1066: The Battle of Hastings and a Christmas coronation gone wrong

What does a battle in October have to do with Christmas?

When Edward the Confessor died 1065 without a direct heir, it left a massive power vacuum in England. The choice now was between the Saxon, Harold Godwinson, and William, Duke of Normandy. Harold had been a powerful nobleman for many years. He claimed that Edward the Confessor had touched his hand, which meant he was now the new king. However, William could also have had some evidence for a claim. He said that Edward had promised him the throne, in fact said that Harold himself had sworn an oath to support him.

William had spent his early years fighting and conciliating his power in Normandy and eventually became the undisputed leader in the region. Harold gained a reputation as a good military leader in a successful war against his own brother.

After Edward died, Harold used all his political muscle to have himself declared king. William, hearing of this, gathered his armies and through his own political scheming garnered support of the Pope in a plan to invade England. Harold organized his own army of 18.000 men and waited. William wanted to move quickly, but the tides were not in his favor. Simon Schama wrote that while the waiting weighed on both men, it was particularly bad for Harold because most of his men were only supposed to serve for two months, and by September that time had run out and many wanted to return home to harvest their crops.

No sooner had Harold sent his men home than he received word that an invasion had taken place – not from William, but from the army led by Harold’s own brother. Harold quickly marched his troops to Stamford Bridge, north of London, and gained a bloody victory. The very next day, William’s army finally sailed for England, thus in less than a week Harold found himself preparing his army for yet another battle.

On October 14, 1066, the men led by Harold set up battle lines in Hastings field. On the opposite side was William’s army. William ordered his men forward; the two armies slammed together. In several minutes of brutal fighting, Harold’s axmen proved devastating to the Norman horsemen, who fell back. Part of the Saxon line broke to follow them. Harold, in the midst of the fighting, could not control the overall movement of the battle. William, on the other hand, was on horseback and could better see what was happening, and ordered other cavalry units to swing around the Saxons and attack from behind. Over the next six hours William ordered charges and retreats again and again. Each time, he weakened the Saxon line. William also had his archers rain down arrows, and according to legend, Harold looked up just as an arrow found his eye. The Saxons around him tried to fight on, but William’s faster and more maneuverable cavalry broke through the lines and killed Harold. The battle was over.

William spent the next several weeks conquering the remaining Saxon strongholds in the South of the England. On Christmas Day, he arrived in the town Westminster to be crowned king. The ceremony was proceeding as planned when the crowd began shouting out their approval. Outside the church, the Norman guard heard the noise and thought a riot had broken out, and they began burning the surrounding outbuildings. Smoke soon drifted into the main building and half of the people inside panicked and ran out, leaving the newly crowned king nearly alone in the middle of his coronation.

William now known as “The Conqueror,” spent the remaining years of his life fighting factions in the north of England who wanted a return to Saxon rule. The Battle of Hasting and the coronation of William had far reaching consequences – the Normans established a new system of laws, a new Norman ruling class, and new ways of building that would influence England for generations to come.

William himself eventually succumbed to injuries he received during a raid in France in 1087. Ironically, he had failed to name an heir, leaving with his death the same power vacuum England had experienced twenty one years earlier.  England sank into a series of civil wars, and it would not be until the reign of Henry II, almost a hundred years later, that the political situation would stabilize.           

Washington’s Christmas present

On Christmas night, 1776, Hessian Colonel Johann Rall sat with other officers drinking and playing cards. Rall must have been relaxed that night – the British Army, his current assignment, had won two major victories against the less organized and ill-equipped troops under General George Washington. In many British circles, it was even believed that the war would be over shortly, once spring came and the armies could once again be out in the field. For the moment, they were content to let Washington sit in Pennsylvania and await his fate. As recent word from British sources said Washington could attack his position, Rall had acted quickly, doubling the guard and sending out extra patrols. Even this very night, he’d received another note of warning. But as the night wore on, a storm of snow and ice began to blow in. Men began to relax – no attack had come for weeks and now the weather had turned so they could afford to rest their vigilance. After all, who would be so bold as to launch an attack in the dead of winter?

