Tim Severin - King's Man

Perhaps the wild courage of the lone defender of the bridge had made the English cautious. Our battlefield was on an expanse of rough pasture sloping gently towards the river, open ground ideal for cavalry, yet the English horsemen appeared hesitant in their initial attack. Their riders came at us, cantering to within range, then thrusting tentatively with their spears at our shield wall before turning away and riding clear. There was no massed shock charge like that I had witnessed in Sicily when the Byzantine kataphract destroyed the Saracens, nor the crashing onslaught I had seen the Norman heavy horsemen rehearse. The English cavalry simply came, engaged, and then withdrew.

For a while I was puzzled. Why did the English not launch a mass attack? Harold Godwinsson must have seen that we had despatched riders to call up reinforcements from the fleet. As soon as the fresh troops arrived, the English would lose their advantage. The more I puzzled, the less I understood Godwinsson's tactics.

Only when the English cavalry had made their fifth or perhaps the sixth probing attack, did I begin to grasp what was happening. The English huscarls intended to wear us down. Each time they rode up and engaged our front ranks in combat, several score of our men were killed or badly wounded, while the English horsemen rode away virtually unscathed. Our shield wall was slowly weakening as more of our reserves had to step forward and fill the gaps. By forming a defensive ring, Harald and Styrkar had lost the initiative. The English controlled the battlefield. They were bleeding us to death.

As that long, cruel afternoon wore on, our circle slowly contracted and the men within it grew more hot and thirsty under the broiling sun. The English, by contrast, took water from the river to quench their thirst and launched their attacks whenever they wished. Soon they were riding right around the shield wall, almost casually, selecting the weakest points. Our army was like a wild ox in the forest surrounded by a pack of wolves. We could only stand and face our foes, and present our best defence.

'Can't put up with much more of this,' said a veteran Norwegian. He had been in the front rank and had fallen back after receiving a lance thrust in his shield arm. 'Just give me a chance to get close enough to those English horsemen, and I'll make sure that they leave their bones here.' He finished tying the makeshift bandage around his bleeding arm, and before he strode away to take his place once again in the shield wall, he looked up at me. 'You haven't got a flagon of water to hand have you, old man? Some of the lads with me are truly parched.'

I shook my head. I was feeling tired and useless, too weary to fight and burdened with the knowledge that my failings had contributed to our predicament. Soon afterwards there was another war cry, and once again the mounted huscarls were cantering down towards us. This time, I noted, far fewer arrows flew through the air to greet them. Our archers were running out of arrows.

Suddenly Harald was in front of me. There was something half-crazed about his appearance. He was sweating heavily, the perspiration running down his face, dark stains of sweat at his armpits. His black stallion was equally distraught: foam dripped from its mouth, and there was white sweat on its powerful neck where the reins touched.

'Styrkar!' Harald snapped, 'we must do something. We have to counter-attack!'

'No, my lord, no,' said the marshal. 'It is better we hold on, wait for the reinforcements to arrive. Only a few hours more.'

'By then we'll all be dead of thirst if not from the English spears,' said Harald, glancing towards the English huscarls. 'Just one good charge will smash the enemy.'

As he was speaking, his horse put down its head and tried to buck his rider off. In his frustration Harald snarled with anger and rapped the stallion between the ears with the flat of his sword. The horse only became more skittish, rearing and plunging, as Harald, who had already fallen from the saddle once that day, tried to control his mount. The members of his entourage scattered out of the way to avoid the highly strung animal. Only my small pack pony, still exhausted from our long ride, stood firm. Harald's stallion careered into us, and I was almost knocked from the saddle.

'Get out of my way,' Harald snarled at me. He was puce from anger.

Looking up into his face as I scrambled to my feet, I saw the battle gleam in his eyes. Harald was losing control of himself, just as he had lost control of the battlefield.

Just then there arose a great cry from our troops, a swelling roar of exultation. They were brandishing swords and axes above their heads as if in victory. Beyond them I could see the backs of the retreating English cavalry. Once again the huscarls' charge against the shield wall had been rebuffed, and they were pulling back. Whether at that moment it was Harald's anger, or a genuine misunderstanding by our men, or that their pent-up frustration simply boiled over, I shall never know, but the sight of the

English cavalry falling back was seen as a full retreat, and our shield wall erupted. Our soldiers, both veterans as well as raw recruits, broke ranks. They abandoned all discipline and spontaneously charged forward in a broken mass, chasing after the retreating English cavalry, shouting at them to turn and fight, then veering off to run at the English infantry where they stood waiting to engage in the battle. It was a disastrous error.

Even then, I think, Harald could have saved the day. He could have ridden forward, shown himself ahead of his troops, ordered them to re-form the shield wall, and they would have obeyed him. But just at that critical moment Harald's black stallion bolted. The panicked horse galloped straight ahead of the Norwegian charge, and it seemed to every man there that Harald himself was leading the assault. From that moment forward, the battle was lost.

I watched, aghast. I had seen William's Norman knights rehearse how to defeat the shield wall by pretending to flee, then turning on their disorganised pursuers as they were drawn out of position. But that had been practice, and what I now witnessed was real. The English cavalry stayed clear of the pursuing Norwegian infantry, and then swerved aside, leaving their own foot soldiers to take the brunt of the Norwegian onslaught. Harald's men had already been run off their legs when the Norsemen's charge burst on to the English levies, and the impact was irregular and ineffective. The two sides mingled in a seething mass of violence, the men hacking and stabbing and slashing at one another. There was no sense of purpose, only that both infantries were desperate to inflict the greatest damage on one another.

Harald himself stood out like a beacon in a sea of turmoil. Seated high on his horse, whose frantic run had been halted by the mass of men, he could be seen fighting like a berserk warrior from the ancient days. He had neither shield nor armour, but held a long-shafted, single-bladed axe in each hand, his favoured weapons since his days in the Varangian guard. He was roaring out in anger. Each of his axes would normally have required a two-handed grip, but Harald was such a giant that he could wield them one in each hand. All around him the English foot soldiers were attempting to dodge his furious sweeping blows and, too slow, were falling to his attack. I tried to calculate where Harald was heading, and whether there was some purpose to his frantic advance, but I could see no selected target for his wrath. The English cavalry had withdrawn to one side and were regrouping, waiting for the right moment to ride to the rescue of their infantry. Among them I thought I recognised Harold Godwinsson, but he was too far away for me to be certain. Harald himself was oblivious to the gathering danger. His own battle flag, Land Ravager, was nowhere to be seen. His standard-bearer had been left far behind in the mad forward gallop.