Housecarl
A housecarl (Old Norse: húskarl; Old English: huscarl) was a non-servile manservant or household bodyguard in medieval Northern Europe.
In England, the royal housecarls had a number of roles, both military and administrative, and they fought under Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings.
Housecarl is a calque of the original Old Norse term, húskarl, which literally means "house man".
[2] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses hiredmenn as a term for all paid warriors and thus is applied to housecarl, but it also refers to butsecarls[a] and lithsmen.
[7] Johannes Brøndsted suggested that the garrison of the Danish fort of Trelleborg may have consisted of royal housecarls, and that kings Svein Forkbeard and Cnut the Great may have "safeguarded the country by a network of forts manned by the royal housecarls, the mercenaries, the hird".
[7] Another runestone there, the Skarthi stone (DR 3), was apparently personally raised by king Svein: King Sveinn placed the stone in memory of Skarði, his retainer [himþiga or heimþegi, again a variant of húskarl], Skarde, who has sailed in the west [a possible reference to a campaign in England[13]], but who then died at Hedeby.
But, by the end of the 12th century, housecarls had probably disappeared in Denmark; they had transformed into a new kind of nobility, whose members no longer resided at the king's court.
As Tostig was fighting against the king at the time, then the use of the term housecarl seems to have been a synonym for a mercenary or retainer rather than just royal bodyguards.
[1][3] According to 12th century Danish historian Svend Aggesen, Cnut's housecarls were governed by a specific law, the Witherlogh or Lex Castrensis.
[16] The Whitherlogh defined an etiquette: housecarles were to be seated at the kings' tables according to a number of factors, among which skill in war and nobility.
They could be disgraced by being moved to a lower place; this was punishment for minor offences, such as not giving proper care to the horse of a fellow housecarl.
[9] On one hand, the number of housecarls receiving land grants and estates from the king seems to have been rather limited, from the beginning of Cnut's reign up to the Norman conquest in 1066.
At that last date, the Domesday Book records only thirty-three landholding housecarls in the kingdom; furthermore, these estates were small.
One theory is that these men were Cnut's housecarls, and that they served as a well-equipped, disciplined, professional, and quite numerous (for the time) standing army at the service of the king.
For instance, Charles Oman, in his book The Art of War in the Middle Ages (1885), states that the main advantage of the housecarls at Hastings were their esprit de corps.
Hooper asserts that while the Housecarles might well have had superior esprit de corps and more uniform training and equipment than the average Thegn, they would not necessarily have been a clearly defined military elite.
In the Battle of Hastings, these Housecarls fought after Harold's death, holding their oath to him until the last man was killed.
[26] The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the housecarls as footmen clad in mail, with conical nasal helmets, and fighting with great, two-handed long axes.
