Great Tales From English History (12 page)

But dash and courage were always Harold’s way, and as the sun went down the Norman army found itself master of the field. Lasting more than six hours, the Battle of Hastings was one of the longest-recorded military encounters of the Middle Ages, and its outcome changed the course of English history. England became Norman. Duke William of Normandy became England’s third king in the tumultuous year 1066. And his defeated enemy, Harold, lay dead on the battlefield, slain by an arrow to the eye. Or so we have always thought . . .

AD 1066

T
HE IMAGE OF THE LAST ANGLO-SAXON
king on the hill above Senlac, staggering back tragically with a Norman arrow through his eye, has come to epitomise the drama of the Battle of Hastings. It is graphically depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry - but in this instance Bishop Odo’s epic is not quite the reliable witness that it seems. Over its long nine centuries of existence, the tapestry has been hidden, stolen, damaged, restored, and finally displayed as a money-spinning tourist attraction. The stitching we see today is not always the original - and, indeed, some of it might be described as a stitch-up.

In 1729, when the tapestry was already over six centuries old, a French artist, Antoine Benoît, carried out a full-scale tracing to serve as the basis for a set of engravings to be sold in France. Nearly a hundred years later, the Society of Antiquaries sent over an English artist, Charles Stothard, to prepare another series of facsimile prints. Then came the age of the camera, and the newly founded Victoria and Albert Museum in London despatched a photographer to make a photographic record of the tapestry. So we have three sets of images, dating from 1729, 1819 and 1872 showing how it looked in the past at three different points - and there are some dramatic variations.

Two British historians, David Hill and John McSween, have recently compared the three versions and have discovered no less than 379 differences. Swords and stirrups appear and disappear. A griffin becomes an angel. A horse that was a mare in 1729 has by 1819 become a stallion. Freckles - or maybe acne - appear on a Norman shipbuilder’s face as a result of some creative darning. Three shields become two, and fish turn into seals. Continuity seems to have gone by the board.

The most significant differences are in the successive depictions of Harold’s slaying. In 1729 the King is grasping at the shaft of a spear that he could be trying to throw - or might, alternatively, be pulling out of his forehead. In 1819 the shaft has sprouted feathers, to become an arrow pointing towards his forehead. But fifty-three years later, in the photograph of 1872, the angle of the arrow has shifted downwards: now it is pointing directly into the King’s right eye, which is hidden from us by the nose-piece of his helmet. This is what you see if you visit Bayeux today.

The reason for this literal re-embroidering of history lies with the industrious ladies of Bayeux. It is thought that the original embroiderers of the tapestry were English, working at Canterbury in the early 1070s to the orders of Bishop Odo of Bayeux. But once the tapestry crossed the Channel to France it was cared for by local seamstresses - among them, from the nineteenth century onwards, the chambermaids of the town’s principal hotel. This was appropriate since the tapestry had become Bayeux’s main tourist attraction, and the chambermaids seem to have made sure that it showed visitors the romantic picture they expected.

The earliest version of the arrow-in-the-eye story has been found in an Italian chronicle written by 1080, but the more likely account of Harold’s death, written only the year after Hastings, is less romantic. According to the ‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’ by Guy, bishop of the French town of Amiens, the crucial moment came when the Normans finally broke through the Saxon shield wall that fateful Saturday afternoon. With Harold and a few of his retainers still holding out, William handpicked a hit squad to go off and kill the King.

The Duke had once boasted that he would meet Harold in single combat. But now he was taking no chances. Four Norman knights tracked Harold down and overpowered him, the first striking him in the breast, the second cutting off his head, and the third running a lance through his belly to disembowel him. According to Guy of Amiens, the fourth knight then performed the difficult operation of hacking off one of the dead king’s legs.

Now the story gets even more gruesome. A poignant tradition originating at Waltham Abbey in Essex, where Harold’s tomb lies, describes the lovely Edith Swan-Neck picking her way through the heaps of corpses and eventually discovering the dead king’s remains. They were so horribly mutilated that Edith alone could identify them as Harold’s, ‘by certain marks on the body, known only to her’. The standard battlefield mutilation that accompanied beheading and disembowelling was full castration - chopping off the penis as well as the testicles - so Bishop Guy was almost certainly being polite when he wrote of a severed ‘leg’.

That ugly interpretation seems borne out by the reported reaction of Duke William when he found out what had happened. According to William of Malmesbury, he was both furious and horrified at the final shaming detail of the assault on Harold, demanding to know who had carried it out. When he discovered the culprit, he promptly stripped him of his knighthood and sent him home in disgrace. Ruthless warrior though he was, William evidently felt that this atrocity had dishonoured his victory.

Posterity has agreed with him. In the last analysis, we cannot be sure whether Harold was shot through the eye with an arrow or dismembered by a hit squad of Norman thugs. It is, of course, possible that both calamities befell him, one after the other. But over the centuries people have tended to nurture the less horrendous version of events. The Norman Conquest was a disaster for Anglo-Saxon society, a bitter defeat that involved subjugation, famine, ethnic atrocities and humiliation - it was one of the most brutal times in English history, in fact. After such a trauma it is natural for a community to look for some sort of healing, and re-embroidering history can go some way towards achieving it.

