October 14, 1066. Hastings lasted around nine hours, which for a medieval battle is almost unheard of, and the reason it went that long is the reason it was so appalling. Most battles of that era are decided in under an hour. One side's line breaks and the killing happens in the pursuit. Hastings did not break. Two armies stood a few yards apart and worked on each other from mid morning until dusk. Start with what the English were standing in. Harold's men formed a shield wall on the ridge, packed so tightly that contemporary accounts describe the dead being held upright because there was no room to fall. They stood in that press for hours in October, in mail, taking arrows and then spears and then the weight of mounted men coming uphill into them. The sources describe the sound more than the sight. Chroniclers reach for the same comparison repeatedly, which is that it could be heard a long way off and did not stop. The weapon that did most of the work on the English side was the Danish axe. A long handled axe swung two handed, which means no shield, which means the man beside you covers you while you swing. The Bayeux Tapestry shows what it did. Horses cut down through the neck and chest in a single stroke. Men split through helmet and skull. One blow from it took a horse's head off, and the accounts of Norman knights being killed along with their mounts are not exaggeration, they are a description of the physics. And because the shield wall held, the Normans had to keep going back into it. Charge uphill, fail, pull back, reform, charge again. Hour after hour. William reportedly had three horses killed under him and at one point had to pull his helmet off and ride along his own line bare headed to prove he was not dead, because the rumour that he had been killed was collapsing his army. What finally broke it was the feigned retreat. Norman troops pulled back, English infantry came off the ridge after them, and were cut to pieces in the open where the cavalry could work. That may have started as a genuine rout by the Breton contingent that William turned into a tactic. Either way it was repeated, and each time the shield wall got thinner. By late afternoon it was no longer a battle line. It was a shrinking knot of men around the king's standard, which is the worst place to be, because that is where everyone aims. Harold was killed there, and his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine were already dead. Then there is the question of the body, and this is where the brutality stops being about combat. The accounts disagree, but the recurring theme in several of them is that Harold was so mutilated he could not be recognised by his face. One version has his remains identified only by marks on his body, and the person brought to do it was Edith Swanneck, who had been his partner for twenty years. Another version has William refusing Harold's mother's offer of gold for the body and ordering it buried on the shore under a cairn, with the remark that he should guard the coast he had been so keen to defend. There is no grave. The last English king before the conquest has no confirmed resting place. The field afterward was left for days. William stayed at Hastings for two weeks and the English dead were not systematically buried. The site got a name in the sources, Senlac, and a long tradition that the local ground turned red after rain, which is almost certainly iron oxide in the soil and is also exactly the kind of story a landscape generates when something like that happens on it. And the terror did not end on the 14th. William's method after Hastings was deliberate devastation. He burned his way through Kent and Sussex and later up through the Midlands, and in 1069 and 1070 he did the Harrying of the North, which was not a battle at all. Villages burned, livestock killed, seed grain destroyed, in winter, across Yorkshire and beyond. Contemporary estimates of the dead run to a hundred thousand, which is probably too high, and the Domesday survey seventeen years later still records huge stretches of Yorkshire as waste. Orderic Vitalis, who was half Norman and generally sympathetic to William, wrote about the Harrying that he could not praise it, that it was a brutal slaughter of the innocent, and that William would answer for it. That is a Norman monk, writing about the man his own people revered, saying he thought it was a crime. Hastings is remembered as a single decisive day, which it was. It was also nine hours of men standing in a crush too tight to fall down in, being killed with axes and arrows at arm's length, and the fourteen years of burning that followed it.