A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (55 page)

BOOK: A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

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Lawson suggests that the entire description of the chamber, let alone the hanging, might be a fiction. The details of the battle could have been taken from contemporary written sources or from oral tradition – one of which has Harold hit by an arrow. In this case Baudri’s poem can be seen in a tradition, stretching back to late antiquity, of poetic depictions of buildings and works of art, both real and imaginary.

For Professor Beech, Baudri’s description of the ‘Blois’ hanging is potent evidence to support his contention that the Bayeux Tapestry was made at the workshops in the monastery at Saumur. It is to be explained not by the reason that Baudri gives, namely that he saw it in the chamber of Countess Adela, but that being resident at Bourgeuil he was able to see the piece as a work in progress at St Florent, across the river. It is indeed rather unfortunate that, if he did see the tapestry there, he did not see fit to mention the fact.

Quite a lot of the tapestry’s existing stitchwork is not original. In part this is because there was a time when those in charge allowed visitors to remove small pieces as souvenirs (rather as the owner of Stonehenge hired out hammers to visitors so that they might take chippings). The artefact has been subjected to exhaustive study and laboratory analysis. But we shall presumably never know who designed the masterly narrative sequence or the composition of the individual scenes, whether man or woman, nor how the selection of the episodes came about.

The Battle of Hastings was an engagement that lasted an entire day and involved thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of men. Besides the tapestry we have the piecemeal evidence of scattered chronicle accounts and poems that may or may not have been available to the designer. He or she may, of course, have had access to other sources of information, now lost – and surely eyewitness accounts or veterans’ reminiscences, whether skewed or reliable. No doubt what its patrons required was a decorative hanging that would justify the conquest of a Christian kingdom and show them in their hour of glory. Possibly the great work would form a backdrop or diorama to epic recitations of the battle by professional minstrels.

APPENDIX 2

THE DEATH OF HAROLD AND HIS AFTERLIFE?

The fact that there were resistance movements after Hastings and that none of them evoked the name of Harold is, presumably, the most conclusive proof, if any were needed, that he died on the battlefield. There were problems, it is true, about identification: the face of the body shown as his was so badly wounded as to be unrecognizable. There are differing traditions about the place of burial. It is said that his mother, Gytha, offered William the body’s weight in gold to receive it for burial, which at least is a tribute to the fabled wealth of the Godwine family. The Conqueror refused and is said to have given instructions for the body to be interred on the seashore. In 1954 building excavations at Holy Trinity, Bosham, the coastal church featured in the Bayeux Tapestry and associated with the Godwine family, but taken into his private estate by the Conqueror, revealed an important tomb with the bones of a tall man with the head, the right leg and part of the left leg missing. These correspond to the dreadful wounds Harold was reputed to have sustained at Hastings. Bosham is certainly near ‘the seashore’, and it is tempting to see these bones as those of the last English king, hidden away by the victor safely under his control to avert the possibility of any popular cult. If this is right, the burial was certainly hushed up, for early tradition held that the body had been moved
from the battlefield and buried at Harold’s foundation of Waltham Abbey, where the supposed site of the grave was still pointed out in the late twentieth century.

The church at Waltham Holy Cross had been a place of pilgrimage since the reign of Cnut, when it became home to a great flint cross discovered in the vicinity of Glastonbury and, following miraculous intervention, brought here. In 1060 Harold built a large new church in honour of the cross and founded a college of secular canons to tend the venerable object. If the church was his final resting place, the canons seem to have been uneasy about the possibility of a popular cult developing. Anyway, they fostered legends about the king escaping after the battle and travelling on the Continent. Then about 1204 an anonymous writer at Waltham produced the
Vita Haroldi
, claiming to have his information from a certain Sæbeorht who had been the king’s servant during his last years, passed in hiding near Chester.

Smuggled from the battlefield more dead than alive, so went the story, Harold spent two years in hiding at Winchester recovering from his wounds in the care of an Arab woman. (Presumably, the superiority of Arab medicine at this time was testified to by returning crusaders.) Restored to health, he journeyed incognito through Germany looking for support to recover his crown. Unsuccessful, he continued his travels as a pilgrim, finally returning to England where he took refuge in a cave near Dover. After ten years he moved to Wales before settling at Chester, where he was associated with the local hermit attached to the church of St John. The mysterious stranger rarely left the hermit’s cave and when he did wore a veil over his face. When the hermit died the disguised king took his place; he was said to wear a mail shirt next his skin. And so the last native king of England ended his days an obscure recluse on the marches with a country that in his young days he had harried to submission. Some say that he revealed his identity shortly before his death. In the thirteenth century it was said that a royal body was
unearthed in St John’s, uncorrupted and wearing leather hose, golden spurs and a crown.

