Battle of Hastings, The (27 page)

c.
Gesta Normannorum Ducum
William of Jumièges’ chronicle ends in 1069, from which it has been assumed that it would have been completed by about
1071. It appears to have been a popular work, for many manuscripts of it have survived. It is a history of the Dukes of Normandy mainly based on an earlier work, but with a final section on the
conquest; it is dedicated to the duke and, as might be expected, is openly partisan. The author narrates the story of Edward the Confessor’s undertaking that William should be his successor,
the story of Harold’s oath and the breaking of it, and the appearance of Halley’s comet. He describes the assembly of William’s army and fleet (3,000 vessels), the crossing to
Pevensey, the battle and its aftermath, and the duke’s coronation in London. His account has been somewhat discredited by his apparent statement that Harold fell in the first attack, which
would be difficult to believe, since it would make nonsense of the generally accepted version that the English only broke, late in the day, on hearing of his death; but this peculiarity is
generally accepted to be the result of error in an early translation of the text.

d.
Gesta Guillelmi Ducis Normannorum
William of Poitiers wrote this chronicle from 1073 to 1074. His military experience gives some added authority to his
references to military matters,
but he is shamelessly sycophantic of the duke. Unlike the work of William of Jumièges, of which there are many manuscripts, only one
version (and that incomplete) has survived, beginning with the death of Cnut in 1035 and ending in 1067; but what is assumed to be part at least of the missing section is supplied by Orderic
Vitalis (see h. below) who based his own
Historia Ecclesiastica
on it and tells us that it originally ended in 1071. Other evidence shows many of William’s statements to be slanted or
simply wrong, causing the reader to regard with some suspicion those on which we have, unfortunately, no cross-check, such as Duke William’s dealings with the Pope in 1066. His knowledge of
classical literature enabled him to move easily among the works of Virgil, Lucan, Sallust and Caesar, selecting the historical episodes with which William’s exploits could advantageously be
compared, but also arousing the suspicion that certain of these could have been manufactured or adjusted to allow such comparisons to be cited. There are clear points of correspondence between his
work and the
Carmen;
one of them has undoubtedly borrowed from the other, unless both used the same sources, oral or written, now lost. The tone throughout has been described by a partisan
of the Norman side as displaying ‘the arrogance of success and the brutality of triumph’.

e.
Vita Ædwardi Regis
This is a biography of King Edward the Confessor by an anonymous cleric, possibly Flemish or Lotharingian and possibly a monk of St
Omer (he refers to the English as ‘that race’ but shows little sympathy for Edward’s Norman friends), written at the instance of his queen Edith, daughter of Earl Godwin, to
celebrate the achievements of the house of Godwin. This stops short at the king’s death, before Harold’s short reign and the invasion itself, though a degree of
foreknowledge of future events indicates that it was concluded after the conquest. It is primarily of interest here for information about the Godwin family, in particular the
characters of two of the main players, Harold and Tostig, whom the writer probably knew and whom he describes with some shrewdness. It must be assumed that for much of the content he was dependent
on Edith, who commissioned it, which may explain its decidedly pro-Tostig stance as he appears from it to have been her favourite brother. Its date is uncertain; it was probably finished before
Edith’s death (1075), but what is not certain is whether the first and most interesting part was written before the battle, the outcome of which is hinted at but not actually mentioned. It
may all be post-1066. The manuscript itself has been dated c.1100.

f.
Historia Novorum in Anglia
Written between c.1095 and 1123 by Eadmer, a monk in the abbey of Christ Church, Canterbury, most of this history concerns later
events than Hastings. Eadmer does not describe the actual battle, but the short account of Harold’s visit to Normandy and the subsequent conquest is illuminating, especially when compared
with the account of, for example, William of Poitiers. Like almost all the English chroniclers, he sees the English defeat as God’s retribution for Harold’s broken oath. His version is
the nearest we can get to an English perspective after the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; but Christ Church was a notably pro-Godwinist establishment. On the other hand, it is possible that, in Bishop
Æthelric, who had been a monk of Christ Church and whom he certainly consulted over his life of St Dunstan, he had access to the memories of a kinsman of Earl Godwin and may therefore have
had information about his sons not known to other writers (see
here
above).

