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If he was forced to give battle, he resolved to give it on ground he had himself chosen, and advancing near enough to the coast to check William's ravages he entrenched himself on a hill known afterwards as that of Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex downs near Hastings. His position covered London and drove William to concentrate his forces.
The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that were wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration. The level rain-storm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the cloth-yard shafts of Senlac and Crecy.
I remember how we took England at one blow on Senlac field; but see you here, Sir King. "And what if I cannot stop the bird-catchers? Do they expect to lime Frenchmen as easily as sparrows?" "Sparrows! It is not sparrows that I have been fattening on this last month. I tell you, Sire, I have seen wild-fowl alone in that island enough to feed them all the year round.
Harold was killed in the memorable battle of Senlac and his army defeated. In a few weeks a number of influential nobles and several bishops agreed to accept William as their king, and London opened its gates to him. He was crowned on Christmas day, 1066, at Westminster.
The Norman invaders landed without resistance on the shore of Sussex, on the 28th of September, 1066, and occupied Hastings. Harold encamped on the heights of Senlac. On the 14th of October the great battle took place in which the Normans were completely victorious. The English stood on a hill in a compact mass, with their shields in front and a palisade before them.
Securing Romney and Dover, he marched by Canterbury upon London. Faction and intrigue were doing his work for him as he advanced; for Harold's brothers had fallen with the King on the field of Senlac, and there was none of the house of Godwine to contest the crown. Of the old royal line there remained but a single boy, Eadgar the Ætheling.
On the morning of Charles I.'s execution in the winters and springs when Elizabeth was Queen while Becket lay dead on Canterbury steps when Harold was on his way to Senlac that hill, that path were there sheep were climbing it, and shepherds were herding them. "It has been so since England began it will be so when I am dead. We are only shadows that pass.
He raised the folk of the Southern, as he had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen days after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat he was entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and Senlac, but Battle to this day with William and his French Normans opposite him on Telham hill. Then came the battle of Hastings.
For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down a wood of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had furnished ship-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier fugitive of the Civil Wars.
No fight that I have seen was as that it was most terrible. Surely, if ever such a fight shall in truth rage across the quiet Senlac stream and up the green hillside, the fate of more than a king shall hang thereon. Surely I saw such a strife as makes or ends a nation. The old woman laughed. "What has Redwald seen?" she asked mockingly.
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