Symbolic Forest

It’s time for an anniversary! Nine hundred and fifty-four years ago tomorrow, give or take a calendrical change in the meantime, was the Battle of Hastings. An all-day affair, it is famously that One Date That Everyone Knows from all of British history. If you believe the more mouth-frothing end of the political spectrum, England has not been successfully invaded since, although that arguably isn’t really true.

Although it has become that one key fixed date in British history, the battle itself was rather more narrow than you might think. In the Traditional Whig History of Britain, that of course is completely forgotten: instead, the battle is something that in essence had to happen so that Britain could be rescued from peasants in brown robes and conquered by knights on horseback to drag us kicking and screaming into the medieval period. This is how I recall it being portrayed even as recently as the 1980s, when everyone became greatly excited about the 900th anniversary of the compilation of Domesday Book. However, one of the problems with teaching Whig History is that this whole concept, the idea that everything “good” that happened in history is both inevitable and inevitably a Good Thing, and that everything else in history is a misstep or a mistake, is an enormous fallacy propped up with industrial quantities of hindsight.

What actually happened in detail on October 14^th 1066 is now probably lost to us. Despite what you might think, there have always been a number of conflicting sources as to the progress of the battle and what happened in the confusion of the fighting. Contemporary estimates of the size of the winning side vary by a factor of 10; the winning side’s estimates of the size of the losing side were in some cases 100 times more than a plausible figure. What is clear is that the English forces consisted solely of infantry; the Normans had a mixed army of infantry, cavalry and archers; the battle lasted pretty much a full day from 9am until dusk; and the Normans definitely won. Almost certainly the English king died, although there are stories he managed to escape, but how he died and what happened to his body afterwards has been retold in too many conflicting versions to know which is true. What’s also very likely is that, pretty early on in the battle, certainly before lunch, the Norman army started to think that Duke William was already dead and started to retreat from the field. William took off his helmet so they could see his face, the story goes, encouraging his men to turn around and fight, and so they did. If they hadn’t, or if doing that had led to an injury, the ending would have been very different; we would remember Hastings about as well as, say, the Battle of Largs or the Battle Of The Standard.

The question there, though, is: what would have been different. But in some ways posing a counterfactual nearly a thousand years back in time is itself a pointless exercise. Everything would have been different, yet everything would still be the same. Me, you, everyone reading this: we wouldn’t exist. None of the people you know would. England wouldn’t exist in its current form, or the UK, or the EU, or the USA. The English language would probably sound very different, too. All these things that we take for granted as basic facts about the world around us, all of them would be different in ways that are almost impossible for us to imagine. Other things, though, would be just the same. The Black Death would still have happened, and many more plagues since. We’d still have had an industrial revolution; we’d still have a climate crisis; we’d still have invented nuclear power and nuclear war, reached the Moon, and be talking to each other through an Internet of some sort. It would be in so many ways an entirely alien world, that you would be surprised just how many things wouldn’t have changed at all.

Historians aren’t really bothered overmuch with what might have happened. What actually happened is far too confusing and debatable and unknown as it is, without introducing hypotheticals that would change the world completely. Imagine, somewhere in an alternate universe, someone is reading a blog post about how the Normans might potentially have beaten the English at the Battle of Hastings, and how if so, everyone in England now might be speaking Normande, part of a single great Normandy stretching from the Meditteranean to the Trent. Of course, they wouldn’t be reading it in a language you or I would recognise as English, but they’d probably be using some sort of device like the one you’ve got, some sort of physically similar screen. Humans and physics wouldn’t have changed, after all. Sit back tomorrow, wherever you are, and think about the Battle of Hastings all those years ago. Without it, the world would be completely different even though it would be still the same.

Keyword noise: Battle of Hastings, alternate timeline, anniversary, counterfactual, England, English, Hastings, Battle, history, William the Conqueror.

Today: the anniversary of the one date in English history that just about everybody knows. It is – as you’ve probably realised – the 944th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which occurred on October 14^th, 1066. And, of course, all that: the death of King Harold II at the hands of Duke William of Normandy, which led to the duke’s coronation as King of England on Christmas Day that year.

