The battle of Hastings, 1066, is a familiar date to practically everyone. It does not come at the beginning of the history of weapons and tactics—any more than it comes at the beginning of the history of England—but we can start this chapter with it because it provides us with an example of the sort of thing to be explained, if we are to understand warfare. In that year Duke William of Normandy defeated and killed King Harold of England, and achieved the Conquest. Why did it happen? In schoolbook histories, children get the impression that the Norman leader was a better soldier than the English; that the battle of Hastings was won by this leadership, and by the cleverness and the fierce courage of the Normans. All this is , within its limits, true. But something else is left out; and often it is left out of the better histories that are not written simply for school children; it is, for example, left out of one of the best of these histories, John Richard Green’s The Conquest of England. A new way of fighting, of handling weapons, of protecting the men who handle weapons—new in England, although it had been developing for hundreds of years in other parts of the world—met and defeated an old way of fighting.
Quite true that William was a better soldier than Harold, though not a braver one. True that the Norman army manoeuvred better than the English, but this was less due to their inborn or acquired cleverness than to the fact that the Norman army had as its shock troops an armoured cavalry; the English fought on foot.
There were reasons for this difference. The two armies’ ways of fighting derived, if you go back far enough, from their ways of living, from systems of society or a lack of system or a mixture of systems. And these in turn had embedded in them all the peaceful or warlike history of the peoples that formed the armies. But this connection between ways of living and ways of fighting (between economics and politics on the one hand and warfare on the other) is not the theme of this book. What matters to us is the fact that war was changing, as far back as 1066; a man on a horse could wear heavier armour (and carry heavier weapons) than a man on foot, and therefore the man on horseback—‘chivalry’—conquered England.
Armour helped to conquer England then. If England is invaded in the present war, it will be largely with armour that the invaders try to conquer us. The heavy cavalry of the Norman Conquest were the Panzer divisions of their day. They had more mobility, tactically, as well as more hitting power than the English infantry they beat. And they had more protection.
Mobility, hitting power, protection—these are, and always have been some of the keys to victory. Where other things—surprise, or concentration at the decisive place and time, or skilful manoeuvre—have won battles, these things have usually derived directly from superiority in mobility, hitting power, and protection, or from superiority in one or two of these qualities.
