October 14

William moved east to Hastings within days and threw up another castle there: the Tapestry shows men digging a mound, labelled HESTENGA CEASTRA. Then he harried the country, Harold’s own earldom, to draw him south. The Tapestry shows a house set alight as a woman and her child flee.

Roughly 9 o’clock. William of Poitiers has the archers go first, then the heavy infantry, with the knights behind. The Carmen says the first blow was struck by a jester, Taillefer, who rode out ahead juggling his sword and killed an Englishman.

Fought on the ridge where Battle Abbey now stands, from the third hour of the day, roughly 9 in the morning, until dusk: a long battle by the standards of the age. The English stood on foot in a shield wall along the ridge; William attacked uphill with archers, infantry and mounted knights. Nobody…

The Breton wing on William’s left broke and ran, and a rumour spread that the duke was dead. William pushed back his helmet and rode along the line bareheaded to show he was alive. The Tapestry shows Count Eustace pointing him out: HIC EST WILLELM DUX. The sources give the order of events, not the…

Twice, William of Poitiers says, the Normans pretended to flee, drew part of the shield wall down the slope after them, then turned and cut them down. Some historians doubt that knights could fake a rout on purpose and read these as real flights that happened to work.

Near dusk, roughly 4 to 5 in the afternoon. His brothers Gyrth and Leofwine had already fallen. The Tapestry’s HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST runs over a man gripping an arrow near his eye and a man cut down by a horseman, and which of them is Harold is disputed. The earliest accounts have no arrow:…

In the dark, Normans chasing the beaten English came to grief at a steep ditch where some of the English rallied. The Battle Abbey chronicle later called it the Malfosse, the evil ditch. Where it lay is unknown.

Two night bayonet attacks, one French and one American. Alexander Hamilton led the column that took Redoubt 10, and the allied guns could now reach the whole town.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway offered £500 for the best locomotive, to be run up and down a level stretch of the new line. Five machines entered, one of them a horse on a treadmill. Thousands came to watch.

Japan’s first railway, 29 kilometres long, was built with British money and engineers. Part of it ran on an embankment across the sea at Takanawa, because the army would not give up its land; the emperor rode the opening train. Japanese calendar: Meiji 5, 9th month, 12th day

Four years into the Meiji era, the Emperor rode the 29-kilometre line at its opening. British engineers led by Edmund Morel built it, and Japan chose the narrow 1,067-millimetre gauge, the gauge the Shinkansen was built to escape 92 years later.

Prisoners led by Alexander Pechersky, a Soviet Jewish officer, and Leon Feldhendler killed eleven SS men and guards and about 300 broke out. Many were hunted down. The SS closed the camp and levelled it soon after.

Dropped from a B-29, Chuck Yeager fired the rocket engine of the Bell X-1 he had named Glamorous Glennis after his wife and reached Mach 1.06 at 43,000 feet. Two nights earlier he had broken two ribs falling from a horse, and closed the hatch with a length of broom handle.

After weeks of cloud and caution, Major Richard Heyser flew a U-2 north across western Cuba early on Sunday morning, at about 07:30 Washington time. In under seven minutes over the island his cameras took 928 photographs.

Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans – me included. — Paulson Paulson, Bernanke and Sheila Bair of the FDIC announced 250 billion dollars of TARP for bank shares, and FDIC guarantees for new bank debt.

A month in which the system nearly stopped. The premium banks charged each other over the risk-free rate for three-month loans peaked at about 3.6 percentage points in October, against a tenth of a point before the crunch.

NASA’s largest planetary spacecraft, bound for Jupiter in 2030 to make dozens of flybys of Europa and judge whether its ocean could support life. It carries a poem by the US Poet Laureate Ada Limón.