for the error of one man. Let the bones of the
dead war against us; in life, they were men like ourselves,
and no saints in the calendar so holy as the freemen
who fight for their hearths and their altars.
Nor do I see aught to alarm us even in these grave
human odds. We have but to keep fast these entrenchments;
preserve, man by man, our invincible line; and the
waves will but split on our rock: ere the sun
set to-morrow, we shall see the tide ebb, leaving,
as waifs, but the dead of the baffled invader.”
“Fare ye well, loving kinsmen; kiss me, my brothers;
kiss me on the cheek, my Haco. Go now to your
tents. Sleep in peace and wake with the trumpet
to the gladness of noble war!”
Slowly the Earls left the King; slowest of all the
lingering Gurth; and when all were gone, and Harold
was alone, he threw round a rapid, troubled glance,
and then, hurrying to the simple imageless crucifix
that stood on its pedestal at the farther end of the
tent, he fell on his knees, and faltered out, while
his breast heaved, and his frame shook with the travail
of his passion:
“If my sin be beyond a pardon, my oath without
recall, on me, on me, O Lord of Hosts, on me alone
the doom. Not on them, not on them—not
on England!”
On the fourteenth of October, 1066, the day of St.
Calixtus, the Norman force was drawn out in battle
array. Mass had been said; Odo and the Bishop
of Coutance had blessed the troops; and received their
vow never more to eat flesh on the anniversary of that
day. And Odo had mounted his snow-white charger,
and already drawn up the cavalry against the coming
of his brother the Duke. The army was marshalled
in three great divisions.
Roger de Montgommeri and William Fitzosborne led the
first; and with them were the forces from Picardy
and the countship of Boulogne, and the fiery Franks;
Geoffric Martel and the German Hugues (a prince of
fame); Aimeri, Lord of Thouars, and the sons of Alain
Fergant, Duke of Bretagne, led the second, which comprised
the main bulk of the allies from Bretagne, and Maine,
and Poitou. But both these divisions were intermixed
with Normans, under their own special Norman chiefs.
The third section embraced the flower of martial Europe,
the most renowned of the Norman race; whether those
knights bore the French titles into which their ancestral
Scandinavian names had been transformed—Sires
of Beaufou and Harcourt, Abbeville, and de Molun,
Montfichet, Grantmesnil, Lacie, D’Aincourt, and
D’Asnieres;—or whether, still preserving,
amidst their daintier titles, the old names that had
scattered dismay through the seas of the Baltic; Osborne
and Tonstain, Mallet and Bulver, Brand and Bruse [262].
And over this division presided Duke William.
Here was the main body of the matchless cavalry,
to which, however, orders were given to support either
of the other sections, as need might demand.
And with this body were also the reserve. For
it is curious to notice, that William’s strategy
resembled in much that of the last great Invader of
Nations—relying first upon the effect of
the charge; secondly, upon a vast reserve brought
to bear at the exact moment on the weakest point of
the foe.
