Where Fate Intervened

1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very useful little book.

I've read a few books lately set near the time of the Norman conquest, and what I never could understand was how? How could the whole country be conquered in that way, by the leader of a fairly small part of another country? What happened?

This book goes a long way toward answering that question. In places, the author confesses that some details may never be known, but offers the most likely conjectures. In other places, we understand more than I realized.

The story is kinda crazy. King Harold did almost everything right all summer, including fighting off the invasion from Norway about a week before the battle of Hastings. But a whole bunch of things suddenly go against him--the wind turns for the invasion fleet after most of the men have been sent home, assuming the window for fighting was past. Harold didn't wait for enough of his troops to join him when he faced his second enemy in the span of just a few days. There were some structural differences in the army that told against them--no mounted fighters, no archers--but his warriors were, apparently, good fighters. They had some chances when they could have pushed the small invasion force into the sea, but Harold didn't have a good way to communicate his orders.

And so on. There's a lot of little things that worked against them, including, probably, the belief that the pope was on the Norman side. So they lost a battle they should have won and didn't have anyone sufficiently powerful to draw together another army, even though it should have been possible to still greatly overwhelm the Normans. It just went wrong in so many ways.

Excellent look at the history. It's told in clear language with, for me, the right amount of complexity.

Highly recommended for those with questions like I had.

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