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The Harold that we see in the tapestry's threads is no doubt confused and angry. His mission has gone disastrously wrong even before it has started. In the eleventh-century view, the invisible hand of God was everywhere controlling events and, like all men of his time, he would have taken his misfortune to be divine punishment and racked his conscience to remember quite what he had done wrong. Had he neglected his God? Surely he had prayed before the journey, as any good Christian should, and in his time he had given profusely to the Church. Some of his dealings had been a little shady, and some of the churches and abbeys of England had complaints against him, but no more than they might have against any great noble;and besides, in the eyes of the Almighty this was as nothing, he would have thought, when compared to the magnificence of his benefactions to Waltham.
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At Waltham's Holy Cross he was once cured of an illness and in gratitude he had transformed the modest church built by Tofig the Proud into a splendid college for canons. He had lavished vast sums on the building; he had donated as many as sixty priceless relics. Brilliant gold furnishings shone brightly through the haze of incense in every corner of the candlelit edifice; the altar he provided was itself a sight to behold, made of marble and supported in front by golden statues of the twelve apostles, and at the back by radiant golden lions; and the gold that decorated one chasuble alone weighed seventeen pounds. Were these gifts not enough in the eyes of the Lord? How could such glittering piety be rewarded thus? How could it be that the greatest living Englishman, whose estates stretched from Cornwall to Yorkshire, who could hunt and roam almost as freely as he pleased, who prided himself on his understanding of the strategies of foreign princes, how could it be that he, Earl Harold, was now held as a miserable captive in this foreign place?

He was far from the love of his life, Edith the Fair; far from his sister Edith the Queen; far from his brothers, loyal Gyrth and Leofwine and the hot-headed Tostig and the lesser earls who might take advantage of his absence; far from old King Edward and the little Ædwardi and all the people in England who depended on his protection; far from England itself at this uncertain time; and if he had come with the intention of rescuing his long-lost kinsmen, Wulfnoth and Hakon, he was just as far from finding them as well. Harold of Wessex was the helpless prisoner of an obscure French count. Somehow he would have to get away - and fast.

6

The Fox and the Crow

There appears in the tapestry's lower border, at the point where Harold and his men were embarking aboard their ship at Bosham, a seemingly irrelevant illustration of a fox, a crow and a piece of cheese. This is an old fable. Sitting on a branch, there was once a foolish crow with some cheese in his mouth, which he had just carried off from a window. The crow was about to eat the tasty morsel when a fox, fancying it for himself, looked up and spoke the following artful words: 'My dear crow, how shiny and beautiful your feathers are! And your face and figure, how graceful they are too! If only you had a voice, you would be the finest of all birds.' Pleased by this flattery but taken aback by the insinuation that he could not sing, the crow opened his mouth to prove otherwise. The cheese, of course, dropped to the ground and was promptly snapped up by the cunning fox. The moral of the tale: he who takes delight in treacherous flattery will usually end up paying a hefty price.

The fable of the fox and the crow is as old as Aesop, the celebrated teller of animal tales in ancient Greece; it was known in classical Latin times through adaptations by Phaedrus and Babrius; and in Anglo-Saxon England the Aesop fables had become popular through translations from the Latin made, so it was said, by King Alfred the Great. The artist of the tapestry included several animal fables in the borders, touching on themes of deceit, dishonesty and possession, but this one he seems to have considered particularly apt, for he included it three times.
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There is surely art in this. It is hard to believe that the fable of the fox and the crow was not deliberately included as an ironic commentary on the unfolding drama, but the crucial question is this: who is the fox and who the crow? Once more the artist courts danger by teasing his public with double meaning. Norman observers, in the aftermath of the Conquest, would immediately see Harold as the fox, scheming with cunning words to take the crown of England from under the nose of its rightful heir, Duke William of Normandy. Yet if the threaded drama is more closely observed it becomes increasingly possible to interpret the fable in exactly the opposite way, with Harold the cheated one and the treacherous and deceitful fox William of Normandy. It is in the crafty guise of a rescuer, a knight, in brightly stitched chain mail, that William of Normandy will make a dramatic entrance on to the linen stage.

Harold is a prisoner on that strand of Ponthieu, but his nerves must shortly have begun to calm. It has become clear that Count Guy will treat him honourably. 'By the ancient law of my land, you are now my captive, Earl Harold, but rest assured - I will not treat you badly.' Some such words were presumably spoken to the Englishman, for they are implied by the tapestry's pictures. In this, once more, the woven story differs markedly from the written account of William of Poitiers. It seems that the latter's evocation of the dire imprisonment that awaited Harold in Ponthieu was an exaggeration, designed, no doubt, to cast Duke William'simpending intervention in the most favourable light. For its part the tapestry ennobles Guy with a certain nascent chivalry. He is intent on getting what he can from Harold, but this is an honourable captivity. Harold is neither shackled nor bound;he sits proudly on his horse as together he and Guy ride along the country paths of Picardy to one of Guy's castles [scene 7]. At the rear of the party two hunting dogs, dodging the gnarled tree which separates this scene from the last, run after their English lord, panting with canine enthusiasm, and both Harold and Guy ride with hawks at hand. Were it not for the armed guard, which discreetly follows, one might think this the picture of a friendly day's chase. There can be no doubt, however, that Harold is effectively a prisoner. The inescapable truth is underlined by a prosaic inscription. HIC APPREHENDIT WIDO HAROLDUM ET DUXIT EUM AD BELREM ET IBI EUM TENUIT (Here Guy seized Harold and led him to Beaurain and held him there).

