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Narrator
Historians have got the Battle of Hastings all wrong. Shouted Britain's newspapers recently. That was because Professor Tom Lysens has proposed an interesting new theory on the subject. David Musgrove caught up with Professor Lysance to find out more.
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David Musgrove
Today, I am joined by Professor Tom Lysance, who's Professor of Medieval History at
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Interviewer
the University of East Anglia, and, and
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David Musgrove
the author of an upcoming biography of
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Interviewer
King Harold, which is coming out with
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David Musgrove
Yale University Press in August. And Tom, you've been in the news a lot recently because you proposed a slightly different take on the run up to the Battle of Hastings, 14-10-1066, which is of course the crunch moment of the Norman Conquest, when Duke William of Normandy defeated the English King Harold and took his throne. And of course, the story is topical right now because we're all excited about the Bear Tapestry coming to the UK in September.
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Interviewer
And the Bear Tapestry tells that story as well.
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David Musgrove
So, unsurprisingly, this attracted a lot of press interest. So let's get straight into it. What is your new analysis of what
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Interviewer
happened in advance of the Battle of Hastings?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Absolutely. So my new analysis focuses on, I think, two very established misreadings of the sources. The first is the idea that Harold disbanded his fleet from London in September and therefore had no fleet left to face Harold Hardrada or William the Conqueror later that campaigning season. And the second piece of, I think, misunderstanding is this idea, idea of the forced march or forced ride. I mean, the much for muchness, the idea that Harold and his men came all the way down from Yorkshire to London, either on foot or on horseback. And when I went and looked through all the sources, I found that none of the sources in the original Latin and Old English refer to marching or riding, even though a couple of translations have inserted those words in there.
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Interviewer
So let's contextualise this a little bit. So the Battle of Hastings, that's 14-10-1066.
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David Musgrove
And then there is a battle that precedes that. It's the Battle of stamford on the 25-9-1066. And those two battles are separated by 200 miles or so in geographical terms, land based. And what happens is that King Harald, the English king, has to go north to fight the forces of the Norwegian King Harald Hardrada and indeed his brother Tostig. And then he has to come back down again a couple of weeks later
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Interviewer
and fight the forces of William of Normandy, who has invaded from the south across the Channel from his domain in northern France. And at that point Harald is defeated.
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David Musgrove
So that's the basic position here, and
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Interviewer
that's sort of the point that we're considering what may have happened.
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David Musgrove
So tell us a little bit more
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Interviewer
about these sources you've analysed.
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David Musgrove
Is it just the Anglo Saxon Chronicle or are there other ones involved as well?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Well, just to clarify the distance, because I think it's important, the actual distance, battle to battle is something more like, I say battle to battle, Stamford Bridge to where the Battle of Hastings was fought. It's more like 280, 290 miles, but we say 200 to allow the poss that Harold might have received the news of William's arrival on the march south, so he might not have had to cover entirely that distance, but just to clarify the distances. So the sources I've been looking at are principally the sea version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which tracks the movement of the fleet through 1066. It starts off by saying that the fleet was stationed on the south coast throughout the summer to guard against William. It then says that Harold sent the fleet back to London and it suffered some losses in the storms in the Channel on the way. The same storms, incidentally, which caused William some losses. And there's this statement after that saying that the fleet then came. After the fleet came home, Harold of England heard of the arrival of Harold Hardrada in the north. Now it's that phrase came home, which since at least 1800, has been interpreted to mean that the fleet was disbanded and sent back to the various ports from which it came. But when I went back through the Chronicle and I looked at how the phrase home was used in relation to the fleet, I found that the chronicler was saying came