A spectacular view of the site of the Battle of Hastings, a panorama available only to gulls and roofing contractors, will open to the public for the first time next year. The opening will celebrate the 950th anniversary of the most famous regime change in English history: the victory of William the Conqueror and his Normans, and the death on the battlefield of King Harold in October 1066.
A crumbling 14th-century stone staircase is being restored and a new wooden platform built over the lead surface of the roof to allow visitors on to the top of the soaring gatehouse of Battle Abbey, still the highest point in the town. Research in preparation for the work has revealed a staircase hidden in the thickness of the wall – uncovered in a cupboard behind the staff electric kettle and microwave.
The platform will give an unrivalled view of the edge of the forest, the road towards the coast and the town built along the ridge where Harold’s soldiers created their shield wall, so densely packed that contemporary chroniclers wrote there was no space for the dead and injured to fall to the ground.
Below stretch the ruins of the great abbey, which William began building within five years of 1066, in penance for the slaughter. According to tradition the high altar was on the exact spot where Harold was killed by a Norman arrow at the end of a day of fighting.
“It’s almost the only spot from which you can make any sense of the accounts of the battle,” English Heritage curator Roy Porter said.
The gatehouse, one of the best preserved in Britain, still dominates the centre of the town. Building began in 1338, and Porter believes despite its martial air with arrow slits, portcullis and battlements, the grandeur was mainly a status symbol for one of the wealthiest Benedictine abbeys .
He found the secret staircase when curiosity finally got the better of him and he wrenched some crude panelling out of an arched cupboard in the staff room.
The room in the second floor of the gatehouse will also open to the public for the first time next year. Once a grand medieval chamber with beautifully carved stone window surrounds, it became a store, and then in the 20th century an art classroom for the school which still occupies part of the site. It has been office space since English Heritage took over in the 1980s, gradually filling with desks, filing cabinets and maroon nylon carpet tiles, which will all now be removed.
Porter suspects the staircase originally gave access to a secure place for the monks’ valuables, and was blocked up to keep school boys from exploring. The steep stone steps are too narrow for anyone except the skinniest monk, but will be left visible.
The Battle of Hastings is one of the best documented medieval battles, with contemporary and near contemporary accounts, and the Bayeux Tapestry telling the whole story of Harold taking the throne and losing it within the year to the Normans. The lost final part is believed to have shown William crowned on Christmas Day 1066 in Westminster Abbey.
But the accounts are also confusing and contradictory, said Porter, while the landscape at Battle has changed so much that it is hard to make sense of them. He rejects recent claims for rival sites, arguing that there was no reason to build the abbey in such an awkward spot – on a cold steep arid hilltop with no water source – unless it had significance as the real site of the battle.
More drastic changes came in the dissolution of the monasteries, when many buildings, including those marking the site of Harold’s death, were demolished and the estate became a private house and gardens.
More archaeology is planned. Excavations so far have been remarkably unhelpful – no substantial traces of the battle, or burial pits for the dead, have ever been found. It’s more than 60 years since the one possibly significant object was found: an axe claimed as a contemporary battle axe. It is now in the local history museum, which plans to make it the focus of an anniversary exhibition.
The roof of the gatehouse gives a bird’s eye view of the town, Georgian fronts masking medieval buildings, and the long narrow garden plots leased by the monks perfectly visible. Porter looked down in irritation. “If we could just get rid of all these,” he said, “I’m sure we’d have found a lot more answers.”
A re-enactment of the battle will be held at the Abbey on 10- 11 October.
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