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The spring and summer of 1066 must have been a time of restless activity on the part of William and of those who were associated with him in the preparations for the great enterprise of the autumn. The building of the fleet was being pushed forward, and volunteers from kindred states were continually arriving to be incorporated in the Norman army; this much we may infer from the fact that by August both fleet and army were ready for the expedition, but we know scarcely anything as to William's own movements in the interval. On the fifteenth of June a council was held at Bonneville at which Lanfranc was appointed abbot of William's new foundation of St. Stephen's Caen, and three days later Cicely, the eldest daughter of William and Matilda, was formally dedicated to the religious life at the consecration of her mother's house, the sister monastery of the Holy Trinity. The motives which prompted the duke and duchess to complete their religious undertakings were widely felt among the Norman baronage. The conquerors of England appear in a somewhat unaccustomed light as we read the charters by which they gave or confirmed land, each to his favoured monastery, "when Duke William was setting out across the sea." It was fully realised that the enterprise might end in utter disaster; the prudent abbot of Marmoutier, for instance, in case of accidents, secured from Robert, the heir of Normandy, at his father's request, a confirmation of all the grants which the latter had made to the house during his reign. [1]
The temporal affairs of Normandy were also discreetly arranged at this time. Matilda was appointed regent, and was supported by a council presided over by Roger de Beaumont, a man of age and experience, and a personal friend of the duke. No doubt if William had perished in England Robert would have succeeded him, but, although he was now of sufficient age to make a voluntary confirmation of his father's grants of land, he was clearly not old enough to undertake the government of the duchy during an interregnum. The fact that the expedition itself provided employment for the great mass of the fighting men of Normandy would promise a quiet rule for Matilda and her advisers, nor indeed do we hear of any disturbances taking place in the duchy while William was across the Channel.
Before the close of August the fleet was ready at last, and lay at the mouth of the Dive ready to set sail at any moment. [2] The army also was ready for embarkation, and the only thing which was lacking to the expedition was a south wind to carry the fleet to the Sussex coast. But for six weeks at least that south wind refused to blow, and every week of delay increased William's difficulties a hundredfold. Nothing could have been more discouraging to an army of adventurers than week after week of compulsory inaction; and the fact that William was able to keep perfect order, among a force part only of which owed direct allegiance to him as feudal lord, suggests that he possessed qualities of leadership which were not very common among the captains of his day. At more than one crisis in his life William had already shown that he could possess his soul in patience until the moment arrived at which it was possible to strike, and he must have succeeded in imparting something of this spirit to his troops in their vigil by the Dive. In the more definite work of commissariat we know that he proved himself a master; for no shortage of provisions was felt at any time during the unexpected delay, and few eleventh-century armies could have remained for a month in the same quarters without being driven to find their own means of subsistence in plunder. William's biographer was justified in remarking on the fact that the unarmed folk of the neighbourhood could pass to and fro without trembling when they saw a body of soldiers; [3] and before the task of provisioning the army by regular means had become an impossibility, a west wind served to carry the fleet to a point which offered a shorter passage across into England than that which was presented by its original station on the Dive.
Within the county of Ponthieu, which had become a member of the Norman group of vassal states when Count Guy became William's "man" after the battle of Mortemer, the estuary of the Somme supplied an excellent natural harbour beneath the town of Saint Valery. The passage from the mouth of the Dive seems to have been accomplished without incident, and William and his forces took possession of their new quarters on the twelfth day of September. For more than a fortnight the situation did not seem to have improved in any way; the wind which was carrying Harold Hardrada down the coast of Yorkshire kept William locked in the mouth of the Somme. The weather was cold and squally and we have a contemporary description of the way in which William kept watching the weathercock on the church tower and of his joy if for a moment the gale drove it to point northward. [4] The strain of suspense was now beginning to tell upon the army
The common soldiers, as frequently happens, began to murmur in their tents that the man must be mad to wish to conquer a foreign country, that his father had proposed to do the same and had been baffled in the same way, that it was the destiny of the family to try for things beyond their reach and to find God for their enemy." [5]
It was clearly necessary to do something to relieve the prevailing tension, and the expedient chosen was characteristic of the time; the relics of the patron saint of the town were brought with great solemnity out of the church, and the casket which contained them was exhibited to receive the prayers and offerings of the duke and his army. The result was a convincing proof of the virtue of the bones of St. Valery; without further delay the south wind blew. [6]
The same day saw the embarkation of the Norman army, the work being carried through as quickly as possible in evident fear that the wind might slip round again to its former quarter. Night was falling before all was ready, and before the duke, after a final visit to the church of St. Valery, had given his last orders on the Norman shore. It was important that the fleet should be prevented from scattering in the darkness, so each vessel was ordered to carry a light, a lantern of special power adorning the masthead of the duke's own ship. With the same object it was directed that the fleet should anchor as soon as it was clear of the estuary of the Somme, and await further orders. Through the dead of night the fleet hung outside the harbour, and it was still dark when the expedition ventured out at last into the open waters of the Channel. The great body of the ships, each of which carried a heavy load of horses in addition to its freight of men-at-arms, was inevitably outstripped by the unimpeded galley which bore William to his destiny; and when the dawn began to break, the duke found himself out of sight of the rest of the fleet, and not yet within view of the English shore. In these circumstances William cast anchor and breakfasted "as it had been in his own hall," says one of his companions; and, under the influence of the wine with which the Mora was well supplied, his spirits rose, the prospects of his enterprise seemed golden in the morning light, and he spoke words of encouragement to his companions. And at last the sailors reported that the rest of the fleet began to come in sight; the four ships which first appeared together upon the horizon grew more and more until the man on the look-out could be made by our imaginative informant to remark that the masts of the fleet showed like a forest upon the sea. [7] Then the duke weighed anchor for the last time, and the south wind still holding carried him and his fleet into Pevensey bay at nine in the morning; the day being St. Michael's Eve by an appropriate chance, for the archangel was highly honoured in the Norman land.
William's landing was entirely undisputed; the good luck which, as we have noticed, waited on his expedition in its diplomatic antecedents, attended its military details also. During the summer months, Harold, making what use he could of the antiquated military system of England, had called out the fyrd, and lined the south coast with troops, which, however helpless they might be in a pitched battle with the Norman chivalry, might have brought considerable inconvenience to William, if they had been in evidence at the moment of his landing. From May to September the Sussex coast in general, Hastings and Pevensey in particular, were guarded by the rural forces of the shire. [8] At last, about the time when William was moving from the Dive to St. Valery, the patience and provisions of the fyrd gave out together; the rustics had been kept away from their homes for four times the customary period of service without anything hap- pening, and they refused to stay on guard any longer. They probably would not have made any difference to the ultimate result in any case, nor need we blame Harold for being unable to keep them together; but the fact is another illustration of the hopeless inefficiency of the old English state. And then, one week before William's landing, Harold had gathered the whole of such professional soldiers as England contained, and had spent them in the life-and-death struggle at Stamfordbridge. Harold Hardrada had fallen, but his overthrow had gone far to exhaust the military resources of England, and it was a shattered, if victorious, army which was resting with Harold Godwinson, at York, when a fugitive from Sussex arrived to tell that William of Normandy had landed, and that the south lay at his mercy.
William's first movements in England were very deliberate. His immediate care was to fortify his position at Pevensey and so protect his fleet against surprise. At Pevensey, as afterwards at Lincoln, a line of Roman walling could be turned to account in the construction of a castle, [9] which was run up in the course of the day; and having thus, like his Scandinavian ancestors, secured for himself a base of operations if events turned out ill, William marched to Hastings, which was to be his base of operations for the rest of the campaign. [10] At Hastings, therefore, another castle was thrown up, the building, like nearly all the castles built during the twenty years which followed the Conquest, consisting merely of a mound, with wooden defences on the top and a ditch and one or more outer works below. Hastings is a point of departure for many roads ; a fact which no doubt very largely accounts for William's choice of the town as his headquarters; for it could easily be provisioned by supplies from the neighbouring country, and it lay very conveniently as a base for an attack on London. The men of east Sussex were not long before they felt the pressure of the invading army. Most of the villages in the neighbourhood of Hastings are recorded in Domesday to have been "waste" at some period between the death of King Edward and 1066, and the connection between these signs of ravage and William's camp at Hastings is sufficiently obvious. But it is not probable that William attempted any systematic harrying of this district such as that which three years afterwards he carried out with grim success in the country beyond the Humber; the Sussex villages, as a rule, had quite recovered their former prosperity by the date of the great survey. The passage of foraging parties over the land demanding provisions, which would be none too readily granted, and the other incidents of a medieval war of invasion, are enough to account for depreciation of the kind recorded. Harold himself, as he drew towards Hastings, left traces of his march in similar cases of temporary devastation, and there is no reason to suppose that William undertook a deliberate harrying of Sussex in order to provoke Harold to a general engagement. [11]
William, indeed, as yet can hardly have known the result of Stamfordbridge with any degree of certainty. Rumours of the great battle in the north would no doubt gradually filter down into Sussex during the week following the event, but for some days after his arrival at Hastings William cannot have ignored the possibility that it might be a Norwegian host which would ultimately appear upon the edge of the downs. Definite news, however, at some unspecified date, was brought to William by a message from an unexpected quarter. [12] Robert, the son of Wymarc, a Breton knight, who in some unknown way could claim kindred with both William and Edward, had been "staller" or master of the horse to the latter, and had stood together with Harold and Stigand by the king's deathbed. Whether he had actually been present at the battle of Stamfordbridge is uncertain; but shortly after the fight he sent a messenger to William to advise a speedy withdrawal to Normandy before something worse happened to him. The message ran that Harold had destroyed the huge forces of the king of Norway, himself the bravest man in the world, and that now, inspired by victory, he was turning upon the duke with a great and enthusiastic army. Rather unwisely Robert went on to add that the Normans were no match for the English, either in numbers or bravery, and that William, who had always shown himself discreet hitherto, would do well to retire at once, or at all events to keep within his fortifications and avoid a battle in the open field. To this well-meaning person William replied that his one desire was to come to blows with Harold, that although Robert's advice might have been better expressed yet he thanked him for it, and that if he had with him but ten thousand instead of sixty thousand men [13] he would never retire without wreaking vengeance on his enemy. It is not unlikely that Robert's message was really inspired by Harold himself, and from one or two turns of expression in William's reply we may perhaps gather that he suspected as much; although it might be thought that Harold, who had seen something of his rival in past years, cannot have had much hope of getting rid of him by mere intimidation. However this may be, it is interesting to find Robert, a prominent member of a class which has suffered much abuse because of an assumed lack of patriotism towards its adopted country, playing a part which so admirably saves his duty to his king and his kinsman alike.
