All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.02of15.Conquest.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

It was the hand of God
that decided the outcome of battles,

the fate of nations
and the life or death of kings.

Everyone knew that.

It was winter,
the season of frost and death.

A king lay dying.
His name was Edward the Confessor.

He was dying childless and it wasn't
obvious who would succeed him.

As there was no heir, many thought
they should be the next king,

including foreign princes
like Duke William of Normandy.

Among those gathered round
the bed of the dying Saxon king

was the next most powerful man
in England, Harold Godwineson

and he thought the crown
would look well on his head.

He was hoping for a sign
that King Edward felt the same way.

Then Edward stretched out his hand
and touched Harold.

But was he giving him
a blessing or a curse?

Was this the hand of God
making Harold king?

Nobody knew for sure,
but Harold had no qualms.

He seized the crown.

The question now was
for how long would he keep it?

Then, in the April sky, the hand of God
showed itself as a comet, a hairy star,

and everyone knew
this was no blessing but an evil omen.

The year was 1066.

Historians like a quiet life
and usually they get it.

For the most part,
history moves at a glacial pace,

working its changes subtly.

In Britain we like to think
there's something about our history,

like our climate, our landscape,
that's naturally moderate,

not given to earthquakes
and revolutions.

But there are times and places
when history, British history,

comes at you with a rush,
violent, decisive, bloody -

a truckload
of trouble knocking you down,

wiping out everything
that gives you your bearings:

Law, custom, loyalty and language.

And this is one of those places.

I know it doesn't look like the site
of a national trauma.

These days it looks more suitable
for a county fair than a mass slaughter.

But this is the battlefield
of Hastings,

and here one kind of England
was annihilated

and another kind of England
was set up in its place.

Some historians say
that for most people of England

Hastings didn't matter that much,

that 1066 was mostly a matter of replacing
Saxon lords with Norman knights.

Peasants still ploughed their fields
and paid taxes to the king,

prayed to avoid
poverty and pestilence

and watched the seasons roll round.

But the everyday can rub
shoulders with the catastrophic.

The grass grew green again, but there
were bones beneath the buttercups

and an entire governing class
of the English had been dispossessed,

their men, land and animals
taken from them

and given as spoils
to the victorious foreigners.

You could survive
and still be English

but now you belonged
to an inferior race, the conquered.

You lived in England
but it was no longer your country.

Anglo-Saxon England
was no stranger to invasions.

Viking raids had been part of life
for a century,

but since the days
of Alfred the Great,

it was a country
stable enough to soak them up.

Longboats came and went but still
the king's law ran the shires.

His churches and abbeys
were built more beautifully than ever,

and a town that would one day
be called London

was beginning to grow and prosper
on the banks of the Thames.

Then one invasion succeeded
where the others had failed,

and there was a Viking on the throne.
His name was Canute,

the man we remember
for trying to hold back the tides.

While he turned Anglo-Saxon England
into part of his vast maritime empire,

he went out of his way
to change nothing.

He even chose as his closest advisor

one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon nobles,
Godwine, Earl of Wessex.

A scheming, ruthless man,
Godwine became

virtual co-ruler with Canute
over what was still

recognisably Anglo-Saxon England.

But with Canute's death in 1035
began a chain of events

that would culminate
in the one invasion

that Anglo-Saxon England
would be unable to swallow.

And what a saga it was.

It started with a bloody
and unsparing fight for Canute's throne

amongst the surviving elite.

Treachery, murder and mutilation
were par for the course.

The last man standing
with any kind of claim to the throne

was a descendant of Alfred the Great,
a prince of the Saxon royal house.

Called Edward, he would become
forever known as The Confessor.

He was crowned
on Easter Day, 1043.

He inherited
more than just the crown.

He also got Earl Godwine,
in no mood to lose power

just because there was a new king.

Unlike Canute,
Edward had good reason to hate

the right-hand man forced on him.

For Godwine had arranged
his older brother's murder.

There was nothing he could do
about his bloodstained rival,

not yet anyway.

He knew that Godwine
held the keys to the kingdom.

When Godwine offered Edward
his daughter in marriage,

what could he do but take her?

Godwine
was not Edward's only problem.

He'd also to learn how to govern
a country he knew little about.

For he'd grown up in exile
in a very different world

across the English Channel
in Normandy.

We think of Edward the Confessor

as the quintessential
Anglo-Saxon king.

In fact, he was almost as Norman
as William the Conqueror.