The year of 1776 had been a rocky one for the burgeoning republic of the United States. In January, word had arrived from England that King George III had declared them to be in rebellion as a result of two small battles the previous April. Then in July, delegates at the Second Continental Congress had released the Declaration of Independence and officially severed all ties with England. Still, these had only been diplomatic maneuvers, and despite military success in the taking of Boston and Fort Ticonderoga, British forces remained determined to strike a blow. The British Army had landed on Long Island in late August and after a short battle, American forces had scattered. Only three days of rain and a morning of fog had saved Washington’s Army from complete destruction and he had used that time to escape back to the New York mainland. Then the British had won a second victory, which had driven his forces through New Jersey to the banks of Pennsylvania.

Now, as Christmas approached, Washington found himself with only six thousand men, dwindling resources, and poor morale. On top of this, enlistments were set to expire on the first of January. Washington wrote to his brother John, “Between you and me I think our affairs are in pretty bad condition.” He bluntly told his brother about the situation and said that unless his men would agree to stay on, the war was over. In Philadelphia, Congress called for a day of prayer. The revolution which had begun in so much triumph a few months before was on the verge of collapse.

Then on December 22, a letter arrived from Washington’s adjutant. In it, he told Washington that due to recent raids in the area around the Delaware River, Hessian forces had been on high alert, and that they were showing signs of exhaustion. The adjutant further stated that Washington could not afford to wait for another opportunity. Washington needed little pushing, as he had already written several people that he was looking for a “counter stroke.” On Christmas Eve, he called a council of war and announced that he had decided to attack the Hessian garrison in the town of Trenton.

The following afternoon, troops were ordered to begin marching down to the Delaware River. It was hoped that the troops could get across the river and could surprise the Hessians before dawn. However, problems immediately began to dog the operations. First, men were slow to arrive at the crossing points – this may have been because many were in poor health and barely covered in ragged clothing; some were even without shoes. Initially Washington had planned to have his army cross in three different places in the river; this had to be forgotten as the weather suddenly worsened around midnight and forced the units at two of the points to call it off. The rain and snow were falling hard, making the river overrun its banks and become choked with huge chunks of ice. Despite this, Washington pressed ahead. Historians have argued that Washington had little choice; if he turned back, the war was over. By all accounts, Washington seemed to have become very fatalistic, selecting as the password for the night: “victory or death”.

Writers like David Hackett Fischer, David McCullough, and Joseph Ellis have been critical of the Washington’s Crossing painting by Emanuel Leutze, which depicts Washington bolding leaning over the wide bow, draped in a American flag. In actuality, the boats were long and narrow, and the biggest ones had forty men shoulder to shoulder with very little room to move; anyone who had attempted to lean over the bow would have immediately fallen in the river. Most likely, Washington would have been indistinguishable from the other men as the dark storm had enveloped them. But while the weather did nothing to help the men’s moral, it did help mask the noise of the crossing and likely guaranteed any Hessian patrols that night would not stray far from camp.

It wasn’t until 3:00 a.m. on December 26 that all of the men with Washington had made it across. By now, they were three hours behind schedule and still had ten miles of icy roads to march before they arrived in Trenton. The exhausted troops kept moving even when two of their number fell dead to the ground in the cold. Finally, just before 8:00 a.m., Washington ordered his men toward outposts surrounding the town. Still a good distance away, they opened fire. Hessians soldiers, caught by surprise, were overwhelmed and fell back. Rall was roused by a staff officer and rode out to rally his men. It was erroneously reported that Washington’s forces had managed to take control of a key bridge outside of town, leaving the Hessians no escape route. Rall gathered his two regiments around him and moved them forward, and his men began falling as result of American volley and artillery guns that had been moved across the river. As Rall advanced, he became cut off; then, as he turned in his saddle to shout orders, he was hit twice. His officers pulled him down and carried him a nearby church, where he died several hours later, with the note warning of a potential American attack still in his pocket. Still under fire from three directions and with Washington’s forces closing in, the Hessians began laying down their arms.

In all, nearly all of the over one thousand Hessian soldiers were taken prisoner; twenty-two were dead and another eighty-three were wounded. Amazingly, only a few of the 6,000 Americans were wounded. Among them were William Washington (Washington’s nephew) and James Monroe, the future president of the United States. Washington did not savor his victory for long. The next morning he ordered his men to move back across the river, before larger British forces could counter attack.

