The Battle of Hastings 1066: The Uncomfortable Truth
The Battle of Hastings 1066: The Uncomfortable Truth

Author: John Grehan

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2013-02-19

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 178159984X

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This historical study upends the traditional narratives surrounding the Norman Conquest by revealing the true location of its most important battle. The Duke of Normandy’s victory at the Battle of Hastings on October 14th, 1066, was one of the most important events in English history. As such, its every detail has been analyzed by scholars and interpreted by historians. Yet one of the most fundamental aspect of the battle—the ground upon which it was fought—has never been seriously questioned, until now. Could it really be that for almost 1,000 years everyone has been studying the wrong location? In this in-depth study, the authors examine both early sources and modern interpretations, unravelling compulsive evidence that historians have chosen to ignore because it does not fit the traditional narrative of this foundational event. Most importantly, the authors investigate the archaeological data to reveal the exact terrain on which history was made.

Mysteries of the Norman Conquest
Mysteries of the Norman Conquest

Author: Robert Allred

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2022-07-20

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1399088068

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Recent challenges to the traditional site of the Battle of Hastings have led to a surge of interest in the events surrounding England’s most famous battle. This, in turn, has increased speculation that the titanic struggle for the English crown in 1066 did not take place on the slopes of what is today Battle Abbey, with a number of highly plausible alternative locations being proposed. The time had clearly come to evaluate all these suggestions, and Robert Allred decided to take on that task. Taking nothing for granted, Robert hiked round the sites of the three battles of 1066 – Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Armed with the medieval sources and much of the current literature, he set out to appraise the evidence and to draw his own unbiased conclusions. Following in the footsteps of the Viking warriors of Harald Hardrada, the knights of William of Normandy and the Anglo-Saxon soldiers of King Harold, the reader is taken on a journey from Yorkshire to the South Coast and down through the ages to re-examine what has been written about that momentous year – the intrigues, preparations and manoeuvres – which culminated on 14 October 1066, on a bloody hill somewhere in Sussex. Whether this will settle the debate over the site of the Battle of Hastings or prompt further investigations remains to be seen, but it will be a book which cannot be ignored and which the reader will be unable to put down!

The House of Godwin
The House of Godwin

Author: Michael John Key

Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1445694077

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The most powerful dynasty behind the throne of Anglo-Saxon England, shedding new light on events such as the Battle of Hastings.

Memory, Heritage, and Preservation in 20th-Century England
Memory, Heritage, and Preservation in 20th-Century England

Author: David Strittmatter

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-09

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 303104469X

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This book explores commemoration practices and preservation efforts in modern Britain, focusing on the years from the end of the First World War until the mid-1960s. The changes wrought by war led Britain to reconsider major historical episodes that made up its national narrative. Part of this process was a reassessment of heritage sites, because such places carry socio-political meaning as do the memorials that mark them. This book engages the four-way intersection of commemoration, preservation, tourism, and urban planning at some of the most notable historic locations in England. The various actors in this process—from the national government and regional councils to private organizations and interested individuals—did nothing less than engineer British national memory. The author presents case studies of six famous British places, namely battlefields (Hastings and Bosworth), political sites (Runnymede and Peterloo), and world’s fairgrounds (the Crystal Palace and Great White City). In all three genres of heritage sites, one location developed through commemorations and tourism, while the other ‘anti-sites’ simultaneously faltered as they were neither memorialized nor visited by the masses. Ultimately, the book concludes that the modern social and political environment resulted in the revival, creation, or erasure of heritage sites in the service of promoting British national identity. A valuable read for British historians as well as scholars of memory, public history, and cultural studies, the book argues that heritage emerged as a discursive arena in which British identity was renegotiated through times of transitions, both into a democratic age and an era of geopolitical decline.