Beaurain lies by the mellow, slow-flowing River Canche, nine miles from the Channel coast. Today it is an inconspicuous hamlet, lost amidst the fields of Picardy half way between Montreuil and Hesdin, but in those days Guy's castle at Beaurain must have been an impressive fortress. It is represented three times in the tapestry (which is more than any other structure) and if we pause to observe closely, and not ignore what is often taken to be another child-like or conventional representation, we can see how cleverly its essentials were tricked out of the threads [scene 13].
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They must have taken Harold first to an outer stone wall, with battlements and towers, and then through a great arched gate to the large enclosure (the bailey) within. Dominating the enclosure, at the back, was a steeply-sided earthen mound (the motte), rising perhaps seventy feet into the air. Now within the bailey Harold would have creaked up his neck at the impregnable centrepiece, a gleaming stone keep standing proudly on top of the mound and itself crowned by a remarkable domed roof. Today a little village still bears the name Château-Beaurain; but nothing is left of the eponymous motte-and-bailey castle or even of any later stronghold on the same site. The last of its stones were whistled away by masons in 1822 in order to be recycled in the construction of a new watercourse. Only an overgrown hillock, obscured by trees, stands where the motte once stood. There is now nothing in this windswept place that we can touch, nothing tangible to remind us of the clank of armour, the rustle of hoofs, the shouts of men or the squeaky pulling of gates as Harold and Guy arrived that day. Only their woollen counterparts live on to re-enact the tale.

Now Harold is taken to the door of Guy's hall; he is surrounded by no less than six guards, one of whom holds his confiscated sword [scene 7]. Harold enters, slowly, and with trepidation. A fellow Englishman from his party encourages him forward with a push in the back. Under the domed roof, captive and captor now converse, man to man, eye to eye, noble to noble, sizing each other up with sly glances, but just as in the tapestry's opening scene, when Harold met Edward, we do not know exactly what passes between them. UBI HAROLD ET WIDO PARABOLANT (Where Harold and Guy confer) is all that the inscription says. Do the discussions range over Harold's wealth? Are they talking of how much gold Harold is willing to hand over for his freedom?For the moment (for the picture, as it were) Harold has been handed back his unbelted sword. He stands throughout the meeting, whereas Guy makes a point of sitting on his comital throne, raised higher than Harold; the seated position is always indicative of authority in the tapestry. It is a dapper, ambitious young Frenchman, still in his twenties, whom Harold can see before him, now with his arm raised, pointing directly at his captive - 'I have you under my complete custody and control,' he seems to be saying. Guy's sword is held upright by the blade, like a sceptre, and his feet are resting on a cushioned footstool. His face is clean-shaven and his hair is worn in the northern French style, which is to say shorn very short at the back. This contrasts with the English who, like Harold, are in the habit of wearing their fair locks thick and long around the nape of the neck and a little stitch of a moustache underlining the nose. The count's dark cape lies over his shoulders like the wings of a mantling hawk; it is neatly buttoned in front with a large brooch. Guy's tunic is something like a long, unbelted dress, with folds and creases forming around his waist and uplifted knees; he wears a fine hose that has been carefully embroidered in horizontal black and brown stripes. His throne, scarcely less noble than a king's, has carved claw feet and its arms are made into sculptured animal heads. This is a man with a taste for luxury, but clearly someone who must be taken seriously within the boundaries of his own county. A contemporary monk at the monastery of Saint Riquier, the chief monastic centre in Ponthieu, described him as pitiless, haughty and corrupted by greed: 'only gold would satisfy him', he said.
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In the next century William of Malmes-bury wrote that Count Guy was effeminate.
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If Guy seemed vaguely familiar to Harold, it was because he had met him, or at least seen him, once before. Harold had not often travelled to the continent but during a visit to Flanders, some eight years earlier, he had been called upon by Count Baldwin of Flanders to lend his name as a witness to a local charter.
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It was the practice for nobles and officials to attest legal transactions in order to give them greater authority, and Harold duly obliged. The young Guy was presumably visiting Baldwin's court too, for the two names 'Duke Harold'and 'Count Guy' appear side by side in the same document, among twenty-eight other witnesses. The surviving diploma, subscribed at the Flemish town of St-Omer, bears the date 13 November 1056. To what extent they conversed in 1056 is unknown, but there was presumably ample opportunity for the assembled nobles gathered at Baldwin's court to mingle and to indulge in feasting and entertainment. Under the late autumnal skies Harold and Guy would have been able to partake in their shared passion for falconry.

