The Battle of Hastings took place on a hill in Sussex in October 1066. The Anglo-Saxon army, led by King Harold, was defeated by the invading Norman army from Northern France, lead by William the Duke of Normandy, who later became known as William the Conqueror.

In this poem, King Harold is addressing his army, shortly before the battle:

Harold to His Troops Before The Battle of Hastings

Not in the annals of historic lore,
nor a sage’s proclamation of renown,
will your valour find its abiding store,
but in this knoll’s consuming, hallowed ground,
and youth, time will conserve on war spent downs.
Dear last vanguard of our imperilled road,
you’re called to this leaf ditched, nominal mound,
to the eternal watch of an impinged wold.
In life or death, this hillock you will hold!

At the time of The Battle of Hastings in 1066, Edith Swan Neck was King Harold’s concubine and mother of their six surviving children. She arrived at Senlac hill, after the battle, brought by two priests to identify her lover’s body, after he was slain in the battle, in which the Anglo-Saxons were defeated by the invading Normans. She was able to identify Harold’s otherwise unrecognisable, stripped body, by marks, which only one as intimate with King Harold as she was, would have been able to identify.

The poem, below, contains her posthumous remarks to King Harold:

Edith Swan Neck at The Battle of Hastings, Aftermath

Long after your defiled corpse is immersed
in this mound the youth of England has enshrined,
and lore has lost its ardour to rehearse
the valour canonising this incline,
cruel war with its unquenchable design,
will be forsworn on this hillock of gore,
when your floret sprouts through the blood dyed lime,
redeeming its contaminated core,
free of the ill which plagued our Isle’s shores.

Gary Borck is from the UK, retired and living in China. He loves reading and writing poetry, and rambling in natural surroundings. He has been published in The Society of Classical Poets, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, Grand Little Things, Littoral and Time of Singing.