The Friday after we got back from the Netherlands Richard took a day off, since the kids were still out of school. So we planned a day trip down to Hastings.  Richard and I are both huge fans of Foyle’s War, which was filmed and based in Hastings, but we didn’t actually spend much time in the city itself.  

We walked down to the beach, and although it was reasonably warm, it was quite windy.  The kids skipped rocks into the waves and we just relaxed for a bit.  We’ve noticed that instead of calling it “the beach” most Brits refer to it as “the seaside.”  The seaside in Hastings wasn’t a sandy beach at all, it was these rocks, which were beautiful.  

We ate lunch at an Italian place, where the pizzas were twice as big as we expected and half the price, and Simon’s spaghetti was tastier than my gnocchi. (And my gnocchi was good!)  We practically had the restaurant to ourselves and the kids meals came with some really yummy gelato.  After lunch we drove up to the Hastings Battlefield and Abbey, which was the location for the Battle of Hastings 1066, and where Battle Abbey was built by William the Conqueror as restitution to God for the many lives lost in the battle.  

The first half of the audio guide tour was a walking tour that went around the perimeter of the battlefield.  It talked you through the day’s events, the strategies and successes and failures of the Normans (present-day French) and the Anglo-Saxons, (present day English.)  The tour also talked about the personalities and shortcomings of each of the army’s leaders. 

The Battle took place in October of 1066, and it was a war between King Harold (Anglo-Saxon) and the Duke William II of Normandy.  For various reasons, they both believed they were entitled to the English throne after the death of King Edward the Confessor.   

The battle only lasted one day, and Duke William II came off conqueror.  He then went on to take over the rest of the country and gain the crown for himself, significantly changing the course of English history.  

The second half of the audio tour was all about the Monastic Abbey built at the battle site.  The abbey was built between 1070-1094, after the Pope ordered the Normans to make penance for killing so many men during the battle. The Abbey was huge, one of the biggest in the country during the time period, the dormitory was said to house 180 monks.  It was a center for learning, worship and development.  

The abbey was destroyed when King Henry VIII parted ways with the Catholic church and ordered its dissolution. The abbey later became a private residence for several hundred years.  The surviving buildings are now a school, and the ruins are open to the public.  

There was a lot more to see than what I’ve posted here.  There was a museum, and we were able to climb to the top of the turrets and look out over the estate.  There was an impressive walled garden that had been built and cultivated for the lady of the house in the 1700s.  There were foundation stones from the ruins of the church, and other parts of the abbey including the cloisters, the chapter house, the abbots house and the refectory.  

It was a really neat place to visit and made me excited to visit other abbey ruins.  It reminds me of a quote I read in a book recently.  Experiencing the world through history is such a gift! 

“A feeling of immediate contact with the past is a sensation as deep as the purest enjoyment of art. It is an almost ecstatic sensation of no longer being myself, of overflowing into the world around me, of touching the essence of things, of through history experiencing the truth. The historic sensation is not the sensation of living the past again but of understanding the world [perhaps] as one does when listening to music…”
-Johan Huizinga