Everything about the Battle of Hastings — its name, its location, even its inevitability — is slightly misleading. It was not fought at Hastings but at a site about six miles to the north-west of the town, later called Battle to commemorate the engagement. It was not the foregone conclusion that the outcome suggests. And its result, when it finally came after nine hours of fighting, owed as much to a combination of exhaustion, tactical miscalculation and possibly a stray arrow as to any fundamental military superiority on the Norman side.
Harold II had just fought and won a major battle at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on 25 September, defeating a Norwegian invasion force under Harald Hardrada, only to learn immediately afterwards that William of Normandy had landed on the Sussex coast. Harold marched his army south at extraordinary speed — perhaps hoping to repeat his success at Stamford Bridge with a rapid assault before William could establish himself — and assembled his forces on the Caldbec Hill ridge near Hastings. He had with him his household troops, the housecarls, and the fyrd, the part-time levy of land-owning farmers, but many of his best troops had been killed or were too exhausted from the northern campaign to have made the march south in time.
The battle began at approximately nine in the morning on 14 October. Harold's army occupied the high ground and adopted the traditional English formation — the shield wall, a tight-packed mass of infantry presenting a continuous front of overlapping shields from which spears and axes projected. Against this formation, the Norman cavalry charges that were William's primary offensive weapon should have been ineffective, and for most of the day they were. The shield wall held. The Norman infantry attacks were beaten back with heavy casualties. At one point the Norman left flank actually broke and fled, and William was nearly killed in the resulting confusion when rumours spread that he had fallen.
The turning point came in the afternoon through a combination of fatigue and tactical error. Some accounts — primarily Norman sources — describe a deliberate feigned retreat by William's cavalry, drawing sections of the English shield wall down from the ridge in pursuit, where they could be surrounded and destroyed. Others suggest the English pursuit was simply undisciplined, the natural inclination of men who had been defending all day and saw the enemy apparently running. Either way, gaps appeared in Harold's line that the Norman cavalry could exploit.
Harold was killed — how exactly remains uncertain despite the famous arrow-in-the-eye interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry, which is actually ambiguous in what it depicts. With the king dead and the shield wall broken, the remaining English forces fought on until nightfall before the survivors fled. By evening William was master of the battlefield and of England, though he would spend years consolidating his conquest. The nine hours of fighting at Hastings had determined the course of a thousand years of history.
