The Norman Conquest (31 page)

Even if this episode really occurred, the Normans had little else to celebrate. As William of Poitiers explains, ‘the English were greatly helped by the advantage of the higher ground’. The hilltop position that Harold had selected seemed unassailable. Not only was it practically impossible to mount an effective cavalry charge up such a steep
slope, the terrain itself was also unfavourable – Poitiers refers at one point to ‘the roughness of the ground’, while the
Carmen
speaks of ‘land too rough to be tilled’. Unable to mount a mass charge, the Norman horsemen were forced to engage the English at close quarters, riding up to hurl their javelins, or closer still to hack with their swords. These methods (both of which can be seen on the Bayeux Tapestry) naturally exposed the attackers themselves to far greater risk. When Poitiers refers allusively to English weapons ‘which easily penetrated shields and other protections’, he is presumably talking about the great battleaxes which we also see on the Tapestry, being brandished by heavily armed English housecarls. ‘They strongly held or drove back those who dared to attack them with drawn swords’, says Poitiers. ‘They even wounded those who flung javelins at them from a distance.’
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This bloody business, with the Normans trying but failing to break through the English line, must have continued intermittently for hours: we know that the Battle of Hastings went on all day. At some stage, however, presumably several hours into the conflict, there came a crucial turning point, though the
Carmen
and William of Poitiers offer different versions of how it happened. According to Poitiers, it began with a near disaster. Because of the ferocity of the English resistance, he says, some troops on the left wing of the French army turned tail and started to flee. At the same time, a rumour ran through the entire army that William himself had been killed, which in turn led to ‘almost the whole of the duke’s battle line giving way’. The situation was only retrieved by an act of personal heroism by William, who rushed towards the fugitives, shouting ‘Look at me! I am alive, and with God’s help I will conquer! What madness is persuading you to flee? What way is open to escape?’ At these words, says Poitiers, the Normans recovered their courage. Following the duke’s lead, they turned to face the English who had been pursuing them, and killed them all in a moment.

The
Carmen
tells it somewhat differently. In this version, the episode begins with the French
pretending
to run away – it is a plan, intended to lure the English out from their impenetrable shield-wall. And at first it is successful: the English take the bait and run down the hill in pursuit of what they take to be a retreating enemy, only to have the French turn around and start attacking them. But soon
thereafter, the plan goes awry, when the English fight back with unexpected vigour, compelling their attackers to run away for real. ‘Thus’, says the
Carmen,
‘a flight which had started as a sham became one dictated by the enemy’s strength.’ It is at this point that William rides to the rescue, rallies the deserting troops and leads them in a successful counter-attack.
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Clearly, something like this must have happened. The two stories are quite similar in places, particularly in the crucial role they attribute to William. In the
Carmen
, just as in Poitiers’ version, the duke removes his helmet to dispel the rumour of his death, and this same scene is also depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. (Although, as ever with the Tapestry, the true hero appears to be Bishop Odo, who rides in brandishing his baculum ‘to encourage the lads’.) The essential difference is that, in the
Carmen
, what begins as a ruse almost results in disaster, whereas in Poitiers’ account it begins as a disaster which in turn gives rise to a ruse. For, as Poitiers has it, the Normans soon realized their moment of crisis had given them a rare opportunity to kill Englishmen. ‘They remembered how, a little while before, their flight had brought about the result they desired.’ And so they fled again, only this time as a trick. The English, as before, rushed after them in pursuit, only to have the Normans wheel around their horses and cut them down.
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There is not much to help us choose between the two accounts. Our first instinct might be to believe Poitiers, the man with military experience. Yet there are strong hints in his text that the old soldier was here writing more in his capacity as ducal propagandist, trying to improve on the version of events related by the
Carmen
. In the latter account, for instance, it is unclear exactly who was responsible for the flight that nearly caused the disaster, but we are clearly told ‘the Normans turn tail; their shields protect their backs’. Poitiers, by contrast, blames the initial flight on ‘the Breton knights and other auxiliaries on the left wing’. If the Normans did run away, he says, it was only because they believed their leader was dead, so there was no shame in that; even the army of the Roman Empire, he continues, fled occasionally in such circumstances. This all smacks of protesting rather too much, and we might therefore prefer to believe the
Carmen
when it speaks of a deliberate stratagem that went badly wrong. Certainly it is hard to credit Poitiers when he claims that a subsequent fake flight was inspired by the original
retreat, as if the Normans had discovered this trick during the course of the battle. Despite the doubts expressed by many armchair generals over the decades, feigned flight was a ruse that French cavalry forces had been employing for centuries. The Normans themselves are described as having used it to good effect against invading French forces in 1053, in the course of the struggle for Arques.
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One flight or two, real or ruse, the outcome was the same: substantial numbers of English soldiers were slaughtered, and the integrity of the English shield-wall was compromised. ‘Up to now’, says William of Poitiers, ‘the enemy line had been bristling with weapons and most difficult to encircle’, the obvious implication being that this was now no longer the case. The English grew weaker, he tells us, as the Normans ‘shot arrows, smote and pierced’. Arrows may well have become the crucial factor: at this point on the Bayeux Tapestry, the lower margin fills with archers. ‘The dead, by falling, seemed to move more than the living’, says Poitiers. ‘It was not possible for the lightly wounded to escape, for they were crushed to death by the serried ranks of their companions. So fortune turned for William, hastening his triumph.’
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What ultimately decided the battle, everyone agrees, was the death of King Harold. Day was already turning to night, says the
Carmen
, when the report ‘Harold is dead’ flew throughout the battlefield, causing the English to lose heart. Poitiers concurs: knowing that their king was dead, ‘the English army realized there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer’. William of Jumièges, in his brief account of the battle, tells us that ‘when the English learned that their king had met his death, they greatly feared for their own lives, and turned at nightfall to seek refuge in flight’. The Bayeux Tapestry puts it in typically telegraphic terms: ‘Here Harold was killed, and the English turned in flight.’
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But how did Harold die? The established story, as everyone knows, is that the king was felled by an arrow that hit him in the eye. The Tapestry famously shows him gripping a shaft that has lodged in his face, and this depiction is seemingly backed up by several chroniclers. ‘A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom’, wrote Baudri of Bourgeuil; ‘his brain was pierced by an arrow’, says William of Malmesbury. ‘The whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold’, says Henry of Huntingdon, ‘and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye.’
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But there are problems. The Tapestry, as is well known, is debatable, principally for two reasons. First, there is debate over which figure is actually Harold. Is he the upright figure grasping the arrow (whose head, after all, interrupts the word ‘Harold’ in the caption); or is he the falling figure immediately to the right, being hacked down by a horseman, under the words
‘interfectus est’
(‘was killed’)? Some critics solve the riddle by saying that Harold is represented by both these figures, and that the Bayeux Tapestry artist does this kind of thing on numerous other occasions; others have demurred that, if this is really the case, Harold manages the neat trick of losing his shield and acquiring an axe in the act of dying.