home to London. In fact, that's what he says. In 1052, a fleet in 1052 was sent homeward to London. So this idea of the fleet coming home is simply confirming what the chronicler just said, that it's back in London. And that means, of course, that Harold has the fleet available to him rather than not having it. And that makes sense of the reference later on in the Chronicle to him having his fleet up on the river wharf just southwest of York. This phrase of Harold having his fleet on the river wharf has previously confused scholars to the point that there have been suggestions that the word lith, meaning fleet in every other instance in which it occurs must mean something else on this occasion. But actually, if we accept that Harold has his fleet with him, then we can see what the chronicler is doing it, simply tracking the movements of the fleet. Now c of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, it was the foundational account here, breaks off after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, so it doesn't follow the movements of the fleet after that, because there are no more entries after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. But we can pick up the movements of the fleet in the Latin chronicles, the early accounts of the Battle of Hastings itself. We have two accounts in particular which mention Harold's use of the fleet back down south. Again, the Song of the Battle of Hastings, or Carmen de Histinge Prelio, as it's known in the Latin, written by Bishop Guy of Amiens circa 1010 68, says that William heard news upon his landing, or at least upon establishing himself in his base camp at Hastings, that Harold had sent a fleet of 500 ships around, presumably from London, where Harold is by this point, to intercept him or blockade his exit so that he couldn't escape from the sea. William of Poitiers, the ducal chaplain writing the deeds of Duke William in the 1070s, follows this same idea, and he talks about Harold having a fleet of 700 ships as opposed to Guy's 500. Now, obviously we can't take these numbers literally, but what they indicate is that Harold was thought by these two very early pro Norman writers to have had a very large fleet, which he sent around after William to trap him in. And Udric vitalis in the 12th century also picks up this idea. Audric Vitalis says that from London Harold sent 70 heavily manned or heavily armed vessels to trap William on the Hastings peninsula. And again, the numbers difference is interesting. We've got 70 here, we've got 500, we've got 700. These sorts of numbers are notoriously unreliable. But what they do indicate is a consensus in the Latin sources and the earliest and most authoritative sources, that Harold had a large fleet down in the south. Now, he wouldn't have had time to gather such a fleet in the brief time between hearing of William's arrival and going down south to meet him. So one can only assume that this is the same fleet that's come down from the north. And indeed, there's reason to think that Harold had enlarged his fleet after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, because the D Chronicle, the D version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells us that the Norwegians came in 300 ships and left in only 24. Now, the point of this is to, I think, illustrate the execution that was done on the Norwegians at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. But it does beg the question, and other people have raised this before, of what happened to those 250, 275 ships that didn't go back to Norway. Now, Geoffrey Gaimar, a 12th century chronicler who is using a lost version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle from the north, he says that Harold confiscated those ships. And so we do have a textual evidence for the idea that Harold actually commandeered Viking ships and added them to his own fleet. And that would explain the 500 or 700 ships that we can pick up in the sources, where the sources pick up on the Norman side at the Battle of Hastings. So the point I'm making essentially is that we can track the movement of the fleet all through the sources, all through the campaigning season in the Old English sources and in the Latin ones, up and down the country. And you compare that to the evidence for marching or riding, and there's no evidence for marching or riding in the sources. No source talks about marching, no source talks about riding. They all use verbs like came or hurried, but they don't specify marching or riding. And there are specific verbs for marching or riding. So while we can't rule out the movement of troops by land, those people who want to hang onto that idea must produce their evidence. What we can say for certain is that there are plenty of ships, hundreds of ships, going up and down the coast, and that ships didn't man themselves. They would have had to have crews and it made sense for Harold to send his men by sea.
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Interviewer
That is really interesting.
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David Musgrove
Thank you for that summation there. I want to understand what we mean
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Interviewer
by a fleet here and a navy.
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David Musgrove
Like, we talk a lot today about how the British navy has been denuded and doesn't have the power that it once was.
