THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ANGLO-NORMAN ENGLAND

HAROLD THE LAST NATIVE ENGLISH KING IS KILLED

Darkness. Death. Confusion. Close combat. It was at this moment that Harold beloved King and Lord of the English was killed. Unfortunately Poitiers is uninformative in his dealings on the subject, confining himself to a brief statement without giving any real details. The Bayeaux Tapestry’s depiction has itself come in for a great deal of interpretation over the years. It portrays a profiled figure holding an arrow that seems to have struck him either in or above the eye. To his right a second figure falls, the sword of a mounted Norman knight close to his thigh. Above the whole group is the Latin legend: ‘Here King Harold has been killed’.

It is now believed that Harold is first depicted as struck by an arrow and the latter cut down as mounted knights finally break into the defended headquarters where the royal standards fly. The reticence of Poitiers may stem from the fact that Harold’s death was rather inglorious since Malmesbury, whose account follows the Tapestry, says that the arrow penetrated the brain and that, as the King lay dying, a Norman knight slashed the Kings thigh with his sword. For this act the knight was stripped of his knighthood and banished from the army by his lord, the Duke. Wace elaborates as usual; the King is struck above the right eye and tries to withdraw it, but the shaft breaks in his hand; he is then hacked down. The Carmen gives an account of William the “Bastard” himself bursting through the ranks of Huscarls with three named knights and hacking down the King, but such a deed would certainly have been well chronicled by every Norman and French writer and ballad singer, which it is not, at least there are no surviving accounts of this happening. Although one recent theory for the omission of evidence for an arrow wound in the early chronicles is that the in-cident as shown on the Tapestry was a symbolic representation of blinding as a divine punishment, an artistic portrayal of God’s displeasure that may be detected in various parts of the Tapestry, this theory may have come from those pro-Norman historians who believe that England began on that bloody field of death and butchery, and that what went before the 14 October 1066, was nothing compared with the glory of Nor-man rule. Although this latter idea would bring us back to the notion that the arrow-in-the-eye story began with a possible misreading of the Tapestry, but it seems likely that near contemporaries would have understood the meaning of medieval embroidery and that such a well-known story would have found such widespread favour so soon after the event had it been inaccurate.