Some events in the sources for the Battle of Hastings are famous because they changed the course of the battle.
The death of Harold matters because it effectively ends organised English resistance. The Norman feigned retreats matter because they are associated with the disruption of the English formation. William revealing himself after rumours of his death matters because panic within his army threatened the Norman attack.
And then there is the Malfosse.
It is one of the strangest episodes associated with Hastings.
A substantial body of Norman troops, pursuing the defeated English after Harold’s death, encounters some form of concealed or unexpected ditch, trench or depression. Men and horses plunge into it. Those behind cannot stop. Horses, riders and bodies accumulate. Contemporary and near-contemporary traditions remember the incident as appalling.
Yet strategically it achieves almost nothing.
Harold is already dead. The English army has already broken. William has won.
The Malfosse does not save England.
It does not reverse the battle.
It does not even appear to threaten William’s ultimate possession of the battlefield.
And nevertheless people remembered it.
Why?
A battle already decided
The timing is important.
The Malfosse belongs not to the great struggle around Harold’s position but to its aftermath.
After prolonged fighting, the English position finally collapses. Harold is killed. The remaining English begin to withdraw and Norman troops pursue them.
That distinction matters because pursuit is psychologically very different from battle.
For most of the day Norman soldiers had been attacking an enemy capable of killing them. Now that enemy was fleeing.
The danger appeared to have passed.
Victory had arrived.
And then, suddenly, men who believed themselves victorious began dying.
Not in an organised English counterattack.
Not beneath Harold’s standard.
Not during a cavalry charge against a shield wall.
They disappeared into the ground.
Orderic Vitalis and the ancient ditch
One of the most striking later accounts is that of Orderic Vitalis.
His description presents the obstacle as an ancient ditch or trench, concealed by vegetation. During the pursuit, horses and armoured men fall into it. Those coming behind compound the disaster, falling upon those already trapped below.
The significance of that description is easily overlooked.
This is not simply:
some Normans fell into a ditch.
It is a description of catastrophic congestion.
The first horse falls.
The rider behind has insufficient warning or space to avoid it.
Another follows.
Then another.
The obstacle itself becomes progressively more dangerous because the men and animals already inside it become part of the obstruction.
The source tradition consequently presents the victims not merely as falling but as being crushed amongst one another.
For mounted men in armour, the consequences are easy to imagine.
A horse falling at speed is dangerous enough.
A horse falling onto other horses and men in a confined depression is something else entirely.
And the men following behind may have had only seconds to understand what was happening.
Wace remembers something terrible
Wace’s Roman de Rou, written considerably later and therefore requiring the usual caution, preserves an even more dramatic memory of the episode.
Men and horses tumble together. Pursuers are caught in the disaster. Englishmen become involved as well. Wace gives an enormous figure for Norman casualties associated with the event.
That number should not simply be accepted literally.
Medieval casualty figures are notoriously problematic, and Wace was writing generations after the battle.
But concentrating on whether his number is numerically credible risks missing something more interesting.
Why does the tradition require such an enormous number?
The answer may simply be that the event had acquired legendary proportions.
But legends generally acquire proportions because something about the underlying story is memorable.
Wace’s account does not preserve the Malfosse as an amusing accident.
It preserves it as a catastrophe.
The strange prominence of an irrelevant event
This is what makes the Malfosse so interesting.
In purely strategic terms, it hardly matters.
Suppose the episode had never occurred.
What changes?
Harold remains dead.
The English army remains defeated.
William remains victorious.
The Norman invasion remains successful.
The political consequences of Hastings remain essentially unchanged.
Remove the Malfosse from the story and 1066 still ends the same way.
Yet medieval writers did not remove it.
The event survived.
That disparity between military significance and narrative prominence deserves attention.
Something does not have to alter the outcome of a battle to become memorable, of course. Human beings remember horror independently of strategic importance.
Indeed, that may be precisely the point.
Victory suddenly becomes catastrophe
Imagine the emotional sequence experienced by the men involved.
They have survived Hastings.
For hours they have attacked an exceptionally stubborn English army. They have seen horses killed, friends wounded and men crushed in close fighting. At points the Norman army itself appears to have experienced serious disorder.
Eventually the English resistance collapses.
The king is dead.
The enemy runs.
The Normans pursue.
For the men involved, this must have felt like the transition from mortal danger to triumph.
Then the ground opens beneath them.
A rider immediately behind the first casualty does not possess a modern braking distance. Nor does a horse galloping or cantering amid a mass of other horses have unlimited freedom to turn.
Once several animals have fallen, the problem becomes worse.
Men behind may not even be able to see the obstacle.
They see the riders ahead disappear.
Then they reach it themselves.
The psychological effect must have been extraordinary.
Men who had survived an entire day’s battle could die after victory had already been achieved, crushed beneath their own horses and comrades.
That is exactly the sort of event people tell stories about.
The English were still dangerous
There is another important element in the traditions.
The retreat from Hastings was not necessarily an orderly procession of helpless fugitives.
Groups of Englishmen could still resist. Darkness was approaching. The landscape away from the principal fighting position was less familiar to the invaders than to local men.
The Norman pursuit therefore moved from an organised battlefield into something much less controlled.
That matters when interpreting the Malfosse.
The episode belongs to the point at which the structured battle dissolves into pursuit.
Command becomes harder.
Formations loosen.