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Interviewer
Presumably we're not talking about an established navy in the way that the Victorian, the great Imperial Navy that Britain had. What is an Anglo Saxon fleet like?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Yes. There wasn't a standing fleet, as we might imagine it, in the 19th or 20th centuries. Rather, there were systems in place to ensure that ships would be made or repaired and produced as and when monarchs called them out. And throughout the 11th century, we find examples of kings calling out fleets. Eber the Confessor did it on a regular basis through the 1040s. And we also know that Eber the Confessor cut deals with the maritime ports that would later become the sunk ports to provide certain numbers of ships, quotas of ships in return for exemptions on taxes and other tolls. So the ports are supplying ships, units called shipsoaks, approximately 300 hides, hide being a unit of land of somewhere between 30 or 60 acres. These units, each of those is supposed to supply ships. And then great men, or sort of great lords, I should say, are also perhaps expected to supply ships. So the earls might have had their own little fleets and bishops might have had some ships. They would have sent particular examples. So when the king sent out an order, let's take Harold, for example, in 1066, in spring, sending out his order for what the sea chronicler says was the greatest fleet ever summoned up to that point, he's sending out riders with the message to everybody who might have a possibility or capability or responsibility for supplying royal ships on an expedition or for defence of the realm to do exactly that. And the chronicler, of course, tells us that it took quite a while for all his ships to be brought in. It might have been a couple of months, giving us an indication how this infrastructure has these rather slow cogs and might have taken some time to deliver ships, because ships take a long time to build and repair and to mobilise, plus to find the men to man them. So getting a fleet together is a slow operation. Which is also why I think the easiest explanation for all these references to large numbers of ships in the fleet in these various sources is to say, well, it's the same fleet, possibly augmented with Viking vessels after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but we're talking about the same fleet here all the way through the campaigning season.
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Interviewer
And you just mentioned Viking vessels here. Are these ships, the things we imagine from that heyday of the Viking period, these long ships, quite narrow, not much capacity, quite small?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Well, I think there probably would have been a mixture of warships which might have had, say, 60 ore ports, like Skuldalev II, the warship that was excavated in Roskilde Fjord and radiocarbon dated to have been built in Dublin in 1042. This is your standard large warship. But they might also have been merchant vessels and cargo containers with sort of deep berths and big square sails for transporting troops and horses and equipment. And they may also have been commandeered cutters, that is to say, smaller ships or fishing vessels. Indeed, because, as the Japanese historian Hiro Shirashima has argued, the herring fleet might have been commandeered by the Godwins for these manoeuvres. So there are lots of different ships available. And it's quite probable that Harald Hardrada's army, his flotilla that came over 300 ships, according to the D Chronicle. We're not entirely sure of these numbers. As I said, they're sometimes exaggerated. But it wouldn't all have been warships. There would have been transport ships too, probably. And other, possibly smaller vessels and private vessels that had joined him. We know, for example, that Harald Hardrada used Orkney as his base and he was recruiting warriors, and presumably warriors in ships around Orkney. So there would have perhaps been lots of little ships joining him, as well as the mightier warships that came with his elite crew.
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Interviewer
Learn more@duo.com so back to your reading of the situation.
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David Musgrove
It kind of requires London to be a naval depot, a naval base. Is there evidence from that in the archaeological record that London had that sort of capacity in the 11th century?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Well, if you're talking about archaeology, certainly there have been excavations of London showing that new wharves were being built there around about 1040. But if we look in the textual accounts, then we see London being used in this way all through the Confessor's reign, London is the home base of the fleet and then Sandwich is its forward base. So when the fleet has to go on operations in the Channel, perhaps to combat raiders coming in via Flanders from Denmark, or simply to put on a show of strength to deter people who might do that, it moves forward to Sandwich or sometimes around the Isle of Wight. But London is usually the base where it's operating from through much of the 11th century. And that's the sense we have from C. That C has this idea of London being the home of the fleet.
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David Musgrove
So if we've got Harold's fleet is
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Interviewer
massed in London, ready, waiting for him to use it.
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David Musgrove
Oh, by the way, I should have
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Interviewer
said you mentioned Edward the Confessor, just for clarity, Edward the Confessor is the
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David Musgrove
king before Harold, who dies at the start of 1066.
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Interviewer
And his death without an heir creates the conditions in which we find ourselves having a conflict later in the year.