We have two poetical accounts of the way in which the news of William's landing was brought to Harold at York. Wace, the Norman poet of the twelfth century, tells how a Sussex "chevalier" heard the shouting of the "peasants and villeins" as the fleet drew in to the shore, and how, attracted by the noise, he came out, hid behind a hill and lay there until the work of disembarkation was over and the castle at Pevensey thrown up; then riding off with lance and sword, night and day, to York, to tell the king the news of what he had seen. [14] Guy, bishop of Amiens, who wrote within a short time of the event, makes the news of the Norman arrival be borne by a rustic from Hastings, not Pevensey; and the details which are told to Harold relate to the devastation caused by the invaders near Hastings, not to the landing itself. [15] Perhaps these two stories are not quite incompatible with each other; but we need not attempt to reconcile them here, in view of the undoubted fact that Harold was informed of William's landing within some three days of the event.
At this crisis Harold acted with astonishing energy. Taking with him his faithful huscarles, a body sadly thinned by the battle of a few days before, he hurried southwards by way of Tadcaster, Lincoln, Stamford, and Huntingdon, the same route which in the reverse direction he had followed in the previous week ; now as then drawing into his force the fyrd of the shires through which he passed. Edwin and Morcar were directed to raise the levies of their respective earldoms, and in their expected absence the government of the north was entrusted to Marleswegen, the sheriff of Lincolnshire, [16] an Englishman who remains little more than a name in the narrative of the Conquest, but who, if Harold had triumphed at Hastings might probably have played an important part in the history of the following years. How far Harold really believed in the fidelity of the northern earls is uncertain; they 'had shown no overt signs of disaffection during the last months since he had married their sister. On the other hand, considering the long-standing rivalry between his house and theirs, and their probable share in the Northumbrian difficulties at the beginning of his reign, Harold was perhaps not altogether surprised that Edwin and Morcar, in the words of Florence of Worcester, "withdrew themselves and their men from the conflict." With the best intentions they would have found it difficult to join him in time for the battle; it would not have been easy for them to raise the fyrd from all the shires between the Humber and the Tweed on the one part and between the fens and the Severn on the other, and to bring the troops to London within the five days which Harold spent there. For on October nth, [17] a fortnight after the battle of Stamfordbridge, Harold set out from London on his last march towards the Sussex downs.
It is an interesting, but not very profitable, speculation how far Harold was justified in staking his all upon the result of a single battle with the invader. With our knowledge of what happened it is natural to condemn him; he was condemned by the general opinion of the historians of the next generation, and very possibly their sentence is right. On the other hand we cannot but feel that we know very little of the real facts of the case; even the essential question of the relative numbers of the English and Norman armies cannot be answered with any degree of accuracy. It may be argued with much plausibility that the wisest course for Harold would have been to let William work his will upon the unfortunate inhabitants of Sussex, trusting to time and the national feeling likely to be aroused by the ravages of an invader to bring an overwhelming superiority in numbers over to his side. This, we may be sure, would have been the course taken by William himself in such a case, but Harold was probably by nature incapable of playing a waiting game of this kind. His ability, so far as we can tell, lay in sudden assaults and surprises; the more deliberate processes of generalship were foreign to his temperament. And then there remains the fact that the loyalty of Mercia and Northumbria was at least doubtful; delay on Harold's part might only mean that Edwin and Morcar with their forces would have time to come over effectively to William's side, while another great victory so soon after Stamfordbridge would have placed Harold in a position from which, for the time being, he could defy all rivals. At any rate he took the step, and paid the penalty of failure.
But, whatever we may think of the general wisdom of Harold's strategy, it is impossible to deny that he showed a general's appreciation of the tactical possibilities of the ground on which he chose to put the fate of England to the test. After a forced march through the thick woods which at that time covered the Sussex downs, the king halted his army on a barren ridge of ground seven miles north-east of the town of Hastings, It is plain from all the narratives of the forthcoming encounter that the ridge in question was quite unoccupied at the time of the battle; and when the English chroniclers wish to describe its site they can only tell us that Harold and William came together "by the hoar apple-tree." [18] The strength of the position was determined, not so much by the general elevation of the ground, which at no point reaches a greater height than 300 feet above sea level, as by the fact that it was surrounded by country very hilly and much broken by streams, and that its physical features lent natural support to the disposition of an army which relied for success on its capacity for stolid resistance. The position was undoubtedly chosen by Harold with the object of forcing his enemy to an immediate battle; for William could not move either east or west from Hastings without exposing his base to an English attack; and Harold, who knew that the main strength of a Norman army lay in its troops of mailed horsemen, had been careful to offer battle on a site in which the cavalry arm would be placed by the ground at a natural disadvantage. [19]
From the nature of the case it has come about that we possess very little information either as to the numbers of the English army or as to the details of its formation on the day of battle. The Norman writers, on whom we are compelled to rely, have naturally exaggerated the former, nor did any survivor from the English army describe the order of its battle array to the chroniclers of Worcester or Peterborough. In recent studies of the great battle there is manifested a strong unwillingness to allow to either the English or the Norman host more than a small proportion of the numbers which used to be assigned to it thirty years ago. [20] It is very improbable that William led more than 6000 men into action on October 15, 1066, and there is good reason for doubting whether the knightly portion of his army can have exceeded 5000. Small as this last number may appear, every man included in it was an efficient combatant; but the English force was largely composed of rustics impressed from the shires through which Harold had rushed on his great march from York to London after the battle of Stamfordbridge, and even so, it is far from certain that the native force was materially stronger than the army of invasion. With regard to its distribution, we know that the English line of battle seemed convex to the Normans on their approach from the south-east, [21] and it is probable that it ran for some 800 yards along the. hill of battle, the flanks being thrown well back so as to rest upon the steep bank which bounds the ridge towards the north. It is certain that the English troops were drawn up in extremely close order, and it is a natural assumption that Harold would place the kernel of his army, the huscarles who had survived Stamfordbridge, in, the front rank; stationing his inferior troops in the rear so as to support the huscarles in resisting the impact of the Norman cavalry. [22] On the highest point of the whole line, a spot now marked by the high altar of the Abbey church of Battle, Harold planted his standard; and it was round the standard that the fight was most stoutly contested, and that, after seven hours of struggle, the king at last fell. In speaking of the generalship displayed by Harold's rival on this occasion, it is important to beware of the associations aroused by modern military terminology. At least if we speak of him as a strategist or tactician, we should be careful to remember that strategy and tactics themselves had attained to but a rudimentary stage of development in Northern Europe in the eleventh century. Recent studies of tie battle of Hastings, the one fight of the period in regard to which we possess a considerable amount of detailed information, have brought out the fact that William's host was far too stiff and unwieldy a body to perform the complicated evolutions by which it used to be assumed that the day was won. [23] We should be committing a grave error if we were to suppose that the Norman army possessed that mobility and capacity for concerted action among its several divisions which belonged to the forces led by Turenne or Marlborough. Feudal battles were determined more by the event of simple collisions of large masses of men than by their manoeuvres when in the field: the skill of a great feudal captain lay chiefly in his ability to choose his ground so as to give his side the preliminary advantage in the shock of battle; apart from the example of his personal valour he had but little influence upon the subsequent fortunes of the day. On the present occasion William was compelled to fight on the ground of his opponent's choice; and this initial disadvantage cost the Norman leader an indefinite number of his best troops, and, even after the issue of the battle had been decided, protracted the English resistance until nightfall had put an end to the struggle. On the other hand, there was one fatal weakness in the English host which must have been recognised by the other side already before the fight had begun. The fact that Harold, for all effective purposes, was totally unprovided with either archers or cavalry exposed his army to a method of attack which he was quite unable to parry, and the arrangement of the Norman line of battle shows that William from the first relied for success on this advantage. The battle of Hastings was won by the combination of archery and cavalry against infantry whose one chance of success lay in the possibility that it might keep its formation unbroken until the strength of the offensive had been exhausted. [24] In the early morning of the 14th of October the Norman army moved out of Hastings and advanced across the seven miles of broken country which lay between the English army and the sea. The march must have been a toilsome business, and the rapidity with which it was accomplished is remarkable. [25] At the point marked by the modern village of Telham, the road from Hastings to Battle passes over a hill which rises to some 350 feet above sea-level, and commands a view of the English position. On the far side of this hill it is probable that William halted, waited for his scattered troops to come together, and then drew them out in order of battle. In his first line he placed his light-armed infantry, who probably formed a very inconsiderable portion of his army, and were unprovided with defensive harness. To these inferior troops succeeded infantry of a higher class, protected by armour, but, like the light-armed skirmishers in the front rank, armed only with bows and arrows and slings. The function of the infantry in the coming encounter was to harass the English with their missiles and tempt them to break their ranks. Lastly came the main body of the Norman army, the squadrons of cavalry, on whom it rested to attack the English line after it had been shaken by the missiles of the previous ranks. [26] The whole army was further arranged in three great divisions, the native Normans composing the centre, the Bretons, under the command of Alan, son of Count Eon of Penthievre, forming the left wing, and the French volunteers the right. [27] In the centre of the whole line of advance, the Norman counterpart of the English standard, there was borne the consecrated banner which William had received from the pope. [28]
So quickly had the march from Hastings been made that the actual fighting was opened at about nine in the morning [29] by an advance of the Norman foot. Galled by a heavy fire from the archers, which could only be answered very ineffectively by the spears and stones which were almost the sole missile weapons of the English, numbers of the native troops broke away from their line, in defiance of the strict orders issued by Harold to the effect that no man should leave his post. In the meantime, the Norman cavalry had been steadily making its way to the front in order to take immediate advantage of the disorder caused in the English ranks by the fire of the archers. But the knights could only move their horses slowly up the hill; the solidity of the English formation had not been seriously affected as yet, and the cavalry were compelled to attack an unbroken line. The result was disaster. The Breton auxiliaries on the left fell back, the confusion spread rapidly, and the English, seizing their advantage, sallied forth and drove the entire Norman line before them in headlong flight down the hill. [30] Fortunately William had not joined in this first attack in person, and when in their panic the Normans believed that their leader had fallen, they were soon recalled to their senses by the sight of the duke with bared head, laying about him with his spear, and shouting words of reproof and encouragement. [31] Mounted as they were, the flying knights could have but little difficulty in outstripping their pursuers, but, if we may trust the Bayeux tapestry, a number of English and Normans perished together in the course of the flight, by falling into a deep depression in the ground situated somewhere between the base of the hill and the duke's post. According to the same authority, the bishop of Bayeux did good service at this moment, restoring order among the baggage-carriers and camp-followers, who were apparently becoming infected with the panic which had seized their masters. [32] Between the duke and his brother, the flight was checked, and then the knights, eager to avenge their disgrace, rallied, turned, and cut off their pursuers from their comrades on the hill, making a wholesale slaughter of them. [33] Mainly through William's self-possession the Norman rout had ended after all in a distinct success gained for his side.