After all,
his mother Emma was a Norman

and he'd lived here
in Normandy for 30 years,

ever since she'd brought him
as a child refugee from the wars

between the Saxons and the Danes.

But Normandy was not
just an asylum for Edward,

it was the place which formed him
politically and culturally.

His mother tongue
was Norman French.

His virtual godfathers were
the formidable Dukes of Normandy.

The Normans were descendants
of Viking raiders,

but had long since traded in their longboats
for powerful war-horses.

The Duchy of Normandy
was in no sense just a piece of France.

Though the Dukes did formal
homage to the kings of France,

they were fiercely independent,

possessed of castles,
patrons of churches.

These warlords
were constantly in the saddle

imposing their will on vassals,

fighting off revolts
and forging shaky coalitions.

But the duchy was also humming
with energetic piety.

In the 11th century, handsome
stone monasteries and churches

with Romanesque arches
began to appear.

Grandiose stone castles, as tough
as the Norman lords who'd built them,

became part of the landscape.

So until the throne of England
tempted him back

across the Channel at the age of 36,

this was Edward's home, and while
he was here a child was growing up

who would change the course
of British history.

It was at the site of this castle
at Falles in 1027

that William, known to his
contemporaries though not to his face

as William the Bastard,
was born.

He was the illegitimate son
of the Duke of Normandy

and the daughter of a tanner
called Ellave.

And in the cut-throat world
of feudal Normandy,

it was important that he learn,
and quickly, how to survive.

He was only a child
when his father died on a pilgrimage

to the Holy Land, leaving William,
just eight years old, as his heir.

A lamb thrown to the wolves.

Certainly Edward would
have known the young William.

There were suggestions that he was
one of the hand-picked companions

entrusted by William's father,
Duke Robert,

with keeping an eye
on the vulnerable young boy.

He would have seen how William
survived the traumas of his childhood,

narrowly escaping
assassination attempts;

how William was forced, aged ten,
to witness the brutal murder

of his beloved steward in his
bedchamber, before his very eyes.

Edward must have marvelled
at the way the stripling boy

grew into a steely
and ruthless young man,

triumphing in battle over
a formidable league of rebel nobles.

While William was securing
absolute power in Normandy,

Edward was, by now,
in the middle of a nervous reign,

continually having
to look over his shoulder

at his biggest threat,
Earl Godwine.

In 1051, Edward seized his chance
to rid himself of his rival.

Edward brought over Norman allies,
established them in castles,

made one Archbishop of Canterbury.

Feeling his moment had now come,
he confronted Godwine

with his brother's murder
and threw him out of the country.

His bid to rid himself
of his sworn enemy failed miserably.

In exile, the Earl of Wessex
was just as dangerous as at home,

and sailed back with a fleet
to humiliate the king.

Out went Edward's Norman cronies,

back came the Godwines
stronger than ever.

Edward was now little more
than a puppet king.

He turned to the religious life,
spending days

in meditation and prayer,
becoming at last, The Confessor,

devoting himself to the foundation
of his Benedictine abbey

upstream of London, his "West Minster".

Impotence though, has its uses.

Godwine clearly had ambitions
for the future.

He'd foisted his daughter
Edith on Edward

to get a young Godwine
as the next King of England.

But Edward had his own ideas.

Yes, he'd married Edith
but he'd never sleep with her.

His revenge
would be her childlessness.

Now Edward had an even more
mischievous thought:

"All right, if Godwine wants
an heir to the throne so badly

"I'll give him one
but one more to my liking."

It's at this point,
Norman chroniclers claimed,

that Edward apparently
promised the succession

to the Duke of Normandy,
William the Bastard.

Of course, nobody knew
of this in England,

least of all Godwine, who in 1053
died suddenly of a stroke

while at dinner with the king.

There were plenty of other Godwines
to step into the Godfather's place.

His sons now took over
where he left off,

controlling England
virtually unchallenged.

And presiding over the family empire
was the eldest son, Harold.

Harold Godwineson
seemed to have everything:

Land, power, riches, charisma,
an aristocratic wife

and a supporting troop
of loyal and clever brothers.

He even managed to make himself
patron of churches,

like this one at Bosham in Sussex.

And though he didn't dare
make too brazen a move,

any dispassionate observer arriving
in England in the early 1060s

would have to conclude
that once Edward was gone

the throne was Harold's
for the taking.

All at once an ill wind blew away
this fair-weather vision.

It started with a voyage that
no one can explain, even to this day.

In 1064, Harold and a group of men
set sail for Normandy.

Maybe it was to rescue
his younger brother, Wulfstan,

who had been taken hostage
by William.

