Men from the North The Normans

Falaise Castle, in Northern France.

The year is 1027.

A young girl is tormented by a strange dream.

An enormous tree bursts out from deep within her belly.

Its branches spread and grow until it towers over the whole of Normandy...

..and then across the water to overshadow England too.

The girl's name was Herleva,

the daughter of the town's embalmer.

And something WAS growing inside her.

She'd just been seduced by the younger brother of the Duke of Normandy.

Herleva's dream is only a legend,

written down 100 years after the event.

But it contains one historical certainty -

she HAD conceived a son that night.

He would be known as William the Bastard.

Later, he would earn another title

by which he would go down in history - William the Conqueror,

Duke of Normandy and King of England.

William's victory at the Battle of Hastings

has given us England's most famous date - 1066.

But this wasn't just a battle.

It was a momentous turning point in European history.

In the years that followed, the Normans transformed England

and then the rest of Britain and Ireland.

They helped forge the English language.

They built monumental cathedrals and castles,

including the Tower of London.

The Conqueror's legacy would leave a permanent mark on British history.

But the Normans didn't stop there.

They also left a deep imprint across Europe,

from northern France...

..to southern Italy...

..and on to the Middle East and Jerusalem.

The Normans were an ambitious band of warriors,

hungry for land, wealth and power,

but also for spiritual inspiration and knowledge.

They would become great patrons of European art...

..and architecture.

Everywhere they went, the Normans transformed the language, culture and politics

in ways that can still be seen right across Europe to this day.

Herleva's dream is a great Norman myth,

designed obviously to glamorise William and add to his mystique.

But the story contains a simple truth -

the Norman hour was approaching.

1066 wasn't England's first encounter with the Normans.

In the year 793, their ancestors sailed across the North Sea

from Scandinavia.

Monks on the tiny English island of Lindisfarne were their first victims.

The 8th-century cleric Alcuin of York described the carnage.

"Never before has such terror appeared in Britain.

"Behold the church of St Cuthbert,

"splattered with the blood of God's priests, robbed of its ornaments."

The Vikings had struck for the first time.

For 300 years, the Vikings burned and murdered their way across the Continent,

sailing thousands of miles in search of wealth and power.

With their formidable longboats and pagan gods,

the Vikings terrorised northern and eastern England,

sailed to the Mediterranean,

and across the Atlantic as far as North America.

But the place where the Viking story took its most remarkable turn

was just across the Channel from England in northern France.

One of the most successful Viking settlements of them all took root here.

It even took its name from them - "Land of the Northmen", Normandy.

The Vikings began raiding the Seine Valley in northern France in the middle of the 9th century.

According to the 11th-century French historian, Dudo of St Quentin,

they liked what they saw.

"This land is rich and fertile with crops of all kinds,

"criss-crossed with rivers full of fish,

"and rich in game for the hunting.

"Let us subject it to our own power and claim it as our own."

Norman history starts here.

The Vikings sailed up the River Seine,

stripping and destroying the wealthy, but very poorly defended, monasteries,

like this one at Jumieges.

These walls are the only part of the church remaining

from the ones that the Vikings destroyed.

And since the monks were the ones who wrote the histories,

it's hardly surprising that they gave the Vikings a very bad press indeed.

But the Vikings' reputation was about to change.

France in the 10th century was in a state of political fragmentation.

The great empire of Charlemagne that covered most of modern France, Germany and Italy

had disintegrated in the 9th century.

France was now a series of warring principalities.

The king had little authority.

Northern France was there for the taking.

But this band of Vikings soon realised

that holding on to territory and power required new tactics.

The Vikings were led by a Norwegian giant called Rollo.

He was said to be so large that no horse could carry him,

so he went everywhere on foot and earned the nickname "Rollo the Ganger", "Rollo the Walker".

He was skilled with the usual Viking tools of violence and chaos.

But he also cultivated the local nobility

and even married the daughter of a French noble.

This was to be the model of Norman power -

conquest through terror and force,

but then settlement, intermarriage, adaptation to local society.

By the start of the 10th century, Rollo's Vikings were unstoppable.

Charles, King of France, had no choice but to do a deal.

In 911, tradition has it that Rollo and the king met here

by the river at St-Clair-sur-Epte.

Rollo realised that the route to power called for diplomacy.

So he swore loyalty to the king,

agreed to protect him from other Viking raiders,

and promised to convert to Christianity.

In return, the king offered Rollo all the land between the river and the sea.

The province of Normandy was born.