g.
The Chronicle of Florence of Worcester (sometimes known as the Chronicle of John of Worcester)
This forms part of a continuation of the
world chronicle of Marianus Scotus (d. 1082) but its most valuable part is the section on English history from 450 to 1140. Based largely on a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, now lost, he
adds information that supplements surviving versions that, especially when it concerns events of relevance to Worcester, cannot be easily disregarded, although his work, which must have been
concluded after 1140, was written later than other sources. It is, for example, on his authority that it is accepted that Harold was crowned by Archbishop Ealdred of York; since Ealdred had
formerly been Bishop of Worcester, and was succeeded there by Bishop Wulfstan under whom John worked (and who was almost certainly present at the ceremony), this is better authority than any of the
Norman sources, which assert that the ceremony was performed by Archbishop Stigand of Canterbury, then under papal interdict.

h.
Historia Ecclesiastica
Orderic Vitalis (c.1123–24), a monk of half-English, half-Norman parentage, did not write until the twelfth century, like Florence
of Worcester. A Benedictine monk born in Shrewsbury of an English mother and a Norman father, he was sent by the latter in 1085 to the monastery of St Evroult in Normandy, where he seems to have
spent the rest of his life. His work was intended, like Bede’s, to be concerned with church affairs; his description of the Norman Conquest (in book 3) is a distraction from this objective.
His aim, he said, was to tell the simple truth, impartial between English and Normans, and he does go some way to correct the bias of William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers on whose
work he relied.

i.
Roman de Rou
Maistre Wace wrote about a century after the event (c.1160–70), in Norman French, and has
therefore generally been dismissed as unreliable, but he spent much of his life in the neighbourhood of Caen in the company of those who could give him first-hand accounts; his estimate of the
number of ships (696) taken by William to England, for example, given to him, as he tells us, by his father, is now regarded as more likely to be accurate than the more inflated figures in some of
the earlier accounts, for example William of Jumièges; on the other hand, he is clearly writing for entertainment rather than as a sober historian, and it is unwise to accept his version of
events unless they can be corroborated elsewhere. He is less likely to be reliable on purely English events for which he must have been dependent on hearsay and legend. He includes the story of
Harold’s brother, Gyrth, attempting to persuade Harold to let him lead the English forces, since he had sworn no oath, and also the story that the envoy sent by William to Harold before the
battle threatened the English with excommunication. In his version of Harold’s visit to Normandy, however, he gives the versions of William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers, but
also the version of Eadmer, and says frankly that he does not know which is truthful. He may well be correct in many of his statements, possibly he often is; but we have no check.

j.
Gesta Regum
William of Malmesbury composed his chronicle about 1125 apparently at the request of Henry I’s queen (the great-granddaughter of King Edmund
Ironside and the last survivor of the old royal family of Wessex). William had at least some of the instincts of a true historian; he compares his sources and points out contradictions in the
evidence. But we have no means of knowing in many cases how authoritative some of his sources
were. Though he is thought to have had some English
blood, he writes avowedly as a Norman (‘to whom [i.e. Normans] I am strongly bound, both by my descent and for the advantages I enjoy’) and, though he regards Harold as a usurper, as
his Norman loyalties oblige him to do, he is very divided in his account of him, telling us that Harold would have governed the kingdom with prudence and with courage, had he come by it lawfully.
He is also the main source of the story that Harold did not share out the booty from Stamford Bridge before marching south, which caused many men to desert from him. This occurs also in Geffrei
Gaimar’s
L’Estoire des Engleis
(1136–37), who may have taken it from William of Malmesbury or (since the two books were written very close together in terms of dates) may
have had a different source; but Gaimar’s tendency to the creative embroidery of his material inspires little confidence in him as an independent witness.