For the Norman chroniclers,
the journey could only have one purpose.

Harold was confirming
Edward's offer of the crown.

Why would Harold do something
so against his own best interests?

Perhaps that's why it makes
up the first bit of the story

of the most grandiose piece
of Norman propaganda,

the 70-metre long Bayeux Tapestry.

The tapestry was commissioned
by William's half-brother,

Bishop Odo of Bayeux,
a few years after the conquest.

It may have been made
by English embroiders in Canterbury,

who were regarded as the most
skilled stitchers in Europe.

Who else would have made
such a glamorous hero?

Something seems to have gone wrong
in the Channel, perhaps a storm.

Landing in the territory
of Guy of Ponthieu,

they were arrested and handed
over to Guy's liege lord,

William of Normandy.

The embroiderers make it dramatically
clear that Harold and his men

now find themselves
in an alien world.

The Saxons are moustachioed
at this stage of the story,

rather fine-looking,
with a certain air about them,

despite their predicament.

The Normans, by contrast,
shave the backs of their heads.

They're the scary half-skinheads
of the early feudal world.

Realising his lucky number
has come up,

William can afford to be all charm
and generosity to his prisoner,

cleverly bringing him
into his military entourage.

William took Harold on campaign
with him in Brittany,

where Harold returns the favour
by rescuing two of William's soldiers

from the quicksands
of Mont Saint Michel,

one on his left arm,
one on his back.

His hospitality is steel-tipped.
He makes Harold one of his knights,

a solemn ceremonious business
involving a two-way obligation.

William, now his liege lord,
would be obliged

to protect Harold, his new knight.

Harold would have had to make his
own promises, and there seems no doubt

he did swear
some sort of oath to the Duke.

To the medieval mind, there was
nothing more serious than an oath,

and the tapestry maker makes it clear
that this was a religious act

by having a witness point
to the word "Sacramentum".

His oath was a kind of sacrament
as it went to the heart of the matter.

What would happen to England
after Edward died?

The English said that Harold
agreed to be William's man

only in Normandy and that it had
no bearing on the English succession.

The Norman chroniclers, though,
said Harold had sworn

to help William
take the throne of England.

The oath became even more binding
when in a cheap theatrical trick

the cloth was whipped from the table
over which Harold had sworn.

Underneath was revealed a reliquary
containing the bones of a saint.

Well, how much trouble
was he in now?

Had Harold promised
something he couldn't deliver,

or had he made no promises at all
about the English crown?

Norman chroniclers like
to imagine the returning Harold

haunted by guilt,
saying one thing but doing another.

In England, there was no sign
of a queasy conscience at all.

To get his hands on the crown,
Harold now did something

inconceivable for a Godwine,
something which

one day would have
disastrous consequences.

He sold his own brother,
Tostig, down the river.

Tostig was the Earl of Northumbria
and also the family hothead,

and had managed to provoke
a northern rebellion against him.

He'd been fleecing abbeys
and monasteries,

creating his own private army
and acting like a greedy tyrannical brat.

Inevitably,
the local nobles rose against him,

declared him outlaw and put in
their own man to be the new earl.

Harold was sent by King Edward
to sort out the mess

and was immediately faced
with two tough choices.

He could back his younger brother
Tostig against the rebels,

but that might create a civil war.

Or he could forget about blood ties
and support Tostig's enemies.

In return,
they might feel grateful enough

to offer him their crucial support

when the time came for him
to make his bid for the English throne.

In the end, Harold put ambition
before brotherly love.

He threw out Tostig and replaced him
with the Earl Morcar.

Harold had broken
Godwine clan solidarity

and turned his own brother
into a mortal enemy.

It was this merciless war
of brothers which in the end

cost Harold his throne
and his life.

More than anything, it was the cause
of death of Anglo-Saxon England.

The winter of 1065
was marked by tremendous gales

which destroyed churches
and uprooted great trees.

As King Edward the Confessor
lay on his deathbed,

he was visited
by a strange and terrible dream

which he insisted on relating
to all who gathered around him.

Two monks came
to my deathbed and told me

that because
of the sins of its people

God had given England
to evil spirits.

I said, "Will God not have mercy?"
And they replied,

"Not until a growing tree,
cleft in two by a lightning storm

"should come together of its own
accord and grow green again.

"Only then will there be pardon."

But no one paid much attention
to the ravings of an old man.

What was much more important

was that Edward
had touched Harold's hand.

The king had fallen short
of actually declaring him his heir

but it was enough
of a sign for Harold

and the northern earls
who supported him.

