Battle of Hastings, The (7 page)

Many explanations have been offered as to why Harold happened to be crossing the Channel at this particular moment. The Norman version (William of Poitiers) was that he was sent by King Edward
to confirm his promise of the throne to the duke and did so voluntarily. An English version (Eadmer) is that he went on his own initiative to try to retrieve his brother and nephew who had been
handed over to the duke as hostages. According to Eadmer, he went against the advice of the king, who warned him not to trust William. In the event he retrieved his nephew Hakon (of whom nothing is
known and whose very existence is slightly suspect) but not his brother Wulfnoth, who
remained in William’s custody. Yet another version is that he had gone sailing for
diversion with no intention of going to Normandy, and had been caught and blown ashore by a storm. According to Henry of Huntingdon, he was on his way to Flanders, not Normandy; this plausible idea
is not corroborated elsewhere. There is no possibility now of discovering the truth. One can only make a guess at the likelihoods. There is very little probability in the idea that he was sent by
Edward to convey a promise and swear an oath that would have been repugnant to him. After the king, he was the most powerful man in the kingdom; if Edward had asked him to do such a thing, he would
have had little difficulty in refusing or procrastinating. One modern apologist for William has offered the rather desperate explanation that he knew that if he refused to go, Edward would have
sent his brother Tostig in his place.
^xv
A message or an oath from Tostig, who had no support in England, would have been of little use to William; and
moreover, if Harold were prepared to break his own oath on holy relics in his pursuit of the crown, he would surely have had few scruples about ignoring his brother’s. It would, in fact, have
been very much better from Harold’s point of view that Tostig should have gone and sworn oaths. If Harold proposed to sail into Normandy with the intention of demanding Edward’s
hostages back, he was more naive and trusting than history shows him to have been; William’s ambitions must have been common knowledge by this time, and Harold is described in the
Vita
Ædwardi
as having made use of his foreign travels to acquire a detailed knowledge of European politics, with the comment that he had such an exhaustive knowledge of European princes that
he could not be deceived by any of their proposals.
^xvi
The idea that he was blown off course during a sailing trip is at least believable.

It is here, for the first time, that some help may be derived from the Bayeux Tapestry, for it begins at this point in the story. The first panel or frame shows King Edward
sitting in his chair of state, holding his sceptre and apparently conversing affably with two men standing beside him. The taller and more impressive of these is not named but is assumed to be
Harold, since in the next panel Harold is shown setting off for Bosham with his men. Harold’s conversation with the king seems to be amicable. This is the image that has been interpreted as
Edward instructing Harold to travel to Normandy to confirm his promise to William. But there is absolutely nothing in the picture or the text to confirm this. There is, in fact, no text over the
picture, which would as well fit any of the other explanations for his voyage; Harold might be asking permission to go on a fishing or hunting trip or to Flanders or proposing to go to redeem the
hostages, though in that case the expression on the king’s face would perhaps be more concerned or anxious. If the mission were as important as the designation of the king’s successor,
it would surely have been glossed; it would, after all, have been the foundation of the whole Norman claim.

The next few panels follow the standard version of the story: Harold arrives at Bosham, where there was a family manor, prays at the church there, eats and drinks with his companions, boards the
ship and, with the sails ‘full of wind’, comes into the territory of Count Guy. Here he is arrested by Guy’s men and taken to Beaurain. There is no explicit mention of a storm,
though the wind in the sails might be interpreted that way
^xvii
. The narrative then shows his transfer to the hands of William, his campaign with
William in Brittany (including his rescue of two of William’s men from the quicksands) and finally the most important scene, the swearing of an oath to William. According to William of
Poitiers, who alone gives a detailed account, this oath consisted of undertakings to support William’s claim to the throne, to act for him in England until the
king’s death, to fortify Dover and other places that William would specify for the duke’s use and garrison them with Norman knights whom Harold would maintain, to marry the duke’s
daughter and to send his sister into Normandy to marry a Norman. Immediately after this, he is shown returning home to England, where he has another interview with the king – but a very
different king this time. He is drawn and haggard, the finger extended towards Harold no longer indicating merely conversation but rather admonition or accusation. Harold for his part is apologetic
and contrite, his head bowed, his hands extended in an exculpatory gesture. It is impossible to misread this scene: the king has heard something that worries and distresses him greatly, Harold is
apologizing and excusing himself. If Harold had gone in the first place to confirm promises and make vows on the king’s behalf, why should he be apologizing? We have seen him do this. The
only obvious answer is that he did not go to do this, but he has, for whatever reason, sworn a vow and in so doing has landed himself in bad trouble with his king. It is interesting that, having
portrayed the situation so graphically, the designer has not attempted to explain it; the legend overhead simply says ‘he [i.e. Harold] came to King Edward’. It is here, more than
anywhere else, that the Tapestry is most ambiguous.