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David Musgrove
So Harold's got his fleet in London. He would then sail down the Thames, up the north coast, up to Yorkshire and then in down the Ouse, I
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Interviewer
think, and be able to get towards York.
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David Musgrove
Is that how you imagine he would
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Interviewer
have got up to face hardrada Then, in September 1066, he would have taken
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Professor Tom Lysance
the fleet that he already had in the Thames, round up the east coast of England into the Humber, and then done whatever he needed to do with it? I mean, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, as I said, see, mentions that he is arraying his fleet on the river wharf at Tadcaster, which is also where he's got his land troops. And there would have been men, possibly including Harold himself, riding up at this point to Tadcaster, because the Chronicle mentions both a land force and a sea force. And I think Harold's intention was to raise armies through the midland shires on his way up to swell the army of the earls. Because one thing he had done is send his land army home. So he was planning on a rendezvous at Tadcaster with the fleet coming up the east coast and meeting him on the wharf. But what I should say is that sea, as is often the case with these sources, it captures the fleet at one particular moment on the river wharf. But that means then, yes, that as you were saying, the fleet has to have traversed the Humber and the Ouse and may be moving around. So although it's there at one point, it doesn't mean that it's there all through the campaign. And one question that I'm addressing in my forthcoming Book Harold Warrior King for the Earlingish Monarch series is how Harold of England might have used his fleet around about the time of the Battle of Stamford Bridge against Harald Hardrada. Because of course, Harald Hardrada was a seaborne opponent and it would have been very unfortunate for Harold of England if he'd gone to face a seaborne opponent who could hop onto his ships without having ships himself to chase him or to block him.
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Interviewer
Okay, yeah.
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David Musgrove
One of the reasons why Harold, the
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Interviewer
English Harold is able to defeat Hardrada is the element of surprise. The sources suggest that he kind of came on the Viking army and they were unaware.
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David Musgrove
How does a shipborne fleet fit into that?
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Interviewer
Cause they would been kind of obvious, wouldn't it? How do you imagine that bit of the puzzle fits together?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I think Harald Hardrada's force, I mean, John of Worcester puts them sort of pausing at Rickell. But John of Worcester is the only source that we have that mentions Rickell. Geoffrey Gaymore has them somewhere slightly different. He talks about them pausing at a place with a certain minster that we can't really identify. And then all the other sources, the contemporary sources, actually say that Harald Hardrada took his fleet right up to York. So it may well be that his fleet's much further up or that they're spread down the river there at different points. At different points. And it's quite possible in that scenario for Harold of England's ships to come up behind them onto the river wharf if needed. But as I said, I think we're capturing, or rather the sources are capturing, certain moments where the fleet is said to be here or said to be there. And we shouldn't take that too rigidly. I think we should allow the possibility that ships may have been moored along rivers or may have been moving around, and we shouldn't sort of stick to this idea that they have to be at this particular point here or there at that time. I think the key thing to focus on is the claim that Harold has a fleet up there and we know that Harald Hardrada has a fleet up there. And so we're looking at two command who have the capacity for opposing each other by land operations and by sea.
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David Musgrove
Ok. Was Harold of England sort of
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Interviewer
noted for his naval prowess?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Well, yes. So he's got a long career of using ships, not always in the most friendly circumstances. But we first find him in 1049. The first time he pops up in the Chronicle doing anything military, is, as a naval commander involved in a military operation by sea. He then, in 1051, obviously flees by ship to Ireland and comes back and conducts a naval raid around the Somerset coast in 1052. And then, most interestingly, I think of all, in 1064, in a campaign, sometimes in the past, erroneously dated to 1063, he and his brother Tostig go round Wales to conquer and subdue Wales and oust the Welsh King Griffith in a pincer movement. And Tostig take troops by land around North Wales and ravages North Wales with a land army. And Harold goes around the south of Wales with a fleet. And this doesn't mean, of course, that he's simply sailing around the coast. What it means is that he was using ships to sort of land troops, get on their horses, presumably, go raiding unfriendly zones, get back on the ships, move along. Next bit, get off. This is how Vikings use ships. They're always hopping on and off ships. And Harold himself is English, Anglo, Danish. All the warfare that the Danes are using and the Norwegians are using and the English are using, by this point, it's all much for muchness, because, of course, we've got that legacy of Cnut in England, and so they're all using the same sort of equipment and the same tactics. And Harald is very much of that stripe.
