The Characteristics and Geographic Origins of King Harold Godwineson’s Army at the Battle of Hastings

Abstract

The Battle of Hastings is without question one of the more important conflicts in English history, representing the last time England was successfully invaded by a foreign power. Reflecting this fact, there are literally hundreds of accounts that seek to examine and explain precisely what happened when opposing English and Norman forces met in Sussex on 14 October 1066. Although much has been written about the men who actually fought there, surprisingly little has been written about where they originated from. To help address this anomaly, this article examines participation in the English army at the battle with the aid of geographic information systems (GIS) techniques. The analysis indicates that participation in the English army was spatially dependent and related to the amount of land per manor. It is also demonstrated that manors held by the local elites at the time (thegn) by and large did not participate in the battle. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the veracity of existing historical accounts of the Battle of Hastings, as well as options for and benefits of applying GIS analysis to other historical events.

黑斯廷斯战役无疑是英国历史上最重要的冲突之一, 代表着英国最后一次被外国势力成功入侵。为了反映这一事实, 有几百种说法, 试图准确地研究和解释1066年10月14日英国和诺曼军队在苏塞克斯相遇时发生的事情。尽管有很多关于作战士兵的报道, 令人惊讶的是, 有关士兵来自何处的报道却很少。为了帮助解决这一不正常现象, 借助于地理信息系统（GIS）技术, 本文探讨了英国军队在战斗中的参与情况。分析表明, 英国军队的参与具有空间依赖性, 并与每个庄园的土地数量有关。这也证明了地方精英所占有的庄园根本没有参与战斗。文章最后, 讨论了这些发现对现有黑斯廷斯战役历史记录的真实性的意义, 以及在其它历史事件中如何应用GIS及其优势。

Sin duda alguna, la Batalla de Hastings es uno de los conflictos más importantes de la historia inglesa, en cuanto representa la última vez que Inglaterra fue invadida con éxito por un poder extranjero. En reflejo de este hecho, literalmente existen cientos de recuentos que buscan examinar y explicar lo que ocurrió cuando se encontraron las fuerzas opuestas inglesas y normandas en Sussex, el 14 de octubre de 1066. Si bien mucho se ha escrito sobre los hombres que realmente pelearon allí, sorprendentemente es poco lo escrito acerca de dónde provenían ellos. Para ayudar a enfrentar esta anomalía, este artículo examina la participación en el ejército inglés en la batalla con la ayuda de técnicas de los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG). El análisis indica que la participación en el ejército inglés era dependiente espacialmente y estaba relacionada con la cantidad de tierra por casa señorial. También se demuestra que las propiedades de las élites locales en ese tiempo en general no participaban en la batalla. El artículo concluye con una discusión de las implicaciones de estos hallazgos sobre la veracidad de los registros históricos existentes sobre la Batalla de Hastings, lo mismo que sobre las opciones y beneficios de aplicar análisis de SIG a otros eventos históricos.

Key Words:

• Battle of Hastings
• combatant participation
• logistic regression
• spatial analysis

关键词:

• 黑斯廷斯战役
• 参战
• 逻辑回归
• 空间分析。

Palabras clave:

• análisis espacial
• Batalla de Hastings
• participación de combatientes
• regresión logística

Notes

1 A hide “probably originated as an amount of land needed to support a peasant family for a period of one year and, at the same time, as a unit of tax assessments. But, beginning in the eleventh century, the hide was usually expressed in terms of acres, with … [between 60 and 180] acres being the most common” (Zupko 1968, 76).

2 The demesne was “land that an owner held back for direct use, as opposed to land dispersed to tenants” (Bennett and Hollister 2006, G-3).

3 A hundred is “a subdivision of a county or shire, having its own court; also formerly applied to the court itself” (Oxford University Press 2015).

4 The digital text is a copy of the translation produced by Morris (1976).

5 The distance was calculated as a Euclidean distance instead of a network analysis distance because many of the manors were of some distance from the Roman roads where there is no road data and as such, it was beyond the scope of this study to investigate in depth on how individuals traveled to the Roman roads in medieval England.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Macdonald Hewitt

CHRISTOPHER MACDONALD HEWITT received his PhD in geography from the University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5C2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests focus on cartography, GIS, and human–environment interactions of contemporary and historical events.