To seal the deal, the king insisted on the ritual kissing of the foot.

Rollo refused - "I shall never bow my knees to the knees of any other man, or kiss anyone's foot."

So he delegated the task to one of his followers,

who bent down, grabbed the king's foot, brought it to his mouth, and sent the king toppling backwards.

It was an early indication that the Normans had no intention of being ruled by anyone.

Rollo didn't simply turn Normandy into another Viking war camp.

He took the city of Rouen as his capital,

and the Normans became part of a great act of political transformation.

In the course of just two generations, they doubled their territory

and turned Normandy into one of the most powerful principalities in France.

The Viking minority ruled over their French subjects.

But they took Rollo's lead and learned from them too.

The Normans became French.

They married local women.

They became wine drinkers.

And within a generation or two, they'd abandoned their Scandinavian language.

These marauding warriors realised

that to make wealth and power permanent, they had to learn how to run a state.

And their new neighbours showed them how.

The Normans willingly adopted the French social structure

and administrative and legal systems.

They mastered them with their customary ferocious energy and ambition.

Rouen's Museum of Antiquities contains a powerful symbol of this process.

This is a coin that dates from the middle of the 10th century,

from the reign of Rollo's son, William Longsword.

You can make out the letters

W-I-L-E-L-M-U-S, Wilelmus,

the Latin for William.

This is the first time a French territorial prince

had put his own name on a coin, with no reference to the King of France.

So this tiny object is a symbol of Norman power

and the Normans' amazing audacity.

Wealth for the Normans was no longer simply booty to be looted.

They now presided over a settled economy.

They were fast learners,

turning their newly conquered land into a fully functioning medieval state...

..based on land ownership, social hierarchy and efficient government.

This was a culture rooted in order and permanence,

not anarchy and terror.

It would make the Normans even more formidable than their Viking ancestors.

But the Normans didn't completely lose touch with their Viking past.

Any attempts to revolt against the new order were brutally repressed.

In the last decade of the 10th century,

the Norman peasantry attempted to oppose the aristocrats.

The Norman historian, William of Jumieges, describes their reaction.

"The duke sent a large number of knights

"who seized the peasants' leaders and many others,

"cut off their hands and feet and left them helpless."

This peasants' revolt was quickly abandoned.

A band of Viking pirates had become a powerful political force.

But it didn't stop there.

Their reinvention encompassed heaven as well as Earth.

The Normans now had a new God as well as a new politics.

And as with everything they did, they embraced their new religion with fierce enthusiasm.

Rollo kept his promise to the king and converted to Christianity.

Some people doubted his commitment.

One French historian even claimed that on his deathbed,

Rollo had 100 men decapitated to appease the pagan gods.

But Rollo and his successors turned to Christianity with the same energy that they had applied to conquest.

His ancestors had burned churches.

They built them.

And this monastery at Mont St Michel was one of their favourite projects.

The monastery of Mont St Michel was founded

on an island off the coast of Normandy in the 8th century.

It soon became one of the major Christian pilgrimage sites.

It's dedicated to the Archangel St Michael, the warrior saint.

So it's little surprise that the Normans came to worship here.

By the middle of the 10th century, they were Mont St Michel's most generous sponsors.

They built the oldest part of the monastery.

It lies behind this door.

This is the chapel of Notre Dame Sous Terre - Our Lady Beneath the Ground.

It was built in the 10th century during the reign of Duke Richard I, Rollo's grandson,

and is the earliest surviving example of Norman architecture.

It's a simple chapel, typical of the French style of the era,

with its plain arches, rectangular supports and small windows.

But within 50 years, Norman ambition and vision inspired the construction

of a magnificent church just above this modest little chapel.

This is the great abbey church of St Michel.

It builds on the architecture of Imperial Rome...

..with its round arches...

..and monumental columns.

Historians label it Romanesque.

This was the most widespread style of architecture

since the fall of the Roman Empire.

This church was a statement in stone.

The Normans were here to stay.

In less than 150 years,

the pagan men from the north had become master builders of Christianity.

Places like Mont St Michel showed off the Normans' growing faith, wealth and pride.

And in return for building the abbeys, the monks would pray for their souls.

Like most people in the Middle Ages, the Normans believed that God would punish them for their sins

and they might spend all eternity burning in hellfire.

The monasteries were a kind of insurance policy,

religious castles where monks engaged in endless spiritual warfare against Satan on their behalf.

But their piety and church building didn't mean the Normans had

any intention of laying down their swords.