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David Musgrove
So if your analysis is right, and
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Interviewer
Harald, having defeated Hardrada at Stamford, then is able to rely on marine forces to move back down to the south as well, potentially as land, I presume it's possible that there could have been a land force and a sea force coming down.
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David Musgrove
How does that change what happens at Hastings?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Well, yes, I mean, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of some people coming by land. But again, I ask, where's the evidence? Because no source refers to marching, no source refers to riding, and the sea voyage would have been much easier. I think you could get down from the Humber to. Well, all the evidence suggests you could get down to the Humber, from the Humber to the Thames, even with a medieval fleet, in three or four days, providing the conditions are good for that. So it's a much easier route. And I certainly wouldn't want to march it or ride it if I could hop on a ship. And neither would have Harold, to be frank, because he wants to get down in London as quickly as possible to oversee the operations in the south against William. And we know from early sources that he did that. He went down to London, and I don't think he'd have had time to get down to London, to be honest, if he'd marched or ridden with a ship. He's down in London. And the way it changes our interpretation of the Battle of Hastings is that rather than Harold being some exhausted commander who's had to dash up and down the country by land, he's had a chance to rest and contain his troops. And we see him as a commander who's using both men by land and men by sea to deal with an opponent who's obviously doing the same. It also, I think, sheds new light on these references to him having hundreds of ships and sending those ships round to blockade William. Because rather than thinking of Hastings as simply a land battle, as it's so often depicted, we have to think of it as part of a larger campaign with a strategic imperative, which is to trap William in the Hastings Peninsula. Now, this reflects back on how we imagine Harold's shield wall and what he's doing on that hill, because various ideas have been put previously that he's gone to attack William, or maybe he's trying to sort of he's caught off guard and trying to fight William before his forces are ready. If we imagine Harold's bigger plan as being a pincer movement, then the purpose of the Royal army, with its shield wall on Senlac, roughly where the high street of battle now is, is a containment operation. It's to stop William breaking out of the Hastings Peninsula. And this is where it's important to understand the lie of the land. William had his fleet in Pevensey, to the west of Hastings. Hastings Castle is roughly where he established his base camp. But he had found himself on a sort of, as I said, peninsula, which is bounded by watercourses. Either side, there's a high ridge of land that runs from Hastings all the way up to modern day Battle. It was then a small place called Senlac. And I've walked this myself, this ridge, and sort of looked around the landscape, and if you go all the way up to that point of battle, you'll see that that is the natural pinch point and exit point from the Hastings peninsula, where William would have gone to break out onto the road network. And breaking onto the road is essential for anyone who wants to conquer a country, which obviously William does. So it was the logical point where Harold would have blocked him. It's also an important point because the ridge that I was talking about dips down just before it rises up on Senlac Hill, the road that's currently called Lower Lake. So William's forces would have bunched up, his column would have bunched up and it would have put his cavalry at a disadvantage, having to charge up rough ground against Harold, who was blocking him in the wooded pass at that point. So it's exactly where Harold would have placed his army, with a view also hopefully to catching William or blocking William off from behind with the fleet that he'd sent round and maybe even landing troops in his rear to Harry William and to force William into his oncoming royal force.
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Interviewer
That makes it a very deliberative approach, a deliberative tactical setup by Harold which is at odds with maybe some other interpretations which have him as very reactive and kind of a headlong rush to basically just see what he could do to stop this invader.