k.
King Harald’s Saga in Heimskringla
Snorre Sturlason’s saga includes an account of the battle of Stamford Bridge that immediately preceded Hastings.
Snorre was writing two centuries after the event, relying on the songs and legends of the court poets who were his predecessors, and has been generally dismissed as an unreliable source; but it has
been pointed out that the most striking inaccuracies in his account (for example, English names and family relationships) are things of which an Icelandic writer might reasonably be ignorant, while
his account of the battle of Stamford Bridge and the English tactics at it (other than the English use of cavalry in the battle) have in some details been corroborated elsewhere. The chief problem
with his account is that, by the time he wrote, in the thirteenth century, the legends that had attached themselves to both Stamford Bridge and
Hastings a fortnight later had become intertwined and confused and it is difficult now to untangle them. The one point that should be remembered is that the Norwegian versions of the
battle, on which Snorre built his saga, derive from the memories and stories of the Norwegian survivors who took Hardrada’s body back with them, and therefore have a validity independent of
the later English sources.

l.
Bayeux Tapestry
This is the most extraordinary source of all: a piece of embroidery that provides a cartoon history of the Norman Conquest from roughly 1054 to the
closing hours of the battle (the final panels are missing but probably originally concluded with William’s coronation). For many years this was thought to have been commissioned by Odo,
Bishop of Bayeux and half-brother of William, and this is generally accepted although it has been suggested that Count Eustace of Boulogne (who is certainly shown as playing a disproportionately
large part in the battle) may have been responsible for it. It seems to have been designed to tell the story from the Norman perspective and it mainly corroborates the versions given by William of
Jumièges and William of Poitiers. But it is almost certainly of English workmanship and was probably executed at Canterbury, a noted centre of English embroidery and a place with which Odo,
as Earl of Kent, had close connections; and in someways the subtext of the story it tells is strangely ambivalent, as has been seen. It is noticeable, for example, that though William’s very
spurious claim to the English crown depended on his inheriting it directly and immediately from Edward the Confessor, so that it was essential to it that Harold should always be portrayed as a
usurper,Harold is always described in the Tapestry after the death of Edward as ‘Harold Rex’ and is, on the whole, shown sympathetically and with dignity.
In the Domesday Book, on the contrary, he is referred to exclusively (apart from one or two oversights) as ‘Earl Harold’. It is interesting that he
makes more appearances in the Tapestry than William: the story it tells is, in a very real sense, the Aristotelian tragedy of Harold, of the great man brought down by a fatal flaw. We know that the
Tapestry was exhibited annually in the cathedral of Bayeux to celebrate the Feast of the Relics, assumed to be the relics on which Harold swore; this accounts for the scene of the oath being shown
on the Tapestry as Bayeux, although William of Poitiers places it at Bonneville. Thus the Tapestry may be read as a religious lesson to the illiterate faithful on the fatal consequences of perjury.
It may also be seen as the work of a designer who did not see the issue in quite such black and white terms as his patron.

It is vital to emphasize that we actually do not know precisely when the Tapestry was worked; a good case has been made for its origin in the years before the fall and disgrace of Bishop Odo in
1082. This is important, if only because of the tendency of historians and other writers (among whom I include myself) to use details in the Tapestry as evidence for and confirmation of details in
written sources, when in fact, if it were of a later date, it might have been influenced by them. If, as a purely hypothetical example, the Tapestry had been the work of the embroiderer of the
hanging depicting the battle that, according to Baudri de Bourgeuil (see below), hung in the chamber of Duke William’s daughter, or if both had been influenced by a common source, now lost,
it would hardly be surprising that it appears to show Harold being killed by an arrow, since Baudri is one of the few sources to give this detail; if it had a totally independent origin, both it
and Baudri would have much more credibility and would reinforce each other’s evidence. But, as
with so much else, we don’t know when it was
worked or by whom; we can only guess.