians are resting by a river in the late summer warmth. Many of them have left their armour behind with the ships. They do not expect an English army... not yet, not here.

By the end of that day, Harald Hardrada is dead, and Tostig with him. Of the great fleet of Norwegian ships that came up the river, only a small number are needed to carry the survivors home.

It is one of the most complete victories of the age.

And then, three days later, the wind in the Channel turns.

On the night of the twenty-seventh of September, William's fleet sails from the coast of Normandy.

Hundreds of ships, broad and open, with a single square sail each, and painted shields along their sides. They carry men, and armour, and weapons... and horses. Thousands of horses, standing in the open hulls through the night, as the ships cross the dark water.

In the morning, they come ashore at Pevensey, on the south coast of England, beside the broken walls of an old Roman fort.

No one is there to meet them. The English army is two hundred miles away, in the north.

The Normans build quickly. Inside the old Roman walls, they dig a ditch and raise a fort of earth and timber. Then they move a little way along the coast, to Hastings, and build another.

They ride out into the countryside around them, and take what they need from the farms and villages.

And they wait.

In the north, a rider finds Harold, with the news.

Again, the army turns. Again, it marches the long road, south this time, down through the heart of England, to London. Harold stays there for a few days, gathering more men from the southern shires. Then he marches out again, toward the coast... toward Hastings.

Some of his advisers tell him to wait. To gather more men. To let William's army grow hungry, in a land that is not its own.

Harold does not wait.

On the evening of the thirteenth of October, the English army comes to a low ridge, about seven miles inland from Hastings.

There is a single old apple tree on the ridge, grey and twisted, and the English know the place by it. The ridge runs from east to west, with forest behind it, and in front of it, the ground falls away gently to a wide valley of rough grass and marsh.

The men are tired. Many of them have walked further in the last three weeks than in all the years before. They light their fires along the ridge, and lie down beside them, in their cloaks.

Below, across the valley and over the next rise, the fires of the Norman camp are burning.

The night is long and cold.

The chroniclers who wrote about this night, years later, liked to imagine the two camps very differently... the English drinking and singing, the Normans at prayer. No one knows if that is true. It may only be a story, told by the side that won.

What is certain is that both armies are waiting for the light.

The morning of the fourteenth of October, 1066, comes slowly over the ridge.

On the ridge, the English form their line.

They stand shoulder to shoulder, the whole length of the hilltop, many ranks deep. In front, the housecarls, in their long coats of mail, with their round shields and their kite-shaped shields held close together, overlapping, edge over edge. A wall of wood and leather and iron, running along the crest of the hill.

This is the shield wall. It is the oldest way of fighting that the English know.

Behind it, near the top of the ridge, the king's banners are raised. The golden dragon of Wessex. And Harold's own banner, the Fighting Man, embroidered with gold.

Across the valley, the Normans come forward, in three great divisions.

In front, the archers... men on foot, with short bows, and no armour to speak of. Behind them, the foot soldiers, in mail, with spears and shields. And behind them, the horsemen.

The horses are the heart of William's army. Tall, strong animals, bred and trained for this, carrying men in long coats of mail, with tall shields shaped like a falling leaf, and long spears held over the arm. The English have horses too... but they ride them to the battle, and then they step down, and fight on foot.

At around nine o'clock in the morning, the Norman archers walk forward, up the slope, and the battle begins.

From the top of the ridge, it is hard to see very much at all. A line of men on the hilltop, and the movement of men below, coming up the slope, and falling back.

The arrows rise and fall. Most of them strike the shields, or pass over the heads of the men on the hilltop. The foot soldiers come up after them, and meet the shield wall, and push against it... and the wall holds.

Then the horsemen ride up the slope. The slope is steep enough to slow a horse, and the ground is uneven. The wall holds.

The hours pass.

From a distance, a battle like this is mostly a sound... a long, low noise rolling over the valley, rising and falling. And under it, if one listens, the sound of metal on metal, very faint, like a smith's hammer heard from far across a field.

On the hilltop, the English do not move. They do not need to. All they must do is stand.

At some point in the morning, a part of the Norman line begins to fall back. On the left, the men from Brittany, who have been climbing the slope again and again, give way, and turn, and go down the hill.

A rumour runs through the Norman army that William has been killed.

And then, the story says, William pushes back his helmet, so that his men can see his face, and rides along the line, calling out to them that he is alive.

Some of the English, on the right of their line, see the Bretons running, and they break from the shield wall and follow them down the slope. Out on the open ground, away from the wall, the Norman horsemen turn, and ride them down.

The shield wall closes again.

Later, the chroniclers write that the Normans did this more than once... pretending to flee, drawing the English down the hill, and then turning on them. Some historians believe it. Others think the chroniclers were tidying up a confused day into a clever plan.

What seems clear is that, as the afternoon goes on, the line on the hilltop is growing shorter. The men in the wall are tired, and fewer. And William's army keeps coming back up the slope.

Late in the afternoon, the light begins to change.

The archers come forward again, and this time, it is said, they shoot higher, so that the arrows fall from above, over the tops of the shields.

Somewhere near the top of the ridge, near the banners, the king falls.

How Harold died is one of the oldest questions in English history.

A famous embroidery, made not long after, shows a figure near the banners with an arrow in his eye... and the words above him say that here, King Harold is killed. But the same scene shows another figure, struck down by a horseman's sword. And the stitches around the arrow may have been changed by later hands, when the embroidery was repaired.

The earliest written accounts say only that he was killed in the fighting. Some say he was cut down by a group of knights.

No one alive today can know which story is true.

As the light fades, the English line breaks.

Some of the men keep fighting near the banners until the end. Others go back into the forest behind the ridge, and are gone into the dusk.

And slowly, the sound across the valley grows quieter... and then stops.

The evening comes down over the ridge.

The grass of the slope is trampled flat. Shields and spears lie where they fell. Here and there, horses without riders stand still, or wander slowly along the edge of the wood.

The light goes out of the sky, behind the trees.

In the morning, the women of the villages nearby will come to look for their husbands, and their sons. Harold's own body, it is said, was found and known by a woman who loved him, by marks that only she knew.

William does not become king that day.

For weeks, he moves slowly through the south of England, taking the town of Dover, and then Canterbury. He waits for the great men of England to come to him. Slowly, one by one, they do.

On Christmas Day, 1066... less than a year after Harold was crowned there... William is crowned king of England, in the same abbey church at Westminster.

The year that began with a light in the sky ends there, under the high roof, in the candlelight of winter.

Later, on the ridge where the English stood, William builds an abbey.

It is said that he wanted the high altar placed on the very spot where Harold fell. The town that grows up around the abbey is still called, simply, Battle.

And in the years after, probably in England, skilled hands stitch a story into a long band of linen, in coloured wools. Almost seventy metres long. Ships and horses, castles and comets, kings and messengers, the shield wall on the hill, and the men falling beneath it.

It still exists. It hangs today in a long, dim room in the town of Bayeux, behind glass... the whole year of 1066, told in thread.

And the ridge is still there.

Grass grows on the slope again, as it did before. In the autumn, the leaves come down in the wood behind it. Walkers follow a path along the slope where the shield wall stood, and on a quiet evening, there is nothing to hear on the hill but the wind... moving through the grass, the way it did on the night before the battle, almost a thousand years ago.

Embers of History.

Also from the late hours: Slow Orbit · The Quiet Armoury · Myth and Score