403. The Norman Conquests: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)

to Empire with me, Anita Arnund. And me, William Derymple, and we are joined again by the wonderful Mark Morris, whose books on both the Anglo-Saxons, which I've got my Copy here, this wonderful cover. Uh, and The Norman Conquest is very much the um the book which well certainly the British Museum welcomes you to uh its bookshop with a great wall of Mark Morris. It is the it's the it's the great uh account of our time uh for the general reader and I r I recommend it uh entirely to all Empire listeners. Now, Mark, welcome back. Set the scene for us now. Um, because William you left a sort of cliffhanger. Well yes, let me remind let me remind listeners. So the wind changed. William, who'd been waiting and waiting and patiently waiting and driving himself nuts waiting, finally gets the right wind and

Finally makes it over. to England, doesn't, as Mark told us, know which Harald he's going to be fighting,'cause he has no idea who's won at Stanford Bridge. Then somebody comes and tells him, actually it's Godwinson, you're going to face With that knowledge, what happens next, Mark? Well he goes home, obviously, and that well that's the end of the story. They all live happily ever after. Yeah. There there is actually um to annoy you even further, there is a pub down my way in Rye. in in uh just across the border in uh into Sussex and it has it's there's a pub called the William the Conqueror and it does have a fake biotapestry of William and Harold having a pint. Which is a nice count nice counterfactual history. Yeah, so the whole point that just to say as a kind of character note for William and and about the campaign as a whole. Williams warfare up to this point has been kind of conventional European style warfare or Norman style warfare, which is basically cautious and attritional in that

You might want to take the land of the guy next door, and the way you do that is you invade and you harry And you destroy his vill you know the villages with the peasants in, and you burn all the crops and you burn the town down. Until the people there eventually say, Please stop harrying us, we will recognize you as our Lord. What you don't do Is March your troops into enemy territory and then say, Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Come and fight us. We want to have a battle, because battle is what you want to avoid. at all costs. Only an idiot would commit to battle.

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