12Jul2008: Day 48: Battle of Hastings and Pevensey Castle

So today we went about 1.5 hours away through the smallest back roads you have ever driven. It was amazing that these are actually two way roads. On one side is high bushes and walls of dirt, and on the other is traffic coming at you. Teri thought (Chris is writing) several times that she was going into the dirt, especially when we had a truck on coming and a bicyclist on the road with us at the same time. I'm really surprised people ride bikes on that road. The bushes on either side grew up so much that they connected over our heads to create a tunnel where light barely got through. We went through several small towns that were very quaint and when we finally got to Battle (name of town), we were almost surprised to see the somewhat busy town.

As the story goes the King of England passed away and next in line was this Harold guy, well, apparently, this Harold guy and the previous King had promised the Duke of Normandy that they would give him the crown. Well, once Harold to the crown he didn't want to give it up and neither did the people of England, but the Duke took the issue up with the Pope and was given permission to invade England. So, that was when William the Conqueror was born, he got on his boats and went across the water and landed and took up hold in an old roman fort that was later to be built up as Pevensey Castle. The roman walls still stand to this day and date back to 200 AD...ancient. The castle has crumbled down to its first story, but you can still make out some of how it must have looked. It is the oddest shape of any Castle in England and no one knows why or what it really looked like. So William was there with his troops and Harold hears about it after he just got done beating up some Vikings that were trying to invade to take the crown and he runs down from the north to attack William. Everyone advised him not to because William would eventually have to leave because he couldn't feed his troops, but for some reason Harold decides to attack him and they have this monster battle where after putting up a valiant defence, 7,000 English troops died and Harold was struck in the eye by an arrow, killing him. Most major towns at that time were only 2500 people, so this was quite a blow. Within one year William was crowned king of England in Westminster Cathedral. William brought in Castles and this was the beginning of the Castle building around England. He built an Abbey on the spot where his invasion battle was fought as penance for all the people who died that day. He put the high altar on the spot where Harold fell. The Church that he built there as part of the Abbey was destroyed by Henry VIII when he broke off from the Roman church, but some of the dormitories and the Abbot's house still stands. (Hopefully Teri will put in some pictures for me later).

It was a good day and a lot of interesting history. I hadn't remembered much about William the Conqueror from my school days and it was interesting to see much of where it happened first hand. It was well worth the scary trip down. Makenna was also very good. We saw a hawk and owl "falconry" exhibition while we were there and they had this absolutely monstrous owl there, easily as big as Makenna. All she kept saying after that was "ow""ow""ow".

Unfortunately, Makenna has a horribly bloody and runny nose. She has been sick for a week now with a runny nose, so we are going to take her to the Doctor's as soon as we can figure it out.

These pictures are of Ruins at the Battle of Hastings. These are both of the abbey where the monks lived. The second floor is completely gone, along with a lot of other buildings.

The below are ruins from castle Pevensey.

The one on the right was believed to be where the main keep was and the one on the left is from a distance as you're walking up to the ruins. But Chris noticed that the one tower looks like a face.