‘This is urgent, compelling, but also delightful writing’
My Battle of Hastings XIAOLU GUO
‘[Guo’s] form of life-writing is not merely personal, but aims to be political, foundational and future-forward, in a vibrant, varied tradition that includes Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living series, the auto-fiction of Annie Ernaux . . . Virginia Woolf would be proud’ Financial Times
‘Every time Xiaolu Guo publishes a new book I devour it immediately, and My Battle of Hastings was no exception. This is urgent, compelling, but also delightful writing, a book about war unlike any you’ll ever read. Guo writes with a lightness of touch that belies the seriousness of her subject. How does she do it?’
Lauren Elkin
‘This is a beautiful, witty meditation on cultural cross-pollination on the English coast, and the meaning of home and history for a wandering artist’
Alice Albinia
‘Xiaolu Guo is currently one of the finest stylists writing in English. She is also one of the most insightful analysts of Englishness. This book’s curiosity about the history, geography and everyday life of Hastings, and its intimate, often melancholic confessions about living there as an outsider, make it both a haunting contribution to debates about the state of the nation and a moving, intensely personal account of acquiring a sense of place’
Matthew Beaumont
‘As sharp and fresh as the wild garlic the author forages. A book to share and savour, bright and brilliant against the grey, grim, post-Brexit, xenophobic times within and against which Guo writes’
So Mayer
‘With the eye of a filmmaker and the soul of a poet, Xiaolu transforms every experience into something thrilling and unique. It never ceases to amaze me how beautifully and imaginatively she organises the world around her, the collisions between cultures, between the inner life and outer, into her own philosophical quest.
One of the most alchemical writers of our time’
Chloe Aridjis
‘Moving, delicate and bracing, My Battle of Hastings combines personal and local histories with rigour and yet remains compulsively readable’
Deepa Anappara
XIAOLU GUO
Xiaolu Guo was born in China and now lives in Britain. Her books include A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel A Lover’s Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She has also directed a dozen films, including She, a Chinese, which received the Golden Leopard Award at the 2009 Locarno Film Festival. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
ALSO BY XIAOLU GUO
Village of Stone
A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers
20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
UFO in Her Eyes
Lovers in the Age of Indifference
I Am China
Once Upon a Time in the East
A Lover’s Discourse
Radical
Call Me Ishmaelle
XIAOLU GUO
My Battle of Hastings
Chronicle of a Year by the Sea
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First published in Vintage in 2025
First published in hardback by Chatto & Windus in 2024
Copyright © Xiaolu Guo 2024
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For Moon, a child who has come to know the ebb and ow of the tides along the English Channel and the sands without end on the coast of Normandy
e island Britain is 800 miles long, and 200 miles broad. And there are in the island ve nations; English, Welsh (or British), Scottish, Pictish, and Latin.
e rst inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia, and rst peopled Britain southward. en happened it, that the Picts came south from Scythia, with long ships, not many; and, landing rst in the northern part of Ireland, they told the Scots that they must dwell there. But they would not give them leave; for the Scots told them that they could not all dwell there together.
ANGLO -SAXON CHRONICLE
AFTERWARDS
Battles produce corpses, multitudes of them. In a mass killing like the Battle of Hastings, almost a thousand years ago, hosts of living humans were transformed into corpses, bodies were strewn across mud and grass. Men believed in God then, and there must have been profound fears a er the battle about what to do with these bodies. Mutilation of the victims was normal at that time. e rituals of treating the dead a thousand years ago are not entirely known to us, but certainly, if we have to, we can visualise shapeless body parts scattered over the elds. Hacked-o legs and arms, a chunk of esh torn from the loins, the cleaved-open skull of a soldier, or disembodied guts above which dance a murder of crows with their dagger beaks. Some body parts might have been identi ed right a er the massacre. For example, a half nger which might have belonged to King Harold, or an ear from one of Harold’s brothers. All lifeless, bloody, smeared with the black soil of East Sussex. A layer of acidic earth enveloped those bones and those strips of skin, still slightly warm a er being torn from their hosts. But soon these membranes, the so and hard tissues, lost their integrity in the cold rain. Rats would have run around in ecstasy feasting on the fragmented esh. Cats, foxes, weasels, boars, squirrels, worms, birds. Yes, birds, migrant birds or non-migrant ones. It must have taken some time for the birds to gure out how they should proceed with the human remains. Were they aware that there was no need for them to ght for their prey, at least not for some weeks or months?
In those days, some eagles were large and strong enough to grasp a child in their talons and y o with it. One might nd the body part of a foot soldier hundreds of miles away, in the north of England or the border around Wales, thanks to a large eagle. But wherever the corpses were, it must have taken years for them to completely decompose. Long a er so tissues had been leached away, skeletons or at least bones would remain, no longer recognisable as belonging to any individual. e wife could not nd her husband in a pile of bones, nor the daughter her father. One cannot rule out that some feature in a whitened skull remained, allowing identi cation. e decomposition would depend on temperature, humidity, insects, animals around the bodies. And of course, water, and not just the English rain. Water would be a factor in deciding the pace of the decomposition, especially in the land along the English Channel. ese moist lands are not like deserts where bodies can be preserved, or frozen wastes where a body can be dug up thousands of years later, still revealing its death agony.
On the battle eld, there would have been countless dead or injured horses, once well-trained Norman horses. ey had made the horrible trip across the sea from Normandy, and survived the chaotic English landing, their solidly shod hooves cracking on the shingle beach, muzzles dragged and roped, their bulging eyes wet and glinting. I hear these animals crying in the thick of battle, stabbed by spears, hacked by axes, then collapsing under armour, or bolting riderless through elds, their anks oozing blood. I see a grey stallion, a war saddle strapped on its back, its le foreleg bleeding, its hock damaged and its gaskins smashed. It runs but gradually slows down, then falls onto a broken branch by the edge of the elds. I search for the animal among the bushes. I see it again. Despite these wounds, its mane is totally intact.
A er the battle, the Norman army was dispatched to other parts of England, and eventually marched towards London. William the Conqueror knew how to go forward on the back of success. Dead
Anglo-Saxons were le on the hills of East Sussex, or in time pushed into massive ditches by surviving locals. Yes, I imagine the locals would have had to do that, in order to avoid disease and plague. It must have been days a er the battle, a er rain and mist. e survivors, probably not many of them, mostly women and children, had to drag and push those bodies into mass graves. ey must have been terri ed doing this. ese days the eld of the battle is serene and seemingly untouched by ancient agonies. It slopes gently down from the old abbey that was constructed on the top of the hill years a er the slaughter. At the bottom of the hill are villages and farmlands that lead to the sea. ere is a desolation here even though it is bathed in so light and green hues. is desolation probably has little to do with its tortured history. When we nd a place to be desolate, sad or abandoned, is it the place itself or us projecting our inner state? Or can we really separate the two?