On January 6th 1066, Westminster
saw the funeral of one king in the morning

and the coronation
of another in the afternoon.

There are two Harolds
depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry,

but which was the real one -

the confident king who issued coins
bearing the optimistic slogan "Pax",

the Latin for peace,

or the guilty, twisted usurper, stricken
by omens, haunted by a vision of ships?

The phantom fleet which the embroiderers
set in a border of the tapestry

suggests Harold could
all too well imagine the reaction

across the Channel
to his coronation.

A Norman historian has William
hearing the news while out hunting.

When the Duke heard the news,
he became as a man outraged.

Oft he tied his mantle,
oft he untied it and spoke to no man.

Neither dared
any man speak to him.

(HOWLING)

For ten years, William had confidently
let it be known throughout Europe

that he'd soon add England
to his territories.

He was now in a lethally dangerous
position of looking ridiculous.

He consulted his feudal magnates
in a series of assemblies

and by no means all of them
were particularly thrilled

with the idea
of an invasion of England.

The risks seemed a lot more daunting

than the enticement
of new lands and wealth.

So the Duke
went to strategy number two,

turning the matter into
an international crusade.

Couldn't the Pope see
that his cause was just,

that Harold was an infamous oath breaker,
a despoiler of churches?

William on the other hand
was a builder of abbeys,

a protector of bishops
against bullying barons.

It was completely absurd
and it worked like a dream.

The Pope was won over,
gave William his Papal blessing

and invested him
with his ring and banner.

It was now much more
than a dynastic feud.

William used the consecration
of his wife's abbey,

here at La Trinite in Caen,

to proclaim a crusade
against the infidel Harold.

The barons who'd fought shy
of risking their necks

on the Duke's personal vendetta

now flocked
to join the legions of the blessed.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows
work immediately got under way

to build an awe-inspiring
expeditionary force.

Rows of Normandy trees
went down to the axe

to emerge
as 400 dragon-headed ships.

Loaded onto the ships were coats
of mail, bows, arrows, spears

and the most indispensable
item of all, vast casks of wine.

Packed so tightly into the boats
they supported each other,

were perhaps 6,000 horses,
three for each knight.

Across the Channel, Harold responded

by proving that he too
was a phenomenal military organiser.

As the crack troops of his army,
Harold could call on the elite

of perhaps 3,000 "huscarls",
professional soldiers

trained to handle a two-handed axe
that, if swung right,

could slice through a horse
and its rider at one blow.

The core of the army was 5,000 Thanes -
or noblemen - of England.

In addition there were the 13,000
part-time soldiers, the "fyrd",

mobilised by their lords,
obliged to give the king

two months service each year.

With amazing speed, this army
was stationed along the south coast.

By August 10th, William had his army
in place along the Normandy coast.

Two great fighting forces
bent on each other's annihilation

faced each other
across a little strip of water

to determine the destiny of England.

And there they sat,

William waiting
for a southerly wind that never came,

and Harold waiting
for William, who never came.

This waiting was particularly
serious for Harold.

By the first week in September
he'd kept the fyrd in battle position

for at least two weeks longer
than their two-month obligation.

What's more,
it was now harvest time.

So, with who knows what
misgivings and uneasiness,

on September the 8th
Harold demobilised the fyrd

and sent the soldiers home.

He was right to feel uneasy.
Just eleven days later

Harold had a very nasty shock -
his younger brother was back.

Tostig, together with
the Norwegian king, Harold Hardrada,

had landed in Northumbria
with as many as 12,000 men.

Tostig had spent his time
in exile looking for allies

to pursue his vendetta against Harold.

It was a coup for him
that he'd enlisted the support

of the awesome King of Norway.

Hardrada was quite simply
the most feared warrior of the age.

Built like a Norwegian cliff face,

he had the reputation
for super-human strength

and elaborately creative cruelty.

Hardrada also had a flimsy claim
to the English throne

that went back to Canute,
and he wasn't one to flinch

at a military challenge that
could win him the disputed crown.

Harold Hardrada sailed southwest
from Norway on August the 12th.

En route, he stopped here
in the Viking earldom of the Orkneys

to pick up yet more men and ships

to add
to his already formidable fleet.

Expectations must have been high.

The Norsemen could almost smell
triumph in the summer winds.

There would have been feasting,
singing and the reading of poems,

some of them doubtless written
by Hardrada himself.

And it may be here that Tostig
joined the Viking fleet.