10th-century France offered new ways to express this urge to command and conquer.

They'd already moved from raiding to government,

and replaced pagan shrines with churches.

Now the Normans would exchange their longboats for horses,

reinventing themselves...

as knights.

The word "knight" summons up images of chivalric warriors,

figures in plate armour,

aristocratic heroes devoted to their ladies, Lancelot and Perceval.

But the reality was quite different.

The first knights were simply armoured men on horseback,

and could be a very rough crowd.

Some of them were little better than brutal thugs.

These hard warriors were given years of training.

Cavalry warfare was a tough and highly demanding discipline.

Training was long, arduous and cost a great deal of money,

not least for the armour and weaponry,

the helmets, ironmail coats, spears and swords...

..and above all, their horses.

People in the Middle Ages knew their horses well, intimately.

There's a wonderful story of a man who could tell by picking up manure and sniffing it,

whether it came from wild donkeys fed on grass

or from war horses that had been eating oats.

It enabled him to tell, of course, whether there were enemies in the neighbourhood.

Fighting on horseback defined a new kind of warfare.

The shock tactics of heavy cavalry must have been physically and psychologically devastating.

The Normans were becoming the most ferocious cavalry in Europe.

It made them a wonderful machine for conquest.

Horseback warfare also left a powerful social legacy.

In most European languages, the word for "knight" -

chevalier, caballero, Ritter - simply means "horseman".

But it soon came to signify both honour and status.

Knights became a vital part of the new social hierarchy.

As the Normans sharpened their military skills, they were also learning another important lesson -

how to consolidate power.

This too involved building.

Wooden fortifications, known as "motte and bailey" castles, sprang up across the region.

Quick and easy to build, they were used as bases for attack

and then for the defence of captured land.

And here, deep in the forest of Grimbosq,

are the remains of an early motte and bailey castle.

Here, there's an enormous earth mound, now covered with trees,

made by digging the soil out from a surrounding ditch.

This is the motte.

Here, there would have been a defensive wall made of wood, a stockade.

And this place would have served as a lookout point

and an emergency refuge for the lord and his men.

Below was the bailey, a level area

also protected by a defensive wall of wood,

used as living quarters and to house the horses.

These fortifications were a statement of aristocratic power and domination.

Soon, like their churches, they would be rebuilt in stone,

great monuments of aggression and permanence.

This was the land into which the most famous of all the Normans was born in 1027 -

a man who, more than any other, ensured that Norman power would spread far beyond Normandy.

No wonder the conception of the new duke became the stuff of legend,

with the strange dream of Herleva, the embalmer's daughter.

Herleva said that she felt something begin to stir and grow in her belly.

It came out of her body and turned into an enormous tree,

so vast that it overshadowed Normandy and the Kingdom of England.

She had just conceived William the Conqueror.

First, this illegitimate son of the Duke of Normandy was known as "William the Bastard".

And he was born into a world of danger.

When his father died in 1035...

..William was just eight years old.

With the Duchy in the hands of a child, the Norman aristocracy saw their chance to grab power.

William's rivals circled.

One night, as the young duke was sleeping,

his steward, Osbern, sleeping in the bed beside him, had his throat cut.

In fact, every one of William's guardians was assassinated.

On another occasion, according to legend, William had to make a quick escape at night,

getting away on horseback in just his underclothes,

and fording a raging river at midnight.

Normandy was in turmoil.

The chronicler William of Jumieges described the chaos.

"Plots were hatched, and rebellions, and all the duchy was ablaze with fire."

The violence was sickening.

Rivals were abducted and mutilated.

One Norman lord who went to a wedding feast came away without ears, eyes, or genitals.

Amazingly, he survived and ended his days as a monk.

The young duke hung on for 12 years.

Then, in 1047, when he was 20 years old, he faced a full-blown revolt.

It was launched by his cousin, Guy, who had mustered the backing of "the greater part of Normandy".

William confronted the rebels here at Val-es-Dunes.

He'd called on the aid of the French king, Henry I.

But William didn't need much help.

He charged into the carnage, terrifying his enemies with brute force.

When they fled the battlefield, it's said that he pursued them relentlessly for miles.

Many were hacked down.

Others drowned as they tried to cross the River Orne.

The battle of Val-es-Dunes was the making of the young duke.

Nothing could stop him now.

William set about restoring order to the Norman state.

He built a new capital here at Caen,

complete with the two indispensable expressions of Norman power -

a castle...