As soon as the cavalry had re-formed, the attack on the English position was resumed; this time under the immediate leadership of the duke. The struggle at the foot of the hill had given its defenders time to close their ranks, and the English continued to present an impenetrable front to the Norman cavalry. All along the line a desperate struggle raged for some hours, but of its details no tale can be told, although it is probable that it was at this point in the battle that Gyrth and Leofwine, Harold's brothers, fell, and there is good reason for believing that the former was struck down by the hand of the duke himself. William, indeed, in all our authorities is represented as the life and soul of the attack, "more often calling to his men to come on than bidding them advance" says William of Poitiers; he had three horses killed tinder him before the day was over, and he did all that might be done by a feudal captain to keep his troops together and to inspire them by his example. But notwithstanding his exertions it is evident that the English were more than holding their own, [34] and a second repulse suffered thus late in the day by the Norman cavalry would almost certainly have passed into a rout of the whole army. At this crisis it occurred to some cunning brain, whether that of the duke or another, that it might be possible by feigning flight to tempt the English troops to break their formation, and then, by turning on suitable ground, to repeat the success which had ended the real flight in the forenoon. The movement was easily carried out; a body of Normans rode away, and a crowd of Englishmen, regardless of everything except the relief from the immediate strain of keeping their ranks, hurled themselves down the hill shouting curses and cries of victory. No discipline could have been kept under the circumstances, and when the galloping knights suddenly spread out their line, wheeled around their horses, and surrounded the disordered mob of their pursuers the latter were ridden down and cut to pieces by scores. [35]
It is, of course, impossible to estimate the actual extent of the loss which the English sustained in the episode of the feigned flight, but there can be little doubt that its success marks the turning-point in the fortune of the day. No incident in the great battle made a deeper impression upon the historians who have described it for us, and the tale of the feigned flight is told in different narratives with great variety of circumstance and detail. But from the writers who lived nearest to the time we may infer with tolerable certainty that the manoeuvre in question was a sudden expedient, devised and acted upon without previous organisation, and also that it was a simple, not a combined movement. The whole business of decoying the English from the hill, turning upon, and then surrounding them, was the work of one and the same body of knights. On the other hand, it is probably incorrect to speak of the feigned flight in the singular, for our best authority distinctly asserts that the same stratagem was used twice;[36] fighting was going on along a front of at least half a mile in length, and different sections of the Norman army may very well have carried out the movement at different times, and in complete independence of each other. However this may be, the effect of the manoeuvre was soon apparent. The English line, though shrunken in numbers, closed its ranks and kept its formation, wedged together so tightly that the wounded could not fall behind to the rear, nor even the dead bodies drop to the ground. But the superior endurance of the Norman troops was beginning to tell; the English were rapidly losing heart, [37] and the consummation of William's victory only waited for the destruction of King Harold, and of the warriors who fought with him round the standard.
The attack which finally beat down the resistance of the English line seems to have been delivered from some point to the south-east of the hill. [38] The battle had already continued for seven or eight hours, and twilight was beginning to fall, [39] but its approach could only remind the shaken remnant of the native host that the day was lost, and the end of the great fight was now very near. It was in the last confused struggle which raged round the standard in the fading light that Harold met his death; and then his companions, tired out and hopeless of reinforcement, yielded the ground they had defended for so long, and broke away to the north-west along the neck of land which connects the hill of battle with the higher ridges of the downs beyond it. The victors followed in hot pursuit; but a strange chance gave to Harold, in the very hour of his death, a signal revenge over the men at whose hands he had just fallen. A little to the west of the original position of the English army one of the headwaters of the Asten had cut a deep ravine, of which the eastern face was so steep as to be a veritable trap for any incautious horsemen who might attempt to ride down it. In the gathering darkness knight after knight, galloping after the English fugitives in secure ignorance of the ground, crashed down into this gully; and the name Malfosse, borne throughout the Middle Ages by the ravine in question, bears witness to the extent of the disaster which the victorious army suffered at this point. [40] Harold, after he had lost life and kingdom, was still justified of the ground which he had chosen as the place of battle.
Late in the night William returned to the battlefield and pitched his tent there. There could be no doubt that he had gained an unequivocal victory; his rival was dead, the native army annihilated; he could well afford to give his troops the rest they needed. The early part of the following day was spent in the burial of the Norman dead; the work being carried out under the duke's immediate care. The English folk of the neighbourhood soon came in numbers to the battlefield and begged for the bodies of their fallen kinsfolk, which they were allowed to cany away for burial; but the unclaimed corpses were left strewn about the hill. Before long the bodies of Harold, Gyrth and Leofwine were found lying close together; but Harold's corpse had been horribly mangled, and, according to the later romantic story, it was only identified by means of certain marks upon the body which were known and recognised by the dead man's mistress, Edith the Swan-necked. Towards the close of the morrow of the battle, William returned to his castle at Hastings, bearing Harold's body with him for burial upon the shore in unconsecrated ground as befitted an excommunicate, and an urgent message from Gytha, Godwine's widow, offering for her son's body its weight in gold, did nothing to shake his purpose. [41] With characteristic irony William remarked that it was but fitting that Harold in death should be appointed guardian of the shore and sea, which he had tried to defend in life; and the dead king's body, wrapped in a purple robe, was laid out of sight somewhere among the rocks along the shore of Hastings bay. Later tradition indeed asserted that Harold before long was translated from this unhallowed grave to a tomb in the minster of the Holy Cross at Waltham, which he had founded three years before [42] ; but the authority on which this story depends is none of the best, and, for all that we really know to the contrary, the last native king of England is still the guardian of the Sussex shore.