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Professor Tom Lysance
Yes, I think that's my interpretation. And also it fits with everything we know about Harold's operations as a commander before he's a thinking commander. We see this at Stamford Bridge in how he outmanoeuvres Harald Hardrada, perhaps the best known warrior in Christendom, how he exploits the fact that Harald Hardrada had divided his forces, how he struck him very swiftly when Harald Hardrada's troops had left their mail behind. It also fits with what we see in 1063, in Christmas 1063, when Harold led a very swift strike against Griffith of Wales, of Griffith Apluellen, on the north coast of Wales at Rudland, in an attempt to seize Griffith. Griffith got tipped off and managed to escape, but Harold did capture Griffith's fleet. So Harold is very good at swift, well thought out operations. And the idea of this commander sort of madly and exhaustedly dashing up and down the country in this sort of landlocked way because he somehow found himself without ships, doesn't fit at all with the Harold that I've been studying for many years.
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David Musgrove
Spoiler alert.
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Interviewer
Sad news, Harold fans.
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David Musgrove
Despite his technical prowess here and his brilliant tactics, he was defeated at the
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Interviewer
Battle of Hastings and dies.
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David Musgrove
I just wonder, is there any further evidence for this fleet after Hastings? What do we know about English naval power under William of Normandy?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Yeah, well, the first thing William does after the Battle of Hastings is he takes his own fleet around the south coast and attacks all those ports, the ports which were responsible for supplying ships and where ships might have been harboured. So it looks like William's strategy is after dealing with Harold himself himself is to go back and deal with the fleet that Harold has sent out. So that's interesting. Presumably it went back to London. And then we do see William using fleets later on in 1068, for example, he takes men north in ships in A fleet as part of the campaigns of that year. So he's using a fleet. But of course, this may be in part the fleet that came over with him. It may be in part the English fleet. It's not really clear. It may be that a large number of these ships are destroyed by William subsequently, or commandeered and merged into his fleet, or managed to find their way way back, or even take some of the English exiles who start escaping across the sea in the next few months. So fleets in historical sources are interesting things. They sort of appear and disappear, they melt away, they merge, they have to be regarded as fluid. They're very hard to pinpoint and pin down. And, yes, it's a bit of a mystery.
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David Musgrove
Right.
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Interviewer
Going back to the point I made at the start of the conversation, that
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David Musgrove
the Norman Conquest is in the news
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Interviewer
because of the Bayer Tapestry coming to the British Museum.
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David Musgrove
One of the things in the Bayer
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Interviewer
tapestry is that it's a very partial story.
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David Musgrove
It has a lot of ships in it.
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Interviewer
Undeniably, it takes a lot of interest in William massing his fleet, creating it and sailing across the Channel.
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David Musgrove
But it speaks not at all of
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Interviewer
this aspect that we've been talking about today. Why is that, Tom?
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Professor Tom Lysance
Well, the Bayeux Tapestry, I think, is speaking to a small circle of people around Bishop Odo of Bayeux and some of his deputies, who might themselves be involved in procuring ships and defending the coast, and also the monks of St. Augustine, who themselves have come from Scotland. The abbot, who probably was involved in designing the tapestry, has come from Mont St. Michel in Brittany. So it tells quite a sort of a narrowly focused story of Brittany and of the relationship between Harold and William, and then later, particularly focusing on William's preparations. What it doesn't tell us about anything at all is the north. It doesn't tell us about the massive Northern Rebellion in 1065 which ousted Harold's brother, Tostig. It doesn't even tell us about Harald Hardrada's invasion and how Harold's sort of advance to the north to deal with that. And coming back down to the south, the first time it presents, Harold with his forces, is already drawn up, ready to face William's army. So it doesn't trace those movements. And I think it's not particularly interested in that aspect of Harold's story. All history is selective. Everything that gets written down is written down from the perspective of the person writing it. And we always select the things that interest us and things that don't. And this is true of battle accounts, always a Battle account will typically focus on the experience of, of that particular soldier who might be writing it. And unless it's written as an official account by a general afterwards or sort of by an official body that's trying to oversee the whole battle, they tend to have very sort of narrow focuses. So it doesn't surprise me at all that there isn't any sort of reference to Harold's movements by fleet or use of the fleet in the Bear tapestry.
