The Battle of Hastings at Sedlescombe
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Battle of Hastings at Sedlescombe By Jonathan and Michael Starkey Second Edition Rev 4 Copyright © 2010-2019 Momentous Britain All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-5272-4204-3 Acknowledgements This manuscript doubtless contains more errors than we would like. We can only say that it would have been an awful lot worse without sage advice from Kathleen Tyson, Simon Mansfield and Jo Kirkham, for which we are enormously grateful. We also have to thank Nick Austin, without whom we would be stuck in the dark ages. Dedication With love to our mum, Maggie About the authors Momentous Britain is Jonathan, Michael, Dominic and Robin Starkey. By training we are an engineer, a lawyer, a physicist and a goldsmith. We proved better at the theory than the practice. By profession we ended up as a banker, a civil servant, a computer programmer and a hairdressing salon proprietor. Our experiences and setbacks have contributed to a wide knowledge base, but very few useful skills. One exception is puzzle solving, for which we seem to have a knack. Compulsions are in our genes. Thankfully, not the muddy fixations of our male forebears, but quirky and capricious fads. A still to make Ogden’s Old Firewhisky, a Herodotus Machine for building Giza-style pyramids and a dilapidated 1857 rose engine to clone Fabergé jewellery boxes are typical examples. Each progresses at glacial speed, interrupted by occasional short bursts of frenetic enthusiasm. Our theory about the Battle of Hastings our first and longest fad. We have been working on it sporadically for forty years. Now that we are semi-retired, we are determined to record our thoughts and pass the baton on to professionals. Considering it cost $30,000, we need to focus on fixing the rose engine! Contents Contents ......................................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 7 Wargames .................................................................................................................................. 11 Part 1 - Finding the Real Battlefield .............................................................................. 22 The Traditional Landing ............................................................................................... 22 The Landing ........................................................................................................................ 28 The Camps .......................................................................................................................... 98 The Battle ........................................................................................................................... 154 Conclusion and postscript ........................................................................................ 174 Part 2 - The Traditional Battlefield ............................................................................. 177 Battle Hill as a battlefield............................................................................................ 178 Traditional battlefield and the primary sources ............................................ 186 Malfosse .............................................................................................................................. 192 Evidence that Battle Abbey was on the battlefield ...................................... 194 Ecclesiastic fiction .......................................................................................................... 199 English Heritage’s argument .................................................................................... 202 Why Battle Abbey is where it is ........................................................................... 203 Part 3 - Alternative Battlefield Theories .................................................................. 209 Caldbec Hill ...................................................................................................................... 214 Crowhurst / Telham Hill ........................................................................................... 225 Time Team ........................................................................................................................ 244 Telham Court Hill ......................................................................................................... 247 Wadhurst Lane / Beech Farm ................................................................................ 250 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 257 Endnote .................................................................................................................................... 260 7 Introduction No one knows for sure where the Battle of Hastings was fought because no one has ever found so much as a battle related button. It was not fought at the traditional location in Battle. At least, that is what we decided after visiting Battle Abbey on a school trip for the 900th anniversary. Even as eight and nine-year-olds we could tell that the basic events described in the traditional narrative do not match the geography and topology of the place. After searching for most of our adult lives, we think we have found the real battlefield near Sedlescombe. These thoughts were originally published as blogs. They got big and messy. We were asked to amalgamate them into a book for reading convenience. Do not expect an academic reference. We are amateurs that write for fun. This second edition tries to clarify dozens of poorly worded thoughts from its predecessor. It could still do with someone scholarly converting it into something more professional and entertaining. Our objective is to get archaeologists to search in the right place. Nearly all the Sussex manors that Domesday marks as ‘wasted’ were on the Hastings Peninsula. The battle must have happened in the vicinity. We will try to show that our proposed battlefield makes more sense, better fits medieval military tactics and better fits the contemporary accounts than any other candidate. These accounts include some 30 clues about the battlefield. We have come up with a credible explanation for all of them at Sedlescombe. None of the other candidates comes close. This text is packed with statements like “we think" (160 of these alone), “we guess” (48), “we interpret this to mean", “surely", etc, which make it sound too woolly to be tenable. Other Battle of Hastings theories tend to be more assertive: “This proves …”, “The only possibility …”, etc. They over-egg the cake. R. Allen Brown once lamented that the only certainty about the Battle of Hastings is that the Normans won. He is right. Until some physical evidence turns up, no matter how confident a theory might sound, it is 8 Introduction conjecture. We are not even 100 percent confident in our own theory, which is more thorough than any other we have seen. Indeed, none of the others even answer basic questions, like: “Why did Harold not stay in London?” and “Why did Harold go close enough to the Norman army to have any possibility of losing a battle?”. By necessity, we respond to other ideas about the battle. Our responses are not intended as criticism. In the majority of cases, we have arrived at different answers because we attach different weight or different interpretations to the same clues. Any or none of us could be right. The genuine narrative could be a combination of ideas from different authors. Everyone that writes about the Conquest is trying to interpret contemporary accounts in a way that fits then current geography and military tactics. We have a couple of advantages over some of our predecessors, insofar as we had access to the latest LIDAR and 1m topology maps, and we worked from our own objective translations of the contemporary accounts. In general, we concur with one or more of the established translations. We will only use our own translations when this is not so. On the subject of the contemporary accounts, we should explain that we trust all and none of them. There are only a dozen or so that contain credible original information about the invasion. Most were written in Normandy to glorify Norman culture and/or their Norman sponsor. Troop numbers, casualty figures and heroic deeds cannot be trusted in any of them. The two most detailed manuscripts - Wace and Carmen - are also among the most sycophantic. The others are chronicles that abridge events into a couple of paragraphs, with potentially confusing results. None of the authors were present at the battle. Only the least trustworthy of them visited the site. Any of the accounts might be based on faulty information. Despite all this, with one exception that we address in Part 2, we cannot think of a reason that any of the authors would invent place names, place descriptions, troop movements or the major events. We trust all of them selectively. Our investigation was like a detective story, each clue leading to the next. Introduction 9 Perhaps it was more Clouseau than Poirot. Our conclusions are linked in time, but not in consequence. We might have fingered the right battlefield even though we got the wrong landing place and/or camps. Any or all of them could be wrong. Any or all of them could be right, though not necessarily for the reasons we think. We urge you to finish, even if you