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Most worryingly, the Duke of Normandy had apparently not forgotten King Edward’s rash promise of 1051. Back then, no one had been very concerned about this. Duke William was a young man, with a few easy victories behind him, but a ruler barely able to control his own territories, never mind seriously threaten England. Now, though, in 1065, the duke looked considerably more menacing. He was undisputed master of northern France, and an experienced general with a reputation for brutality and success.
    In the event, however, when Edward finally gave up the ghost in January 1066, it was Harold Godwinson, the man on the spot, who unexpectedly seized the moment. How long he had been plotting this move we don’t know. Certainly, his nomination by the dying Edward the Confessor can’t have come as a surprise – it was simply a useful piece of last-minute propaganda. For many years now Harold had been the power behind the throne, and he seems to have decided he might as well just sit on it himself and deal with the consequences. Of course, this meant that he had to push young Edgar out of the way first, but no one of any importance seemed particularly bothered about that. The choice was between a strong, powerful and experienced man with a weak claim, and an inexperienced child with a better one. With England threatened by other, much less appealing overseas contenders, ready to wage war in pursuit of their ambitions, most people probably thought that backing Harold was the wise choice.
    And so it proved, for most of 1066. Throughout the summer, Harold showed what a capable leader he was, summoning and holding together a great army in readiness for the invasions that everybody now expected. When the King of Norway landed in September, Harold marched straight up to Yorkshire and won a famous victory. The Norwegians had arrived in three hundred ships, but they sailed home in just twenty-four. The more poetical English soldiers were probably already composing songs to their new king’s greatness when messengers arrived from the south, bringing the news that William of Normandy had landed with an army of seven thousand men.
    Landing his ships at Pevensey on the morning of 29 September, William’s first concern was to establish a beachhead, and he did this by building a castle. Pevensey was the site of an old Roman fort, and William and the Normans proved adept at customizing such ancient sites. There is also the intriguing possibility, suggested by a twelfth-century chronicler, that the Normans brought this castle with them. The fact that this is only mentioned in a later source casts some doubt upon its veracity, but there is nothing inherently implausible in the idea of a flat-pack fortress. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the elaborate lengths to which the Normans went in preparing their invasion fleet – transporting barrels of wine, armour, weapons, and the like. Landing in hostile territory, they didn’t necessarily want to go scurrying around looking for suitable timber, and waste time cutting it to shape. We have at least one example in later centuries of an invading army taking a wooden castle with them ready to assemble when they landed. It seems quite possible, therefore, that the first castle built in England by William the Conqueror was a prefab.
    The castle at Pevensey, and the second castle that the duke began further along the coast at Hastings, can be used to explain in part why Harold rushed headlong into battle with William. The new English king, as recent events had shown, was by no means a bad general, yet he plunged his exhausted army straight into battle at Hastings without pausing for breath. Why was he so hasty and intemperate? Historians have tended to conclude that Harold was responding to William’s provocation. For his part, William knew that his only hope of success was to draw his opponent into battle as quickly as possible; above all, he needed a decisive victory. Landing in Sussex made this somewhat