Individuals and smaller groups make decisions for themselves.
Men pursue opportunities.
Fugitives exploit terrain.
Visibility deteriorates.
And the landscape itself begins to dictate events.
Whatever precisely happened at the Malfosse occurred in that environment.
But what exactly was the Malfosse?
Surprisingly, that is difficult to answer.
Even the name can mislead.
“Malfosse” has become such a familiar label that it sounds almost like the medieval name of a known geographical feature.
It is safer to think of it initially as a description associated with the event: the bad or evil ditch, the disastrous depression into which men fell.
The sources do not hand us a modern grid reference.
Nor do they provide the sort of topographical description from which one can confidently identify it on a present-day map.
Was it a natural feature?
An artificial ditch?
An old boundary?
A deeply worn route?
A defensive work?
Something modified by centuries of use?
The accounts have been interpreted in different ways.
The responsible answer is:
we do not know.
And that uncertainty is part of the fascination.
Nor do we really know its scale
There is another trap here.
Once later sources describe very large casualties, it is tempting to imagine an enormous chasm swallowing a substantial part of William’s army.
That is not necessary.
A comparatively modest obstacle can become lethal under the right conditions.
What matters is the relationship between the feature and the movement of the men encountering it.
A ditch crossed cautiously by infantry in daylight may be trivial.
The same feature encountered unexpectedly by tightly packed mounted pursuers can be catastrophic.
The number of casualties therefore cannot simply be inferred from the dimensions of whatever feature eventually proves to be involved.
Nor can the dimensions of the feature safely be inferred from medieval casualty figures.
We have to tolerate the uncertainty.
Something happened
But uncertainty should not become dismissal.
That is the opposite mistake.
It would be easy to treat the Malfosse as one of the colourful legends that accumulated around Hastings.
Yet multiple narrative traditions preserve a disaster associated with the pursuit.
The details vary, as medieval accounts inevitably do.
The numbers may grow.
The horror may become embellished.
But beneath them sits a persistent core:
during the final pursuit, Norman troops encountered an unexpected feature in the landscape and suffered a serious local disaster.
That deserves explanation.
Not because it altered English history.
Because people thought it worth remembering.
Why was it remembered?
Perhaps because of the number killed.
Perhaps because some important individuals died.
Perhaps because of the grotesque circumstances.
Perhaps because men and horses became piled together.
Perhaps because the victims had survived the battle only to die moments after believing themselves safe.
Perhaps because the incident became a cautionary story about reckless pursuit.
Perhaps because survivors repeatedly told the story.
Or perhaps there was something about the circumstances that we no longer understand.
We should be careful not to choose among those possibilities simply because one produces a satisfying narrative.
The historical discipline required here is precisely the opposite.
Leave the anomaly intact.
Something sufficiently terrible occurred during the pursuit that chroniclers writing about Hastings considered it part of the story of the battle.
Yet its precise location, physical character and circumstances remain uncertain.
It also tells us something about the battlefield
There is nevertheless one conclusion we can draw without identifying the feature.
The Malfosse reminds us that Hastings was not fought upon an abstract rectangle of open ground.
It occurred within a real and complicated landscape.
There were slopes.
There was vegetation.
There were routes of movement.
There were features capable of obstructing men and horses.
There were places that could apparently remain unseen until dangerously close.
And when the English position finally collapsed, the battle did not suddenly cease to interact with that landscape.
Quite the reverse.
As formations broke apart and pursuit began, terrain may have become more important.
That should make us cautious about reconstructions which reduce Hastings to two armies manoeuvring across a broad, conveniently open field.
The Malfosse refuses to fit that picture comfortably.
Whatever it was, it was there.
And somebody failed to see it.
A peculiar historical clue
Perhaps that is how the Malfosse should initially be approached.
Not as something requiring an immediate identification.
Not as evidence for a particular reconstruction.
And certainly not as a feature that should be placed on a map merely because a candidate looks attractive.
Instead, treat it as a clue.
We know approximately when in the story it appears.
We know what kind of movement was taking place when it was encountered.
We know that mounted Norman pursuers were involved.
We know the incident was remembered as exceptionally unpleasant.
And we know that it happened after the decisive struggle had already been won.
Those are constraints.
If a reconstruction of the battle and its pursuit eventually produces a landscape feature that satisfies those constraints naturally, that would be interesting.
But the feature should emerge from the reconstruction.
The reconstruction should not be built around a predetermined Malfosse.
That distinction is crucial.
The mystery should remain a mystery—for now
The temptation with Hastings is always to solve things.
Where did Harold stand?
Where did William approach?
Where was the Malfosse?
Where did the English flee?
Certainty is attractive.
But sometimes an unresolved piece of evidence is more useful than a premature answer.
The Malfosse gives us one of those pieces.
Near the end of one of the most consequential battles in English history, after the result had effectively been decided, something horrifying happened to part of the victorious army.
It was sufficiently memorable to survive in the written tradition.
It was sufficiently dramatic for later accounts to magnify it.
And yet it had virtually no effect upon the outcome of the battle.
Today we cannot confidently say where it happened or exactly what physical feature caused it.
So for the moment perhaps the most useful thing we can do is resist the urge to explain it.
Put it to one side.
Remember its requirements.
Then reconstruct the battle from the other evidence.
And see whether, somewhere near the end of that reconstruction, the Malfosse finds us.