..and two abbeys, the Abbaye aux Hommes, for men,

and the Abbaye aux Dames, for women.

Next, to secure his dynasty, came marriage.

William's bride was a distant cousin called Mathilda.

She was the daughter of Normandy's most powerful neighbour, the Count of Flanders.

Even in marriage, the young duke never forgot politics.

But William and Mathilda appear to have been happy together,

despite their rather ill-assorted appearance.

He was almost six foot,

she apparently only four foot three inches.

At first, the Pope prohibited their wedding on the grounds that they were too closely related.

The church had very strict rules at this time about marriage between cousins, however distant.

But they went ahead and got married anyway, and then did penance by building their two abbeys.

This is Mathilda's, the great Abbaye aux Dames.

The abbeys of Caen are a high point of Norman church building.

This was a golden age for Normandy,

and William was asserting his Christian piety and the magnificence of his power.

The abbeys share the same imperial pretensions as the church of Mont St Michel,

but they are more sophisticated.

Their arches more graceful,

their columns more refined.

The duke was a fervent Christian.

But he'd been hardened by his enemies and the trials of his childhood.

William could be devastatingly savage.

One story that concerns his siege of the city of Alencon

tells how the defenders hung out animal skins over the battlements

to mock the fact that his mother was an embalmer's daughter.

When he captured the place, William ordered the offenders' hands and feet to be cut off,

and then their eyes to be gouged out to satisfy his desire for revenge.

William ruthlessly restored Normandy's power, prestige and wealth.

One Norman historian remarked that he was "ruler of his whole land,

"something which is scarcely found anywhere else."

By the time he was in his 30s, William was secure enough to consider expanding his territories.

In 1063, he invaded the county of Maine,

which lies to the south of Normandy,

crushed the fierce resistance he encountered,

and added it to his dominions.

But he already had in mind a yet greater prize,

a large and powerful kingdom that lay not far away across the sea.

What happened next would catapult the Normans

and their ambitious leader to the very centre of European power.

11th-century England offered much more than just territory.

King Edward the Confessor ruled over one of the wealthiest

and best-governed states in Europe -

efficient and highly centralised.

Only the king could mint money.

And the English silver penny was famous for its purity and stability.

Most importantly, money flowed into the royal treasury, thanks to England's sophisticated tax system.

But England was confronting the most dangerous prospect

that a medieval kingdom could face - the death of a king without an heir.

King Edward the Confessor was later to be made a saint, partly because,

it is said, he lived and died a virgin, even though married.

But from the point of view of dynastic politics, the death of a childless ruler was a disaster.

And disaster was looming.

King Edward was dying,

and the Normans had become so entwined in the dynastic networks of Europe

that William could make a plausible claim to the English throne.

He was Edward's cousin, and had known him since childhood.

When Edward succeeded to the English throne in 1042,

he'd been living in exile in Normandy for almost 25 years.

He was a stranger in his own land, who knew his cousin, Duke William,

far better than he knew the English aristocracy.

William even claimed that Edward promised him the English throne after Edward's death.

And that was a prize William was determined to get his hands on.

In France, William was a duke, but in England he could be a king.

And kingship in the Middle Ages was an institution blessed and approved by God.

But William had a rival.

Earl Harold Godwinson had no hereditary claim to the throne.

But he was the richest man in England, a successful general and a skilful politician.

He claimed that Edward had promised HIM the throne too.

The Norman duke's claim to the English throne was strengthened

when Harold made a mysterious journey to Northern France in 1064.

The story is told at the beginning of the greatest surviving record of the Norman conquest.

This is the Bayeux Tapestry,

one of the most amazing objects surviving from the Middle Ages.

It's over 900 years old,

and it sheds a unique light on that period.

The 11th century is a distant and in some ways a dark period,

but then suddenly, like a searchlight cutting though that darkness,

we have this - 70 metres of detailed visual imagery.

It's a masterpiece of needlework.

The colours are clear and fresh,

and when we look in detail,

we can see how carefully observed every scene is.

You can tell from this who are the English

and who are the Normans by their hairstyle.

The English invariably have shoulder-length hair and moustaches.

The Normans are clean shaven,

with a savagely high razor cut at the back.

Modern historians can enrich their story with photographs or film.

Medievalists can't do that.

But once in a while, they have a wonderful gift of something like this,

something like a medieval film strip

which tells us about a remarkable event in European history.

It's believed that the tapestry was commissioned by William's half-brother Bishop Odo.

Its size and complexity tell us the Normans regarded this expedition

as more than just another bout of war-making.

