1066 (13 page)

At Stamford Bridge, on 25 September 1066, Harold launched a decisive attack on an unprepared Norse army. The fighting was 'very hard' and continued 'long in the day', so the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(C) tells us, but it was the English who were victorious. King Harald Hardrada was killed, as were Tostig and several thousand Norsemen. In the end the rout was so great that it took only twenty-four ships to carry home the survivors of an army that had arrived on 300. Hardrada's own son and heir, Olaf, was amongst those who made the sombre journey home; Harold allowed him to return to Norway after he had sworn an oath never to invade England again. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, no less than Hastings, was one of the decisive encounters of the Middle Ages. Three centuries earlier the age of Viking terror had begun when bands of marauding Norsemen struck fear around the coasts of western Europe. Now it was effectively over. Never again was England to be seriously imperilled by invasion from Scandinavia. This, of course, could not have been known to King Harold, but he had undoubtedly won a great battle. It was his finest hour, and on the morrow of victory he could sit back and congratulate himself on the first nine months of his reign. He thought he had seen off the danger from Normandy. He had decisively defended his country against Norwegian aggression, and in the process he had defeated and killed King Harald Hardrada, the most famous and formidable of war riors. His tempestuous brother also lay dead and would trouble him no more. 1066, it seemed, was going to be a good year for Harold Godwinson.

At this point the thread of the tapestry's tale can once more be picked up. Barely three days after Harold's victory at Stamford Bridge, the wind in the Channel changed. Duke William's mighty force took their chance and left the shores of Ponthieu on the night of 28/29 September 1066. The tapestry tells us nothing of events in the north, nor of Harold's preparations, but now the great Norman fleet takes up the whole of the canvas as it crosses a moderate sea of undulating threads [scene 35]. Some of the ships are packed with men and horses; others predominantly horses; others only men. HIC WILLELM DUX IN MAGNO NAVIGO MARE TRANSIVIT ET VENIT AD PEVENSAE (Here Duke William crossed the sea in a great ship and came to Pevensey). William's ship is the largest in the fleet. Illustrated as a typical Viking-style ship, it bears a cruciform banner (or possibly a lantern) at the top of the mast. At the prow there is a carved lion's head; at the stern a sculptured child holds a horn to his lips and points towards England, to which steady progress is being made. The duke's ship, unnamed in the Tapestry, is called the
Mora
in the document known as the
Ship List of William the Conqueror,
and it had apparently been given to him by his wife Matilda. Torches attached to the masts, like so many stars, are said to have kept the fleet of 700 ships in contact with each other during the night. We are told by William of Poitiers that at one point the duke's ship, no doubt the fastest, became separated from the rest. He ordered the anchor to be dropped and hid his anxiety by taking a hearty breakfast and drinking spiced wine, cheerfully behaving 'as if he were in his hall at home' until the flickering lights of the rest of the fleet gradually reappeared.
⁸

It has been calculated that at an average speed of three or four knots the whole flotilla would have taken at least twelve hours to cross the Channel.
⁹
They probably left the estuary of the Somme at nightfall, on an ebbing tide, an hour or so after the sun had set at 17.26 p.m. A quarter moon was then in the skies. The moon may have lit the first part of the journey, but would have disappeared from view three or four hours later. It would have been imprudent to arrive in darkness and with the sun not rising until six o'clock on the morning of 29 September 1066 it is possible, as we are told by the
Carmen de Hastingae Proelio,
that William's fleet had already dropped anchor for a while off the coast of France for a final review or tactical delay. The tapestry's illustration of the crossing is, however, entirely seamless. Under a grey-linen sky the vast armada now arrives in sight of the Sussex coast. What terror it must have struck in the hearts of anyone who saw it approach, first a few spangled dots on the dim horizon, then more and more until the dots numbered in their hundreds, gradually taking on the shape of warships, a terrifying prospect drawing ever nearer, the metal of swords and shields glinting, here and there, in the angled light of morning. The army within was intent on the mission that the English had long feared, and they were arriving only three weeks after Harold had commanded his own coastal force to disband.