The historical Harold did have a link with Chester, in so far as his second wife, Alditha, sister of Earl Morcar, gave birth to their son Harold there. The association of the city with the Mercian earl and the dead king’s family ties in with the rebellion in the area of 1069–70, so ruthlessly suppressed by the Conqueror. In his article ‘The Cult of King Harold at Chester’, on which much of the foregoing is based, Alan Thacker surmises that the
Vita Haroldi
was commissioned by the Augustinian community of Walthamstow Abbey (reformed by Henry II) to the glory of the divine cross, through describing the merits and virtues of its most celebrated worshipper. Whatever its provenance, the
Vita
is an interesting addition to the theme of nostalgia for Anglo-Saxon England in English thirteenth-century culture.

APPENDIX 3

ROYAL WRITING OFFICE OR CHANCERY?

Some have romantically dated the office of chancellor to early seventh-century Kent; many academics would debate the very existence of an Anglo-Saxon royal chancery. Others would apply the term, at least from the tenth century onwards, to the royal writing office of the kings of Wessex from the time of Alfred, that drew up charters of grants made to ecclesiastical establishments or other recipients.

Between 928 and 935 charters issued in the name of King Æthelstan seem dedicated to projecting the concept of the ‘kingdom of the English’. Writing on the diplomas of Æthelred II in 1980, Simon Keynes concluded that the charters were produced not by the clerks of the recipients but by a royal writing office or chancery; however, there does not seem to have been a central record kept.

Latin-literate chaplains serving the royal court could be well rewarded. Under Edward the Confessor, the cleric Regenbald accumulated estates and enjoyed the legal status of a bishop. He was called ‘Royal Chancellor’ in the witness list of a charter dated of 1062 and was probably the man chosen by William I as his ‘Chancellor’. However, the actual latin title
cancellarius
(chancellor) may not pre-date the Norman Conquest – the 1062 charter being perhaps a later forgery.

NOTES

Introduction

Sir Frank Stenton’s
Anglo-Saxon England
(3rd edition, 1971) is considered an academic classic. After this, Peter Hunter Blair’s
An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England
(1956) is much respected; in the third edition (2004) the text was reprinted with a valuable and up-to-date bibliography. The richly illustrated
The Anglo-Saxons
(1991), edited by James Campbell, is both authoritative and a joy to the eye, with much photography of archaeological sites. Christopher Brooke’s
The Saxon and Norman Kings
(1963) remains a stimulating analytical survey.
The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England
(1999, reprinted in paperback in 2004), edited by Michael Lapidge and others, is an indispensable reference work.
After Rome
(2003), edited by T. M. Charles-Edwards in ‘The Short Oxford History of the British Isles’ series is an authoritative overview of the early chapters.

1
Campbell, ‘Late Anglo-Saxon State’, 1994; cited in Campbell,
Anglo-Saxon State
, 2000, p. 10.

2
Charles-Edwards,
After Rome
, 2003, p. 24.

3
See Campbell, ‘United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 31.

4
Levison,
England and the Continent
, 1946, p. 93.

5
Godfrey,
Church in Anglo-Saxon England
, 1962, p. 221.

6
Elton,
The English
, 1994, p. 4.

7
Talbot,
Anglo-Saxon Missionaries
, 1981, p. 205.

8
Lapidge, ‘Asser’s Reading’, 2003, p. 33.

9
Talbot,
Anglo-Saxon Missionaries
, 1981, p. 69.

10
Levison,
England and the Continent
, 1946, p. 83.

11
Campbell, ‘United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 31.

12
Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, pp. 217–18.

13
Campbell, ‘United Kingdom of England’, 1995, pp. 31–5.

14
Mason,
House of Godwine
, 2004, p. 149.

15
Lawson,
Cnut
, 2004, p. 15.

Chapter 1 – Invaders and Settlers

Here, as for the next three chapters, the primary source is the Venerable Bede and his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, for which the edition of 1969 by Colgrave and Mynors may be considered standard. The contributors to
The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
(1989), edited by S. R. Bassett, opened up valuable, sometimes controversial, new ideas on early Anglo-Saxon history for this section and
chapter 2
.

1
Orchard, ‘Latin and the Vernacular Languages’, 2003, p. 217.

2
See Lapidge, ‘
Beowulf
, Aldhelm, the
Liber Monstrorum
and Wessex’, p. 311.

3
Hines, ‘Society, Community, and Identity’, 2003, p. 92.

4
For the development of these arguments see Ward-Perkins,
Fall of Rome
, 2005, and Heather,
Fall of the Roman Empire
, 2005.

5
Kabir,
Paradise, Death and Doomsday
, 2001.

6
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 1969, p. 135.

7
Blair,
Church in Anglo-Saxon Society
, 2005, pp. 24–5.

8
Hawkes and Mills,
Northumbria’s Golden Age
, 1991, pp. 4–5.

9
Allott,
Alcuin of York
, 1987, p. 18.

10
Wallace-Hadrill,
Early Germanic Kingship
, 1971, p. 21.

11
For this paragraph see Blair,
Church in Anglo-Saxon Society
, 2005, pp. 252 and 267.

12
Canon J. Higham, notes for Peterborough Cathedral Guides.