It begins with Harold's journey to France.

We don't know why he went.

But we do know that the voyage would lead to disaster for Harold...

and for England.

Here we see Harold and his men getting on board ship.

They're sailing into the Channel, across to France.

The wind blows them, unfortunately, to enemy soil, the land of Guy of Ponthieu, who imprisons them.

Duke William of Normandy gets to hear about this,

and he demands that Harold should be sent to him.

And when he's there, he treats Harold as an honoured guest.

He even invites him to go on campaign with him,

so Harold is actually fighting in William's army.

We see the army proceeding towards Brittany.

They pass Mont St Michel on their way.

Harold distinguishes himself in this warfare. He's a kind of hero.

And in return, William actually knights him.

He gives him arms.

A sign of great honour, but also perhaps of subordination.

And then, on their return to Normandy,

we have one of the most important scenes in the whole tapestry.

It shows Harold taking an oath, his hands on reliquaries -

containers with saints' bones inside - swearing to Duke William.

It doesn't say what the oath is.

William's story is that the oath was,

"I, Harold, will support your claim to be the next king of England."

We'll never know exactly what happened.

Some people think it's unlikely that Harold,

the most powerful man in England,

with an eye to becoming king himself, would take this oath.

But what is clear is what William thought had happened.

Harold had sworn before God

to recognise him as the next King of England.

And it was on that that he based his invasion of England in 1066.

The death of Edward the Confessor on 5th January 1066 was like the crack of a starting gun.

First in the field was Harold.

He wasted no time, and had himself crowned king in Westminster Abbey

on the same day as Edward's funeral.

In Normandy, William was out hunting when he heard the news.

According to one historian, "he became as a man outraged."

Another chronicler denounced Harold as a "pseudo king".

Worse, he had perjured himself, committing a grave sin against God.

Nature itself appeared to be disturbed by this wickedness.

A few months after Harold's coronation, Halley's comet appeared in the sky.

For people in the Middle Ages, the appearance of a comet was a sign from heaven.

It meant some great change was about to occur, perhaps the downfall of a regime.

A comet was even called "the terror of kings".

And Harold had reason to be afraid.

Nothing could now stop a Norman bid to remove the usurper.

Ever the politician, William first launched a diplomatic offensive.

He asked his barons and the rulers of other European kingdoms

to support his claim to the English throne.

William sought support everywhere.

He even sent envoys to Rome to get the backing of Pope Alexander.

They came back with a papal banner to carry into battle,

one of the first ever issued.

In the words of the Norman chronicler, William of Poitiers,

"he could now attack his enemies with greater boldness and security."

William had God on his side.

The way was clear for a full-scale military invasion.

William of Jumieges recounts the felling of trees to construct a fleet of 3,000 ships...

..enough to carry a quarter of a million men to England...

..with all their horses, weapons and armour.

William of Jumieges was exaggerating.

He was, after all, the official historian of the Normans.

We now think that maybe 700 ships carrying 7,000 men would be nearer the mark.

Whatever the numbers, this was a vast, efficient, well-organised operation.

William recruited troops from all over northern France, well beyond his own duchy,

promising them the rewards of the adventure -

wealth and power in England.

King Harold had deployed his troops on the south coast of England

and was waiting for William to attack.

But William didn't come.

His ships were grounded in France by unfavourable winds.

The weeks went by, and there was still no sign of the great Norman fleet.

As summer turned into autumn, Harold thought that William would not now risk the crossing.

The winds were too strong, the sea too rough.

Besides, Harold's own provisions were now running low.

He sent his men home.

England was now open to attack.

Just a few days later, the attack came.

But not from William.

The invasion came from the north, from Scandinavia.

The king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, "Hard Ruler", was a ruthless warrior,

and he too had his claims on the English throne.

Hardrada landed in the north of England with a vast army of Viking warriors.

They captured York and defeated the local earls.

Harold marched north and took the Norwegian army by surprise on 25th September 1066.

At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, the invaders were completely defeated.

It's said that of the 300 Norwegian ships that had originally landed,

only 20 were needed to carry the survivors home.

Harald Hardrada was amongst the many dead.

The Viking age was coming to an end.

Harold Godwinson was triumphant.

But on the other side of the Channel,

William was still waiting.

Waiting didn't come easily to William.

You can imagine him staring at the weathervane of the local church,

praying for the wind to change.

Eventually, he turned to the supernatural.

He had the body of the local saint, Saint Valery, taken from its tomb

and carried in solemn procession through the town.