Harold, above all kings in English history with the possible exceptions of Richard III. and Charles I, was happy in the circumstances of his death. He gained thereby an immediate release from the performance of an impossible task, and he was enabled to redeem the personal ambitions which governed his past life by associating them in the moment of his fall with the cause of the national independence of England. It has been possible for historians to regret the outcome of the battle of Hastings only because it overthrew Harold before he could prove the hopelessness of the position in which he had placed himself. What chance had he, a man of uncertain ancestry and questionable antecedents, of completing the work which had overcome every king before him: the work of reconciling the antagonism of north to south, of making the royal word supreme in the royal council, of making the provincial nobility of England and its dependents the subjects of the king and of the king only? It may well be that such a task would have proved beyond the power of any native king, though descended from the immemorial line of Cerdic[43] how could it be completed by an ambitious earl, invested indeed with the royal authority, but crippled in its exercise by the bitter rivalry cf men who had formerly been his fellow-subjects; whose birth was more noble, whose wealth was scarcely less, who, in opposition to his rule, could rely upon endless reserves of local patriotism, the one source of political strength which the land contained? To genius, indeed, all things are possible, but to ascribe genius to this commonplace, middle-aged earl would be to do sheer violence to the meaning of words. Harold will always hold a noble place in the record of English history; but he owes that place solely to the events of his last month of life, when the terrible necessity of straining every faculty he possessed in the support of his trembling throne roused in him a quickness of perception and a rapidity of action which his uneventful career as earl of Wessex could never have called into being. Harold was undoubtedly the best captain that England had seen since the death of Edmund Ironside, just fifty years before the battle of Hastings; but the work which Harold had undertaken would have called for quite other powers than those which he revealed so unexpectedly on the eve of his death. William the Conqueror, endowed as he was by nature with the faculties of a great ruler to an extent perhaps without parallel in English history; superior by the fact that he came in by conquest to all the local jealousies which distracted Anglo-Saxon politics; and with unique opportunities of recasting the social and tenurial features of English life ; could only create a strong and uniform government in England after three years of almost incessant war, the reduction of a third of England to a wilderness, and the remodelling in principle of the whole fabric of the English administration, civil and military. When it is remembered that the resistance to William was made essentially on grounds not of national feeling, but of local particularism, and that these forces would undoubtedly have conspired against Harold as they afterwards conspired against his rival, we can only conclude that fate was kind which slew Harold in the heat of battle in a noble cause, instead of condemning him to witness the disintegration of his kingdom, in virtual impotence, varied only by spasmodic outbreaks of barren civil war.
1. Round, Calendar of Documents preserved in France, No. 1713.
2. William of Poitiers, 122.
3. William of Poitiers, 123. "Turmasmilitumcernens, noneshomescens."
4. Guy of Amiens, ed. Giles, 58.
5. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, ii., 300.
6. William of Poitiers, 125.
7. William of Poitiers, 126.
8. Abingdon Chronicle, 1066.
9. Guy of Amiens : "Diruta quae fuerant dudum castella reforxnas; Ponis custodes ut tueantur ea."
10. William of Poitiers: "Normanni previa munitione Penevesellum altera Hastingas occupavere."
11. See on this point Round, Feudal England, 150-152.
12. William of Poitiers, 138.
13. William's real numbers probably lay between six and seven thousand.
14. See the paraphrase of this passage in the Roman de Ron, Freeman, N. C., iii., 417.
15. Guy of Amiens, p. 31 : "Ex Anglis unus t latitans sub rupe marina Cemit ut effusas innumeras acies. Scandere currit equum; festinat dicere regi."
16. Gaimar, l'Estoire des Engles, R. S., i., p. 222. Gaimar wrote in the twelfth century, but he followed a lost copy of the Anglo Saxon chronicle.
17. For the chronology of the campaigns of Stamfordbridge and Hastings the dates given by Freeman are followed here
18. Worcester Chronicle, 1066 : "He com him togenes at thoere haran apuldran."
19. The statement that Harold further strengthened his position by building a palisade in front of it rests solely on an obscure and probably corrupt passage in the Roman de Rott (lines 7815 et seqq). Apart altogether from the textual difficulty, the assertion' of Wace is of no authority in view of the silence both of contemporary writers and of those of the next generation. In regard to none of the many earlier English fights of this century have we any hint that the position of the army was strengthened in this manner; nor in practice would it have been easy for Harold to collect sufficient timber to protect a front of 8oo yards on the barren down where he made his stand. The negative evidence of the Bayeux tapestry is of particular importance here; for its designer could represent defences of the kind suggested when he so desired, as in the case of the fight at Dinan.
20. Spatz, p. 30, will only allow to William a total force of six to seven thousand men.
21. William of Poitiers, 133. "Cuncti pedites consistere denslus conglobati." For the arrangement of the English army on the hill see Baring, E. H. R., xx., 65.
22. It is probable that the expressions in certain later authorities (e.g. W. M., ii., 302, "pedites omnes cum bipennibus conserta ante se testudine") from which the formation by the English of a definite shield or wall has been inferred mean no more than this. The "bord weal" of earlier Anglo-Saxon warfare may also be explained as a poetical phrase for a line of troops in close order. See Round, Feudal England, 360-366.
23. This fact, which must condition any account to be given of the battle of Hastings, was first stated by Dr. W. Spate, "Die Schlacht von Hastings." section v., "Taktik beider Heere," p. 34.
24. This point is brought out strongly by Oman, History of the Art of War.
25. Spatz, p. 29, uses this fact to limit the numbers of the Norman army.
26. William of Poitiers, 132.
27. Guy of Amiens: "Laevam Galli, dextram petiere Britanni. Dux cum Nonnannis dimicat in medio."
28. William of Poitiers, 132.
29. Florence of Worcester, 1066: "Ab hora, tamen diei tertia usque ad noctis crepusculum."
30. Guy of Amiens. W. P., 133: "Cedit fere cuncta Ducis acies."
31. "Fugientibus occurrit et obstitit, verberans aut minans hasta." W. P., 134.
32. Bayeux tapestry scene: "Hie Odo episcopus, baculum tenftns, confortat pueros."
33. William of Poitiers, 134.
34. "Animadvertentes Normanni , . . non absque nimio sui incommode hostem tantura simul resistentem superari posse." W. P., 135.
35. Normanni repente regirati equis interceptos et inclusos undique mactaverunt." William of Poitiers, 135.
36. "Bis eo dolo simili eventu usi." William of Poitiers, 135.
37. "Languent Angli, et quasi reattun ipso defectu confitentes, vindictum patiuntur." W. P., 135.
38. Baring, E. H. R., xxii., 71.
39. "Jam inclinato die. 1' W. P., 137. Crepttsculi iempore. Florence of Worcester, 1066.
40. Baring, E. H. R., xsii., 69.
41. Guy of Amiens.
42. See the Waltham tract, De Iwentione Sancti Cruets, ed.
43. Stubbs. William of Malmesbury was evidently acquainted with this legend.


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CAIRO (Reuters) - The attack by Islamic State came as Egypt's defense and interior ministers walked toward a helicopter waiting to fly them out of the Sinai peninsula last December. Five army and police sources told Reuters that the militants fired a laser-guided missile at the aircraft, destroying it.
The ministers survived the Al-Arish air base attack, whose sophistication and boldness served as a reminder that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, expected to easily win re-election this month, is still engaged in a major military campaign to deliver the security he has promised to Egyptians.
Even with widespread public support, Sisi's security forces have yet to quash a stubborn insurgency in Sinai, an area that Islamic State is using as a base in its campaign to install an Islamic caliphate in Egypt. The United Nations singled out Islamic State in Egypt in a January report from its secretary general, expressing concern over the branch's "resilience."
The military mentioned the attack in a brief statement the day it happened but did not give details. A military spokesman, who also speaks on behalf of the defense ministry, later declined further comment on the attack. The Interior Ministry did not respond to telephone calls or reply to questions on Whatsapp about the helicopter attack.
The military previously has said that it has killed more than 1,800 jihadists in the area since late 2014, according to a Reuters review of its public statements over the period.
Last month, the army launched a highly publicized offensive, and says it has killed scores of suspected fighters and detained hundreds more in Sinai, the main stronghold of Islamic State after their defeat in Libya, Iraq and Syria.
The military says the new campaign features unprecedented coordination between the army, navy and air force in Sinai, and that these tactics should help it clear the peninsula of militants.
Sisi's supporters argue that the security situation now, although not completely secure, is better and more predictable than the unrest that rocked Egypt for years after the Arab Spring uprising of 2011. Sisi's office did not respond to requests for comment about the security situation.
But years of military action in the Sinai have not stopped Islamist fighters launching attacks intended to destabilize the government and stir up unrest. In the past four months, they have carried out two spectacular assaults there - on the air base on Dec. 19, and at a mosque on Nov. 24, killing more than 300 people.
In the helicopter operation, military and police sources say jihadists commandeered a house on the edge of the air base on the day of the attack and used a Russian-made Kornet missile, a much more advanced weapon than the rifles, suicide vests and mines the militants mostly use.
It was a rare and close targeting of senior government officials by Islamists, and the attack alarmed Egypt's security establishment, several foreign diplomats said.
The attack came three weeks after Sisi ordered his generals to use "brute force" against jihadists.
Egypt's military is using warplanes, tanks and troops that have battled radical Islamists in the Sinai for years.
Some diplomats and analysts say the army must adopt more effective counterinsurgency tactics and avoid alienating residents with the more destructive methods of air raids, curfews and buffer zones that have razed populated areas and radicalized residents.
"We're seeing the exact same military operation (as before) - aerial and ground force bombardment, mobilization of heavy armored vehicles on the ground," said Mohannad Sabry, an Egyptian author and researcher on security in Sinai.
A Western diplomat said Egyptian authorities have been focusing their military strategy on conventional warfare by using heavy weapons rather than adopting more targeted, intelligence-led tactics to eradicate extremism.
Military spokesman Colonel Tamer al-Rifai told Reuters that security forces were closing in on militants and blocking off their supply and escape routes.
"While one part (of the military) is searching houses, another is raiding terrorist hideouts in populated or unpopulated areas ... the operation won't end" until militants are rooted out, Rifai said.
He said in a recent televised message that civilians would be financially compensated for material damage resulting from fighting, and that there were hundreds of development projects taking place in Sinai, without elaborating.
More than a dozen soldiers have died in the operation, the army says, adding to hundreds in recent years. Islamic State says via its online media outlets it has killed dozens of soldiers in the last month, including through the extensive use of roadside bombs.