The Bayeux Tapestry gives us over 70 metres of proof that history can be just about anything you care to make it - or 64.45 metres, according to the Nazi historians who examined its slightly shrunken form after it had been taken down for safety during the Second World War. In 1940 German forces had occupied Normandy along with the rest of northern France, and as Hitler prepared to invade England a team of scholars were despatched to Bayeux. After all, the famous tapestry depicted the last successful cross-Channel invasion, and the academics were commissioned to investigate what lessons might be learned.

They sent back an encouraging report to Hitler’s henchman Heinrich Himmler, head of the German secret police, the Gestapo, and founder of the SS. The decorative animals woven into the tapestry’s borders derived from German mythology, they stated. Better still, the whole message of the saga symbolised three ‘characteristic German traits . . . the joy of fighting, the love of war, and the chivalric respect of the enemy’. So this Norman tapestry that had been woven in England, they concluded, was actually ‘a sort of German royal saga’. Heil Hitler!

AD 1070

W
ITH HIS VICTORY AT HASTINGS, WILLIAM
the Bastard became William the Conqueror, and he staged his crowning as King William I of England in the Confessor’s great abbey on Christmas Day 1066. In terms of the law and of blood descent the Duke of Normandy knew that his claim to the throne was slight, so he introduced a new element into the Anglo-Saxon coronation ceremony - a call for the people’s consent to his rule. Questioned in both English and French as to whether they freely accepted William as their lord, the assembled congregation obediently burst into shouts of ‘
Vivat Rex!
’ - ‘Long live the King!’ But outside the abbey, William’s guard of Norman knights misinterpreted the pandemonium. Maybe they panicked, or maybe they wanted an excuse to panic. The mounted warriors went on a rampage, setting fire to the surrounding buildings and slaughtering any Saxon not quick enough to get out of their way.

England’s first Norman king might have asked for popular consent inside Westminster Abbey, but the burned houses nearby made it clear that the Conqueror was well named - his power rested on force of arms. William’s first project in the New Year was to throw up a wooden fortress on the banks of the Thames, the original Tower of London. The new arrival wished to make clear who England’s new boss was, and castles became the trademark of his reign. The weathered stone towers and battlements of Norman England remain romantic landmarks to this day. But they were anything but romantic to the Anglo-Saxons who were conscripted to dig the ditches for the moats, raise and ram solid the great mound of earth on which the central fort would stand, then live the rest of their lives with the fortifications towering above them.

In the twenty-one years of his reign, William and his followers built hundreds of castles. Wherever there was trouble or discontent, the Normans rode in on their destriers, taught the agitators a lesson, then raised a castle to make sure it did not happen again. They built in wood to start with, throwing up pallisades of sharpened stakes that were replaced with stone in later years. And if a community had been particularly irksome, the castle would be built on the site of Saxon homes that had been trashed.

There is some evidence that William’s original intent was to be conciliatory. He tried to learn some English, and for several years he kept most of the local English sheriffs in place. The new king’s early official documents bear the names of senior Anglo-Saxon office-holders, still in positions of high trust at court. But when William went home to Normandy in 1067 to check on the affairs of his duchy, a series of uprisings broke out. Three of Harold’s sons by Edith Swan-Neck tried to raise Devon and Cornwall in revolt. Danish raiding parties sailing up the east coast found themselves being welcomed by the anti-Norman locals. The north rose, and Mercians on the Welsh border joined forces with the ever-defiant Welsh.

It was time to take off the kid gloves. Back in England, criss-crossing the Midlands and the north with his armies, William mercilessly punished neighbourhoods that had risen against him. Villages were destroyed and the countryside burned so that it remained derelict and uninhabited for years. Scorched earth, ethnic cleansing - all the horror words apply. It was a time of famine and tears that seared itself on the folk memory as the tyranny of the ‘Norman Yoke’.

Just one centre of resistance held out. In the tradition of King Alfred, it was only in the Fens, in England’s watery wastelands of treacherous swamp and brackish lagoons, that some local defiance survived. Hereward of Peterborough, a Saxon gentleman who had been deprived of his lands by the Normans, retreated into the East Anglian marshes around Ely with a band of fellow freedom fighters.

For a time Hereward received help from the Danish raiders in the area - and in 1070 he joined forces with them to plunder the Abbey of Peterborough. But when William bought the Danes off, the English kept on fighting. Hereward’s guerrilla warfare became the symbol of native resistance. As the Saxon squire used the mists and marshes of the Fens to outwit his lumbering enemy, folk tales multiplied of his bravery and cunning, and of his legendary sword, which he nicknamed ‘Brainbiter’. The folk hero gained a nickname of his own, Hereward the Wake - ever alert, luminous, elusive, the enduring Saxon embodiment of the fight for justice.

Not every Anglo-Saxon was impressed with Hereward. The monk who compiled the Peterborough version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
was scathing that an Englishman should help the Danes plunder the treasures of his local abbey with the excuse of denying it to the Normans - ‘they said they did it,’ he wrote sarcastically, ‘out of loyalty to this minster’. The sacrilege prompted William to take action. Refusing to be defeated in the Fens by mere pools of water, the Normans built siege causeways - bridges of wood and earth embankments whose traces can still be found today in villages around Ely - and they flushed out the resistance. ‘The outlaws all came to hand,’ reported the
Chronicle
- with the exception of Hereward who, spry and nippy as ever, masterminded an escape.