And William's prayers were finally answered.

On the night of 28th September 1066,

the winds changed, and William's fleet sailed the 70 miles to Sussex.

A forest of masts, lit up with burning torches,

slipped across the Channel.

The ships looked startlingly like the Viking warships

that had brought William's ancestors to Normandy 150 years earlier.

But this was no band of pagan pirates on a raid.

It was a well-trained, disciplined army of knights...

coming to take a kingdom.

Legend has it that as William jumped ashore, he stumbled and fell.

At first, the Normans regarded this as a bad omen.

But William immediately leapt up and cried out,

"See, I have grasped the land with both hands!"

The Normans began as they meant to continue.

They built two wooden motte and bailey castles within a fortnight,

one at Hastings and one here, at Pevensey.

They laid waste to the surrounding countryside,

wiping out the locals, burning their houses

and killing their animals.

Exhausted from doing battle in the north,

Harold marched the 200 miles from York to London in just five days.

The story goes that Harold's mother begged him to postpone his showdown with William.

After all, Harold had the upper hand.

He could trap William in Hastings, starve him out, and raise new forces.

But Harold refused to listen and charged headlong into his next battle.

William was just as eager.

It's said that he was in such a rush to confront Harold that he put his mailcoat on back to front.

Another bad omen?

Not for William.

"I trust in God.

"Today you will see a duke changed into a king."

On this hillside, on Saturday, 14th October 1066,

a single battle between a few thousand men

permanently changed the course of history in England and beyond.

It was said to have taken place "at the grey apple tree".

Nowadays, the site is known simply as Battle.

The English occupied this ridge,

standing shoulder to shoulder, many armed with huge axes.

To protect themselves, they overlapped their shields, forming the shield wall.

This was the traditional way of fighting,

tried and tested over the centuries.

Confronting them was something startlingly new in English warfare.

The Normans were drawn up in three lines -

first the archers, then the infantry, then the mounted knights.

It's said that William hung around his neck the very saints' relics on which Harold had sworn his oath.

With the papal banner fluttering in the breeze,

he must have been confident that God and the saints were backing HIM.

Harold's army was battle weary and exhausted from the long march south.

Fighting began about nine o'clock in the morning.

The Normans charged uphill.

The war cries on both sides were soon drowned out

by the clash of arms

and the shrieks and groans of the wounded and the dying.

Harold's men were packed so densely behind their solid shield wall

that the dead were unable to fall.

The Normans couldn't break the English line.

A rumour spread amongst the Normans that William had been killed.

The men on the left flank panicked and began to rush down the hill.

The English above broke ranks and followed them.

But William had not been killed.

He pushed back his helmet to reveal his face and called out,

"I live, and with God's help will conquer yet!"

The Normans immediately rallied, turned on the English who were pursuing them, and cut them down.

The English line was broken...

..and the Normans charged in.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows all the confusion and desperation of the battle.

In the 11th century, it was customary

for the bishops to join in, though they were forbidden to shed blood.

Here's Bishop Odo, William's half-brother.

He's carrying a huge club.

That way, he could break a few arms or heads without any bloodshed.

Bodies fall in a heap of twisted and broken limbs.

The hillside must have been saturated with blood.

Then came the decisive moment - the death of King Harold.

Two early accounts of the battle say that an arrow struck the king in the eye.

The king was dead.

And a world was coming to an end.

Harold's body was so mutilated that it couldn't even be found.

It was recognised eventually, legend has it, by his mistress, Edith "the Swan necked",

who identified it by "certain, secret marks" known only to her.

And along with Harold, Anglo-Saxon England died on this battlefield.

One of William's chaplains describes the scene.

"The flower of English youth, the flower of English nobility

"covered the ground far and wide, filthy with their own blood."

It's said that William refused to bury the English dead.

They lay rotting for days.

He would later relent and build an abbey here as penance for the carnage of the battle.

Its altar is said to have been built on the spot where Harold fell.

But in the immediate aftermath of the battle, William felt no remorse.

A week after his victory, this bastard descendant of Viking pirates set off on the march to London.

He was now William the Conqueror, soon to be William, King of England.

The future belonged to the Normans.

In the next episode,

Anglo-Saxon rebellion...

..the Normans transform English politics and culture...

..and a new order in Scotland...

Wales...

and Ireland.

And if you'd like to walk in the steps of the Normans,

you can download maps of Norman walks all over the UK

at bbc.co.uk/history.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]