Islamic State filmed the air base attack in a video released online showing a guided missile destroying a stationary helicopter. Reuters could not independently verify the video's authenticity.
Farmer Mohamed Sweilam told Reuters Islamic State fighters took over his house near the base on the day of the attack. Five army and police sources say that is where the militants launched the missile from.
"A car with armed men wearing balaclavas and some in military fatigues pulled up. At first I thought they were police," Sweilam, 36, said.
"They blindfolded me, drove me somewhere for several hours, then took me back. I didn't know what had happened until the next day when police came to search the house and question me (about the attack)."
After the attack, North Sinai Governor Abdel Fattah Harhour announced a plan to create a secure perimeter extending west and east of the airport.
Some residents were skeptical.
"They (authorities) think this will protect the airport, but they're wrong. It will just make people angry," said Mostafa Sayed, 51, whose home is also in the zone slated for clearance.
Harhour said people forced from their homes would receive compensation.
Corrects name of governor in final section.

subset: commoncrawl


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Florida Raises School Aid, But Declines To Revamp Finance Formula
Florida legislators approved a hefty 11.6 percent increase in state school aid before adjourning June 2, but declined to adopt a new funding formula that backers claimed would have made the state's system the most equitable in the nation.
Lawmakers earmarked $5.3 billion for precollegiate education in the upcoming fiscal year, a $555-million increase over the current spending level.
"This is probably one of the best years we've had in 15 to 18 years'' with regard to the education budget, said Senator Robert Johnson, chairman of the Senate education committee. "Every educator I've talked to is pleased with where we are."
Florida's education community, however, failed in its attempt to gain a complete overhaul of the school-funding formula. The measure, which died in the Senate appropriations committee, was endorsed by 66 of the state's 67 districts, its two major teachers' unions, and the state school-boards and administrators' associations.
Strong Opposition
"The opposition was strong enough to keep it from flying," said John Gaines, executive director of the Florida School Administrators Assocation.
Mr. Gaines blamed members of the Senate appropriation panel for the bill's defeat, saying they refused to relinquish their political control over the allocation of education spending.
"It wasn't a dollar issue," he said. "It was over who controls the allocation of dollars."
Senator Johnson, however, said the amount of additional funding that the new system would have required was disputed. Supporters said implementing the formula would have cost $92 million, but critics estimated it would take $150 million.
He added that some lawmakers from areas that receive special benefits under the current system had a "vested interest" in seeing that it remained unchanged.
Senator Johnson also indicated the education community should bear some responsibility for the bill's rejection because it underestimated the difficulty of getting the measure through the legislature.
"The coalition held together, but it basically didn't do anything until the last 10 days of the session," said Mr. Johnson. By the time the coalition mobilized its forces, he said, it was too late.
Mr. Gaines said the education community would bring the issue before lawmakers again next year. Senator Johnson noted that Gov. Bob Martinez, who had expressed concern about the program's cost, agreed to meet with school officials in August and to create a model budget using the proposed formula.
Lottery Dispute
Much of the increase in school aid was financed by state lottery revenues. Although legislators had4pledged to use lottery proceeds only to "enhance" education programs, they killed measures that would have prohibited them from using lottery profits for basic-education programs.
"You can argue all day long if [the funding increase] was for enhancement or not," said Senator Johnson. "In my opinion, when you look at the Florida tax base and the horrendous growth [in enrollments], it's tough enough to try to hold on."
Mr. Johnson said half of the combined $900-million increase in state and local funding next year will be used to cover the costs of higher enrollment.
State officials recently estimated that districts will have 82,000 more students in the next school year, up from the 60,000 increase projected last fall. Many of the new students are refugees from Nicaragua and other Central American nations. The federal government has thus far rejected the state's pleas for additional assistance.
To help districts cope with the situation, lawmakers agreed to let them raise their property-tax rate for school construction from 1.5 to 2 mills. The change is expected to raise an additional $60 million.
Other Action
In other action, lawmakers:
Approved financial incentives for districts to experiment with school-based management. To obtain funding, districts must secure agreements with teachers through the collective-bargaining process, and submit plans to the state education agency.
Agreed to deny drivers' licenses to students who drop out of school before they reach 18.
Doubled funding, to $50 million, for the state's prekindergarten program.
Created a "Good Start" program in the health department to identify infants who may encounter difficulty in school because they have teenage mothers, learning disabilities, or low birth weights.
Established a companion "First Start" program, in which districts and community agencies will train parents of children with special problems to become their children's first teachers.
Declined to enact legislation relating to the "official English" constitutional amendment adopted by voters last fall.
"All of our official documents are already maintained in English," said Senator Johnson.
Vol. 08, Issue 38
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Mill Creek Softball
2008, 2015 State Champions
2005, 2006, 2007, 2016, 2018 Region Champions
2019-20 Lady Hawks Softball
Lady Hawks Softball on Facebook
Athletic Participation Form
In order to participate in any athletic program at Mill Creek - conditioning or try outs - students must complete our Mill Creek Athletic Participation Form and turn it in to the Athletic Office. The form consists of 4 pages that all must be completed. The form may be picked up from the Athletic office, the main office or downloaded below.
Athletic Participation Form
2019 All County Honors
Please join us in congratulating the following young ladies on being selected to the Gwinnett "ALL COUNTY"Softball Team. This is a huge honor as players are voted on this team by coaches of other programs.
1st Team
Angelica Gallegos
Olivia Shaw
Players of the Month
Kathleen Maijala
Helena Nagy
Jade Montgomery
Sara Shaw
Scholar Athelete
Taylor Murdock
Gwinnett County Player of the Year
Dallis Goodnight
Lady Hawks Seniors
2018 Region Champs!
The Mill Creek Lady Hawks Softball Score Board is located behind the left center field wall at our softball facility. The score board can be seen from our softball stands, baseball stands, and the entry to Osborne Middle School. Along with our scheduled home games we have daily visibility exceeding over 4000 students along with the traffic volume of parents and visitors to our schools and many other after-schools scheduled events. Your business name and message will be shared with thousands of existing and potential customers on an annual basis as Mill Creek High School hosts events year round. Configurations that are available will be based on space at the beginning of our softball season and will be honored by contract length and years of participation on the score board. Waiting lists will be built each year and open spots will be offered to our waiting lists first and then new companies.
The Mill Creek Softball Program would love to have you as a sponsor for years to come. Below is the Softball Sponsorship Package Form for you to complete and become a Hawk Sponsor! If you have any questions, please contact Coach Pierce.
Mill Creek Scoreboard Sponsorship 2018
Score Board Sponsorships include the following:
- Score Board Signage
- Home Page Banner Advertisement on hawkssoftball.com
- Sponsorship recognition during home Varsity Softball Games
- Sponsorship recognition during home 9th Grade or JV Softball Games


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CONTRIBUTED BY MATTHEW & MARZENA KESTI Looking to escape the friendly confines of the Adana area? Given current conditions, the quickest, cheapest, and most convenient way is to head down to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Since 1974 the island of Cyprus has been divided by a UN buffer zone. The southern portion … Continue reading Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
Category: To Do in Turkey
Family Fun at Ekotepe
REVIEW & PHOTOS CONTRIBUTED BY TUTI HAWKINS and LARISSA KOERSCHNER I recently went to visit Ekotepe on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Adana. I chose Ekotepe because it was one of the many great recommendations on Turkey Tamam. Sure enough, I was not disappointed. Since the first article was publish, there is now a little market … Continue reading Family Fun at Ekotepe
Incirlik Village Firins
CONTRIBUTED BY REBECCA WILLIAMS In my two years at Incirlik I never quite warmed up to the idea of "off base". I have been off base – I've climbed Anavarza with the best of them, I've toured the Hagia Sophia, I've basked in the history of Ephesus (and the July sun), and I've even been … Continue reading Incirlik Village Firins
Çobandede Türbesi Park & Zoo
CONTRIBUTED BY MARZENA KESTI If you're looking for a fun place to visit in Adana, we found it. A nice, clean park with a mini zoo and waterfalls. Our kids loved exploring this park. It's near the lake. You can climb up the stairs and little walkways to the top of the hill. On your … Continue reading Çobandede Türbesi Park & Zoo
Saturday Homegoods Market, North Adana
CONTRIBUTED BY EMILY SMITH I've always known this market to be called the "Saturday Women's Market," but it's definitely not just for women. I can't quite decide what this market should be called. It could be the "Saturday Knockoff Market" or the "Saturday Homegoods Market," or even the "Saturday Super Walmart Market." Whatever you … Continue reading Saturday Homegoods Market, North Adana
Kizkalesi (The Maiden's Castle)
CONTRIBUTED BY KATY STRYKER Roughly two hours from Adana, in Kizkalesi, you can drink in a little piece of paradise, with a twist of medieval times and a splash of touristy fun. Nestled beside the ruins of two magnificent castles, are beaches that offer a variety of enjoyable options. Just beyond the Korykas Castle (on … Continue reading Kizkalesi (The Maiden's Castle)


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Flying by a hope and a dream
The trouble with maintaining a blog is that you think of all sorts of things to write about when you're doing something else, like working, or driving, but when you finally sit down in front of the computer, all those great ideas go right out the window. So you end up, or at least I end up, spewing a bunch of "blah, blah, blah, I'm not feeling so good right now" twaddle that comes nowhere near the brilliant, elusive, dreamy posts that fly in through one ear and out the other before they make it into typed words. Oh, if you could have seen the posts I composed in my head.
