Conquest

Martin interjected. ‘Let’s get the King away. We and his hearthtroop can fight our way out. If needs be, Einar can carry him out!’

Einar needed no second invitation and was already making for the King. He would have readily knocked him cold and thrown him over his shoulder to ensure his safety.

‘Hold!’ Hereward bellowed at his friend. ‘The King has chosen his ground. There is no retreat; I stand here with him.’

‘Then we stand with you.’

Duke William was circling the melee from a distance of about 100 yards, his Baculus dripping crimson from the punishment it had meted out. He had been heavily involved in the fighting and was now on his third mount of the day. He summoned four of his most powerful knights: Eustace of Boulogne, Hugh of Ponthieu, Walter Gifford and Hugh de Montfort.

‘The English are finished. Bring me the body of Harold, then the rest will scatter.’

The four collected discarded lances from the battlefield, raised their maces and set off at a gallop into the boiling scrum of fighting men. They made straight for the King, who was trying to seal breaches in the ring of housecarls. As the knights’ destriers bludgeoned their way towards him, Hereward was alert to the danger and brought Eustace of Boulogne to the ground by scything away the front legs of his mount with the Great Axe of Goteborg. Horse and rider hit Hereward hard as they fell, pinning him to the ground. Walter Gifford grasped the opportunity and plunged his lance through the shoulder of Hereward’s hauberk, a blow that exited below his collarbone and stuck firmly into the ground beneath him. Hereward, still trapped under the horse, quickly lost consciousness.

The knights made for the King. He had become completely isolated from his bodyguards as the massed Norman cavalry engulfed the English defenders. Surrounded by four ferocious knights, three on horseback, he stood little chance.

Hereward’s companions had a simple choice: to attempt to protect the King or to save their friend and mentor. They did not hesitate and were at Hereward’s side in an instant. While Martin lifted and pulled Hereward’s shoulders, Einar and Alphonso used their shields and spears to lever the weight of the stricken destrier, freeing him from under the animal. Mercifully, he was unconscious, so they could act without regard for pain. Einar used his great strength to break off the head of the lance and pull out its shaft, while Alphonso dragged out the arrows, tearing flesh as he did so.

The day was almost done and it was all but dark. They took their chance to escape in the gloom and the growing hysteria of the victorious Normans. Einar hauled Hereward on to his shoulder, picked up his weapons and, with Martin and Alphonso providing protection from would-be assailants, they made for the distant undergrowth, where Alphonso had tethered their horses.

Despite a prolonged and valiant resistance, his housecarls dead or facing their own demise in small pockets around the last redoubt, the four Norman assasins showed Harold no pity. After bringing him to exhaustion by their onslaught, they taunted him with their lances, piercing his flesh as a hag would stick pins in a clay effigy. They smashed his head and body with their maces, and then impaled him on their lances as if they were skewering a wild pig. Finally, while he still lived, they hacked him to pieces with their swords.

Harold’s gruesome death did not have the effect anticipated by Duke William. Its savagery roused the remaining housecarls to fight even more ferociously, until none was left standing. It was a scene of mayhem. Men, crazed by killing, screamed like animals as their horses trampled over the dead and the dying. Many of the Norman knights rode off in pursuit of fleeing Englishmen in order to commit yet more acts of brutality.

The Wyvern of Wessex was ripped to shreds and Harold’s personal standard, the Fighting Man, blood-spattered and torn, was handed to William, who immediately gave it to a messenger with instructions to have it delivered to the Pope in Rome.

In the murk of the autumn evening 500 housecarls drew close to the battlefield; they were the reinforcements for which Harold had prayed. Ashamed by the cowardly stance taken by the earls Edwin and Morcar, many of the younger thegns of Mercia and Northumbria had made the long march from the North. On hearing of the muster at Caldbec, they had ridden straight through London, picking up provisions as they rode.