The only explanation that makes sense of everything is that offered by the monk Eadmer. According to him, Harold wanted to go to redeem the family hostages in Normandy and asked permission from
the king to do so. The king apparently gave this reluctantly, but warned him that he would only bring misfortune on the whole kingdom and discredit upon himself, for ‘I know that the Duke is
not so simple as to be at all inclined to give them
up to you unless he foresees that in doing so he will secure some great advantage to himself.’
^xviii

The duke was not simple and he did indeed gain great advantage for himself. Without the oath sworn and broken by Harold, it is highly improbable that the Vatican could have been persuaded to
turn an unprovoked attack on a neighbouring independent and peaceful kingdom into a holy war against a perjurer (if indeed it did, as we shall see in due course). And without papal backing,
William’s success would have been much less likely.

It is extremely improbable that Harold would willingly and freely have sworn to the conditions recorded by William of Poitiers; as has been noted by previous historians, at least two of them
would have amounted to treason against the present king. On the other hand, he was in a desperately precarious situation. As Eadmer points out, he was in danger whichever way he turned. He cannot
have been unaware that his recent host, Guy of Ponthieu, had been captured by William after the battle of Mortemer and had been held incarcerated in Normandy for two years until he freed himself by
swearing allegiance to the duke and accepting him as his overlord; nor that after William’s recent unprovoked conquest of Maine, the rival claimants, Count Walter and his wife (also possible
claimants to the throne of England and with a much stronger claim than William’s), had died by poison in his custody. However courteously entertained at the Norman court so far, he was in
fact a prisoner, and if he refused to swear, his conditions were likely to become less comfortable. And as the effective deputy king of England, his prolonged absence would be disastrous. If he
took the oath, he probably did so relying on the generally accepted belief that a forced oath was not regarded as binding. He might also have remembered Alfred’s law (the very
first in his code) that, ‘If a man is wrongfully constrained to promise either to betray his lord or to aid an unlawful undertaking, then it is better to be false to the promise
than to fulfil it.’ No wonder that on his return the king is reported by Eadmer as saying reproachfully, ‘Did I not tell you that I knew William and that your going might bring untold
calamity upon this kingdom?’
^xix
Such an explanation makes perfect sense of the expression on the king’s face in the Tapestry and of
Harold’s abject stance.

In considering this, one may also bear in mind the close connection that both the Tapestry and Eadmer had with Canterbury (Eadmer certainly and the Tapestry probably), and the possibility of
some now unknown connection between the two accounts and also, of course, the fact that Eadmer was writing with the benefit of hindsight. If no hostages were ever given to William by Edward (we
only have William of Poitiers’ word that they were), and Wulfnoth was imprisoned by William on a different or later occasion, then Eadmer’s version would fall to the ground. But there
may be reasons for giving some credence to Eadmer’s account. It has been suggested by Harold’s biographer, Ian W. Walker, that Bishop Æthelric of Sussex, who was consulted by
Eadmer over his life of St Dunstan, may well have been the Æthelric of Christ Church, Canterbury, whose election as archbishop was rejected by King Edward in 1050 in favour of Robert of
Jumièges. If so, he was a relation of the Godwin family; and if so, this connection would have allowed Eadmer access to a relative of Harold’s when he wrote his account of the events
of 1064, giving his version some authority.
^xx
At the very least it implies the existence in Canterbury, and possibly further afield, of a reasonably
plausible account of events that might reconcile Eadmer’s history with the Tapestry.