The sudden victory shocked the British. General Charles Cornwallis, who had been planning to return to London, found himself having to rapidly form an army to march on Washington. This would lead to another improbable American victory in the town of Princeton, just north of Trenton on January 3, 1777. The result of the combined victories proved an enormous boost to the fledgling American nation. More than half of the men under Washington reenlisted, and others joined up for the first time, notably from the newly freed territory of southern New Jersey. The victories also gave Congress hope that the war was not yet over and renewed faith in Washington himself.

The war would drag for another seven years, and more low moments lay ahead. But Washington would manage to keep his army inspired and effective, by fighting a largely defensive war that would eventually leave the British forces largely trapped in New York for the rest of the war. Today, Washington’s Christmas assault is seen by many historians as the decisive moment of the War for Independence, and the battle that saved the Revolution.

Two books by found very helpful in writing this article were

1776 by David McCullough

Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and the plight of the poor

With Christmas fast approaching, many people will be dusting off their copies of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. While we know the classic tale to be about the Golden Rule and keeping Christmas traditions, few realize it was a biting and timely political piece meant to shed light on a serious problem in London society.

London of the 1840s was in the mist of the industrial revolution which had begun at the end of the 18^th century. Textile mills, steam engines, and other innovations allowed England to import and exports goods as never before, making business owners and enterprising inventors extremely rich. However, this same industrial age had created a vast poverty class, leaving thousands unemployed and with only the option of working in “poor houses” which were government run building where poor families would go to live and do manual labor. In his documentary series on Britain, Author Simon Schama explained, “Workhouses had always been deliberately designed to be as much like prisons as possible, to deter anyone with who had slightest chance at a job.” Thus, Scrooge, the old money-lender symbolizing the indifferent upper class, facetiously inquires in the first chapter of A Christmas Carol, “Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?”

If anything could have been worse than life in a poorhouse, it would be life in a factory. An American observer in the city of Manchester during this time wrote of the people “Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature lying in bleeding fragments.” Worse yet was the widespread use of child labor. Often the children would be told a retrieve pieces of cotton from underneath moving machinery where one brief slip could crush their arm.

Dickens himself, visited Manchester and elsewhere, and was shocked by the poverty he saw. Dickens’s father had been forced into a debtors prison, and as a young boy Charles had to work in a shoe polish factory. As Dickens remembered, wages were horribly low and the factory teemed with rats. The experience left Dickens with deep bitterness toward his parents and a great sympathy for the lower classes. Then in 1842, the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was published, which showed the growing problem of child labor in England. Dickens wanted to write a response to this in form of a political pamphlet, but put it off.

Finally, he wrote A Christmas Carol. In his story, Scrooge came to represent everyone in the upper class who blatantly ignored the conditions of the poor and only made money for themselves. Again and Again Scrooge is told how he should use his money for good, but the direct appeal to help the poor comes in form of a cold warning when the Spirit of Christmas Present lifts his robe to expose two poor children. “They are Man’s,” he says, “This boy is Ignorance. The girl is Want. Beware them both, and all their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that which is written is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.” Dickens was saying that the poor and the problems they faced would continue to get worse unless addressed, and could lead to the overthrow the wealthy class. Dickens struck one last chord at the end of the story when Scrooge sees that his house has been ransacked and that he has died alone without friends. To every well bred Englishman, the thought that they would not be liked, or at very least respected at the time of their death, was a terrifying thought.

Ultimately, Dickens wanted greater attention for the poor, and for them to be provided with more opportunities through moral changes in society and greater financial support.  

Dickens would not be the last one to focus on the plight of the poor. Four years later Elizabeth Gaskell would once again plunge the British readers into the slums of England in her novel Mary Barton. The book focused on two poor families in Manchester who had to work in factories and watch their children starve. Gaskell brought into sharp contrast, and Schama believed even more so the Dickens, the great divide between the rich and poor. Gaskell’s main point was that poor people cared little about the luxuries of the upper class and only wanted to see their children fed. In one scene, she showed how a family’s life depended on what a wealthy character considered loose change. 

That same year German writer Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto and echoed what Dickens and Gaskell had said when he wrote, “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie [wealthy class] and Proletariat [lower class].” Marx also wrote, “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of [laborers] crowded into the factory are [organized] like solders.” Here the worker became more a part of the machinery than a man. Up to this point Marx reflected the writing of the Dickens and Gaskell, but where Dickens and Gaskell believed that society should voluntarily take care of the poor by admitting their existence, Marx thought that compromise with upper class was pointless and that only true solution was to mount a violent overthrow of the government.