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David Musgrove
And I hope you might come back on again in August to talk more
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Interviewer
fully about Harold when your book is out properly.
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David Musgrove
And I very much look forward to having a read of it before the then, but as a little teaser for
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Interviewer
people, just give us a sense about what you think about the personality of Harold, having studied him for so long. And perhaps just in the light of this particular finding that we've been talking
- [27:32]
Professor Tom Lysance
about today, I think Harold grows up in quite a difficult environment. I see him and his siblings perhaps carving out their own separate identities for themselves. Harold learns early to manage difficult personalities and to survive by being rather smooth. He's got a reputation for being a very good negotiator. He's also very interested in studying the art of war and tactics and espionage. And he takes at least two opportunities to go abroad to do this. One of them perhaps Most famously in 1065, just before Edward the Confessor's death. And he's a very cultured and civilized man in terms of his religious approach too. He's riding some of the newest trends in religious thinking in the continent, Perhaps a bit more ahead than Eber the Confessor is, who's a bit old fashioned with his Benedictinism. And he's a very versatile general. And I think in 1066, the way he handles what was probably the biggest threat England had faced since, I don't know, sometime back in the Roman period, if then, you know, being invaded from multiple directions by multiple foreign powers is a testimony to all the experience he'd gained and all the practice he gained, campaigning and all his research that he had done, going overseas to study the art of war on the part of foreign princes. So for me, he's a very interesting figure. And has he defeated William? And I think he could have done. I mean, that battle's a coin toss. William could easily have died. He almost did on one occasion. He had to lift up his helmet and tell people he was still alive. Harold might have gone down in history as the greatest Anglo Saxon king, sort of after Alfred the Great perhaps, who defeated both the Vikings and the Normans So he's a very interesting figure.
- [29:03]
Interviewer
I think it's a curious and fascinating what if, isn't it?
- [29:06]
David Musgrove
Sorry, one last thing. Super last thing. Were you at all surprised at the level of media interest that came from this finding you've got? I mean, on the face of it, it's quite niche whether Harold marched or sailed. But it got blanket coverage, didn't it?
- [29:22]
Professor Tom Lysance
I'm not surprised by things very easily, I don't think. I'll tell you what surprised me though, it was going through the sources and not finding any references to marching or riding and then finding some translators shoving marching in there. That surprised me, the media coverage, it was incredible and I was very pleased with it because it's a great boost for our subject. You know, we're all here, we're all working on medieval history, we all love 1066, we all want to inspire the next generation in one way or another. And so to get these things out there and to get them debated and the possibility that the new discoveries can be made, whether people agree with it or not, they can make up their own minds. But I just think it's fantastic to have that and coming as it does between the miniseries King and Conqueror and the arrival of the Bay of Tapestry, obviously 1066 is having a moment and so I think the medium coverage reflects that apart from anything else.
- [30:09]
Interviewer
Absolutely.
- [30:09]
David Musgrove
And of course your book is particularly well timed and all of that out in August, as I said. Will you come back and talk to us in a bit more detail about Harold then?
- [30:17]
Professor Tom Lysance
Of course, Dave, I'd love to, yes. Thank you.
- [30:19]
David Musgrove
Well, thank you, Tom. Professor Tom Lysens from the University of East Anglia. And as I said, the book Harold
- [30:24]
Interviewer
in the Yale University Press series is out in August, so look out for
- [30:28]
David Musgrove
that and we will have a further conversation then. So Tom, thank you very much for your time.
- [30:31]
Professor Tom Lysance
Thanks Dave. Great to to be here.
- [30:34]
Narrator
As Dave says, we plan to talk further to Tom License later in the year for a deeper take on the life of King Harold. In the meantime, do follow History Extra for coverage on all the news on the forthcoming Bayer tapestry loan to the uk. And if you're after a detailed exploration into the Norman conquest, check out our special four part video podcast series with Mark Morris us called 1066 the Battle for England. The link for that is in the show notes.