If he did and looked out
and saw the 300 ships,

his little heart must have
skipped a beat

to think of the catastrophe
awaiting his brother.

Together, Tostig and Hardrada
would be unstoppable, invincible.

Or would they?

Landing on the Northumbrian coast,
the Viking army headed for York,

where it fought off the northern
earls to take control of the city.

Complacent with victory,
Hardrada and Tostig travelled

with just one third of the army,
eight miles east of York,

to Stamford Bridge, where they'd
arranged to collect 500 hostages.

What they saw on the banks
of the River Derwent

was not a forlorn group
of hostages but a massive army,

their weapons glittering like sheets
of ice, as the Viking bard put it.

Tostig knew it meant trouble.

It was his big brother.

Getting his army in position
to surprise the Norsemen

was an epic feat by any standards.

Harold had travelled from London,
picking up his army on the way,

covering 187 miles in four days -
37 to 45 miles a day.

Imagine then, thousands of men
going as fast as their horses,

or, in many cases, as fast
as their legs could carry them.

Up the Great North Road
to Peterborough, Lincoln, Tadcaster.

The ultimate high-impact hike
with the heaviest backpacks imaginable.

At the end of it, Harold fought

one of the bloodiest
battles in English history.

(SHOUTS AND CRIES)

It was the English
who broke the Viking line,

and the remaining Norse warriors
cowered around their chiefs.

We must imagine the great Hardrada
swinging his axe beneath the Landvaster flag,

before finally sinking down
with an arrow in the throat;

Tostig picking up the Raven flag
and, in his turn, being cut down.

The carnage was so complete
that it took just 24 of the 300 ships

that had sailed to England
to return the pitiful remnant

of the Norse army back to Norway.

In a final act of respect,
Harold found his dead brother

and took what was left of him
to be buried at York Minster.

He had no time to grieve or exalt
over the death of Tostig,

for the day after the Battle
of Stamford Bridge, the Norman fleet,

at last,
felt the wind change direction.

So, with great haste,
the Duke went to sea,

with his fleet sailing swiftly
to the coast of England.

Their first sight of land would
have been the cliffs at Beachy Head,

and they landed in the nearby
sheltering harbours at Pevensey.

An old Roman fort guarded the beach.

Within its empty shell,
William's men erected

a prefabricated timber castle,
later to be rebuilt in stone,

as if declaring that they
were now heirs to the Romans.

Expeditions for food
and forage from the base camp

took the usual form, burning
everything that couldn't be seized,

striking terror
into the hearts of the locals.

One of the most unforgettable details
in the entire Bayeux Tapestry

is this seemingly incidental detail
of a mother and child turned refugee,

fleeing from their burning house,
maybe even Hastings,

resigned to their fate,
not looking back.

This is the first of the images
that will echo through European art;

through Rubens, Goya
and Picasso's Guernica,

of the victims of war,
of civilians, of innocence.

William soon discovered there was
no easy route from Pevensey to London.

The country behind the town
was waterlogged,

crossed by little river valleys
that fed into the sea.

But there was one old
Anglo-Saxon trail that could take him

to the Roman road north
through Kent,

and it was for mastery
of this ancient, muddy, rutted track,

that the most gruelling battle
in early British history would be fought.

Having beaten back the threat
of the Vikings and his own brother,

it must have seemed
inconceivable to Harold

that he'd have to do it all over again
within a week or two.

It would not be easy.
Who could he call on?

The bruised and battered
remains of his army.

It would be a long shot,
but after Stamford Bridge

perhaps Harold felt he could
actually trust his gambler's luck.

Besides, William's public name-calling -
Harold the Perjured,

Harold the Oath Breaker,
Harold the Perfidious -

had made it personal now,
a mortal duel.

Let the hand of God decide
the righteous party, who would prevail.

Harold left London at full speed.

He gathered what he could
of a new army by an old grey apple tree,

an ancient blasted tree
that stood on a hill

at the crossing of the track
leading out of Hastings.

There Harold planted his banner,
"The Dragon of Wessex".

The Normans called this place
"Senlach", meaning "Lake of Blood".

(CHANTING)

Imagine yourself on the morning
of Saturday 14th October, 1066.

You're a Saxon warrior,
a huscarl as it happens,

and you've survived Stamford Bridge.

You know your position here
couldn't be better.

You stand on the brow of the hill
and look down

hundreds of yards away
at the opposition.

You only have to prevent the Normans
breaking through to the London road.

They have the horses
but they have to ride them uphill.

You look along the hillside
to see a densely-packed crowd of Englishmen.

