Which battle in 1066 changed English history?

Hastings, on 14 October, and the thing that decided it was arguably a battle three weeks earlier and 400 kilometres away. Harold Godwinson had just marched north, destroyed a Norwegian invasion at Stamford Bridge, and then marched his exhausted army straight back south to meet William. Had the wind not held William in port for weeks, the two invasions would not have arrived in sequence.

The Saxon shield wall held on the ridge most of the day, and broke because parts of it pursued a Norman retreat downhill - whether that retreat was a feint or a panic that was exploited is still argued. Harold died late in the day, and the arrow in the eye comes from a reading of the Bayeux Tapestry that may be a mis-stitching or a later repair.

What followed was more thorough than a change of king. Within twenty years almost the entire English landholding class had been replaced - Domesday shows a handful of English names among the major tenants - and resistance in the north was answered by devastating the region so completely that Domesday still records vast areas as waste seventeen years later. The language absorbed thousands of French words and split into a Germanic core with a Romance vocabulary for law, government and cooking, which is why we herd swine and eat pork.