Mythical Battle
Mythical Battle

Author: Ashley Hern

Publisher: The Crowood Press

Published: 2017-11-29

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0719824761

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The Battle of Hastings is one of the key events in the history of the British Isles. This book is not merely another attempt to describe what happened at Hastings - that has already been done supremely well by many others - but instead to highlight two issues: how little we actually know for certain about the battle, and how the popular understanding of 14 October 1066 has been shaped by the concerns of later periods. It looks not just at perennial themes such as how did Harold die and why did the English lose, but also at other crucial issues such as the diplomatic significance of William of Normandy's claim to the English throne, the Norman attempt to secure papal support, and the extent to which the Norman and Anglo-Saxon armies represented diametrically opposed military systems. This study will be of great interest to all historians, students and teachers of history and is illustrated with 10 colour and 10 black & white photographs.

The Battles That Created England 793–1100
The Battles That Created England 793–1100

Author: Arthur C. Wright

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2023-01-05

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1399088017

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In popular imagination the warfare of the Early Middle Ages is often obscure, unstructured, and unimaginative, lost between two military machines, the ‘Romans’ and the ‘Normans’, which saw the country invaded and partitioned. In point of fact, we have a considerable amount of information at our fingertips and the picture that should emerge is one of English ability in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressures on society, and a resilience that eventually drew the older kingdoms together in new external responses which united the ‘English’ in a common sense of purpose. This is the story of how the Saxon kingdoms, which had maintained their independence for generations, were compelled to unite their forces to resist the external threat of the Viking incursions. The kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex were gradually welded into one as Wessex grew in strength to become the dominant Saxon kingdom. From the weak Æthelred to the strong Alfred, rightly deserving the epithet ‘Great’, to the strong, but equally unfortunate, Harold, this era witnessed brutal hand-to-hand battles in congested melees, which are normally portrayed as unsophisticated but deadly brawls. In reality, the warriors of the era were experienced fighters often displaying sophisticated strategies and deploying complex tactics. Our principal source, replete with reasonably reliable reportage, are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, comprehensive in collation though subject to oral distortion and mythological excursions. The narrative of these does not appear to flow continuously, leaving too much to imagination but, by creating a complementary matrix of landscapes, topography and communications it is possible to provide convincing scenery into which we can fit other archaeological and philological evidence to show how the English nation was formed in the bloody slaughter of battle.

Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry
Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry

Author: Arthur Colin Wright

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1526741113

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For the first time, a scholar reveals the meaning of the marginal images on the Bayeux Tapestry, unlocking a completely new meaning of the work. The story of the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry is arguably the most widely-known in the panoply of English history, and over the last 200 years there have been hundreds of books on the Tapestry seeking to analyze its meanings. Yet, there is one aspect of the embroidery that has been virtually ignored or dismissed as unimportant by historians—the details in the margins. The fables shown in the margins are neither just part of a decorative ribbon, nor are they discontinuous. They follow on in sequence. When this is understood, it becomes clear that they must relate to the action shown on the body of the Tapestry. After careful examination, the purpose of these images is to amplify, elaborate, or explain the main story. In this groundbreaking study, Arthur Wright reveals the significance of the images in the margins. Now it is possible to see the “whole” story as never before, enabling a more complete picture of the Bayeux Tapestry to be constructed. Wright reexamines many of the scenes in the main body of the work, showing that a number of the basic assumptions, so often taught as facts, have been based on nothing more than reasoned conjecture. It might be thought that after so much has been written about the Bayeux Tapestry there was nothing more to be said, but Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry shows how much there is still to be learned.

1066: The Lost Hastings Battlefield
1066: The Lost Hastings Battlefield

Author: David John Barnby

Publisher: Pen and Sword Military

Published: 2023-09-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1399049097