I'm sitting here in a cafe typing into my laptop right now. The impermanence of life is weighing heavily on my mind, and has been for a while. The holidays are over. One person I knew, a man who helped me out a lot, simply by living an example and by exuding serenity when I got to a crisis point over 19 years ago and had to abandon one way of life for another, died over the holidays. Another person I've known just about as long, who was around when I was wrestled by life into surrender, is reportedly on her deathbed as I write this. My daughter, 23 and beautifully independent, left for Thailand right after Christmas on a one-way ticket. I sincerely hope there's a god, or maybe some benevolent spirits, who will watch over her and keep her safe.
Me? I'm not a loser. I make a lot of mistakes. Lately, the task of making amends has been coming up, partially because of where I am in a certain spiritual-growth process, and partially because, well, I'm sick and tired of making the same mistakes over and over, and I'm tired of doing stupid things that hurt people I care about, and I want to stop and I want to set things right. I've got one in particular that's at the top of the stack, an old friend I badmouthed on Facebook, and maybe somewhere else I can't remember because I was in a fugue state of being a butthole. I've tried to make amends several times, with no response any time. Please don't laugh.
Many of my resentments seem to grow out of my frustration to be heard as a songwriter and musician. I get frustrated, then bitterly resentful, and then that negative state I'm in, along with the damage I've caused, turns people against me. What I really need to do is let go of any desire to play music — not give up, but just let go. I did that for my nonexistent love life, which is still nonexistent, but at least I'm not torturing myself anymore whenever a beautiful woman crosses my path, or worse, a beautiful woman who at one time professed love for me. It doesn't mean I have to stop playing music or singing or writing songs; it just means I have no expectations that anyone other than me will give much of a hoot.
This morning I woke up to a pretty cool dream. It was long and byzantine, probably fueled by the anodyne Tom Ka Gai soup I ate the night before to ward off this horrible fluey-coldy thing that hit me on New Year's Eve, and all I remember was the end. I descended with a small group of people, familiar to me but I can't recall their names, into a cave that led to another world inside the Earth, kind of like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I'd enjoyed in comic-book form (Classics Illustrated) until I stupidly took it with me on a Boy Scout 50-mile hike and the Scoutmaster caught me reading it behind a tree and he made me burn it and a couple of other childhood comic favorites, me weeping like a pussyboy at losing some things I loved dearly, in front of all the other Boy Scouts.
Anyway, this group and I descended into this other world, which was verdant and primitive, like the plants were at an earlier stage of evolution. There were these younger boys, like my sons, and at one point one of them told me how cool it might be if we could fly. "What's holding you back?" I answered him. "It's easy. Watch." Then I got a running start, but my arms out like plane wings and took off. I was zooming around this inner dome world, rising and diving and doing barrel rolls, and I saw that they followed. The sky was pink and orange with clouds, and the landscape was lush and green, like hilly jungles that went on for miles. At one point, I flew over what looked like some kind of modern defense installation, or maybe a nuclear power plant or a UFO, all gleaming chrome in the bright light. My mind couldn't make sense of what it was doing in the corner of this domed jungle world of my dreams.
And then, we all landed, and it was time to leave. There was a woman sitting in a lounge chair on a deck, and she was a composite of my first girlfriend Jo and my daughter's mom Lynne and a couple other women I've loved. She looked up from the newspaper she was reading, and as I walked by she rose up and planted a big kiss on my lips. "It's so good to have you back, Bri," she said, calling me by a shortened version of the middle name I'd gone by in my younger years. "It's so nice to see you acting like your old self again." I'm not sure what she meant. I mean, I kinda have an inkling, but I'm really not so sure.
Then again, there is a lot I do not know, and probably never will. —Jackson Griffith
Happy new year, a day or so late
So what did you do to ring in the new year? I dragged myself out of my little hidey-hole, figuring that it would be much better to welcome the new year while being somewhat sociable than just chilling out in my apartment. Didn't really have a plan; walked a few blocks to Tres Hermanas, a Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood, and right after I got seated, a threesome that I think might've been roasting a bowl on the sidewalk came in, carrying a really big bottle of cheap (Cook's) champagne, acting like they owned the joint. That takes stones; the only thing cooler would have been if it was Andre cold duck. The guy was hispanic, with one of those goofus fauxhawks and a fake tan; he was wearing a black dress shirt with a really ugly crimson tie. One of the two women was a blonde, the other a brunette; both had painted-on dresses, and the blonde's lingerie covered up her tats, but the brunette had a bunch of stuff in what looked like olde English script tatted all up and down her slightly plump legs.
There was a couple seated in between them and me, so I only could gander snippets of their conversation; something about "you look hawt," directed toward the blonde, and a rather loud passage wherein Mr. Ladies Man was arguing over his cell phone with what sounded like a cab dispatcher about the price of getting from Tres Hermanas to the Mercantile Saloon, an easy five-and-a-half block jaunt by foot in athletic shoes, made slightly more difficult in counterfeit Louboutins. I kept trying to take pictures of them, because they were such a funny sight, but I am the world's worst photographer. When I left, Fauxhawk and the blonde were decamped outside with their champagne and cigarrettes: "You look sooo hawtt," he told her again, "but Gina just looks sooooo trashy tonight."
Later, I made it over to the Fox & Goose in time for D.J. Larry Rodriguez's big soiree, which must have been pretty fun. Except that Sir Nose D'Voidofunk hit me with some kind of anti-bop entropy gun, so I got rhythm about as well as Mitt Romney, which is to say, not at all. Everybody was dancing, and had not committed to Larry that I would pull the string at midnight that would release the balloons, I might have bailed. I mean, I could not dance, I could not feel it; what I was feeling instead was crummy, increasingly crummy.
Once I got home, I didn't leave until this morning. On New Year's Day, I felt like that Detroit Lions fan who ran in front of a bus, except that I lived through it. At least I think I did. Maybe not. I just proned out in bed, slept, woke up, read, and dreamed of buying a toaster. That's what my life has been missing, I thought: The ability to make toast on demand. So today, finally, I scraped myself off the mattress and into the shower, and then made it across town to pay rent and go to Target to shop for, you guessed it, a toaster.
I hate stores. I hate shopping. I hate other people in stores who push massive shopping carts down aisles and expect me to stop concentrating on various makes of toasters so I can flatten myself against the shelves to make it easy for their obese juggernauts to pass me by. I hate getting in line behind some couple whose teenage daughter is still running around the store grabbing stuff to buy, only to sprint up to the checkout and dump it on the counter ahead of my solitary toaster, solitary because I didn't feel good enough to buy more stuff. Meanwhile, everyone else who made smarter picks for lines to get into have bought their swag and moved out the doors. Especially I hate shopping when I don't feel good. Still, I ain't about to pepper spray anybody.
Right now, I feel like a catbox left to fester. I'm doing laundry. But I did make amends with the guy I'd maligned, described in my last post here, by apologizing, saying I was sorry, telling him I'm really working on not practicing any more of that dickish behavior, which is rooted in my own insecurities that the world has passed me by, and I asked him if there was anything I could do to make it right. There is one other person I offended a while back, a big shot in the local music scene, to whom I've sent three separate messages apologizing for my behavior, but he's choosing to ignore me and my entreaties, or not acknowledge them. Which is something I have no control over. If he doesn't want to accept my amends, that's his choice.
I just have to stop shooting myself in the foot. And I gotta start feeling better, too. —Jackson Griffith
Butthurt singer-songwriter for hire
Looks like I fiddlesticksed up again. Gosh darn it; sometimes I should look down at that third rail and say, "You know, that's a third rail. If I touch that third rail, I'm likely to get all shocked and all, so I'll just note that thought and move away from that third rail without being stupid enough to touch it."
But no. Instead of doing one of a hundred other things, like sit in meditative silence, or call that platonic galpal back who wanted to meet for a meal tonight, I had to do a stupid. I got an Facebook invite to a show at a local coffee room, and I clicked on the page for that show and typed a message about wanting to come, but I'm boycotting any shows by the person at the top of the ticket until he lets me play on one of his shows. The top of the ticket guy immediately wrote back: "That'll never happen." Fine, I wrote back. At least you're finally communicating with me, instead of giving me a passive-aggressive cold shoulder every time I stupidly abase myself to you for asking to play on one of your shows. Then he said something like "Butthurt singer-songwriters aren't my style."
Now, I'm not sure that butthurt is the correct word; I think that in my case the word "frustrated" is closer to the mark. Hey, maybe I come across as butthurt, or unnecessarily entitled, to people, and I'm just a poor self-observer. But not being named Cayce, or Criswell, or Kreskin, or Mesmer, I have no idea unless you tell me, preferably before I make an annoying idiot out of myself. Psychic I am not, contrary to what those astrologers tell me about my Pisces Moon-Mercury combo in the sixth house trining my Neptune in the second or something like that.
Yes, I have a lot of songs that I want to play for people. I thought that this certain DIY straightedge punk legend and onetime local cafe owner might be open to my little ambition, perhaps. I figured wrong, of course, but I kept persisting even though I wasn't getting any kind of straight answer. Perhaps I was, but it was telegraphed in that unspoken way that non-Asperger types communicate, and I was too cluelessly autistic to pick up the signals. Story of my life, there, really.
