On September 28, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, put roughly seven thousand men ashore at Pevensey and met no one on the beach; the English king who might have stopped him was still two hundred miles north, celebrating a battle fought three days earlier.

William, Duke of Normandy, spent most of the summer of 1066 waiting on a beach. What he did not have, for the better part of two months, was wind.

Why the crossing took so long

By early August, William had gathered his fleet at the mouth of the River Dives, on the Norman coast. Chroniclers writing decades later put the number of ships in the hundreds (Wace, a 12th-century poet who researched the invasion, counted 696), and modern historians generally settle somewhere between 600 and 800 once the more inflated medieval tallies get discounted. The men aboard numbered around 7,000, and the horses made the logistics harder than the headcount suggests.

The wind that summer would not cooperate: it blew steadily out of the north, sometimes the east, and William needed it from the south to cross the Channel. He shifted the fleet up the coast to Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, nearer the narrowest crossing point, and waited some more. Norman writers such as William of Poitiers, a chaplain who had served in William's own household, described the delay as a trial God sent to test the duke's resolve. Since the 1980s several historians have offered a less devotional reading. William, on this account, had less to fear from bad weather than from landing too soon, while King Harold's army and fleet were still mobilized and waiting on the English coast to meet him.

Both readings agree on the date the wind finally turned: the night of September 27.

What Harold didn't know

Two hundred miles north, Harold Godwinson had a war of his own to finish. Early in September a Norwegian fleet under King Harald Hardrada, reportedly some 300 ships and, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "no small one," had landed near York. Harold's own estranged brother Tostig sailed with them, hoping to reclaim an earldom he had lost the year before. On September 25, Harold's army caught the invaders by surprise at Stamford Bridge and destroyed them. Hardrada and Tostig were both killed; the Chronicle records that only 24 ships were needed to carry the survivors home, out of a fleet that had numbered in the hundreds.

It was a remarkable victory by any measure. It also left Harold's army five days' hard marching from the coast that actually mattered, at the exact moment the wind in Normandy turned favorable.

Where the Normans came ashore

William's ships crossed overnight and reached Pevensey Bay, on the Sussex coast, before dawn on September 28. They found nobody waiting for them. The English fleet that had patrolled the Channel all summer had been stood down on September 8, its provisions exhausted and its crews' term of service run out; the coastal levies had gone home with it. William's men waded ashore onto an empty shoreline.

They did not stay in the open. Pevensey still held the ruined walls of Anderitum, a Roman fort built roughly seven centuries earlier as part of the coastal defenses the Romans called the Saxon Shore. William's men dug in behind those walls, cut a ditch across the peninsula to seal the fort off from the mainland, and raised a timber stronghold inside the old Roman perimeter. The Bayeux embroidery, the roughly 230-foot stitched wool-on-linen chronicle commissioned within a couple of decades of the conquest, shows Norman soldiers digging an earthwork of exactly this kind soon after the landing scene; most historians read it as a picture of the fort at Pevensey, or the similar one William's men threw up days later at Hastings.

Within a few days William moved his army the short distance along the coast to Hastings, judged a better base, and built a second fort there. Then he waited, and sent riders to make sure Harold heard what had landed on his southern shore.

The five days that decided it

Harold heard, and moved fast. He marched his army out of York, gathered fresh troops as he passed through London, and covered something close to 250 miles in under two weeks: an extraordinary pace for a force that had already fought and won one battle that same month. Whether the speed helped him or hurt him is one of the oldest arguments about the campaign. A slower march would have let him gather a larger and less exhausted army, and several chroniclers, English and Norman alike, suggest his own advisers wanted him to wait.

He did not wait. On October 14, the two armies met on a ridge outside Hastings, and after a day of fighting that turned on the last hour, Harold was killed and his army broken. William was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey that Christmas Day.

Whose story is this, exactly?

Almost everything specific about the landing (the ditch at Pevensey, the digging scene, the precise order of the two forts) comes from sources with a stake in how William looked. The Bayeux embroidery was made within a couple of decades of the conquest, probably at the commission of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William's own half-brother. William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges, the two Norman chroniclers most often cited on the crossing, were both writing for a Norman audience about a Norman duke's claim to a foreign throne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the main English-language source, is far terser about William's side of things and considerably more interested in Harold's.

None of that makes the broad outline wrong. It does mean that a famous scene like William stumbling as he stepped off his ship, then turning the fall into a joke about seizing England with both hands, survives only in Norman retellings written to make him look destined for the crown. Treat it as the kind of story a court likes to tell about its founder, not as an eyewitness account.

What's still standing

Pevensey's Roman walls are still there, inside a later medieval castle built on the same footprint starting in the 1070s. The site went back into service more than once after 1066: earthworks went up against a feared Spanish landing in 1588, gun emplacements were added during the Napoleonic wars, and concrete pillboxes were built into the Roman masonry itself in 1940, when a different cross-Channel invasion again looked possible. Anderitum has now been defended, on and off, for roughly seventeen centuries, a long career for a fort whose builders could never have guessed who would use it next, or why.

Sources

• Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2012)
• David Bates, William the Conqueror (2016)
• English Heritage, "History of Pevensey Castle," english-heritage.org.uk
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 1066 (Peterborough manuscript, trans. Michael Swanton)
• English Heritage, "How to Organise a Norman Invasion Fleet," english-heritage.org.uk