So while A Christmas Carol emphasizes a broad theme of Christian charity in keeping with Christmas traditions, it should be remembered that it was also part of a powerful series of books that, for the first time, brutally focused on the plight of the poor and demanded serious changes in how the privileged viewed their responsibilities to society.

How a Christmas card led to a holiday tradition

How a Christmas Card started a holiday tradition

As Christmas approaches many people get movies that fit the season – any number of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, the more recent A Christmas Story, and of course, It’s as Wonderful Life. But did you know that It’s as Wonderful Life started out as just a Christmas card?    

On February 12, 1938, writer Philip Van Doran was shaving when an idea for a story came to him in a sudden flash. The work would tell the story of a man disillusioned with his life and getting to see what it would be like if he hadn’t been born. Van Doran, a primarily non-fiction author, later remembered, “I was just learning to write fiction, so the first version was pretty terrible.” Still, he thought of a title that fit the main point of story: The Greatest Gift.  Van Doran finished a second draft in 1943 with better results and gave it to his agent. Van Doran’s daughter later wrote, “After [his agent] tried everything from the Saturday Evening Post to farm journals it was evident that no magazine would touch it.” So Van Doran decided to rewrite it once again and release it as a twenty page Christmas card to his family and friends. A copy of one of the cards was shown to Charles Koerner, the head of RKO Studios, who immediately paid the incredible amount of $50,000 for the copy.  Van Doran’s agent sold the movie rights to the story to RKO Studios for $10,000 soon after.

In spite of its appeal, the story proved difficult to mold into a screenplay, and after three failed scripts the studio decided to drop the project for the immediate future.  Van Doran’s creation, like so many story ideas before and after it, may well have died there. However on a visit to the studio, Frank Capra happened to being talking to Koerner, who was eager to unload the troublesome project. Koerner talked about the wasted scripts and told Capra that they had failed to capture the original story. Capra was no stranger behind the camera and had directed such films as It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take it with You, and Mr. Smith goes to Washington. During World War II he had gone into the Signal Corps and directed a series of documentary films about the war. Still Capra was nervous about his working on his first major film in several years. “I was scared to death,” he later remembered. Despite his misgivings, Capra jumped at the chance to buy movie rights, re-titling the story, It’s a Wonderful Life. Capra later said, “It was the story I had been looking for all my life!” Capra hired new writers, who were finally able to turn out a version worthy of being produced. He also determined that only one man could play the role of George Bailey.

Jimmy Stuart and Capra had worked together on Mr. Smith goes to Washington and You Can’t Take it with You. Stuart, who had spent the last four years flying bombing missions over Nazi Germany and had just been discharged, was reluctant to take the role, but Capra talked him into it. Capra now turned to filling in the role of Mary Bailey.  Initially, Capra wanted Jean Arthur, but ultimately chose Donna Reed. For the town of Bedford Falls, a three block set was constructed, complete with specially produced fake snow – it was one of the largest sets ever constructed at the time. Stuart and Reed immediately generated on-camera chemistry, best featured in the phone scene where George tells Mary he loves her. In the scene, Stuart actually forgot a page of lines, but Capra was so impressed that he used the first take. 

After its long journey to the screen, It’s a Wonderful Life proved a modest box office success, making enough money to rank as twenty-sixth most profitable film of the year of four hundred released. It was also nominated for five Academy Awards but failed to win any and was quickly forgotten. The film was put into a studio vault for almost ten years. Then in 1951, the new medium of television began broadcasting this forgotten picture. In the ensuing decades that followed, It’s a Wonderful Life became a traditional, if not vital part of the holiday season for hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. Fan mail poured into Stuart and Capra, and the movie became one of the most critically acclaimed of all time. As recently as 2007, the American Film Institute placed it at number 20 on the 100 Greatest Films list. Its theme has been the plot for dozens of movies, books, stories and television shows, and it’s been referenced, honored and even parodied on programs like The Simpsons and South Park. Every TV fan knows a few of the famous lines from the now classic film.

Still, the visionary directing by Capra and the brilliant performances by Stuart, Reed, and the rest of the cast would never have happened, had it not been for a simple Christmas card.