The Wind from Hastings by Morgan Llywelyn
Hardcover: 245 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (1978)
Average Customer Review on Amazon: 4.5 stars (12 reviews)
Edyth, wife of King Harold of England, disappeared forever on the day of the great Battle of Hastings in 1066, taking with her the legitimate heirs to the thrones of England and Wales. This is the story of that amazing woman, who loved and married the King of Wales and then the man who would be King of England, only to witness his historic defeat by the light of Halley’s Comet.
Excerpt from Chapter One:
When the wind blows from the Channel, it carries to us the smell of rotting flesh on Senlac Ridge. For days the Bastard’s men have been burying the Norman dead, cursing as they work in the October sun and covering their faces with cloths against the stench.
Many of Harold’s men still lie where the fell. Swollen and grotesque, they guard in death that awful piece of ground they could not hold in life. At night, when the Normans have gone back to their camp, the Saxon women creep onto the field of battle to find their men. It is difficult. The battle was daylong and savage; it took mutch butchery to kill the brave English. Angle and Saxon together, in death they have become the English. Mutilated beyond recognition, they sleep open-eyed on bloodstiff grass, and the keening of their womenfolk is piteous to hear.