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A fully illustrated examination of the Battle of Hastings' historic accounts and analysis on the terrain and topography of the land. The year 1066 is a date in English history that changed the way people lived and were governed, as well as transforming the language of the land. Astonishingly, this book finds the traditional site attracting many thousands of visitors each year is not where the battle was actually fought. The death of King Edward the Confessor in January 1066 set off competing claims for the English throne by Norwegian King Harald Hardrada, Duke William of Normandy and the English magnate, Harold Godwinson; contentions finally settled at the epic Battle of Hastings later that year. This book tells the compelling story, from the Norman duke's crossing with an army, that included a large cavalry contingent, in a fleet of Viking looking longboats from St Valery on the French coast, to the final battle, the Battle of Hastings, on Blackhorse Hill on the high ridge some two miles east of the traditional site at Battle Abbey. It was there that King Harold met his end when surrounded and attacked by Norman knights in the closing stages of the battle. In addition, the story from the Viking invasion of Lindisfarne until William’s crossing of the Channel and events leading up to William’s death have been included to provide context to our main story. The sequence of events told here relies upon the several historic accounts and the placing of events, carefully matching them to the terrain described there with the topography of the area, a painstaking process of trial and error, to accurately place the battle site on Blackhorse Hill. The author has made use of satellite imagery, not previously available to earlier authors on the battle, to confirm the location of the old Cinque port of Hastings (first proposed by Nick Austin in his Secrets of the Norman Invasion), the site of Duke Williams's pre-battle camp. The author has analyzed the relative distances from the old port to the Battle Abbey site and the Blackhorse Hill site to eliminate the former and confirm the latter. As far as is known, no-one has ever considered the Blackhorse Hill site before and it is hoped that this will inspire researchers to expand upon these findings.

The Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings

Author: Jim Bradbury

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 164313633X

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A rousing historical narrative of the best-known and arguably most significant battle in English history. The effects of the Battle of Hastings were deeply felt at the time, causing a lasting shift in British cultural identity and national pride. Jim Bradbury explores the full military background of the battle and investigates both what actually happened on that fateful day in 1066 and the role that the battle plays in the British national myth. The Battle of Hastings starts by looking at the Normans—who they were, where they came from—and the career of William the Conqueror before 1066. Next, the narrative turns to the Saxons in England, and to Harold Godwineson, successor to Edward the Confessor, and his attempts to create unity in the divided kingdom. This provides the background to an examination of the military development of the two sides up to 1066, detailing differences in tactics, arms, and armor. The core of the book is a move-by-move reconstruction of the battle itself, including the advance planning, the site, the composition of the two armies, and the use of archers, feigned retreats, and the death of Harold Godwineson. In looking at the consequences of the battle, Jim Bradbury deals with the conquest of England and the ongoing resistance to the Normans. The effects of the conquest are also seen in the creation of castles and developments in feudalism, and in links with Normandy that revealed themselves particularly in church appointments. This is the first time a military historian has attempted to make accessible to the general reader all that is known about the Battle of Hastings and to present as detailed a reconstruction as is possible. Furthermore, the author places the battle in the military context of eleventh-century Europe, painting a vivid picture of the combatants themselves—soldiery, cavalry, and their horses—as they struggled for victory. This is a book that any reader interested in England’s history will find indispensable.

English Collusion and the Norman Conquest
English Collusion and the Norman Conquest

Author: Arthur C Wright

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2020-09-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1526773732

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The reality of war, in any period, is its totality. Warfare affects everyone in a society. Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive analysis of eleventh century warfare as exposed in the record of the Norman Conquest of England. King William I experienced a lifetime of conflict on and off so many battlefields. In English Collusion and the Norman Conquest, Arthur Wright’s second book on the Norman Conquest, he argues that this monarch has received an undeserved reputation bestowed on him by clerics ignorant alike of warfare, politics, economics and of the secular world, men writing half a century after events reported to them by doubtful sources. How much of this popular legend was actually created by an avaricious Church? Was he just a lucky, brutal soldier, or was he instead a gifted English King who could meld cultures and talents? This is a tale of blood, deceit, ambition and power politics which pieces together the self-interested distortion of events, brutalizing conflict and superb strategic acumen by using and analyzing contemporary evidence the like of which is not to be found elsewhere in Europe. By 1072 King William should have been secure upon the English throne, so what went wrong? How did a Norman Duke and a few thousand mercenaries take and hold such a wealthy and populous Kingdom? Even in the ‘Harrowing of the North’, which probably saw the death of tens of thousands, who was really to blame and why did it happen?