At the front are the huscarls,

a wall of solid shields,
and with them the axemen.

Behind them the part-timers,
the fighting farmers,

who must have time
to find their courage.

At the foot of the hill you can hear
the whinnying of Norman horses...

...and what sounds like
the chanting of psalms.

You're a Norman foot-soldier
and you hope to God

the gentlemen on horses
know what they're doing.

All around you can hear
the scraping of metal,

the sharpening of blades,
the mounting of horses.

You look up to the brow of the hill

and you see a glittering line of men
and you cross yourself.

You finger the rings
on your coat of mail, your hawberg,

and wonder how solid they are.

You wonder what use
they'll be against an axe.

You've never seen axes
in battle before.

Then you catch sight
of the Papal banner and take heart.

Surely God is on your side.

The real beginning must be imagined
as the cavalry raced up the hill,

one by one getting into range,
hearing the rhythmic chant

of "Oot, Oot!" - Out, Out! -
from the Saxons,

and then hurling their javelins
at the front line.

Then came the slow advance
of the archers,

unloosing their first arrows
under a hail of enemy spears.

And finally the foot-soldiers
breaking into a run behind them.

Then there was just the murderous
smashing and crashing of horses,

the slicing
and thrusting of weapons,

the screams,
cries of the wounded and dying.

If the axeman stood firm
against the oncoming horse

he'd still only get one good swing.
If he missed,

he was left open to the slash
of the sword from the rider above.

The initial success of the English
threatened their downfall.

On the left flank of William's army,
horses stumbled and retreated.

The right flank of Harold's army,

many of them inexperienced fyrdmen,
decided to chase them down the hill.

But Harold,
always conservative in his tactics,

refused to allow others to follow.

He seems to have lost
momentary control of his troops,

who couldn't resist
following the horsemen,

elated by the thought that
the Duke of Normandy was lost.

But William threw back his helmet
to prove he was very much alive.

He rallied the ranks of the Norman centre
round the rear of the pursuing Saxons

and set about slicing them to pieces.

The battle wasn't over yet.

It was going to take
at least six hours to decide.

The Bayeux Tapestry
is shockingly explicit

in exposing the extent
of the carnage and mutilation.

But it was the English army that was
eventually, and very, very slowly,

ground down.

William began exploiting weak points,

settling into an alternating rhythm
of archers and cavalry.

The arrows now shot high
into the air and fell,

not onto the front line but the heads
of the unprotected men behind them.

How did Harold himself die?

Lately there has been an attempt
to read the death scene in the Tapestry

as though he was the figure
cut down by the horseman,

not the warrior
pulling the arrow out of his eye,

the story you and I grew up with.

It seems to me perfectly clear
that the words "Harold Rex"

occur directly and significantly
above the arrow-struck figure.

Then certainly the knights would
have been on him, cutting him down,

leaving him disembowelled.

The Thanes bravely mounted
a last stand,

defending the body of their king,
but for many it was a lost cause.

It was time to save one's neck,
to get out of the way.

There are such sad stories
of what follows,

and perhaps some of them are true.

One of them has Harold's lover,
Edith Swan Neck,

walking through the heaps of gory
corpses to identify the dead king

by marks on his body,
known only to her.

What we do know is that around
half the nobility of England

perished on that battlefield.

William had sworn
that should God give him the victory

he would build a great abbey
of thanksgiving at the exact spot

where Harold had planted
his flag, and here it is -

a statement, if ever
there was one, of pious jubilation.

But William had to make sure
he'd won not just a single battle

but the war for England.

This was done in the time-honoured way,
cutting a swathe of fire, rape and plunder

through the countryside
of south-east England.

One by one
the Anglo-Saxon cities folded.

William was crowned at Westminster
on Christmas Day 1066.

But the event was more
like a shambles than a triumph.

At the shout of acclamation,
the Norman soldiers stationed outside

thought a riot had started,
to which their response was

to burn down every house in sight.

As fighting broke out,
many inside the Abbey,

smelling smoke, rushed outside.

The ceremony was completed
in a half empty interior,

with William, for the first time in his life,
seen to be shaking like a leaf.

When he emerged from the smoke
and chaos of the coronation,

just what kind of king did the surviving
remnant of the old governing class

imagine they had?

Did they fondly suppose
he was going to be another Canute,

who now that he'd won, would disband
his army and send them home?

If they did, they were in
for a very nasty shock,

because even if William had wanted
to do this, it was quite impossible.

His whole campaign had been based
on the promise of the lure of land,

the pledge to hand over Saxon
land on a golden plate of conquest.