I could go off at this point and rip the guy a new sphincter with my precision-sharpened critic's scalpel, but I won't. I respect the guy's work and like a lot of his songs, really, and in the past, we've enjoyed reasonably warm conversation to the point where I thought I could consider him a friend. I admire his tenacity to keep going even when the world is throwing him the middle finger, and I think he's got a great work ethic. In fact, I'd spoken to his wife at one point about asking him to help me sequence a set's worth of my songs, which is a service I would pay money to have done, and she seemed to voice that it might be a decent idea. Perhaps I misperceived. Anyway, I ran it past him, and got that cold shoulder, and didn't press forward with that idea anymore. Asking for help in a way that I actually receive it doesn't seem to be one of my strong suits, which is one reason I don't seem to have many musician pals helping me to flesh out my songs.
My only caveat is that this person and his cohorts seem overly chummy and exclusionary, at least toward me. Perhaps they think that I, my music, or maybe both, "suck," or aren't up to their lofty standards, but they never got around to telling me to my face until now. Which is okay; I've spent large parts of my life casting what few pearls I have before swine, and I'm just getting around to stopping that behavior, or at least reining it in. The funny thing is, this person has rattled off many column inches in one of his blogs bitching about the local music scene, and to me, he and his little treehouse of friends are as much of the problem as anyone he rails about, and the idea of him calling anyone else "butthurt" is more than slightly risible.
But I'd rather not focus anymore on something I can't control, which is what he or anyone else thinks about me. I'm more interested in getting at the root of the problem, which is why people react to me the way they do. It's kinda like my dad used to tell me: "If you're walking around town and all you keep running into is assholes, come home and look in the mirror." And I really want to figure out why people perceive me as too "butthurt" to want to work with me, so I can address those negative qualities or try to get help working through them. I'm sincere about this; I don't want to die and then have somebody say, wow, he wrote some pretty good tunes; too bad he's not around to play them now.
So at some point, I'd really rather move past that which is holding me back. I'd like for people to want to play music with me, rather than talk behind my back about what a jerk they think I am, or laugh at me for trying. I'm not getting any younger, but mostly I'm getting incrementally wiser. I want to use the time I have left to communicate with others, and I really would like the privilege and opportunity to play my songs to people. I don't think that's too much to ask. But I'll have to approach people who feel warmly toward me, rather than people who secretly harbor animosity toward me.
So maybe next time, I'll do the smart thing and shut up before I make any more enemies. —Jackson Griffith
Happy December 24, or Santa is just Satan spelled sideways
Because I can't locate any Mr. Magoo marathons anywhere on the cable, and even more because I don't have cable so even if there was a Mr. Magoo marathon somewhere I wouldn't know about it, I'm sitting here on Christmas eve, doing my laundry. Like you were surprised, right? I mean, me and this obsession with doing laundry, when I used to be that guy who would be schlepping plastic garbage bags of dirty clothes down to the laundromat every month or so, is kinda not in character. But really it is; I lead a tidy, reasonably organized, utterly boring and solitary life, with far less surprises than in the past.
I'm not going to post any Christmassy stuff, just because I'm not really a Christmassy guy. Didn't get a whole lot of party invitations this holiday season, probably because I've been such a hermit. Hermitage is good, though. I can noodle around on the guitar and read books and go eat dinner by myself and walk around the neighborhood, and nobody gives me a hard time about it. Hell, most of the time I have such a difficult time making conversation with people that it's kind of a relief being alone. I prefer to communicate with people via my fingers, as in typing or writing. My mouth, not so good, at least until I can work up the nerve to see a dentist.
I hope you aren't getting the vibe that I'm wallowing in self-pity here, because I'm most decidedly not. My life is generally pretty good. Yeah, the holidays suck, especially when your family is fractured and you haven't had anyone gaze at you lovingly and call you sweetie in a long time. But usually I can get through any rough patches or raw emotional moments, or days, by holding the realization that things change, and then they change again, and then they keep changing.
So here it is, almost Christmas. I'm kinda planning on working on this crazy song cycle I started, but I'm pretty open to whatever comes surging down the pike. Got some nice plans for tomorrow, and gonna fold my laundry today.
Like now, really. Till next time. —Jackson Griffith
It's cold by Ramentown standards, and I dunno what I'm doing tonight
Whatever it is I'm doing this evening, I have no idea what it is. Rather than get in some porcupine-rasslin' match with Ron Paul enthusiasts on Facebook, for which I really don't have the bandwidth tonight, and rather than fix some dinner at home, I elected to bundle up and walk down to the local twentysomthing cafe three blocks away. Figured I'd eat a salad, drink a root beer and bang out one of these little windows into my cranium.
I might have drived/driven/drove, but that would mean I'd have to give up my parking slot in the apartment complex first-come-first-serve lot, and I'd have to park on the street because the lot is full, and that's because a lot of chumps from neighboring buildings are parking there, and our manager has other things more pressing than telling these nincompoops to vamoose or get towed, so it's a sucky situation and I have a lingering resentment that makes me race home after work just so I can grab one of the slots before one of the other resident tools gets in first, like this one balding goatee'd troll in a VW GTI who grabs the front slot, I swear he lurks and watches until someone leaves and then he runs out and gets in his car and whips it into the empty space, so I have a stupid resentment about all that. Stupid, stupid resentment.
Anyway, I walked.
So then I got a table, which is nice because the usual crowd of college kids is on hiatus. Ordered a salad and a root beer. Tuned into the two couples at the next table because they were talking loud about nothing in particular, found myself getting judgmental, realized that all my judgments were in my head, so I went back to typing. Found a really dumb Croatian blond-wig band for your enjoyment. Ate a salad: The bleu cheese is surprisingly catboxesque, but not in a bad way; it's just pungent in the way your dog's breath is when he kisses you after snouting his way through the Fresh Step in search of kitty-sourced Tootsie Rolls.
And now they're gone. This place stops serving beer around 10, even though it's open until 11. Those kids wanted to drink. Doesn't make sense, they complained. I told them I thought it might be because when the coffeehouse, a fixture in this part of town since before I arrived in the mid-1980s, got new owners, who were more foodie-inclined, they went for a beer and wine license and got a lot of pushback from the neighbors, many of whom are old hippies who bought victorians and other old houses when they were run-down piles in the 1970s, and they kicked in a lot of time, love and money into bringing them up to suff, and they they grew older and grumpier and turned into old-city preservationists. Nothing wrong with that, but you can't stay fixed in a time when you packed your bong and cracked an Anchor Steam and blissed out to the willowy strains of your favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash record, because those days are long since passed, and this is a young person's town now.
Which I actually like, even though I'm older now, too. It's a really crummy place to be single, though, because most of the women in this 'hood are closer to my daughter's age, and I prefer women who are much closer to my own age, which is, um, like, well, I was born in the first year Chevrolet offered a V8 engine in its Bel Air model. Not to hard to figure out. Which is to say that it's after 10, and I'd better start ambling back to my tiny apartment and hope the neighbor across the way isn't having ring-shout sexytime. If I'm awake, I just improvise my own porno soundtrack via some ninth chords and R&B vamps on my guitar. But waking up from a dead sleep to hear some random woman having a theatrical orgasm can lead to some pretty jinky dreams, like animals getting tortured and things like that.
Cranked the heat before I left. I know my bed's yummily toasty now. G'night! —Jackson Griffith
Ant man bee two thousand yard stare
Heck whiz gosh darn hardy har har. I'm a one-eyed tomcat in a sushi bar. Honey, squinkle my dinkle, hinkle my binkle, crinkle my minkle till the cows come home. Um, went to a party last night, took my guitar, it was mostly couples except for me and this other guy whose sweetie is in New Zealand or somewhere. Thought we was gonna sing and play guitars and I brought mine, but then the vibe was all wrong and when I was trying to run through this original acoustic number entitled "I Am Almost Fixing to Get Ready to Rock and Roll," one of the husbands, I'm sure reasonably well-lubricated on whatever it was they were quaffing, decided a little pianistic accompaniment might be in order. So his Cecil Taylor on PCP ivory tinklings completely overpowered my music, and I got the message and put my guitar away. Did not get to try out "Squinkle Mah Dinkle," or more fluffy romantic fare like "Morning Glory," or anything else. To hang with that crowd, I'd better bone up on classic rock fare that everyone can sing along to, rather than my own stanky repertoire of tuneage that nobody knows or gives a hoot's patoot aboot.
So, over it, or what I was on about last time. Fuggit, really; life is not fair. Well, to be honest, I have had spells of plenty in the past, but as my middle age segues into slightly older, I'm increasingly getting the idea that I'd better get used to my own company, unshared with any fine ladies, and had better bone up on checkers, or chess, or bocce, or even horseshoes. Yes, there are prostitutes available, but if you know anything about the historical Griffith, you'd understand why I'm not really interested.
Anyway, here it is that turn-cold time when we go lurching into the holidays, and I'll have to go into high gear on practicing the art of not giving a merde that I'm just one of those people who must be better off living a quiet little life on their own, or at least not suited for anything other than solitary. So, the gosh darned heck with it. Even if every little thing is gonna remind me that I'm one of those weird loner misanthropes. Hey, I love people. I love you. I love everybody. Well, most everybody. Just don't invite me to one of your little parties where everybody's coupled up except me, or I'll get all wasted on ginger ale and start in with the ribald limericks and explicitly pornographic haikus. You do not want that, trust me.
