Into battle!

I went into battle last week. Well, actually Battle, next to Hastings on the Sussex coast, and to Battle Abbey to be precise. I wasn’t very enthusiastic to start but my friend persuaded me. I’m never keen to visit anywhere billed as a ‘great family day out’ especially when it comes from the English Heritage ‘family’ but it was marvellous!

Brilliantly simple, life-size, wooden models of knights, archers and axemen mark out the edge of the massive 1066 battlefield as you walk along, through woods and across the vast field. It is estimated that King Harold and William the Conqueror each had between 5,000 and 7,000 fighting men. The rival forces camped the night before within sight of each other and then, on 14 October, from 9am until daylight faded, they fought in waves of attack and retreat, charge and counter-charge, with archers and axes and horses until what was left of the English army was finally defeated and ‘the hoofs of the Norman horses inflicted punishment on the dead’.  The sights and sounds and smells of that infamous day of injury and death do come a little close to life as you wander up and down the battlefield slopes.  

And then you come to the staggering ruins of Battle Abbey, built by William to atone for the terrible violence associated with his conquest of England. The Benedictine Abbey grew and flourished into the coming centuries, as did the town of Battle and its surroundings, until 1538 when Henry VIII gave away the Abbey and much of its land. Thereafter the Abbey was mostly demolished and so began a long saga of re-building and re-modelling to become a grand country house and estate. The site encapsulates a fascinating period of English and French history though in these times of war in Ukraine, thoughts of contemporary battlefields also filter into one’s mind……