Even if, however, we accept that the first figure represents Harold, there is controversy over the arrow itself. The Tapestry was heavily restored in the mid-nineteenth century, and the death of Harold is one of the areas where the restorers may have taken considerable
liberties. Some experts contend, from an analysis of the embroidery and an examination of the earliest drawings of the Tapestry in its (apparently) unrestored state, that the first figure is actually holding not an arrow but a spear, ready to hurl at his attackers.
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Even if the Tapestry artist did intend to depict an arrow, can we be sure that he was depicting what really happened? On many occasions we can see that the Tapestry includes images which are not truly original, but which have been copied and adapted from other illustrated manuscripts that the artist had to hand, and it looks very much like this process was at work in Harold’s death scene. Immediately before the king dies, we see a Norman soldier about to decapitate an unarmed Englishman. This otherwise inexplicable image seems to have been lifted more or less unaltered from an illustrated version of an Old Testament story, namely the fate of King Zedekiah and his sons, one of whom is shown being beheaded in exactly this manner. This artist may have lighted on this particular image because of the resonance of the story – Zedekiah and his family were punished because he had broken his oath of fealty to his overlord, and Zedekiah’s own punishment was blinding. It could well be, therefore, that the arrow in Harold’s eye is simply a piece of artistic licence based on nothing more than an allusion to this particular Bible story, and that blinding was felt to be a fitting end for a king who was similarly foresworn.
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Lastly, we have to consider the fact that the Tapestry is our only
contemporary
source to suggest that Harold was hit in the face by an arrow. True, a similar report is carried by an Italian chronicler, Amatus of Montecassino, writing about 1080, but his account is compromised by the fact that the Latin original is lost – it survives only in a fourteenth-century French translation, heavily interpolated in places, and hence of negligible worth.
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These two questionable sources apart, the story that Harold was felled by an arrow occurs in later works (Baudri of Bourgeuil, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon are all twelfth-century). Contemporary accounts, by contrast – the
Carmen
, William of Poitiers, William of Jumièges and the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – make no mention of it. In the case of the last two, this omission is not very remarkable, given the brevity of their accounts; in the case of William of Poitiers and the
Carmen
it is altogether more striking. Poitiers offers us the longest and most detailed account of the battle, yet makes no mention of the manner in which Harold died. Possibly this was because he did not know. Alternatively, it may have been because he knew full well, having read the
Carmen’
s version, and did not care to endorse it.

For the
Carmen
– our earliest source for the battle – offers an entirely different account of how Harold met his end. According to the
Carmen
, the battle was almost won – the French were already seeking spoils of war – when William caught sight of Harold on top of the hill, hacking down his foes. The duke called together a cohort of men, including Count Eustace of Boulogne, Hugh of Ponthieu and a certain ‘Gilfard’ (‘known by his father’s surname’), and set out to kill the king. In this they were successful, and the
Carmen
gives a graphic description of the injuries each inflicted on Harold, who was pierced with a lance, beheaded with a sword and disembowelled with a spear. His thigh, we are told (possibly a euphemism for his genitalia) was hacked off and carried away some distance.
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