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For the text version of this and all our Long Reed, go to the Guardian.com forward slash Long Reed. A Chinese-born writer's quest to understand the Vikings, Normans, and Life on the

English Coast by Showlu Gore.

Afterwards, battles produce corpses, multitudes of them. In a mass killing, such as the Battle of Hastings

almost one thousand years ago, hosts of living humans were transformed into

corpses. Bodies were strewn across mud and grass. The rituals of treating

the dead 1,000 years ago are not entirely known to us, but certainly if we have to, we can visualize shapeless body parts scattered over the fields,

hacked off legs and arms, a chunk of flesh 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 identified right after the massacre, for example, a half-finger that 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 lair of acidic earth enveloped those bones and those strips of skin, still slightly warm after being torn

from their hosts. But soon these membranes, the soft and hard tissues, lost their integrity in the cold rain.

Rats would have run around in ecstasy

feasting on the fragmented flesh.

Cats, foxes, weasles, bores, squirrels, worms, birds.

It must have taken some time for the birds to figure out how they should proceed with the human remains.

Were they aware that there was no need for them to fight for their

prey at least not for some weeks or months? These days the field 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

after the slaughter. At the bottom of the hill years after the slaughter. At the bottom of the hill are

villages and farmland that lead to the sea. There is a desolation here, even

...