The invaders disembarked without opposition from hundreds of ships on to the sloping beach at Pevensey. The tapestry's artist was impressed by the novelty of so many horses travelling by sea, for he shows us the horses, rather than men, leaving ship. One horse has a hind leg still on the boat as he clambers into the shallow water. There must have been hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such horses being led off the ships that day. Masts are pulled down and the ships are left beached upon the shore. A foraging party now penetrates inland, riding in the direction of Hastings with orders to purloin provisions for the Norman army. Livestock is quickly found. A cow has been seized and slaughtered and now it lies on the linen ground, the first English casualty. Two Normans proceed to fell a sheep with an axe; another carries a pig on his shoulders; and a fourth is holding what appears to be a coil of rope. Behind them we see a line of empty English homes; it is their land that is being pillaged. The pillaging of provisions, though unfortunate, would have been seen as inevitable by viewers of the tapestry. It was what armies did. There is, however, a curious feature about this whole operation. The mounted Norman knight overseeing it is designated by name. HIC EST WADARD (Here is Wadard) [scene 37;plate 8]. This mysterious man is evidently not a person of rank or title, and his job is hardly the most important on the expedition. He is the third of the four obscure characters given a name by the artist.

Food has been seized by the invaders and taken back to the Norman camp. The task of cooking is illustrated in extraordinary detail [scene 38]. At the front, two men are busy boiling meat in a great cauldron, which has been hung by poles over a flickering red fire of tongue-like woollen flames. In the background a rack of spitted fowl is ready to be eaten. An army baker removes hot bread from a field oven, using a pair of tongs, and then places it carefully on a tray. The cooked birds, still on their spits, are served to the eager diners, one of whom blows a horn to announce the start of the meal. A party of knights eats at an improvised field table, a wooden structure on which kite-shaped shields have been laid as a makeshift surface, but the more important of the diners have gathered around their own semicircular table. William's half brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux dominates the table; once more Odo takes centre stage [scene 39; plate 7]. HIC EPIS-COPUS CIBU[M] ET POTU[M] BENEDICIT (Here the bishop blesses the food and drink). This meal is not referred to in any other source, but there can be no doubt that the bishop in question is Odo; one of the diners points to the words ODO EP[ISCOPU]S (Bishop Odo) in the inscription which follows, whilst looking back at the bishop in mid-benediction.

This scene of feasting, observed in these threads, still holds many beguiling secrets. Odo's tonsured head rises above all the others in a carefully constructed composition. There is bread and fish and other food arranged about the table, which the diners eat with hands and knives (forks were not used in the eleventh century). Duke William is unnamed, but he may be the figure upstaged by Odo, seated on Odo's right and looking up at him. Another figure, an enigmatic, older man with a long, straggling beard, sits to the left of the 'duke' and, with his back turned, he rather rudely stretches across him in order to take a piece of bread from the table. At the same time he sips from a cup of wine. A further figure has engaged the older man in the eye and points to a loaf of round flatbread lying in front. It is as if reference is discreetly being made to the bread and wine of the Eucharist; but if so, it is an allusion that is completely ignored by Odo and the duke. At the other end of the table a man is about to eat a fish eye; mysteriously, he points to the vacant eye-socket in the fish. A servant at the front, with his knees bent, offers a bowl of water so that the party can clean their greasy hands and he also has a towel laid over his arm. There are parallels in the iconography of this scene with early medieval manuscript representations of the Last Supper, where the servant figure would be Judas and the man at the centre Jesus. It seems that at one level Bishop Odo is being flattered, not only by upstaging the duke, but more presumptuously by taking on the role of Jesus at this carefully embroidered repast. More discreetly, however, the reference to the bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist passes unnoticed and is ignored by him.