To those who were there at that noble Flemish gathering in 1056, Count Guy probably seemed a bitter and resentful youth. He had himself only recently emerged from two years'imprisonment and his jailer was none other than his powerful enemy Duke William of Normandy. Guy knew what it was like to be a helpless prisoner; and he had personal experience of the wrath of the Norman duke. It is one of the ironies of history that nowadays Guy of Ponthieu, like his cousin Count Eustace II of Boulogne, is often erroneously referred to as a 'Norman'. Ponthieu (still less Boulogne) had never been part of the lands ceded to the Vikings in 911 and it had never been part of Normandy. Its culture, history and ruling class were all quite separate from the much larger land of Normandy, lying just to the south and west. The people of Ponthieu were proud of their past. They sang heroic tales of how they had once resisted the pagans and they would have considered themselves as belonging to an older Gallic culture, one which was Christian hundreds of years before any Norseman had abandoned the religion of Odin and Thor.
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Guy of Ponthieu and Eustace of Boulogne were French, but on no account were they Normans.
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These were not merely matters of abstract nuance; they reflected a real hostility on the ground. The smaller territories of northern France had much to fear from the growing power of Normandy under its indomitable and headstrong duke. William had inherited the duchy of Normandy in 1035 while only a boy, but he outlived those who had idly scoffed at him and he had grown into a powerful and violent man. In Norman accounts 'France' is often distinguished from Normandy and the 'French' are portrayed as the natural enemies of the Normans. Together with lands such as Boulogne and Mantes, great Anjou to the south, and for much of the 1050s the French king himself, Ponthieu formed a block of powers hostile to Normandy. Duke William was a strong and fearless opponent;he also had luck on his side. He survived all attempts to depose him, both from within and without his duchy, and emerged with his authority not only intact but enhanced. In October 1053 Guy's elder brother, Count Enguerrand of Ponthieu, famous for his nobility and beauty, was killed fighting the Normans at Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. Guy, as yet still in his teens, inherited the county but was himself captured by Normans in February 1054 when engaged in a similar venture at the town of Mortemer. It was in these circumstances that Count Guy of Ponthieu became Duke William's prisoner.

William did not kill Count Guy: instead he wanted to teach him a lesson, and in the process reduce Ponthieu to the status of a client state. For two years he held Guy in captivity at Bayeux.
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At long last he was released, in 1056, but only after he had sworn a humiliating oath of loyalty to his Norman enemy and in particular to provide the annual service of 100 knights. This did not make Guy a Norman; but it certainly curtailed his freedom of action. The oath was a primary bond in the society in which these men lived. It bound the swearer both in sanctity and honour. To break such an oath was to incur the wrath of God and, which was no less certain, though possibly more immediate, the wrath of William. Now more than eight years had passed, eight years during which Guy had kept out of harm's way and had been able once again to enjoy the kind of luxury that befitted the ruler of a small but prosperous French county. He stood to gain much from capturing Earl Harold, but if there was one person in the world that he feared, one person that he did not want to see flexing his muscles just now, one person that he would rather not pay him a visit at his castle at this particular, rather delicate juncture, it was Duke William of Normandy.

Guy feels a little tap at his elbow. One of his soldiers, standing by his throne, alerts him to the fact that two Norman knights have just arrived at the castle gate and wish to speak to him as a matter of urgency in the next scene. What can they know? What on earth do they want? What has brought them in such haste to the northerly castle of Beaurain, which is just about as far from Normandy as Guy could have taken Harold within his own territory? In an obscure corner of the hall, hiding behind a pillar, a sly fellow in a jagged-edged tunic has been watching the proceedings all along - a jester perhaps, or a spy, or both.

The meeting with Harold is over. Guy has moved outside his castle in order to speak with the two Norman knights [scene 9]. They have dismounted their horses and are standing upright. Tall, lanky, aggressive men, each is armed with a lance and sword. What they lack in number is more than compensated by their unquestioned authority as the emissaries of the Duke of Normandy. UBI NUNTII WILLELMI DUCIS VENERUNT AD WIDONE[M], says the inscription (Where Duke William's messengers came to Guy). 'It is no use trying to be clever,' they seem to be saying. 'Our lord William knows very well that you are holding the Englishman Harold here. He requires you to hand him over forthwith and without question.' As this tense scene unfolds, Guy's dwarf 'TUROLD' grips the reins of the Normans' horses, an incongruous little figure holding the two hot animals, freshly ridden across the border from Normandy and through the forests of Ponthieu to the riverside castle [scene 10; plate 1]. A mere fifteen people are named in the tapestry; most of them are more or less familiar players on the stage of history. Turold the dwarf is the first of four highly obscure figures whose names have been stitched in for us. Although the dwarf is often passed over without comment, his identity and significance will be of the highest interest.