So there was never
the remotest chance that William

was going to be another Canute
and assimilate himself

into the world
of Anglo-Saxon England.

His conquest
turned the country around.

England's orientation now was south,

away from Scandinavia
and towards continental Europe.

The part of the country
offering most resistance

was the north of England, which still
retained strong Viking sympathies.

Just three years into William's reign,
York opened its gates

to King Swein of Denmark,
hailing him as a liberator

from the new king of England.

William's response was to mount
a campaign of oppression in the north

which was not just punitive
but an exercise in mass murder -

thousands of men and boys
gruesomely butchered,

their bodies left to rot and fester
in the highways.

Every town and village
burnt without pity.

Fields and livestock
destroyed so completely

that any survivors were doomed
to die in a great famine.

Hard on the heels of massacre
and starvation came plague.

All across England,
William built at least 90 castles,

dominating areas
of potential revolt,

engines of terror that helped William
control over two million Saxons

with just 25,000 Normans.

Most of the voices that have come down
to us describing the events after 1066

are written
from the victor's perspective,

unapologetic and crowing,
sketching the starkest possible contrast

between the Machiavellian perjurer Harold
and the noble, betrayed William.

But among this nauseating
chorus of congratulation

there's at least one
that dares break rank,

that in fact sees the conquest
as it surely was -

a brutal, ruthless and completely successful
act of aggression and cruelty.

The voice is all the more credible
because it belongs to someone

who by rights, should have found
nothing to fault in the Norman Conquest -

the monk Orderic Vitalis,
whose family came over with William

and belonged, therefore,
to the conquering class.

In the early 12th century,

he began to pen his account
of the Conquest and its aftermath,

and, in complete contrast to the others,

Orderic never minces his words
about what he thought of as a colonisation.

Foreigners grew wealthy
with the spoils of England,

while her own sons
were either shamefully slain

or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly
through foreign kingdoms.

His account conveys the traumatic
magnitude of what happened in England

in the years following 1066.

Pre-Conquest England was an old country,
as Orderic describes it.

Afterwards,
it was a completely new one.

Of course,
not everything changed,

and to look at a list
of governing institutions

you might suppose
nothing had changed;

that one class of governors had
kicked out another class of governors.

Big deal!

But I rather think it was a big deal.

Imagine the county gentry
of England - priests, squires, judges -

all wiped out overnight,
half of them dead,

the rest humiliated, broken,
replaced by an alien class.

They speak differently, they look different,
they take what they want when they want,

and then rubber-stamp
the decision in your courts.

They also build differently.

Ely Cathedral is one of those places

where the intimate scale
of Saxon churches

was replaced by a statement
of massive triumphalism.

These columns speak
of authority and raw power.

They command obedience
and reverence.

They are, in the most
literal sense, awesome.

It was the difference

between the immense Romanesque bulk
of the great Norman cathedrals

and the small spaces
of the Saxon chapel.

There is another telling difference
between the old and new rulers of England:

Anglo-Saxons didn't use surnames.

They were Cedric or Edgar
of somewhere or other.

But the Normans
incorporated places

into their own names
like an act of possession.

They were Roger of the beautiful hill -
Roger Beau-Mont -

as the place was theirs and they
owned it lock, stock and barrel.

In fact,
preserving the estate intact

was what the Norman nobility
was all about.

It was they who introduced
the practise of passing on whole estates

intact to one heir, to the eldest son.

The unsentimental, decisive way
with things was the Norman way,

giving a hard-nosed edge to
the fuzzy tangles of contracts and customs

that had been used
by the Anglo-Saxons.

And it was in this spirit
that William, in 1085,

held court in Gloucester
and launched arguably

the most extraordinary campaign of his
entire reign, a campaign for information.

We tend to think of William
as more or less permanently in the saddle.

He grew up in a world, after all,
where authority was usually delivered

on the blade of a sword.

So it's all the more impressive that he seems
to have understood instinctively

that information
could also be power.

William the Conqueror
was the first database king.

His immediate need
was to raise a tax,

but the compilation of the Domesday Book
was more than just a glorified audit.

It was a complete inventory
of everything in the kingdom,

shire by shire, pig by pig;

who had owned what before the coming
of the Normans and who owned what now;

how much it had been worth then
and how much now.

The king sent his men
all over England, into every shire,

to find out how many hundred hides
there were in each shire,

what land and cattle the king
himself had in the county.

So very narrowly
did he have it investigated

there was no single hide
nor - shame to relate it,

but it seemed no shame to him -
was there one ox or one cow

left out
and not put down in record.

