4 - The Feigned Flight

Summary

The feigned flight or retreat – pretending to run away in order to trick an enemy force into pursuing – was famously employed by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings (although this has been the subject of some debate, as outlined below). This makes Hastings a logical place to begin an analysis of this stratagem: whether such a manoeuvre was even possible, what may have happened during the battle and how it was portrayed by the various chroniclers. A wider reading of medieval narratives reveals that, far from being an isolated incident, the feigned flight was employed in a variety of conflicts and by a variety of forces.

The Battle of Hastings

Several scholars have claimed that the description of the Norman army feigning flight to draw the English off Senlac Hill on 14 October 1066 is a fiction, invented after the fact to cover up a very real and embarrassing retreat that almost cost the Normans the battle. The source of this theory appears to be Charles H. Lemmon, who argued that ‘such a manoeuvre is contrary to the principle that troops once committed to the attack cannot be made to change their direction’ and that it would be impossible to relay such an order to thousands of individuals, all fighting hand-to-hand. Furthermore, the feint would have been too obvious if the Norman army had fallen back at the same time, en masse. This argument was taken up by John Beeler, who concluded that the story of a feigned flight at Hastings was nothing more than a ‘legend’, a historical ‘hoax’ perpetrated by the Norman chroniclers. More recently, John Marshall Carter argued that there is limited evidence that the Normans were able to use this tactic and that the topography of the battlefield would have made it difficult for cavalry to perform such a manoeuvre. Carter proposed that the story of the feigned flight was inserted into the Hastings narrative by the early chroniclers in imitation of Vegetius, in order to make the Normans appear more skilful.

Bernard S. Bachrach provided a thorough criticism of this thesis, demonstrating that the feigned flight was employed by both the Huns and the Visigoths, many centuries prior to Hastings.