The Anglo - Saxons' Last Stand

- Marc Morris

Even by medieval standards, the body count at the battle of Hastings was unusually high. “Far and wide,” wrote William of Poitiers, chaplain to the victorious William the Conqueror, “the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood.” Chief among the fallen, with or without an arrow in his eye, was the recently crowned king of England, Harold Godwinson.

The death of Harold, along with two of his younger brothers and countless other Englishmen of rank, meant that the clash on 14 October 1066 was decisive, and it quickly came to be regarded as the watershed moment in English history. A little over half a century later, the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury described it as “a fatal day for England, a melancholy havoc for our dear country, brought about by its passing under the domination of new lords”.

But even the most decisive defeats do not necessarily seem so at the time. In the months and years immediately after Hastings, many people in England chose to resist the Norman conquest in the hope that the verdict of the battle might prove reversible. When news of Harold’s death reached London a few days later, the remaining members of the English elite vowed to fight on. They elected as their new king Edgar Ætheling, a great nephew of the late Edward the Confessor, and the last surviving male representative of the Old English royal line.