While some of the information was
taken verbally by William's scribes,

some must have owed
its existence to Saxon records.

The most extraordinary paradox
about the Domesday Book

is that what we think of as a monument
to the power and strength of the Normans

owed itself to the advanced machinery
of government

left in place by the old
Anglo-Saxon monarchy.

And it was thanks to this
that the data was collected

at such lightning speed,
less than six months.

The results were presented
to William here at Old Sarum,

an ancient Iron Age fort
inside which he'd built

a spectacular royal palace.

When he took hold
of the Domesday Book,

it was as though William had been handed
the keys to the kingdom all over again,

as if he'd re-conquered England,
but this time statistically,

because its information was more
impregnable than any castle.

It was called
The Domesday Book, after all,

because it was said its decisions
were as final as the Last Judgement.

The Church itself holds Wenlock.

There are 20 hides, four of which
are exempt from tax under King Canute.

There are 15 slaves, two mills
serve the monks, plus one fishery.

Enough woodland to fatten 300 pigs,
and two hedged enclosures.

Value now twelve pounds.

Two ceremonies took place
on Lammas Day, 1087, at Old Sarum.

First, every noble in England
gathered here

to take an oath of loyalty
to the king.

Then came the handing over
of the Book,

the ultimate weapon
to keep them in line.

Nobody could hold back anything,
and it was this book,

the Domesday Book, that made
the gathering at Old Sarum

unique in the history
of feudal monarchy in Europe.

For the Book ultimately WAS England.

For centuries after, this was
the secret of English government,

a partnership between the power
of the landed classes

and the authority of the state,

between the guardians of the green acres
and the keepers of knowledge.

In the right hand corner, the gentry;

in the left hand corner,
the civil service.

In between them,
the eternal umpire, the king.

But the umpire was finally
feeling the strain of it all.

Not surprising when, aged 60,

William still couldn't resist
playing the warlord.

In 1087, he subdued
a border dispute in France

by totally destroying
the town of Mantes.

But perhaps this devastation
was one too many,

for a flaming timber
from a house burned by his soldiers

fell right in front of the king.
William's horse suddenly bucked,

throwing the now overweight king
violently against his saddle,

his gut taking
the force of the blow.

Mortally wounded, William
was taken to a priory at Rouen.

At the very end, Orderic Vitalis
puts into William's mouth

an extraordinary
deathbed confession,

so penitential,
so utterly out of character

that it seems on the face of it
completely incredible.

But whether William
actually spoke those words or not,

they clearly reflected what some,
perhaps many people,

felt about William the Conqueror -
that when all the battles were won,

when the laws were all laid down,
he was what he had always been,

a brutal adventurer.

And the conquest of England
not a righteous crusade,

but just a grand throw
of history's dice.

I appoint no one my heir
to the crown of England

for I did not attain that honour
by hereditary right,

but wrestled it from a perjured
King Harold

in a desperate battle
with much effusion of human blood.

I have persecuted its native
inhabitants beyond all reason.

Whether gentle or simple,
I cruelly oppressed them.

Many I unjustly disinherited.

Innumerable multitudes,
especially in the county of York,

perished through me
by famine or the sword.

Having therefore made my way
to the throne of that kingdom

by so many crimes, I dare not
leave it to anyone but God alone,

lest after my death worse
should happen by my means.

Once he had gone,
in the early hours of the morning

of the 9th September, 1087,
a shocking scene took place.

His closest followers now paid
their last respects to William

by all deserting him,

racing to the four corners
of the kingdom to secure their land,

leaving the corpse
to be looted by the servants,

naked, bloated and beginning to putrefy
on the monastery floor.

So the man who spent his life
taking whatever he could

by whatever means,
was finally robbed of everything,

even his dignity.

Perhaps the hand of God had decided
that this was a fitting end.

As for his old antagonist, Harold,

he certainly didn't stay buried
on the shore facing the Channel,

as some Norman historians suggested.

Rumours had it that he'd escaped
and was living as a hermit.

But another story
is much more likely to be the truth -

that once it was safe,
the female survivors of the family

took Harold's remains and had them
interred here at Waltham Abbey.

According to William and the Pope,

Harold was supposed to have been a despoiler
of the Church, deserving of destruction.

But the monks at Waltham
didn't seem to agree,

for they secretly buried him
and prayed for his soul.

Somewhere, then,
beneath the columns and arches

of this Romanesque church,
is the last Anglo-Saxon king,

literally part of the foundations
of Norman England.