Ergo, fuggit. Hey, how 'bout those Niners? What are they, seven and one? Kick arse. About time we got some decent football in this region. What's that? Raiders? No, I'm talking about sporting events that can be enjoyed by humans. Nevertheless, do rest in peace, Al Davis. Loved your team back in the day, but whenever there's a Raiders game on now, I try to stay off the road during it, and at least four or so hours after it's over. No offense, but you've got some real hammerheads in that fan base.
Go Jints! And rest in peace, Bob Forsch, Sacramento pitcher who got to see his team win a series before he went off to that big sports bar in the sky. And while I'm no fan of the formerly Budweiser Cards, if you had a manager who was idiosyncratic enough to be a vegetarian and hang out with Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, well, I guess better that team taking the trophy than one associated with George W. Bush.
Now, about that roundball. Still locked out. No season. Which means bye-bye Kings, so my friends and I are already discussing a renewed allegiance to the Golden State Warriors. And as much as I love the Kings, I know the Maloofs will either sell the team or move them to somewhere with more money on the table. I miss basketball, really. I wish these millionaires could come to an accord so those of us who love the game can have something to follow.
Because I still don't get hockey. Maybe if I can go to a game with some hardcore fans and they can explain a few things to me, I can catch the fever. I still don't have it, yet.
Other than that, there's work. Bugs, more bugs, and maybe some rats. Get up in the morning, go to work, enjoy that, come home, play some guitar or go to an AA meeting, eat, meditate, read a little, set the alarm and go to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. On weekends, do some stuff like laundry and shopping, so I can have a less stressful work week.
Life isn't bad, but it's boring without the ladies. But because somewhere in there I guess I lost the ability to attract them into my life. So now I'll just get used to being a big ol' stinky guy, or something like that.
Go figure. I sure can't. —Jackson Griffith
Saudade Coronet 500 Super Bee Thousand
Another few weeks, another apology. I guess I shouldn't have to apologize when the muse goes south, though. So I won't. Maybe if I can get my high-functioning autistic shit together for like five minutes, I could get some wi-fi in my crummy apartment and then I'd me writing way more. I'd never leave the apartment, even.
So, to paraphrase the late great Elvis Presley back when mama Gladys' little pink hearts were still a novelty, I'm all shook up. You see, last night I went to dinner with my first serious love from when we were both just stumbling out of our teens, and we've developed a nice warm friendship via Facebook and she's in a nice relationship back in Canadasota or wherever it is she lives, something about lutefisk and hotdish and conniving Oldsmobile salesmen getting fed into woodchippers, so it was just a very golden-burnished evening in an tandoor joint in Davis, talking about old times and all that. Really, it was the first date-like experience I've had in at least a year.
It's just that I woke up today with a massive saudade hangover, because it reminded me of a time in my life when time when I could have relationships with beautiful women, but even moreso because I realized that I'd let a lot of that part of me go to sleep, or even most or nearly all of that formerly irrepressibly romantic and warm part of me that used to bring me such joy. And heartbreak, too.
I don't know where I went wrong, really. Oftentimes I feel like a ghost walking around the Midtown district of the city where I live, and much of that may arise from the fact that I'm a middle-aged guy in a district that's now overrun by people a lot younger than me, people who I seem to have a pretty nice rapport with as friends, but as dating material, there's just that cultural disconnect. Plus my daughter is 23, but most importantly, I prefer the company of women a lot closer to me in age.
But the women I know close to me in age, around here, I just don't seem to click with them. Maybe it's because I still haven't quite recovered from the big washout of a divorce followed by a major crash and burn, and I've got an invisible metaphysical "X" carved in my forehead like the door of a 1930s house to signify easy stew for hobos. Or maybe it's something else. The reality is that, in their company, I feel like that kid who had to wear a helmet until well into his teen years to prevent impromptu head injuries, lurking around the pretty and popular girls on the senior quad at high school who laugh at him the moment he turns his back.
That, of course, is all feeling, and feelings aren't facts. But there is some kind of major disconnect going on, or at least it seems like it, and I've begun to get worse lately. Basically, I've been poring over my life with a fine-toothed comb in recent months, and that cursory diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism that I got when I had health insurance before my big two-year wipeout seems to be hitting home pretty hard.
I think that everyone wants to be understood, and validated. It isn't that I'm craving the sweetness and sensuality of a warm relationship, although that would be nice. It's just that I need to have intimate friends around me I feel close to that I can talk about this stuff with, just so another human being or two knows what it's like to feel like when cognition and emotional response with other folks suddenly segues from the familiarity of conversational English to trying to make way in one of those countries where the written tongue is either all vowels or all consonants.
Perhaps I've said too much, and I should shut up now. This is like three years to the day when the last woman I really loved, my muse I figured wrongly, said hasta la bye-bye loser boy, and I've had a few chances since, but mostly it was me running away for trumped-up reasons like they couldn't handle my thirst for squigglicous free-jazz saxophone yammering, or I got the feeling I wasn't in a safe zone to talk about my boundless fascination for eusocial insects or oddball prewar Czech dreamcars like the Tatra T-87, or something. Anyway, I ramble.
And so I will shut up, and let that flowering romantic in me slip back into the safety of slumber. —Jackson Griffith
Oops! Not so fast, there, podna
Remember what I was saying about hey, it's good to be back, and more soon, I promise? Well, I kinda jumped the gun. I'm going to be going offline now, maybe for a while, and I won't be able to access this blog or Facebook, at least until I get a replacement hard drive for this troubled MacBook, and then get this computer serviced or overhauled or whatever it's going to take to bring it back to the living and functional.
The good news is, I'm working. The bad news is that I'm probably going to be broke for a while, or diverting my capital resources to other, more pressing obligations, and so it won't be right away that you see much from me. Which may turn out to be a good thing. At least I'm going to look on the bright side and take that tack, and catch up on some other things, like reading and Top Ramen recipes. So be well, have a great holiday season, give somebody a big hug and I'll catch up with you all down the road.
Gosh darn, if I'da had the $300 extra for that AppleCare warranty three years ago …. —Jackson Griffith
Hello darkness my old friend
So sorry to have forgotten you, my good friend the blog. I have missed you, missed typing my little updates into your pages, missed the longer extrapolations pulled out of the netherworlds of my cranial downmarket caucasian neighborhoods, the ones with the rusting Plymouth Dusters on blocks in the oil-stained driveway behind the waist-high cyclone fences, with the goat tied to the passenger-side door and the rottweilers feigning sleep but growling at imaginary cats from under the porch.
Truth be told, I couldn't write there for a spell. I lost my mojo. I've still lost it, but I'm feeling this broke-ass hillbilly vibe this Friday night, and I'm sitting here all by my lonesome typing out a bunch of nonsense to try to get something started again in the scrivener department. But lately I've been feeling all jinky, janky, saditty and dicty, all rolled into one not very bad-ass whiteboy sense of autumnal malaise. I don't know what the problem is, really. I've done a bunch of things to try to right the ship, but I still feel like a bad robot in a cut-rate Japanese horror film, where everything is wired just a little bit wrong so the damned thing goes to move and it's like it's clanking apart. I'd rather not go into the particulars, but thangs've gotten kinda hincty for me here going into the holidays, which one person I know who normally has sterling predictive abilities assured me months a go would be a season of bee's knees. More like a gosh-darned head full of spiders.
And so, after having crawled back from my own personal refugee camp over the course of the past few months, now it's starting to sink in that I've got a lot of work to do to get back to even keel, and a lot of amends to make and bills to pay and old scores to settle, and who knows what else. It's just weighing on me pretty heavily, and all I've wanted to do is hole up and play hermit. That isn't the answer, of course, but lately I've been in Walter Sobchak's world of pain, psychically speaking, like I stepped over some unseen line when I was trying to roll a nice strike or even a spare and the universe keeps yelling "You're over the line! Mark it zero! Mark it zero!"
Shoot, maybe I'll go for a walk in the park. On second thought, though, um, no. —Jackson Griffith
Even I don't know what I'm on about tonight
They say that dogs have an uncanny eye for when they're being cheated. Dogs will pay attention to what treats the other dogs are getting and they'll get all caught up in that unfairness and start whimpering. But dogs also are supposed to be all buddhist and in the now and all that, so I'm kinda confused. Plus, they sniff butts.
What I can say is that the secret is in the doing. Which means get home from work, pick up the guitar and work at fleshing out all those songs I've written over the years, try to get a good and reasonably flawless set of them together, and then find someplace to play them and hope that some people show up and that I'm good enough that they not only stay in the room and not walk out mid-set, but maybe come back for a second helping sometime later.
I was going to post a bunch of negative stuff. Instead, I'll say that it's great that certain people can fast track their successes. As for me, well, I'm such a slow learner. Hell, I dunno. Maybe I'll keep after it for all the time I have left, and then after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've left behind and go, "Meh. Guy's stuff wasn't very good." Which will be okay with me.
Because even if you suck, that's not the point. The point is that you gave it a shot, that you kept after it, that you tried to get as good or as non-sucky as it was humanly possible for you to achieve, and that even in the face of not getting a biscuit or petted or anything, you still got up and worked at whatever it is that makes your soul feel complete.
Ah, gosh darn. This isn't what I'd planned to write. I've got a head full of grander designs, but my body has been feeling really crummy all week, so I get home and fall asleep and then wake up and meditate, which is one thing I've been disciplined enough to do every day for three years and nearly three months, and then I try to write, which is something I'm trying to discipline myself to do on a more regular schedule.
Anyway, more later, when I've got more life in me. Time to crawl off to bed, methinx. —Jackson Griffith


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