Whichever version comes nearest the truth, William appears to have equipped himself in advance with, according to Goebbels, the best ingredient for propaganda – the
big lie consistently told: that the kingdom had been promised to him by King Edward (possibly not altogether a lie but certainly not proved and in any case not a valid promise), and that Harold had
freely and voluntarily sworn on the bones of the saints to uphold his claim to it. William was to use his advantage skilfully.

THE PRIZE

I
t is impossible to understand the determination with which the various contenders pursued their claims without understanding the value of the
prize for which they were competing. The civilization and culture that in the eleventh century distinguished England from her European neighbours were less important to them than her wealth, which
was legendary and colossal, even after the Viking depredations of Æthelred’s reign. Looking back from this distance in time, it is easy to think of Anglo-Saxon England as a remote,
comparatively brief and homogeneous phase of history, in much the same way that we think of Tudor or Victorian England. This would be to underrate its duration and its significance. The
Anglo-Saxons ruled England for six centuries, as long as from the Middle Ages to the present day, about as long as the duration of the Roman Empire, a period broken only by the twenty-five-year
kingship of Cnut and his sons. Naturally, during these six centuries, much changed, and the barbaric paganism of the original settlers evolved relatively peacefully into the rich, sophisticated,
Christian kingdom of 1066, of which it has been said that ‘the most important economic developments before the Industrial Revolution took place in the later Anglo-Saxon
period’.
^xxi
In the confusion of Dark Age Europe, and unlike the
parvenu
Norman dukedom founded in 911,
England stood
out among other European states for its antiquity, its long-established line of kings, most of them highly effective rulers, its well-developed governmental systems, its stable and well-regulated
currency and, in consequence, its thriving economy and prosperity.

It was conspicuous, too, eventually, for another characteristic: its unity. How much of this was due to the fact that it was, to all intents and purposes, an island state is difficult to assess;
the fact is that, in comparison with other western European states of the time, such as proto-France or Germany, it was a united and self-conscious nation state. The English king’s writ in
the eleventh century ran fairly consistently throughout his realm, admittedly less strongly in the north towards the Scottish border, though the legal concessions allowed in the Danelaw were more
apparent than significant. By contrast, the French king (or king of the western Franks, as he was more correctly known at this date) had real authority over an area little larger than the Ile de
France, and was hemmed in on all sides by vassals who may technically have owed him allegiance but who in fact governed (and contended among themselves) as independent sovereigns in their own lands
such as Anjou, Maine, Blois, Ponthieu and Normandy. The English state may have started in the fifth century as a conglomeration of independent kingdoms known loosely as the Saxon Heptarchy; but it
was a more homogeneous body than has always been recognized, in which the various petty kingdoms very soon had more in common with each other than with either the former British races whom they
encountered on arrival or with the continental districts from which they had come. They quickly came to share a language that would have been in some degree intelligible in any of them. The
Venerable Bede, born in the seventh century, described the languages of Britain as English,
British (that is, Welsh), Scots, Pictish and Latin; he did not subdivide English
into West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian or Kentish. Individual kingdoms expanded or shrank by a natural process of ebb and flow. Every now and then, one particularly strong ruler would manage to
assert his power over his peers and achieve the slightly legendary title of
Bretwalda
or ruler of all Britain; this usually ceased at his death and the title lapsed until a successor or a
rival was strong enough to claim it. Inter-marriages between the different royal houses produced a network of alliances and kinships that meant there was more to connect the various kingdoms than
to separate them. The importance of the conversion of the English and the developing institutions of the Church can hardly be overestimated. Monasteries were being founded the length and breadth of
England, all working to the same rule, with monks and abbots (many of them from the most powerful and noble families in the country) moving between them; the importance of their unifying role is
obvious, as was that of the metropolitan sees of Canterbury and York.