It is, of course, slightly silly to posit: what would the world be like now if the Battle of Hastings^* had turned out differently. Counterfactual history can always be true, as the narrator of an Umberto Eco novel almost said, because the premise you’re starting from is always false. Nevertheless, it’s an ever-interesting exercise, particularly with an event like Hastings which turned on a rather narrower pivot than you might think. The standard history of the battle, after all, was written for the victor’s brother, and follows a firm melodramatic template: our hero is promised his future inheritance by a pious elder, and our dastardly villain swears loyalty to him. Come the pious elder’s death, our dastardly villain grabs power, God shows his displeasure, and the plot ends with the villain dying a perjurer’s death and our hero getting his just reward.

The battle was a long battle, though, for the time; and it certainly didn’t start off as a rout. At one point, in the confused melee, things definitely seemed to be going the English way: some of the Norman troops had fled, and Duke William appeared to have been killed, disappearing down into the miry slaughter. However, it was only his horse that had been killed, and somehow he survived, climbing up and throwing off his helmet to persuade his troops he was still there to fight for. There were a good proportion of mercenaries in the Norman army, after all, and you can imagine how willing they would be to go on fighting once they thought the chap paying the money out was down. It was a very narrow escape, it seems, but from there he eventually succeeded in turning the battle round; and thus, English history proper started.^**

Would we be living in a very different world if the battle had been won by the English? Undoubtedly, in both large and tiny ways. The English we speak would be a rather different English, for one thing: probably none of those legal paired phrases like “cease and desist”, “goods and chattels”, and so on. We’d have one fewer national park: the New Forest would never have been built. Moreover, we may well have had a rather more decentralised country. King William overthrew a system of English nobility which had slowly grown up from a loose grouping of tribes sharing a common North Sea culture, a system in which no single family was dominant over the long term, there was no automatic hereditary throne, and the individual royally-qualified families had strong regional power bases. He replaced this with a single dynastic line; in the following thousand years, there have only been three major breaks in the line of succession.^*** He made sure this happened by carrying out an economic conquest alongside his military one: destroying the entire economy of Yorkshire and Durham, for a start, and thoroughly replacing the English land-ownership structure, taking economic power out of the hands of the English and giving it over to the new nobility.^****

Would England have been very different if this hadn’t happened? Would rural Yorkshire have denser settlement patterns, and would we still have a single Royal Family? Naturally, it’s impossible to say: on the first point, the Black Death would still have happened, so by 1400 the population in our projected Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire may well have been around the same as it actually was. We’d probably have different northern cities: York, Durham, Newcastle and (probably) Grimsby were already well-established by 1066; Manchester, Leeds and Middlesbrough were nowhere, and Sheffield was a Norman foundation. I like to think, though, that overall the country would have been more like Germany: still with its capital as the nation’s hub, but with a much greater sense of regionalism, and the importance of the regional cities. We’d still have been English, but we might have been English in a rather different England. Whether it would have been a better England, of course, is another of those things that’s impossible to say.

* Which, of course, didn’t happen in pier-bereft Hastings, but in the handily-named nearby town of Battle.

** Or at least it felt as if we were taught that in schools 25 years ago. I particularly remember, at the age of 5, watching a Norman Conquest-themed series of the educational TV show Zig Zag, featuring a “will the peasant forced into poaching really get his hand chopped off?” cliffhanger.

*** There was something of a hiccup after all William’s own sons had died, largely because some leaders at the time did not like the idea of a queen regnant. The outline of the start of that phase of history, strangely enough, is almost the same as the story of the Bayeux Tapestry: dastardly villain swears oath but goes on to seize throne, etc. However, instead of the dastardly villain dying within the year during a short and decisive military campaign, this story ends with 19 years of on-off civil war until the villain, King Stephen, died a natural death.

**** And those people who can trace their ancestry back to that newly-founded nobility are, of course, still very proud.

Keyword noise: alternate timeline, Battle, Battle of Hastings, counterfactual, England, Hastings, history, Norman Conquest, Normandy, William the Conqueror, Yorkshire.