After the meal, Bishop Odo, Duke William and the Duke's other half-brother, Count Robert of Mortain, hold a meeting to take stock of the initial landing and the preparations for the fight with Harold [scene 40]. All three are shown seated on a cushioned bench and are named in the inscription, as if in a family portrait on the eve of the great adventure: ODO EP[ISCOPU]S, WILLELM, ROTBERT. William, as would be expected, is taking counsel from amongst his leading feudal vassals, but the highlighting of his kinsmen Odo and Count Robert, and no others, is noteworthy and it is Bishop Odo who once more takes the limelight. He appears on this occasion to be advising caution and William is evidently listening to him. A commander, presumably on Odo's advice, now orders a fortification to be built at the port of Hastings. Workmen duly take up their tools; but a disagreement arises between two of them and they are now hitting each other about the head with shovels [scene 41]. Whatever disorder occurred, it must have been quickly quelled for the workmen are now busy throwing up an earthen mound on which a makeshift timber castle is raised. The work passes without further incident, except that a stone falls off someone's spade and hits another on the head;perhaps this was the cause of the dispute shown earlier, or a continuation of it. The prefabricated wood necessary to build the castle would have been already prepared in Normandy and transported across the Channel. What is quite possibly the mound of earth that these querulous workmen built may still be seen, at the top of Hastings cliff, where pottery fragments have been found dating from the time of the Norman Conquest.
¹⁰

William is next illustrated receiving some unspecified news of Harold [scene 42]. King Harold himself received the dire news of William's landing whilst still in the north, though it is possible that he had already commenced his journey south and met a breathless messenger
en route.
If Harold's heart sank, as it must have, he soon steeled himself to face the new challenge with formidable, almost inhuman energy. He reached London in four or five days, with little more than the core of his men, and stayed there a week in order to wait for reinforcements. He then marched swiftly into Sussex to confront the invaders with an army that could match them. If we are to believe Orderic Vitalis, a comparatively late source, Harold met his mother Gytha in London and she begged him to wait and at least take some rest after all that he had been through. His brother Earl Gyrth even offered to lead the English against William himself, but when Gytha clung to Harold in an attempt to prevent her son leaving, the king indignantly kicked her away. Harold was to fight two major battles, 250 miles apart, within the space of nineteen days.

What may have incensed Harold was that his ancestral homeland in the south was being cruelly ravaged by the invaders; and this is exactly what the tapestry now shows [scene 43]. The invaders are setting a large house on fire, from which a woman and child flee in panic. HIC DOMUS INCENDITUR (Here a house is burned). William of Poitiers himself notes that Harold 'was hastening his march all the more because he had heard that the lands near the Norman camp were being laid to waste'. The woman and child shown in the tapestry are usually regarded as representative figures, and it is tempting to see them as standing generally for the innocent victims of war. It is just as possible, however, that they are meant to stand for actual people. There are only two other women depicted in the work - the named but mysterious
Ælfgyva
and the unnamed but identifiable Queen Edith - and it would certainly be consistent for the third woman, who also wears aristocratic clothes, to be a real and identifiable person. If so, one wonders whether she might possibly be Harold's mistress Edith Swan-Neck and the child perhaps one of the sons she had borne to Harold. He could be a boy called Ulf who at the time when the tapestry was being made had become, like Harold's brother Wulfnoth, a hostage of William the Conqueror.
¹¹
Whether this is so cannot, of course, be proven; it would have to be established that they were either in the vicinity at the time or else that the tapestry is alluding to an earlier flight before the Normans arrived. At some point after 1063 Harold had also entered into a strategic marriage with Ealdgyth, the sister of Earls Edwin and Morcar and the widow of King Gruffydd of Wales.

William's scorched earth policy was probably premeditated. He would have calculated that reports of men, women and children suffering on Harold's own land, people whom Harold knew and was duty bound to protect, would incense his enemy and it was to William's advantage that Harold should be provoked into a decisive early encounter. The path of the Norman rampage may still be traced in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it is noted that a succession of lands to the north and south of present-day Battle - at Crowhurst, What-lington, Netherfield and Broomham - had been devastated and laid waste. Yet although this devastation may have played a part in Harold's decision, he had a tactical reason, too, to advance swiftly and pin William down by the coast, where the isolated invaders would eventually run out of supplies. By the evening of 13 October Harold's army had assembled only a few miles from the point at Hastings where William's forces were encamped.